Infinity and Paradox

Human consciousness appears to operate through two primary orientations. Most of the time, we experience the world as an objective environment that exists independently of our minds, positioning ourselves as observers moving through physical space. This outward-facing mode establishes a clear division between self and universe, subject and object.

Yet certain shifts in consciousness can invert this structure. In these moments, the external world is no longer perceived as something “out there”, but as something arising entirely within the mind. The universe ceases to feel like a place one inhabits and instead becomes a substance consciousness produces. Reality reveals itself as a mental event, and the boundary between observer and observed appears not as a physical wall, but as an internal construction.

This inversion also alters our relationship with time. Ordinary human experience is driven by expectation: the mind continually leans toward the future. This forward momentum generates tension, as the present is measured against outcomes that have not yet arrived. Anxiety emerges from this comparison, from the psychological demand that something must come next.

When expectation dissolves, the mind can enter a state of absolute presence. In this condition, the need for a future moment disappears, and with it much of the machinery of anxiety. Existence becomes a steady, self-sufficient now — an unchanging completeness that loosens the grip of goals, consequences, and narratives of becoming.

There is an important distinction between expanding awareness and dissolving the setting of the self. Many profound intellectual or emotional experiences widen our understanding of the world while preserving a sense of identity and location. Other experiences — often described in spiritual or mystical terms — strike directly at the mechanism that anchors us to being someone. When this anchor falls away, a person may encounter a radical “freedom”, but also loses the fixed reference points needed to orient themselves within reality. Without a defined self, one becomes a detached witness, observing a world to which they might no longer feel fully connected or responsible.

These reflections inevitably lead to the nature of death.

Traditionally, death is understood as the end of consciousness. But from within consciousness itself, the matter becomes far more ambiguous. No one can honestly say whether death is an external event observed by others or an internal phenomenon experienced by the subject. What can be stated with certainty is more subtle: to recognize the end of one’s own experience would require crossing that very boundary. It is like attempting to register the final period of a sentence — you would have to pass beyond the point in order to acknowledge it.

From the subjective perspective, this is impossible. If awareness is present, death has not occurred. If death has occurred, awareness is no longer there to register it. In this sense, death never appears within lived experience at all. One way or another, it does not exist for the subject.

This idea echoes an ancient Greek insight, often attributed to Epicurus: when we are, death is not; when death is, we are not. Death is always absent from first-person reality.

Seen this way, to contemplate death while alive is not to approach a void. From the outside, others may witness a body’s cessation. From the inside, however, there is no moment labeled “death”. There is only experience.

If consciousness can fold inward completely, then what we call death may be less an ending than a final reorganization of awareness: a transition from outward projection to total interiority. Yet ultimately, this remains an unknowable object for the living in the collective shared reality.

The most honest conclusion is simple and profound: death may be an observer’s effect, or it may be a private internal collapse of perspective. All we can say is that it never arrives in first-person awareness.

And so, for the subject — for subjective reality — it is always absent.

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