You will die, so you should love

I

I happened upon an interesting meditative approach. There is an ancient practice of contemplating the imagined image of oneself as a corpse, Maranasati. I realized this is easily adapted for the modern era. I typed into ChatGPT a description of myself as a corpse received the output and gazed at it. It was not terribly convincing, so I made more images and began seeking the alignment of my self-image with the idea of cessation. I tried to view a world that no longer contained my viewpoint.

I urge you to go now, to ChatGPT, or DALLE and enter a description of yourself as a corpse and contemplate it. Cyber-Maranasati. I hope it catches on. I hope it becomes a global trend because I have a sense that it might help.

II

Death is, as far as we know, the inevitable conclusion of biological life. Perhaps radical technological changes may shield you from it. Perhaps a pill will be invented that reverses aging! Perhaps you will be uploaded onto a computer! You will still die sometime between now and 10^100 years into the future- or thereabouts. If nothing else, heat death will finally get you. Of course, all this is open to revision. There are possibilities I cannot rule out in which you never die and there are possibilities in which you do die, but death is not the end. Perhaps you will be granted eternal life by a deity. Perhaps you will be reconstructed by some Fyodorovian project. Nevertheless, it seems on balance that you ought to expect death. This wouldn’t be a problem in itself, but we humans crave for infinitude.

Moreover, everything you value could die sooner than you think. You might value your reputation, but it could be utterly ruined, perhaps even through no fault of your own. I have spent nearly twenty years terrified of this- believe me the mechanisms are endless. I have lived most of my life awaiting, in futile expectation, a fate worse than death. Your liberty might be taken, for example, by illness. Your senses could be confiscated, as could your power of movement. You might value your intelligence, but you could contract a degenerative condition or have a stroke. You may value your beauty, but you already know that will whither. You might, due to awful circumstances, lose even your capacity to choose to live or die- because, through captivity or illness, you might lose the power of suicide.

It might seem that everything you love will be taken away, but this depends, at least to some degree, on the breadth of your love.

You have the choice as to what to identify with. The choice is arational but there are still, in some senses, better and worse options. Some people, for example, identify only with their present selves, regarding the interests of themselves a year from now as wholly alien, or at least subject to a steep discount. Others, most of us, identify with our whole lives as biological organisms. This seems more prudent than identifying with a few time slices from a larger life, because it gives us a bigger, and less limited existence. Although few of us fully identify our ‘selves’ with larger objects- families, societies, and all of that- many of us regard ourselves as not wholly distinct from these things, as having, in a sense, a larger self than just a single biological organism.

Now suppose, as seems likely, that our reality is vast. That life continues in times and places we have no knowledge of, even past the heat death of this particular segment. In this case, there is one, and only one attractive project that persists eternally. Projects for the valorization of self all end. Projects for the valorization of a particularity- a single family, culture, or nation terminate because they cannot continue after that particularity ends. Only projects concerned with general things extend infinitely, and respond, in a sense, to our deep desire for endlessness.

There is one and only one fully general project, capable of extending past the death of any individual or group that has excited the human will historically- the love of all beings. I suppose there are other endless projects- projects not tied to a specific instance. You could participate in a cross-dimensional timeless and spaceless project to count as many objects as possible, for example, but such goals simply do not seem attractive to most of us.

You should be kind, then, because it is the closest you can come to participating in eternity. The love of all beings is what will allow you to step outside your own flesh, soon to ripen and die.

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