Learning to Be Alive

In writing about death and dying, it's necessary to contemplate the process of living, and to arrive at an understanding on what it means to be alive. 

For my new readers:  I'm writing in the West, specifically in the Southern/Midatlantic United States.  So my perspectives shared here include mentions of western media, and the stories/anecdotes shared may reflect very different narratives than elsewhere.   Here in the West, life means the pursuit of financial success, and the worship of the gods of money and fortune.   So much so that a great number of our population has forsaken what they love in favor of what will bring them more money, and a result we have a large percentage of our population on medication for depression and other diseases.  Just looking through this lens can demonstrate to anyone that the Western way of living is unsustainable at best.  

But we are more than just elements in an economic machine. We weren't born to pay bills and die.  

Life is more than this picture presents.  But what does it really mean to be alive? 

At its core, we are told that life is merely a series of biochemical processes that have conveniently learned over the course of eons to happily overlap and/or cohabitate in such a manner as to produce a conclusion that results in bodies, limbs, stems, organs, etc.   We are also taught that this type of life - rather, these types of biochemical processes - evolve over the course of time, and sometimes one formation yields to another, sometimes not.  All of these elements may certainly be true.  But adherence to these hypotheses does little to fundamentall address another problem that lurks so stark and radiant agains the landscape of scientific noise:  the hard problem of consciousness.    

Consciousness, it appears, is not born from biochemcial processes, or at least not insomuch as we can currently understand them.   A lot of finite resources have been allocated to solving this problem, but to no avail.  So the question still remains to us to define - from our physicalist perspective - how consciousness has evolved from the synaptic interactions and biomechancial nodes within our biological brains, which themselves evolved carefully-coincided paired enzymes and critical proteins.   Enter biocentrism, and Hoffman's theory of conscious agents.   I won't go too far into the weeds on either of these, but to summarize:  both of these theories support the notion that consciousness is fundamental to life, and indeed creates it somehow, and that consciousness may be an elment fundamental to the universe itself, so that all that we see and experience is an outlier - a creation - of consciousness. 

Consciousness may be a universal axiom upon which all other fundamental laws 
of nature and life are based.  

This has far-reaching implications for modern science as a whole, but its potential to impact our knowledge around death and dying may shift the course of history altogether.   But more importantly than that even, it may reveal to us a very important, fundamental axiom about ourselves and the world we inhabit:  life perhaps does not happen out there.  It happens in here. 

If life is what happens inside, then, we must immediately adjust our paradigm.   We will need to reimagine and relearn to be alive, as all our focus has heretofore been about things out there: clothes, houses, food, learning, money, cars, infrastructure, etc.   We have done relatively little to live inside, and have focused all of our efforts on building things outside of ourselves.   We've built cultures and civilizations around the premise that life is about how we interact with our physical environments, and how we utilize resources (or rather, how we waste them), but if consciousness is fundamental to life, and life happens inside and not out, then we have greviously forsaken life for a faux version of it.   

Learning to be alive then likely means learnig to experiences ourselves, and doing so outside the paradigm of our phsycialist world. It is going to mean a lot more introspection and less time on social media. It's going to require self-reflection and self-evaluation, and more importantly, self-truth.   

But in relearning how to be alive, we may come to realize what I'm trying to convince my readers of:  there is no physical life or death at all, only consciousness, and it is fundamental to all these moves anda breathes, and there is nowhere we can go that we are not immediately in the infinite presence of it.