Too often I find that the subject of death is addressed with goofy speculation, close-minded stubbornness, or outright fear and avoidance. So let's bypass the "Death for Dummies" approach and take a deeper intellectual look at death to better understand the important role it plays in our lives... and especially what it can teach us about how to live.
As far as our human bodies are concerned, death eventually captures all of us. As far as I can tell, no human being has yet managed to live forever. Even if we evolve new silicon bodies for ourselves and find a way to transfer our minds into them, there's no reason to believe those bodies will be immortal either (even with frequent upgrades). We may be able to delay death, perhaps even for a very long time, but eventually our physical existence will end at some point. Forever is too long for us to last as physical beings. No backup system is foolproof, especially when its opponent is the infinity of time.
On average more than 150,000 people die every day on this planet. That's 2 people per second. Over a million corpses a week. And this is "normal" for planet earth. Does this fact help you get some perspective on the scope of various tragedies? If 3000 people get wiped out in a single stroke, that's still only 2% of one day's total... hardly significant from a cosmic point of view.
And here's the worst part. You don't even know when you'll die (unless you're reading this right before committing suicide, in which case I'd better keep writing). But my guess is that you don't have an item labeled "die" on your to do list or in your tickler file.
So how comfortable do you feel with the idea that today might be your last day alive?
For 150,000 people today, that's about to become the reality, so if you happen to be among them, you'll have plenty of company. I wonder how many of those people feel prepared for what awaits them.
What do we really know about what happens after death?
Instead of launching into stories about near-death experiences and what various religions say, let's try sneaking up on this problem from a different angle. Let's ask this question instead:
What can we reasonably say does NOT happen after death?
Obviously what's "reasonable" will differ a bit from person to person based on his/her context and beliefs, but I think most of us can agree on some fairly basic observations.
First, you can't take it with you. All your physical stuff stays here. Whenever someone dies, we notice that their stuff remains in the physical world. It doesn't suddenly vanish.
Another thing we notice is that our physical bodies stay here. That includes our heart, lungs, brain, hemp tattoos, etc.
Also, it's fair to say that because the physical stuff stays here, then any knowledge and skills you've developed which are rooted in the physical world will become obsolete when you die. Your knowledge of HTML probably won't be of much use in the afterlife, unless of course there are dead computers in the afterlife too, such as my old Atari 800. I hope you still know BASIC.
If we manage to retain anything of ourselves after death, it seems reasonable to say that it won't include any of our physical stuff or our physical bodies. And much of our knowledge will be obsolete as well.
If we can take anything with us after death then, it would have to be something non-physical in nature. And the non-physical part of ourselves is our consciousness. You can call it other names if you wish -- soul, spirit, etc. The exact term you use doesn't really matter. I'll use the term consciousness.
So we have a couple alternatives that seem reasonable to me:
- After we die we retain some part of our consciousness, but all the physical parts of our existence are lost.
- After we die we cease to exist. Our consciousness gets wiped out along with the physical. Dead and gone forever.
Life After Death
I can think of many other options which are variations on these two. You can twist and reword these basic ideas into different forms, and you can speculate endlessly about what it would be like to experience option 1 (such as a precursor to reincarnation), but I think this is what death basically boils down to. Either we continue to exist in some non-physical state of consciousness, or we don't.Now which one of these general options is most likely true and correct?
Certainly we can unearth pieces of evidence that may favor one side or the other. We can look externally and examine things like near-death experiences and those who claim to channel dead people and so on. We can look to ancient texts and other people (living or dead) for guidance. Or we can look within ourselves and attempt to intuit the truth.
Personally I've done plenty of both looking within and looking without, and so far it hasn't really given me a satisfying answer. I found enough evidence to partially convince me that option 1 is more likely correct than option 2, but there are still a number of holes that leave me with doubt. Given what I know about beliefs, I always have to wonder to what degree I may be finding what I expect to find at any given time.
This uncertainty about death presents a serious problem though. In order to live my life in a manner I feel is intelligent, I'd really prefer a clear answer here. If I know that option 1 is correct, I'm going to live my life very differently than if I know option 2 is correct. I can't do both at the same time because they seem incompatible. I'd set different goals on one side vs. the other.
Living in a state of uncertainty doesn't quite work either. Uncertainty in this particular area gives me a poor basis for making intelligent lifelong decisions. It's fine that I'm uncertain about what the weather will be like next week. But uncertainty about death itself makes long-term planning nearly impossible unless I lower my consciousness, watch a lot of TV, and subscribe to the social context without thinking for myself. Think about it -- if you knew with absolute and total certainty what will happen to you after death, would it change how you're living your life today?
Remaining uncertain in this area is a suboptimal choice -- it's better to decide one way or the other and be wrong than it is to remain uncertain and do nothing. Too much doubt in this area will produce the worst outcome of all. In order to intelligently decide how to live, we need to have a reasonable understanding of where we're headed. We can still live OK without this certainty, but we couldn't really say that we're living intelligently, since we'd have no basis for knowing if our decisions would ultimately turn out to be smart or foolish in the long run.
This line of thinking helped me realize that I needed to achieve certainty on whether I was going to live in accordance with option 1 or option 2. Only then would I really have the freedom and direction needed to live intelligently.
But looking at all the evidence wasn't quite enough to convince me to intelligently choose one side or the other. It leaned me towards option 1 but not enough to give me total certainty. I could at least see that the approach of looking for evidence wasn't going to work. It would continue to produce more data but not more certainty.
That's when I decided to come at this problem from a different perspective, as I mentioned in a blog post called, A Scientific Method for Exploring Consciousness. Instead of worrying about which option was correct, I decided to more immersively explore both sides -- to treat each of these options as its own belief system in order to experience them directly. I realized that I would never have enough data to make a firm decision from the outside looking in. So I chose to consider the inside looking out.
One perspective I took was the perspective of being already dead. Under option 2 I would completely cease to exist, so that was an easy perspective to consider. It was in fact no perspective at all. I wouldn't be around to regret or praise anything I did. So if option 2 ultimately turned out to be true and correct, then in the long run it would make very little difference how I lived, at least in the sense of getting anywhere in the future. About the only meaningful conclusion I could draw from this (un)perspective was that a life lived under option 2 should be lived with a strong focus on the present moment.
Then I considered the perspective of option 1. That one had a lot more branches to explore, but essentially they fell into two types. First, there's the possibility that I can no longer really do anything with my consciousness after death. Perhaps I enter some sort of eternal state of existence from which there's no escape. Maybe it's a heaven or a hell of sorts. No more doing... just being. So if I found my consciousness frozen in such a manner, where I was still self-aware but unable to really do anything other than ponder my celestial navel, there is a reasonable leap of logic I can make there. And that is that if this happens, I think the most likely state in which my consciousness would freeze would be related to the general state it's in when I die. So my death would sort of be a continuation of my life, but there would be no further development of my consciousness. I don't really need to consider the situation where my consciousness is frozen in some random state that's out of my control, since that doesn't give me any more information about how to live and basically reverts to the same conclusions as option 2.
The other branch of option 1 is that perhaps I will have some ability to continue to take action after I die. So there's some type of postmortem doing in addition to just being. But what would I do? If it wouldn't be anything physical, then the only real doing would have to involve something for my consciousness to experience. And this implies that I'd be able to continue developing and growing as a conscious being even after death. Perhaps there will be a new phase of existence similar to a human life but without any of the physical elements. Then I could continue what I'm doing now and put together a soul site called, "Personal Development for Dead People."
Source: stevepavlina.com
No comments:
Post a Comment