I’ve always been a little perplexed by the question “is there life after death?” Especially as I find it more interesting to consider life before death, but mostly, because death is not the opposite of life, it is the opposite of birth.
Life has no opposite; it is the cycle of which death and birth are just a part, and lets face it, dying is a lot easier than being born. People come back from the afterlife with experiences of bliss and happiness; if you could remember your birth would the same be true? As Mark Twain put it: “All say, "How hard it is that we have to die" - a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.”
Death has it’s own customs that feature in every culture in the world, to the sky burials of Tibet to the mummifications of the East. Not every culture mourns death in the same way, according to James Michael Dorsey in his article Extraordinary Burials from around the World, “the way mankind deals with its dead says a great deal about those left to carry on, and burial practices are windows to a culture that speak volumes about how it lives. As we are told in Genesis, man comes from dust, and returns to it. We have found many different ways to return.”
But it seems that nothing is able to occupy our cultures more (when it comes to death) than the concept of the afterlife.
Since before the early Greeks devised of Hades, there have been as many theories to the afterlife as there are applications, some believe you are greeted by God’s servants and family members, others believe you are thrown back onto the Samsaran conveyer belt to be born again, while others simply assume that you are sucked into a void of nothingness…which is getting off lightly, when you consider what could happen to you in hell.
Since Dante’s Divine Comedy, those with a European mindset have conceived of hell as eternal punishment awaiting those who refused to conform to God’s will (the will of the Sea of Rome) in life. However, the corrupt agenda of the Catholic Church can barely be trusted to give any kind of guidance in such matters, especially in modern times (although, its not like the behaviour has worsened, its just become public.) The scandals that surround priests and the flagrant displays of wealth that surround Vatican City demonstrates how prepared the leaders of the Christian Faith are to follow the teachings of Jesus, who lets face it, had death nailed.
Was Jesus not here to lead by example? Was the story of his rising not meant as a hint that death was nothing more than another doorway in life?
The idea of reincarnation has always appealed to me, but is life really just a buffet of experience we each gorge ourselves on, and death the price we pay for each feast? Johann Wolfgang von Goethe believed that “as long as you are not aware of the continual law of Die and Be Again, you are merely a vague guest on a dark Earth."
He is by no means the only one to believe so. One of my favorite thinkers of all time had this to say on the matter. "The soul comes from without into the human body, as into a temporary abode, and it goes out of it anew it passes into other habitations, for the soul is immortal. It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again. Nothing is dead; men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals… and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some strange new disguise." Ralph Waldo Emerson
Not one of us can say with absolute certainty what is going to happen to us when we die. And even though we may witness the termination of biological functions that sustained people, loved ones, animals surrounding us, can we honestly testify that that is their total end?
Samuel Butler said: “To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.” Can anyone know they are dead? What are ghosts (if you believe in such things) if not spirits without a machine? How do mediums (the genuine ones) contact the dead?
There are so many incredible mysteries in life that we may never know the answers to until we die, and when you look at it like that, death could be the most illuminating experience you have ever had (since the last time you died?). Until then the purpose of life must be to live. "Live so that thou mayest desire to live again - that is thy duty - for in any case thou wilt live again!" Freidrich Nietzsche
No comments:
Post a Comment