Thoughts on death

What of death?  One thing we can say with surety is not one of us will escape it.  What is it like when you die?  Clearly, we cannot know.  However we have seen animals and people die.

Most of the deaths of animals in the wild that I have witnessed have ended in calm submission.  Not all, so that is not to say there is no pain in death, but in most cases there is a peaceful letting go at the end.

There is acceptance and an element of tranquillity. Is this why people are executed in painful ways?  You would think that if a society decided to deprive someone of their life, they could at least do so “humanely”, but the electric chair, painful injections, and other unpleasant forms of execution still exist, even in what some regard as a “civilised” country. The passing away doesn’t look nasty enough, so they try every imaginable means to prolong death, and overwhelm this moment of peace with pain.

I don’t want to delve too deep into something I know nothing about, and can only guess at.  While I find this interesting, I consider it a diversion, as it is a matter I can only be ignorant about until the day I die. Nevertheless, how strange that there should so often be this calm at the end!  When we are undergoing what we (man and animal) fear most.  Why?

Should this not be an important question?  I am sure many religions have an answer to this question. Your soul has left you. You have begun another life.  But I prefer to focus on nature, and what I hear, see or smell.  Of course Science tells us that in many cases you lose blood, which lowers oxygen levels to the brain.  That should make you weak and dizzy.  Most of us have been in that situation, even just by lying down and quickly standing up, or when we have a fever. Initially what we normally worry about becomes irrelevant. Later we might not be fully aware of our surroundings.

What happens next?  Well, it seems that after that last bit of calm the light goes out.  You die.

I think it is odd that often there is tranquillity just before.  It suggests to me that the worst thing about dying must be not knowing what is happening, and not being prepared.  We always want a few more years, days, hours, minutes, seconds.  There are things we wanted to do.  Things left undone.  And we never planned to die.

If there is relaxation before that last moment, why the struggle before?  

I think the struggle before is all about what I call “the game of life”.  It is the most serious game we ever play, and at the end of it I imagine myself thinking that it all seems so pointless and so irrelevant.  Hence my choice of the word “game”.

Of life after death

We are born, we live and we die.  Is that it?  What is the point?  What happens next? Do we go to heaven?  Hell?  Do we reach Nirvana?  

These questions are the very core of human culture.  We have been asking these for millennia.  Every religion is concerned with answers to these questions. Every religion has come up with answers. I am very wary of the effect our desire for answers to these questions has on any results. I think the only answer we can truthfully have to these is another question. Why am I so sceptical of answers to questions on the afterlife?  

Firstly, because questions that could result in answers that we really fear historically make us invent the most amazingly imaginative answers.  Murderers fear the truth of their actions, and invent astoundingly intricate stories.  A similar thing happens to people who have suffered terrible tragedies. We naturally fear death, and fear of what happens to us after death seems to fit this pattern.  The likelihood that we will invent wonderful stories of what happens afterwards is very high.  It requires incredible bravado and strength to face a hard truth.

Secondly, because the answers available to us from many cultures consistently return to some theme of life after death.  Does that really mean we have a life after death?  Some would say so.  Does that mean that there is some truth there?  I doubt it.  I am sceptical because what happens to us is of such universal concern and not knowing induces such fear, that I strongly suspect that the consistency in the theme merely highlights the fear, not a truth in the answer.

Thirdly because some of us proselytize that we really know.  As if they’ve been there.  They are very convincing in their determination of the “truth”. Well the likelihood is they haven’t been there, and they don’t really know.  

There are people who say that the answers are in a holy book, and these books are right because through one way or another God spoke to people and they wrote it down, so it is the word of “God”.  Well, leaving aside the question of god, it is clear that people wrote these books, and people are fallible, often opinionated, and often wrong.  People once believed the earth to be flat, to be at the centre of the universe.  Now we know better.  

Lastly, because there is no real way we can know.  Really know.  

It would seem logical that if god is really there the answer to these questions will be around us. In “his” world and not in a book.  If he is not there, the world around us is all we have got to answers these questions, so it seems logical that we start there anyway.

So, there I will begin.  In nature.  On Earth.  In the sea.  Around us.