The Meaning of Facing Death

The Meaning of Facing Death

‘’They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.’’

- Arthur Schopenhauer

I am often told by my closest friend that looking up at the sky can cause the most intense feelings.

It will make you feel small, insignificant, unimportant. As if you are just a speck of dust in a whole galaxy of stars.

On the other side, it can cause a strange sensational feeling of power. Knowing that the things, that may seem the most important to you, won’t matter in the long run.

This begs the question whether I should see my life as significant as I do or whether it is, like myself, a undefinable small accident caused by the universe itself.

Let me rephrase myself: is it courageous of me to think of my life as important as I do or am I really just replaceable?

And if so, how courageous can it be for me to end my life at any point I desire to?

To begin with, it is a fact that it has never been our personal choice to be born. Whether you enjoy life or despise it, you have always been placed on this earth without your own permission.

After all, how is it even possible for us to choose life? For something like that to take place, it is necessary to have consciousness and lots of experience to evaluate the value of your own life and to then decide whether it is worth living or not.

Knowing that this is impossible, this will lead us to us the conclusion that we are humans placed on the world without our own permission.

What the exact relation between a human and the world is, can be explained in two substations, namely consciousness and matter.

Consciousness is that which makes me aware of my own being and the matter is that which carries my consciousness.

The process that takes place between that, which takes place inside my subjective ability and that, which the worlds puts inside of me in the form of information, forms who I am.

I am therefore a series of processes going back and forth between my inner machine and the outside world.

There is one thing though that makes my consciousness a little bit different than the consciousness of an animal and that’s the fact that I am also self-aware.

With other words, I am a self-conscious being.

The fact that I am self-conscious does also mean that I am limited by my perception of reality and my subjective ability of judging that reality.

However, there are a few things that I can be certain about.

The first is that we will never be able to perceive something that is good on its own, because we are limited by ourselves to perceive that.

This consequently means that everything that is being labelled as good or wrong is in fact a judgment based on someone’s own interpretation of reality, rather than the real reality.

Even so, we are still social creatures.

So what we do is that we adapt our abstract concept of thinking into something that is valid and the most passable for every person in order to make our lives more liveable.

And because I have stated, that we live because of each other and grow up with one another, this raises the question when it is your own decision to commit suicide and when it is due to your environment that you have been driven to commit such an act.

Of course it is due to your environment that you are driven into such an act.

It is the same as any other act that isn’t based on satisfying the primary needs.

Your very own sub-consciousness has been filled with your environment from the moment you were born. There is no escaping of it.

This fact degenerates the human into a machine, that only gathers information and spits it out into its environment.

That is not what I am trying to say.

Surely the human is a machine, but it is not just a machine. It is more than a machine.

Unlike a machine, every human has the ability to dream and fantasize, to create a free space in which he can move freely and reason with himself before taking any harsh decisions.

And exactly this way of existing and being is what makes us more human than machine.

The fact that we can look at ourselves at the environment in such transcendent way and then do what seems right at that moment.

When a person with suicidal thoughts does exactly this, he is no longer a part of the world, but he has transcended that.

This may cause a trigger in which that person realizes that Death is an escape from the fusion between his consciousness and the world.

People who look at themselves in such a manner have long been mentally death.

They decide on that, which is their very own property.

Taking this last step is not brave nor cowardly.

Committing suicide is only the last chapter in their book of life, in which they take the last step to close it.