The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 81 of 125
The culture-wide denial of death
When my mind cleared I was sitting quietly, leaning up against the beech trunk, thinking about death. Gurdjieff used to speak of two higher “centers” in us, a higher emotional center and a higher intellectual one; and I know that on several trips I have touched on a qualitatively more highly evolved type of thought, something far more focused, swifter, and more incisive than the sluggish mulling over of things I normally call thinking. So it was now. Far from being a taboo from which my thoughts inevitably skittered away, death had become a subject of compelling interest; and what I was trying to understand was the extent to which we have lost our freedom through our culture-wide denial of death. For once you know, really know, that you are going to die, there is no way you can take this world with the same deadly humorlessness. A crack runs through your identification with your own life. You start to see the forever disappearing, evanescent, insubstantial nature of all objects and events. You start to intuit that the only truly solid thing is the very thing that seemed the least substantial of all: consciousness itself.