beyond wishful thinking 3So life ends in a strange sacrifi ce. Each of us is brought to the altar.
Th is time, no angel stays Abraham’s hand. What is the point of the sac-
rifi ce, and what faith does it serve? It is an incident in a cult the secrets
and purpose of which remain forever closed to us.
It is all the more terrifying to know that those whom we love most
will be brought to the same altar, and off ered in the same sacrifi ce,
sometimes under our eyes. In their death we see what we can only
imagine for ourselves: the annihilation to which we are all doomed
confi rmed, as love proves powerless to sustain the life that love may have
given.Th e terribleness of death becomes clear as well from another vantage
point: the perspective of consciousness and of its relation to the world.
Th e experience of life is an experience of consciousness. Th e mark of
consciousness is to present a complete world: not just how I see, feel,
and think about myself, but a whole world centered on me, extending
outward from my body. For consciousness, everything that exists, or
that has existed, or that will exist exists only because it plays a part in
this mental theater of mine. Beyond the perimeter of its stage, there is
no world, and there is no being.
Continuity of consciousness, embodied in an individual human or-
ganism, is what we mean by a self. Th e experience of selfh ood is the
experience of consciousness associated with the fate of the body and
per sis tent over time, until the body fails and dissolves. Th ere are no hu-
man beings for whom the world fails to be manifest in this way as
extending outward, and backward and forward in time, from the con-
scious and embodied self.
We come to learn that this view of the world is an illusion. We cor-
rect the illusion, or compensate for it, but only theoretically; that is to
say, by telling ourselves that the world is not in fact the way in which we
will continue to experience it.
Death not only brings the conscious self to an end; it also shows, in
defi nitive and incontrovertible form, that the repre sen ta tion of the
world as extending outward in space and time from the self was false
from the outset. Th e dead person will not be there to see the demon-
stration of his error, but the survivors will register what has happened.
Each of them will know what awaits him.