I'm starting to wonder if death isn't such a bad thing. I know we've been brought up to believe that death is something to be feared, but death is really just a part of life. If you think about it, without death there wouldn't be any life. Just about everything we eat comes from something living, even that tofu was once a plant that had to die in order to be turned into a cube of food-like substance. And that's the way things go. Something has to die so something else can live and eventually that something else dies too. When I was younger I was afraid of dying. Maybe most people are afraid of death simply because we have no idea what happens afterwards. No one who has experienced it can tell us what to expect. There have been reports of near-death experiences where someone sees a bright light or a tunnel, but even if those reports are true, I have a feeling that it's not death itself, rather the road to it.
There are a few possibilities when it comes to what happens when we die. If you're Christian or religious there is the belief that there is some kind of afterlife, be it heaven or whatever. When you die you get to experience bliss and are surrounded by all your loved ones. Maybe that's true, but a part of me wonders if that's just a story told to people so that death isn't so scary. Don't worry about dying because afterwards everything will be wonderful. There is another belief that when you die you're reincarnated as someone or something else. Scientists have shown that energy cannot be destroyed, only transferred or changed. This is like money, or at least the value of money. You hand a dollar over to someone, the money isn't lost, it just moves on to somewhere else. The value remains the same. Then again I guess someone could destroy the dollar since it is just paper, but you get the idea of what I'm saying. So if our "soul" is just another form of energy, like an electro-magnetic field, then when our bodies die that energy has to go somewhere else. Some believe that goes into a new body. A question I had heard awhile ago went like this. In 1700 there were around six hundred million people on the planet. Three hundred years later there were ten times that many. If a soul is constantly being transfered after death, where did all those other souls come from? Speaking strictly from an energy stand-point that is huge leap in growth. It's hard to say what the original source is for all that new energy.
The other possibility for what happens is nothing. It could be when we die we simply cease to exist. Our body dies and it's like someone turns out the lights on our consciousness. The idea of not existing is what scared me the most for a long time. Life is all we know, or at least all we can remember if there was something before this. It's what we're comfortable with. Again, no one can tell us what happens afterwards so there is a tendency to be afraid of the unknown. I don't want to cease to exist, but I suppose when it happens I won't be around to care one way or another.
One could argue that there are ghosts or spirits, which contribute to the notion that there has to be something beyond this world. Maybe those things are indications of something else. We understand so little about our own world that I have a feeling we understand even less about the worlds and realities around us. If ghosts do exist then given the number of people who have died and even more to the point, people who have died badly, must number in the hundreds of millions. All six hundred million people from 1700 are dead and at least some of them had experiences that got them stuck here. A ghost could be nothing more than the echo of life. So the ghost of your grandmother might not actually be her, but rather an emotional resonance of who she was. They say ghosts, at least the bad ones, are stuck in some kind of loop, repeating the horrible event that lead to them dying. Because of this they're trapped between worlds. I tend to think of them more like psychic scars. Given time it could heal on its own.
Getting back to my original thought, maybe death isn't so bad. Some believe paradise is waiting for them. Others think we might get another go at things until we get them right. Or there would be nothing, which given how some people live, could be a huge relief. We are sad when someone dies because we no longer get to see them. Everything we knew about them came to an end, sometimes abruptly. People say that someone who died is in a better place. I don't know if they're really in a better place, but more a different place. Maybe this whole thing called life is just a giant preamble to something more and all our fear about death is like ancient man being afraid of the thunder because they didn't understand it. Then again, maybe this is all we get and we need to make the best of it because when the show is over there is no encore.
