Death is often treated as an ending, a full stop placed at the edge of meaning. Birth, by contrast, is framed as a beginning, the arrival of something new into an already existing world. These assumptions feel natural, yet they rest on a quiet misunderstanding, one that dissolves when examined closely.
Nothing truly ends. Nothing truly begins.
Every form that appears does so by way of disappearance. Every arrival is carried on the back of a vanishing. The body emerges because countless cells die. Stars ignite because other stars collapse. Thought arises because silence gives way. Creation never stands apart from dissolution; they occur as a single movement, mistaken for two.
The universe itself is not exempt from this law. Should the cosmos dissolve entirely, space folding back into silence, time releasing its grip, matter unbinding, nothing would be lost. That collapse would not be annihilation. It would be intimacy taken to its extreme.
What remains when everything disappears?
You.
Not the personal identity shaped by memory or biology, but the condition that made the universe possible in the first place. Awareness does not arrive after existence; existence arrives within awareness. The world is born where perception happens. When the universe vanishes, what stands revealed is not absence, but the one to whom absence appears.
Every night offers a quiet rehearsal. Deep sleep erases the world without effort. No stars, no body, no history, yet being does not flicker out. Something remains unmistakably present, though nothing can be pointed to. That presence is not waiting for the universe; the universe is waiting for it.
Cosmic death follows the same logic. When all structure dissolves, what shines through is not void, but origin. Birth does not just occur inside the universe; the universe occurs inside birth.
This is why death feels so intimate. It threatens the loss of what was never fundamental. It removes what was added, not what is essential. What dies is the scenery. What is born is the one who was never inside the scene to begin with.
Every ending reveals the same truth from a different angle. The death of a moment births awareness of time. The death of identity births presence. The death of the cosmos births the one who was always watching it happen.
Death and birth are not opposites. They are the same doorway, approached from different sides.
And you are not what passes through.
You are what remains when the door itself disappears.
Morgan O. Smith
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Morgan O. Smith 