I propose a moral framework. It goes like this: Sentience is death-awareness and the conceptualization of death in the mind is what generates our perception of time. Temporal experience is interlinked with death, as a definitional border: we define “life” by it’s exclusion. Life-is-not-death. Sentience is being able to define yourself, and the act of definition is what generates our temporal experience, which we call sentience. You spring into sentience by the conceptualization of it’s potential lacking: “One Day I won’t Be Here Anymore”. Thus, “death” generates “time”. More specifically, temporarily.
Morality is the matter of your response to the fact of sentience. It is a binary question, an either/or. Your options are, facing death, or running away from it. Conceptually acknowledging it, or rejecting it. Courageously facing it, or denying it, pretending it’s not real, trying not to think about it.
The way denying-death manifests is through a series of what we would today call “copes”. This goes all the way from sticking your metaphorical fingers in your psychological ears and going “lalala can’t hear you”, to, elaborate ritualistic acts of inversion, in which you vampirically attempt to extend your life by feeding on the youth of others.
All morality falls on a single line from courageously facing death, through perversion and cope, to the ultimate Satanic inversion of child sacrifice and paedophilia. Psychologically speaking.
You cannot be an adult and a pervert. You cannot be a man. All perversion is an attempt to enter into edenic pre-sexual awakening mental state, and it's always ruinous because this is impossible – once you experience sexual awakening childhood is lost forever, and there is no going back. To attempt to return is counter to nature. It is always-necessarily a dereliction of duty.
We are in a war against death, and perversion is abandoning your post.
Morality and bravery are in this sense synonymous. It is a valor that takes place before any action in the world, preceding action. You can call it psychological in our contemporary vocabulary.
The quest for immortality is the perfect inversion, perversion, of the war against death. All desire for immortality, all trans-humanism etc, is an attempt to avoid the confrontation with death, and it comes from a belief that you cannot win, so you do everything you can do run away from it. To the trans-humanist, death is an unbeatable force, to which the only reaction is to perpetually run away. In much the same psychological process is suicide, as a belief that you cannot win against death, so you might as well just get it over with. Both share the same idea, and vary only superficially in execution.
Unfortunately for the losers and the freaks, we are kicking death’s ass.
Every day you meet the world with valor and a song in your heart, we are kicking deaths ass. Every time you embody vitality and joy, blind, reckless embrace of Being, we are kicking deaths ass.
In the more extended version, you can know that we are gonna win, because God has gone through great effort to inform us that death is a little bitch.
“At the end of time, death will be defeated”.
Well said .
I wonder about death all the time, I was fascinated by it as a child and now don't fear it but am aware of it being a Motocylist who's survived two "fatal" crashes .
-Nate
Great essay.