Death, Existence and SRH

I went to the 40th birthday dinner of a friend last night and it is something which cannot be ignored: the expectation of our society that we get married. The group was very sharply divided between those who are married and those who are not. There was only one couple awaiting marriage there.

This morning I re-examined my attitude to this; there are two notable features. One is the very irony that I find so distasteful of relationships and society: that those who chose not to get married are actually shunned by those who do; the creation of society always occurs at the exclusion of some group; if this didn't happen and everyone was welcome then what would the meaning of society be!? Marriage is an institution born of excluding other people from the partnership - primarily sexually but it extends much farther. I don't believe those who chose not to marry exclude the married in the same way - altho they may be bitter and jealous so it might be hostilities all around.

The other point is more interesting. Examining my own view I saw distinctly that my own eyes are set at the horizon and that the field of view that includes relationships is quite small. We may marry and enclose ourselves within safe relationships, but they are finite and death eventually breaks in (I had this all laid out for me long before I ever even embarked on a serious relationship! luckily?). It is this breaking in of Death that I realised, in stark contrast (again probably), is what proves our immortality. How can we extend our field of vision beyond ourselves if we are limited within ourselves? It is Buddha's argument to Ananda in the Shurangama Sutra, yet again, in another disguise. We must inhabit a space outside ourselves to be aware of our own finitude and mortality. Certainly in the last two weeks I have been acutely aware of mortality and how it will happen to me "one day" and the question of, will I be prepared for that day, is really hitting home at the moment: I am not prepared for the most important moment in my life, not yet anyway! It is like a marriage day, but a marriage with a much greater being than a finite partner, and a marriage that everyone who has every lived has or will have to make, so it is a true society that we all belong to.

It brought me to consider that maybe the issue of the SRH is to do with existence. A system must be able to encode its existence and its non-existence. The birthday do was interesting for another reason: namely, that the host was over half and hour later than the last guest. Standing around chatting waiting his arrival was an excellent experience one where he seemed to be more present, and to have left a greater nark on the event than if he had arrived. In an entirely selfish way it would have been far more excellent for me if he had deliberately shunned his own celebration - to me at least it would have been a piquant moment of existential revelation experiencing the presence of someone so perfusively who was not there. Something I hadn't had the chance to do properly since everyone is so robotically punctual. This is a kin in a way to the experience of "my muse" whose presence was overwhelming whether present or not. Altho this borders on my own criticism of "fetishisation of existence" and may be more intellectual stimulation than anything real... anyway things need to be able to encode their own absence in order to qualify for being self-aware (maybe this rather than self-referential). Self-Awareness Hypothesis (SAH) then.