Saturday

After Death: All and Nothing




Your being in itself, on the contrary, knows neither time, nor beginning, nor end, nor the limits of a given individuality; hence no individuality can be without it, but it is there in each and all. So that, in the first sense, after death you become nothing; in the second, you are and remain everything. That is why I said that after death you would be all and nothing. It is difficult to give you a more exact answer to your question than this and to be brief at the same time; but here we have undoubtedly another contradiction; this is because your life is in time and your immortality in eternity. 


Don't worry, my first reaction was undoubtedly the same as yours: HUH?! But I think Schopenhauer is trying to make an intelligible point here. He believes that our individuality is simply the transient form of consciousness in the universe. That we are in fact all and everything (isn't that what the religious sages and kids that just had their first acid-trip keep trying to tell us?) but we (the universe) can only experience consciousness through individuality. So when we die, we return back to the All, which Schopenhauer says is a better form of existence anyways.


Don't Miss Any of the Timeless Ideas. Subscribe!


Delivered by FeedBurner

No comments:

Post a Comment