The idea of death is something I have rejected from a philosophical perspective…that is, from a perspective of capital-T Truth. I am okay with death form the purely emprical side of things…that eventually our bodies give out for whatever reason and we are returned to the dust from whence we sprung. But from a rational position, one where fundamental epistemological conceptual consistency is the only real basis for knowing anything at all (which is true), nothing about death makes sense. And birth, being death’s corollary in this regard, is in the same position. You see, if we only accept truth based upon empirical “evidence” then we can never arrive at a rational, relevant, and meaningful answer to the question “what is man?”. For man is more than his senses; more than just his body. If he were not, then consciousness would be impossible. The Singularity of the Self…that is, the constancy which is necessary for consciousness, and from consciousness, observation, and from observation, conceptualization, and from conceptualization, meaning, and from meaning Truth, is utterly denied when we accept that man is merely a transient phenomenon; that there is nothing constant and absolute about his Self; that consciousness is entirely finite; it begins with blankness, and returns to blankness, which fundamentally nullifies all which it had learned and spoken in the meantime.

Consciousness is where the empiricists and determinists and objectivists completely fail in their philosophy, which is why they relegate it to mere epiphenomenon—an illusion, with a purely subjective ontology. Consciousness, by their standards, remains “inside”, whilst “objective truth” is that which is found on the “outside”. That this renders consciousness mutually exclusive from objective existence, and thus makes conscious understanding impossible, and thus any claims about what constitutes objective existence and truth likewise impossible, which voids their entire philosophy…well, that never seems to come up much. But we cannot have our cake and eat it, too. Consciousness cannot spring from the abyss of absolute unconsciousness (pre-birth) flourish for a while to grasp all manner of empirical and objective truth, and then return to the abyss (post death). The 1 of consciousness cannot be born from and then die to the 0 of oblivion. Consciousness, whether we want to accept it or not, is a Singularity; it is Absolute. The existence of You is predicated on You being a constant. If there is no constant/absolute frame of reference for You, then You is impossible.

You cannot be a function of that which is outside of you, because then You are not actually You. And You cannot be merely relative to that which is outside of You because then there is no fundamental constancy to You, in which case you have no grounded frame of reference by which to define “You” in the first place. And You, and by that I mean Your Self, and by that I mean your Conscious Awareness of Self, cannot merely be some (perhaps complicated or mysterious) kind of cosmic or evolutionary illusion because that begs the question: “An illusion of what?” And that question has no answer because the “what” is that which the proposition (that consciousness is purely an illusion) denies can even exist in the first place. And consciousness cannot likewise be a non-illusory product of some unconscious biological/evolutionary determinative process because that creates the self-defeating assertion that consciousness is direct function of unconsciousness….that somehow consciousness can step out of the absolutely unconscious processes from which it directly springs, observe these processes from a specific and distinct frame of reference, and proceed to make claims about the “objectivity” of the utterly unconscious determinative nature of consciousness.

The only options we have are: 1. That Consciousness IS, and is Singluar, and thus does not come from the Nothing which precedes birth and return to the Nothing which follows death; or 2. That it is a function of either a purely relative existence, unconscious biological/evolutionary determinative processes, or is an illusion. In other words, that consciousness is in fact entirely unconscious.

And only one of thes two options makes consciousness actually possible.

You ARE; and You are Constant. I don’t really care what objectivists, empiricists, scientific pseudo-philosophers, or other nihilistic determinists think—I have listened to their positions on this for years and years and it never changes and never manages to wiggle its way out from under the rock of self-defeating contradiction which crushes it to dust. I have heard everything, from appeals to quantum physics to cosmic evolution to taxicab geometry (where apparently squares are also circles…which, no; this is verifiably false all day long). Any and all attempts to negate consciousness as being what it self-evidently IS fail, always fail, and will fail forever.

So…with that being said, how now can we proceed to understand birth and death from a rationally consistent point of view? Do they even exist at all. Well, subjectively, perhaps. But objectively, no. More in part two.

END PART ONE