The Next Adventure
“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
~ Mark Twain
Is death the next adventure or the end of the only adventure that a person’s consciousness has ever known? Religious people are afraid of death, thinking about the sins they have accrued and being afraid of the judgment in the afterlife. Non-religious people are afraid of the nothingness. Of the ceasing of the only adventure that they’ve known. But the better philosophy for the mind, regardless of whether one believes in it truly or not, is one of optimism. Hope is the only thing that would make life here more serene. The universe existed billions of years before humans appeared on the scene on Earth, but every person can reflect every day to evaluate if he/she has done something to make the world a better place. If not, do something today to make tomorrow better. Knowing that you’ve helped another live better, that you’ve helped pave the path for the next generation to have a better life, that you’ve created things to improve the civilization as you know it, means you don’t have to be worried about death at all.
Reminded of a book that I’d read sometime back “Proof of Life” where the author talks about a Near Death Experience. There are a lot of books on NDE, Astral Projection, and similar tell us about what it feels like for them but they cannot really convey how we can experience it. Moreover human mind is so complex that people can imagine things that are extremely strange and unbelievable.
But at the end of the day, belief in anything, even in oneself, is personal. One could close one’s eyes, imagine latching one’s soul to the bird on the window sill, and fly away looking at the body sitting on the chair with eyes closed. As the bird goes farther, the home, at the city, the bay, everything looks smaller and smaller. And when one comes back after the journey, did one really travel or just replay all the past images seen through videos from drones and airplanes? What about a human 10000 years back? What did they imagine? I guess not something too far off. Deep down, most humans want to believe in the unknown. Most people know somehow that the human body is more than more flesh and blood.
