What is death? While human words cannot explain what humans have not experienced, science claims that death is the end of life, and religion maintains that it is the door to the next life. But people still wonder, and death still inspires fear, outrage, and sometimes hope.
Beyond science and religion, there is still philosophy. For the philosopher, death is more than a single moment in time, it is also a thought to be thought at any time. Actually, this is misleading. Death is more than a thought; death is actually a part of thought and consciousness because it is the negation of objects of consciousness. To imagine death is not to imagine the paraphernalia of death but to imagine/think the loss of everything, absolute negation. So I say, death is not a thought, not an object of consciousness; instead, it is the non-object, or better yet, the object-negating act. It is the action that deletes objects of thought and frees consciousness for new objects. As such, death is vital to developing intellectual flexibility, behavioural adaptability and wide-ranging imagination.
Trying to imagine one’s own death means performing the thought-event that deletes all objects of consciousness, all memories, all beliefs. The death-though is a performative thought, a thought action that does something more than tell us about the future, it negates everything we know or remember in the present.
If death represent the negation or deletion—in theory—of all objects of consciousness, death is integral to consciousness, for consciousness cannot exists as anything but a negation-production process. Simply put, without the ability to negate one thought we could never produce another; without leaving one thought we could never move on to the next. And so, even the smallest or most trivial thought process involves a small negation or a small death. What makes thinking of death so difficult for consciousness is that it demands we negate all thought-objects, not permanently, but completely, and thus to gain some control of them, as an artist over its medium.
There are at least two unhealthy relationships to death: one, to clutter the mind with convictions, hopes and treasures that resist negation, and two, to seek to eliminate all objects from consciousness by reducing mental activity and going into a vegetative state. Death-as-though is a challenge that, to the highest degree, demands mental activity in active negating.
The benefit of treating death as the active negation of objects is that the mind grows stronger with practise. In learning to negate any object of consciousness, the mind gains the only self-mastery it can ever have. It frees itself from the power exerted by objects of consciousness, eliminates all clinging and buries the idols.
Negation, or the death-though, is intrinsic to all imaginative thinking, both in science and the arts. No new cause-and-effect relationship could even be imagined without the ability to negate the old; no new experiment could ever be attempted without the ability to imagine the new. The arts themselves would be an endless mimicking of natural phenomena and tradition if the mind were not able to negate, destroy, and make room for the new. Even someone who refuses to believe in the eternity of death has negated the possibility that it is eternal, and in doing so they punish themselves, for by rejecting this possibility they fail to address their fears and bar themselves from developing their fullest potential as thinking, imagining beings.
