Death Is An Illusion

 

I am a Block-Time-Theorist. I think that all time is wherever it was.

But when I consider my nephew today, I cannot seem to consider him as he was. His younger self and my younger self are elsewhere.

Space and time obviously have some things in common. When anyone takes a few minutes to study space and time, they will begin to see their bond.

Here is where things get weird. I am going to die. Oh yes, it is that simple. There is no reason at all to make it more difficult than that. So there will come a day, when I simply fade. But the moments right after that, will be just like the moments right before my conception. The fact that I lived, whether 60 or 90 years, will not have any effect on what happens to me once I stop living.

Two people died while I typed this very sentence.

Two more just died.

Two more.

In fact, if I were to say, “One, two, three…” in just the regular rhythm of spoken language, I’d be representing about how fast deaths are occurring during that count.

The more fascinating feature of this count is this: for every death, there are two births.

As the population grows – if it continues to trend as it always has – then the count will go faster; both for the dying and those being born.

It will continue to be two steps forward for each step back.

What does this mean for me?

Nothing.

Here is the only way to think of it for me:

I am a flock of cells. The flock, were it viewed as it is, would appear to be coming and going. There are hairs falling and new ones growing. There is waste and then food and water. This hour alone, I will literally lose 30,000 skin cells. You’ll lose about half of your own body weight in your lifetime (average).

In one hour of this very day, you will be awarded with 2.5 billion new cells. Depending on where you happen to be along the block of your entire loaf of life, you may lose that many or many times more in that same hour.

Don’t worry too much about the big, entropic picture. That bigger picture can look like the unraveling of all we know, but we cannot really see how everything we know is but a husk, covering what we don’t know. Let us look, instead, to me and you.

If there were a lens capable of capturing our typical day, as it would pertain to the duration of our experiences, it would show us as pixilated forms, collecting and distributing fragments of debris from all of our experience as a whole. In that view, you would not see yourself as the human you think you are, but you’d be billions of bits and pieces, in something like a swarm which happens to be in the shape of yourself. As billions of cells fly away or die, the lens would show them floating off or falling to the ground and you’d look like Pig-Pen from the Peanuts stories. As you age, entropy has decided to increase the diminishment of parts with less and less restoration of new ones each day. The lens we are now using, would literally show yourself fading; little by little.

Of the trillions of cells, all clumped together in an arrangement you are familiar with, only 100 billion of those cells think that the other 37 trillion cells are who they say you are. These 100-billion cells are responsible for thought, and they pass data around as fast as humanly possible; just so you get the sense of being you. However, these cells escape and diminish as well. We call it “forgetting”, which etymologically means that you are losing your grip.

With this lens, you would probably begin to see something very special indeed: that you cannot really die.

You will, eventually, lose your grip on most of your cells. This will include those ones who have presently organized to think they are you. But the law of conservation is a strict one and as your flock disburses, it joins other flocks and becomes the soil and fertilizer for new cells. Everything you are will be variations of you forever.

There is a field where you became you and that field was there before you. That same field will be where it is when you completely come undone. And this is the most difficult fact to grasp: YOU ARE THAT FIELD.

This is going to be contrary to the rules set up by the 100 billion cells who have formed a perfect union to think like you. That’s okay. That’s just one experience and you are designed to think it is unique to your group of cells.

I’ll just use one word to make sense of it all: LIFE

Life breathed one breath into you and you became alive; when you finally come apart again, Life requires that breath back. Nothing dies. Death is the greatest of all illusions.