A Personal Conclusion

At the beginning of this essay, I shared the very basic fear of death I held in childhood. To me, it was a primal fear and despondency rooted in the inevitable loss of personal experience in life that is death. But it is an inexplicable feeling of despair that everyone encounters at some point in their life. We face it in passing moments of personal reflection and solitude, in private moments of personal tragedy and loss or even in those final, most terminal moments on our death beds. At the same time in foretold moments of interpersonal loss, death also speaks acutely to us in emotions of grief, melancholy and mourning. These sentiments are common and unambiguous in their anguish.

But these emotions of despair are inherently rooted in paradigmatic archetypes. Their foundation is inextricably linked to a conceptual model of the world that is perceived as intrinsically egoic and idiomatically individual. But philosophically distinguishing gestalten conscious awareness and individuated conscious awareness from general personal experience is practically powerful in holistically understanding the ontology of conscious death. Not denying the individuality of general experience, it also epistemically reveals a frontier of an unbounded universality in basic and uniform perception stationed across all individual consciousnesses. It then practically enables our individualities to consciously mourn the experiences of terminal suffering and interpersonal loss of experiential life in death, and simultaneously, to recognize by a parallel gestalten awareness that the moment and the perception of one’s own passing in death is equanimously, archetypically impersonal and collective.

But this intuition of collective universality is already commonplace. It is an instinct born from that basic state of awareness in which our individual perceptions of physical pain and trauma - and death - are exactly the same across incarnations. It reflects our common understanding of what is instinctually right and wrong, and purposeful - shaping our natural inclination and affection to love and serve others. We need to look no further to shared spiritualities to find synchrony in this message: That they all shall be one, just as you, my Father, are in me, and I am in you, of the Book of John; and, He who experiences the unity of life sees his own Self in all beings, in the Bhagavad Gita.

And yet woefully, this shared transcendent intuition is marred by corrupting forces; across time and geographies, history and the present are thereto clear. But if our instinctual aspirations are to ren and transcend from stress and suffering, we cannot, we must not deny the central role of the human character in this trauma. We must concede that the fundamental flaw in human character is judgement and that judgement - reflecting the darker sides of our nature - is untruthful and predicated on this fallacious ego representation. By arbitrary birth and individuation, our consciousnesses are unwittingly dropped into this preexisting determinist current of judgement and ego. But through conscious awareness, we retain the potential to will and transcend from this existential stress.

How difficult and daunting this must then seem to be. How frightening and confounding it must be to practically surrender and lose the intrinsic self, and the existential paradigmatic reality one is acculturated to from birth. My personal struggles on this path reflected this and were no different than anyone else. I was born into a predetermined self-identity, gravely suffered in moments of trauma, at times feared mortality, often sat in judgement of others, and certainly doubted myself in life experience - while always wielding that latent intuition of universality that is common within all of us. This story is familiar. But this probative exploration generated the epistemic clarity and grounding for me to dispassionately see beyond this self and willfully surrender it without equivocation. The choice may be bewildering and difficult; but on the other side of the river’s current is a peaceful stillness, and a transcendent meaning and purpose in willful experience, service and love.