B1220 <=> B1222 [BTG XLVIII From the Author, p. 1221]

An approximate understanding of the manifestations in ourselves of these consequences may be derived from a further fact, perfectly intelligible to our Reason and beyond any doubt whatever.

All of us, people, are mortal and every man may die at any moment.

Now the question arises, can a man really picture to himself and so to say “experience” in his consciousness, the process of his own death?

No! His own death and the experiencing of this process, a man can never, however he may wish, picture to himself.

A contemporary ordinary man can picture to himself the death of another, though even this, not fully.

He can picture to himself, for instance, that a certain Mr. Smith leaves the theater and crossing the street, falls beneath an automobile and is crushed to death.

Or that a signboard blown down by the wind falls on the head of Mr. Jones who happened to be passing and kills him on the spot.

Or that Mr. Brown, having eaten bad crayfish, gets poisoned and, no one being able to save him. dies the next day.

Anyone can easily picture all these. But can the average man contemplate the same possibility for himself, as he admits for Mr. Smith, Mr. Jones, and Mr. Brown, and feel and live through all the despair from the fact that those events may happen to him?

Think what would happen to a man who clearly pictured to himself and lives through the inevitability of his own death.