“I look upon death to be as necessary to the constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.” Benjamin Franklin
You know, I can’t believe in all my years of writing and sometimes feeling like I had to dig way too deep to find a story, I have never written about my very favorite subject. What the fuck happens when you die?
I want you to find me one person, who has never thought about this, even for just a minute. For me, it was an early introduction, when my father died at aged nine. It kind of twisted me, ever so subtly, into thinking about that kind of stuff and it has followed me around for decades. I have no desire to outrun it at this point.
This is such a loaded subject, no way I am going to score major, clarity points, but I want to go for the sincerity end zone anyway. It is so wonderfully helpful to create two, total extremes and find a path between them, where the truth often lays.
In my story of the outcome of life and death, there is one, very simple extreme. When you take your last breath, darkness and the void of nothingness enveloping, it all comes to an abrupt end. There is absolutely nothing beyond that last fraction of a moment. I am not sure if that is my biggest fear, but it frequently gets my attention.
Now, let’s move out toward the spiritual frontier, where possibilities are nearly endless. For the moment, let’s focus on reincarnation, the idea we keep returning in some life form or other, until our spiritual journey is complete. I have a problem with this one, just as I do with the one dimensional approach to the simple explanation just before this.
Before getting any deeper into any of this, let me be clear that I know absolutely nothing more about any of this than you do. I just happen to have the audacity to think I can write about it, which is exactly what I’m doing right now. Of course, I’d be full of shit if I didn’t admit that this whole idea has become a bit more present in my life these days, because of the accumulation of my years.
To me, the flaw in the reincarnation idea is that it is predicated on our continually coming back until we have achieved a level of evolvement that allows us to move beyond this place. We now have eight billion people crowded on this planet and it is crazy to think we are all supposed to transcend to a higher state and then move on. There are so many of us here, because transcendence is a fabrication of wishful thinking and cultural coitus.
God moved west over the millennia. Heaven and Hell became the spiritual real estate many of us began to invest our lives in. I am sorry, but I have always had a problem with this fable of a place for the good and a much less attractive place for the bad. The compass for either one was never very clear and destination exceptions have been continually made in the their liturgy.
I’ve had a kind of terribly, sloppy Zen practice for many, many years. One of the things that it has done for me is to create this kind of muted, internal dialogue, finding me always in agreement with the Buddha. He just nailed it and never used a hammer to make his point. I think as this practice has evolved over the years, it has somehow kept pace with the scientific brilliance that has been struggling to find the same answers. I believe it is the questions that anchor this journey of ours, spiritual and cerebral.
I think all that matters is what you think, even assuming you are gifted the privilege of orchestrating your departure. I think if you believe your last breath turns to empty darkness, your last singular moment on earth, then you are gone, go with it.
I find myself increasingly drawn to the idea that we are some energy form, long before we even have our name, let alone a face!. We are just a vessel for this energy. It passes through us, having existed before we became its temporary custodian. There is no end for us, just a continuum.
I like to think we set our own course going forward. What you believe, you become. I don’t think what’s next is some pre-ordained destination. Of course, I am being completely selfish at this moment. I do think something continues well beyond our last breath.
I want to be around my grandson forever, whether a whisper in his ear or a cold chill on his neck. I don’t think I need to become an intergalactic alien, visiting residents in assisted living facilities, because no one would believe me anyway.
I am not the arbiter of truth, just an opinionated jerk. What happens is what we want to have happen. I will let you know, maybe.