Of Life and Death

To be conscious of life, of that which surrounds us, of that located within our body, which we maintain by instinct and not by will…

We maintain our body, which openly declares us as part of an animal species. It evolves through a process of inheritance, transmitting information about our adaptation and the use and disuse of abilities. Without a doubt, we recognize the biological system to which we belong and can interact with it without any difficulty, whether for our self-preservation or that of another species, as we are not outside the food chain, which has as its main function to maintain the body with energy, in other words, to keep it alive.

Nevertheless, setting aside the functionality of our instinct, it is worth noting that we can be alive without being conscious of it, as the vast majority of other species do. To be conscious of being alive is different from being conscious of the world around us, being conscious of oneself, or being conscious of death. We would say then that this is where the difference between man and other species lies, in recognizing that we are alive and that we are going to die. We realize that, if it were not for this, we could subsist instinctively, contemplating the interaction of nature with species, forming part of its cycle.

Assuming that we only had consciousness of the world around us, we would say:

— There is the world! There is nature! There is the family nucleus to which I belong! There is the prey and the threat that make me part of the system!