The Nonsense of 'Life' and 'Death'




(pub. The Mountain Path, April 1966. Posthumous Pieces (HKU Press, 1968) Part 1, Chap. 4)


What difference could there be between 'living' and 'dying'? 'Living' is only the elaboration in sequential duration of what otherwise is known as 'death'.

When What-we-are functions, extending in three apparent spatial dimensions and another interpreting them as duration, together known as 'space-time', there is what we know as 'living'. When that process ceases we are no longer extended in sequential duration, we are no longer elaborated in 'space', 'space-time' is no more and the apparent universe dis-appears.

Then we say we are 'dead'.
But as what we are we have never 'lived', and we cannot 'die'.

Where could 'we' live? When could 'we' die? How could there be such things as 'we'? 'Living' is a spatial illusion, 'dying' is a temporal illusion, 'we' are a spatio-temporal illusion based on the serial interpretation of dimensional 'stills' or 'quanta' cognised as movement.

Only the concepts of infinity and intemporality can suggest intellectually a notion of what we are as the source and origin of appearance or manifestation.


(© T.J. Gray, 1968)
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