DEATH AND IMMORTALITY
697. Only in his exceptionally intense moments can man realise that - putting it in the first person singular - »I will indeed die«.
698. The angel of death is depicted as a skeleton, not because this is what remains the longest from the body, but because this is the most petrified and fossilized part of the body which has become mostly body: bone represents the fact that the body’s destiny is death. Man dies because he has got body.
699. One cannot meet the angel of death because everyone carries it within his body in the form of his skeleton.
700. The relation of man living in an advanced phase of the dark ages to death is one of the most obverted: on the one hand he does not believe in his after-death subsistence. On the other hand, he lives - one could say he lives so carelessly - as if his mundane and deeply temporal existence would never end. On the contrary of this, spiritual man lives his life by supposing, knowing and experiencing his own eternity both pre-existentially and post-existentially, moreover he considers each and every day and moment of his mundane existence as the last one.
701. Nothing exemplifies better the tragic situation of modern man than the fact that he considers himself completely mortal, and still lives his life as if he were completely immortal.
702. In most cases man lives his life as if his bodily existence were eternal.
703. While the fact that he himself will die reveals itself to man in its full dramatic sense during a short-term fatal disease, he does not perceive a much more assured fundamental situation: that he has to die at all.
704. Only consciousness that has already dramatised death adequately can de-dramatise it adequately.
705. Each spiritual school of high order with no exception has this fundamental tenet without any pessimistic overtone: »consider each day of your life as if it were the last«.
706. Our whole life is necessary in preparation for the moment of death.
707. Death inevitably pertains to life as its complement. Man experiences death to the degree he indulges himself in life, because life contains death.
708. When life is lacking what is beyond life then death, the complement of life, overcomes life.
709. The after-death dissolution of consciousness is an individualisational annihilation, i.e. in concreto the annihilation of an identification. The annihilation of an identification is the annihilation of the one who identified himself with it.
710. While salvation and damnation provide the biggest polar tension related to dying on the religious level, from the metaphysical point of view the tension between absolution and annihilation is the greatest.
711. Immortality is neither a faculty nor a gift, but a task to be accomplished.
712. According to the general understanding of immortality, it is the extension of a cut-off, particular and isolated experience of being into the endless.
713. After the collapse of mundane vehicles, the conditions of individual consciousness can further exist. These conditions should be gathered in the nigredo; conditions of the relative immortality, i.e. the conditions of cum tempore genesis and that of cum tempore termination should be collected in the albedo, while the rubedo is the attainment of absolute immortality.
[See the notes after aphorism 605.]
714. I-myself (Sanskrit aham ātmā) as I myself am immortal. I myself am mortal only to the extent that I am not myself.
715. I myself - as fully myself - am immortal. But as a person, or as a being connected to the physical or other more subtle bodies, I am mortal.
716. I am immortal as much as I am myself.
717. If my identification tends toward the engendered world, I will pass away with the engendered world.
718. Man is mortal because besides »I am-ness« (Sanskrit asmitā) he also carries »it is-ness« (Sanskrit astitā).
[Otherness is present in man through astitā. The less asmitā is contaminated by astitā, the less man is mortal, and the more he is he-himself.]
719. Only the uncreated is immortal. All that is created will pass away.
720. To avoid having an end I should relocate myself into the position where I never had a beginning.
721. Personality has a beginning, and so it has an end too; personality is not eternal. The subject - »the beyond-being centre of being« - is eternal.
722. Only man who realises the state of beginningless-ness can realise absolute immortality. Only one who has no beginning can become endless.