But if you wish, you can imagine that the Shadow does wait for your return and that it does remember everything that has gone before and that it doesn__ let you accept yourself as perfect until you let it. There is truth in that. That is why a child usually cries as soon as it__ born. With its first breath, the Shadow returns.

Consciousness is the product of electrochemical signalling in the neurons of your brain. So when the brain stops functioning fully, your consciousness, or to a broader aspect your mind ceases to exist with its unique individualistic qualities. It's like the soothing flow of water. It is only water as long as its internal realm of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, remains intact. If you break that structure which we call H20, it ceases to be water. Likewise a soul remains a soul, as longs as its neural structures remain intact. If you mess with those structure, then the entire personality of the soul may get radically altered. So, to think even further, if those neural structures inside your head stop working, then the soul ceases to exist forever. So, as long as you have a functional brain, you exist, and the moment that brain dies you die.

He looked like an evil male model, showing off what the fashionable college-age villain was wearing to Harvard this year.

Hell is the impossibility of reason.

I have brought you a hero__ fate, and a hero__ fate is never happy. It is never anything but tragic.

No one should know his entire fate. It's too dangerous and too depressing. Just keep going, do your best, and hope it's good enough. That's all any of us can do.