Life & Death

The mind is a forager of patterns; we, as all living organisms with a brain, seek out repetition and a semblance of ordered, comforting, controllable, predictability in a seemingly chaotic and erratic existence.

This we call logic, reality, experience and knowledge but, above all else, we call it ?'truth' and/or power.

Whether these patterns are discovered or created, by the mind, is at the center of most philosophical debates and is the main cause for all misunderstandings and confrontations in matters of abstract reasoning.

For the majority order and patterns appear to be pre-existing concepts awaiting our attention or dictating our understanding, as with the Platonic Idea or Christianity, while for some they are illusions produced by a mind is search for power in a universe defined by chaos and constant flux.

What for the former is referred to as ?'truth' or ?'God' or ?'reality' or ?'Idea' for the latter is an unwanted constraint upon free-will and a delusion caused by the minds nature of comprehending only what can be regimented and stored as memory.

Either way what can be safely admitted is that patterns, symmetry and order is of the utmost importance and of extreme interest to our mental wanderings and is the prime source of strategising and theorizing in the human species. We like to categorize and label phenomena; we understand the world through opposites and through causes and effects; we reach for control and power through deducing or inducing rules, laws and relationships and we call our adherence to them happiness, virtue, morality and purpose.

In fact, it can be argued, that since we are products of order ourselves and providential, ephemeral instances of pattern in a universe of predominant disorderliness, that it is therefore natural that we will be attracted to these concepts, see them everywhere and glorify them as our highest standards neglecting, perhaps, the idea that order and disorder themselves are the way we discern between the intelligible and the unintelligible and that this prejudice is one due to consciousness itself with no real transcending meaning.

As products of patterns, it is natural to assume, that we are also slaves to them. No matter how hard we try to liberate our individuality from conventionality we must inevitably confess that we behave, act and think in manners similar to others sharing our social, cultural, religious, and genetic pasts. This uncomfortable reality is what makes psychology, biology, sociology, anthropology and science, in general, respectable disciplines that can teach us things about ourselves but also makes cosmology, philosophy and physics possible since all of these base their validity on how phenomena, sharing common characteristics, will act predictably and consistently.

This idea of mental enslavement and human prejudiced, delusional thinking and of mans subjugation to larger entities [Nature, Society, Culture, Religion] was recognized firstly by the ancients, particularly by the Greeks, and has entered popular consciousness through art and philosophy in more recent times.

The concept of existing in a false reality is not a new one but it has grown in popularity and strength in more modern times culminating in the philosophies of Kant, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, in the science of physics and quantum physics in particular and finding its way into modern artistic mainstream expressions such as movies [?'Fight Club', ?'Matrix'], music [?'Rage Against the Machine', ?'Pink Floyd', ?'Marilyn Manson', ?'Radiohead'] and any form of surrealistic, mythological or abstract expression attempting to uncover a hidden perspective or to redefine reality through imagery.

It is therefore natural for man to attempt to encompass life and being [becoming] by finding patters in its processes and procedures.

In my own attempts to discover commonalities and life patterns I have stumbled upon an unfortunate realization that at first caused me some discomfort: All life is preoccupied with just staying alive and all acts of being are a struggle to avoid non-being.

The act of living seems to consist of the mere practice of dealing with death and mortality. We feed, drink, procreate, create, interact, build, explore and hypothesize in an endless struggle to give meaning to our inevitable demise or to come to terms with it and, if possible, avoid it altogether.

Civilization is the result of this fight against death and little more.
Life, in essence, can be described as the act of resisting death or the activity of maintaining self and nothing else besides.

We may even say that we don't really live but only resist dieing and spend our every moment thinking, acting and avoiding our own demise.

Schopenhauer described wisdom as the product of heightened intellectual power that is so abundant that when the physical survival needs of the organism are met the leftover intellect turns upon itself and starts becoming aware of self and its place in the world. It becomes an observer of itself and a critic of its own nature as an almost completely objective observer. This is the experience of self-consciousness which is a characteristic shared by all higher entities with superfluous intellects.

It is this aspect of human nature that eventually leads to nihilistic tendencies and the denial of the self through extreme asceticism caused by self-hatred and insecurity.

This residual intellect varies from individual to individual and, in the ones blessed or damned to possess great quantities of it, it can have detrimental or beneficial effects on the psyche, depending on the mental stability, psychological fortitude and environmental experiences of each person.

Because of this, I believe, it is possible for man to look upon himself and his consciousness with a certain detachment that makes the discernment of patterns, shared by all living beings no matter their sophistication, feasible.

It is this excess intellectual capability that can detach itself from the continuous preoccupations of survival that has the potential to become more than just an instrument of struggle against non-existence and can witness itself and the world as it is without the limiting influences of self-interest and ego.

So, in closing, we may say that we never really live but are only involved in the act of not dieing and it is in those instances of becoming aware of what life is or can be that we find the sublime and the transcending.