What keeps me up at night

Let me ask the faceless mass a question.

If you think about your existential status, and provided you are not concious for any sort of afterlife, a hypothetical-at-best scenario for even the most devout religious person, and you have imagined what it is like NOT to exist, have you ever found yourself on the cusp of revelation, yet scared of the reality of such an existence? Have you thought about the experience of no experience? The existence of null? The being of not being? The Thing of Nothing?

I do.

I do and I feel like it is a place that will kill me.

I try to imagine not existing and a remarkable thing occurs. It is almost like a gate appears before me. My mind, acting as a regulator, advises my wandering imagination to avoid this gate, but my curiosity pushes me closer. The latch swings open and gives me a taste of oblivion.

I dictate to my imagination the scenario of oblivion. "Blackness, no, not even, no eyes, no senses, no body, just infinite emptiness. " Then I think of the inevitability of such an experience, how we are in a constant state of decay, and realize that I will one day experience this emptiness, and that at a certain time in this existence, I will not. I will experience non-experience. After death, my body will no longer receive electrical impulses, no longer be able to interpret stimuli, and cut off forever my consciousness from the rest of the world. The gate swings open, and I am given a profound sense of dissonance, and worse, angst of crossing, as though I found the self destruct button to myself and I am coyly brushing the dust from it's red cylindrical surface, flirting with the idea of just mashing the button.

This is when the experience begins to disturb my psyche. I try to think of Heaven. I try to think of becoming a cow, or a fly, or a beetle. I try to think a great spirit will take my soul to join those who have gone before me. I try to think of existing beyond the universe. I imagine I become the pieces of a tree, as my body fertilizes the roots, embodies the bark, and reaches out from the branches. Then, the escapism of the impending null is broken by my own inquisitive imagination, recreating the prescribed scenario of empty nothing. It is almost like an alter-ego forcing me to look beyond at a possible reality of having no future beyond this "Mortal Coil". It is my Tyler holding my hand in the lye, reminding me of existence now and the void to come. "Don't look away. Don't block this out. We are learning something here. We are becoming enlightened"

I feel my life slip away. My finger outlines the Self-Destruct button. I take a breath. I put my index finger pad on the button and push until the resistance begins to give, and the button flexes. It feels like the emptiness is pulling my senses away, and for a second, I really do not exist. I never push the button until activation, mind you, but something sadistic and malicious inside me likes having that power, to tempt fate, to push only so far.

It's the same angst one feels looking over a high drop. Even with the arm rail there, a primal fear kicks in that directs your body to fear this height, to walk away. However, the charge and the rush of knowing that impending doom is only a misstep away also has its intriguing elements.

It is an interesting concept, the terror I feel imagining death without a conscious afterlife. It just causes so much dissonance that I can't sleep some nights. I start crunching fuzzy numbers in the waning light about the odds that even if I get into heaven, my spirit will be conscious for it. No one really knows if your consciousness is involved in the afterlife. Something not a lot of people have considered: your spirit mignt indeed go to Heaven, but there is no guarantee that you will experience it. What if even if there IS an afterlife, your consciousness only exists with the sensory array of the biological machine? Your spirit gets a "well done" and your body no longer experiences the world. Your spirit sees pearly gates, your body no longer functions. Your spirit gets a mansion, the body has no idea, and by this I truly mean NO Ideas.

What if what we call "consciousness" is really just your brains UI and when the system shuts down, the user gets up and leaves through the gate, we are left in this virtual OS of molecules and energy? What if the button powers off the system and leaves us in consolation, a pass up for a new model and our hard drives won't reformat or become an external drive to a new machine?

In the end, I sometimes lose myself in this concept and find myself later horrified. It ruins my sleep and traps my brains when I am tired and left to my own devices. I simply have the compulsion to explain this to the empty faces, until the feeling goes away, ignorance sets in, the lye is neutralized with vinegar, and I walk away from the gate to forget about its existence, and more importantly, my inevitable nonexistence. Life goes on, and I can continue with my cyclical, fractalized existence in this world. I can continue to punch my card and spend my time, go home to rest for the next day... until its facade is ruined again by my own imagination's wandering.

Why can't I just go on pretending I will live forever like all the other deaf-mutes?