It is said that life is made great through death, is this true? It is said that the prudent die daily, is this true? It is said that some are glad to be born to die, are they really?
It is hard to say, but when one looks to the Ancients, within the many various Scriptures, one finds only one obvious answer: there is only cosmological Nothing without death. One must look no further than the Epic of Gilgamesh, history’s oldest preserved narrative, for such a parable; the Brahmanas for such a literary lesson; or the Tibetan Book of the Dead for this in myth. The Mahayanists say there is no suffering greater than the pain of the Gods, for in their near immortality and their knowledge of their own deaths, it is the greatest suffering they have ever felt, for they know no true suffering.
You can continually find this motif because it is all-abounding: the human experience is fixated on death, that restless and boundless consumer of all things, the wretched beast that gives us life.
Yet scripture is worthless, meaningless paper ,without Truth. What is the Truth of death? And why is it something we must learn to live with?
The Truth is: death is life. For without life is only death, the true death, of total Nothingness. But you have heard this all before; it is nothing new, and perhaps you still disagree:
"Death is something that must be overcome, it is a scourge! All pain, all tragedy, and everything in-between… what good has come from mortality? This is the great battle of Light against Darkness."
Neo-Gnostic theology in this kind of argument aside, this line of logic completely falls apart when one truly thinks about it for any period of time and sits with the feeling. You do not need scripture; you do not need even logical rhetoric, simply sit with this concept.
What would it truly be like to live forever? What are the implications of not dying? The people most gung-ho about these things have never taken the time to truly consider the implications. Perhaps they have, but say something like, “Oh well, I won’t be invincible, I can still choose to die,” yet then they spend their entire lives being unable to truly live, always fearing death.
What if they were invincible? Well, this is completely impossible, so let us not even humor the concept.
So, we have with us the idea of immortality but at a limit, perhaps we can stave off death, yet everything else would still kill us. Try staying immortal with a round lodged into your skull. Good luck!
You will live your life in a state of neurosis. You will have beaten death, yet will now be afraid of life. Is the point of not dying not to live? Yet how can one truly live if the only thing they have to live for is protecting their own life?
The truth is: the lure of immortality is great, it is a haunting nectar, it is the same Outsideness that lulls many into the void of lust for Nothingness, and it is so for a reason. What could be better than not dying? Is life not wonderful? Indeed, so sweet it is, which is precisely why death tempers us. It is our evener.
Yet the second you are gifted this, you immediately have to protect it, forever. And once you do decide to give yourself up willingly to the maw that consumes all, you will not do so with the satisfaction of having truly lived life, but rather you will end your life for the same reason the miserable commit suicide: to escape life.
In the end, immortality is simply a prolonged suicide.
That’s all it is.