Driving home yesterday I experienced a strange and profound feeling, somewhat out of the blue.
My mind was wandering through it’s random strings of thought, drifting from events of the day to events of the future when suddenly it landed squarely on a very disturbing string.
Death. However not the fairly benign and rather intangible thought of death in general. Not even the more disturbing concept of the loss of friends and family. Rather, my mind quite unexpectedly and and vividly focused in on the thought that I will cease to exist at some point.
The thought was not that I will become a ghost or angel, or even spend my days in hell. The thought was that I will one day be completely non existent and everything I have ever seen, said, loved and experienced will become complete and utter void. Even darkness was not considered in this thought because the darkness is a somewhat quantifiable state. Void. I briefly began to feel the absolute void that my life would become.
The thought was a completely selfish thought. My current mindset tells me that I have left a legacy in the memories and lives I have touched. In my void there was no legacy because I was nothing. The continuity of reality beyond my death was meaningless because I was no longer able to give it meaning. What is reality to any living being aside from a subjective interpretation of information? Without being able to interpret it the information is useless; any concept I can conceive including the existence of reality beyond my death is rendered null when I become void.
I felt myself sinking…despair until despair lost meaning…a siphoning away of everything I cared for in the realization that without me, the meaning was irrelevant. Selfish.
Then as fast as it came my mind built a wall. I snapped out of it and lost touch with the mental construct (de-construct?) of the void that briefly existed in me. Part of me tried to recover it despite it’s disturbing nature in order to search for some sort of meaning but my mind would have nothing of it. Even now I struggle to retain enough of the feeling to provide an accurate description of it to convey. I think my mind threw up the wall as a protective measure. To exist with such a pure concept of the end of personal existence readily accessible to my conscious mind would quite likely drive me mad with thoughts of futility.
Today, I feel no worse for wear. I just feel like I have been witness to a rare moment of clarity in my visualization of a rather elusive concept. That being the concept of absolute non existence. It has left me with one more thing however…It has left me with the hope that upon my death there will be something. Anything. Even a single tangible atom that my consciousness can latch onto to stave off the emptiness in the void.