The Immortality of Not Being Born

Abstract

What does a life matter, if every life is part of an endless string of lives? It matters to us individually, perhaps, because the consciousness of our selves, the consciousness that we hope will have eternal existence. But how permanent is feeling compared to the physical? The physical might never perish, only be transformed, but is this true also for feeling and consciousness? Perhaps Ibsen was completely wrong: perhaps only feeling can be lost. Perhaps, beyond physicality, only loss of feeling and thought is eternal? Perhaps feeling and thought come from nothingness and revert to nothingness. Perhaps the unique feature of living organisms is the ability to lose? Is the descent into nothingness then what makes living organism unique? Is that where eternity is found?