Ignorance is Premature Death

Introduction 🔗

In a previous text I have considered how the inorganic can appear living.¹ In this text I want to consider the defining feature of qualitative life, and how that is what makes NPCs gray.

Discussion 🔗

Autonomous and Conscious Life 🔗

The only way to ward off death is by living. We live when we perceive time and it is precisely in the state of consciousness we can experience the lapse of time. It is ironic: those most concerned with time tend to be the ones that spent the least of it in their conscious, living. Do they fail to see this or did they shun their eyes out of fear for uncomfortable truths?

So reflects the protagonist of a novel I am preparing to publish. He is pointing to a particular type of human. Not a life without meaning, rather a state of being that passes unnoticed.

Consciousness is the medium through which life becomes actual. A body may move, and a mind may think, yet without awareness, both operate on autopilot. Thoughts arise, but remain ephemeral distractions from consciousness experience. The organism autonomously moves on, but in a bleak gait.

The term life carries a joy that we all can recognize. It is the glow in care-free children, spark in loving couples, or the quiet pride in elderly who observe their thriving lineage. In contrast, the aura of the dying cogs of the machine cries out grim and agonizing cries. But dying implies that something once possessed vitality. The type of human of whom I speak never awakens, the NPC opens its eyes and it blinks.

The Eternal NPC 🔗

In the Vedic tradition, ignorance is one of the three modes of nature that conditions the consciousness away from self-realization.² Similarly, in Tantric systems, the term pashu (“animal,” from the verb pac, “to bind”) is used to designates those who are subject to primitive urges, conformists lacking knowledge—an archetype said to dominate during the dark age.³

Zarathustra and Judge Holden alike would agree. Both remark how the Last men are absorbed by the difficulty of life, causing them to resign themselves from their intended architecture, existing as husks.⁴ This seems to be ageless.

Does this occur for those who fall under a specific threshold of intelligence? I lack the evidence to say, even if I have the hunch that it would be weakly correlated. Has technological slavery⁵ and goyslop amplified the NPC epidemic? Perhaps. The human body doesn’t decompose without consciousness.

Conclusion 🔗

From the first-person perspective, an unlived experience is indistinguishable from non-existence. Without consciousness, it is as though it never happened—almost as though one was never alive.

Fear of death moves herd and master alike. But the herd fears only physical death and they happily submit their spiritual dignity in favor of more time alive. Time they will inevitably waste. In contrast, the master is more concerned with spiritual death, and may yield their physical life for a higher purpose.

Take this thought experiment: imagine a pure consciousness able to perceive itself and its own existence, even without the five senses. From its perspective, how would it feel to die? Quite how it felt to not be born.

There is a saying that the second life starts when we realize that there is only one life. Well, have the NPCs even been born?

This returns us to the initial claim: the only way to hold the shadow of death at bay is through conscious living.

My exploration continues. I wish you luck on our continued path through necropolis.