Death and Life
We are born only to die, only to cease to exist as we are. Knowledge of that ending, of a time to come without us, is terrifying to many people. So we search for immortality, guarantees, anything to predict what will come when, and how to plan for or against it. But our daily life offers no guarantees, no promises of the future except that it will come. Promises of the future can only come from faith.
How we handle the knowledge of mortality defines us in many ways. We spend our lives striving for immortality, hoping for survival against all reality. Yet in truth many of us desire certainty even more than immortality, desire to know the date and time of our death, and to know how it will happen and how to pass painlessly and with grace. Such knowledge cannot exist, of course, because even if we knew our own body's original time limit, we constantly do things to change that and shorten and lengthen our timeframe.
This uncertainty and brevity of life, far from the apparent curse people see it as, is actually a great blessing in disguise. Only because we do not know the time of our death can we risk it, always in the hopes that it won't be this time, won't be us. We strive and struggle against the unknown, to learn, and grow, and become better than we were. This drive for immortality, not in the body, but in the minds of others, drives both the best and the worst of human behavior. We seek the immortality of opinion, of remembrance, and that seeking can guide us in many directions of life.
We exist, and strive, for a reason. As part of the Divine, we are separately-willed individuals that work to improve ourselves and the Universe around us when we are at our best. These drives to strive, to grow, to change and improve ourselves and others, push us only because we have a time limit, because we cannot put these desires off indefinitely, but must work at them from a young age if we hope to achieve them.
All words, however, are cold comfort when faced with mortality and the mortality of our loved ones. The Divine can seem cold and uncaring compared to personal pain and hardship. Yet, the Divine suffers, as we do, with each death, and rejoices with us in each life. Our Flame is that of the Divine, never lost or forgotten, even when we leave our bodies and cease to be separate, and are again one with the Universe.
The loss of ourselves, of our individuality, is scary to many people. We value our identities, our separateness from each other, even as we bemoan it. Anything that threatens our separateness, our knowledge of self, is a potential threat even as it is a potential gift. And so we fear death, knowing that we will no longer be ourselves when we do not wear our bodies, and fearing what we might be without them. We try to find ways to save our individuality even beyond death, beyond all knowledge into the realm of hope and faith.
But the Universe does not conform to our will and desires, much as we wish it did. Our lives end, but we are never forgotten or lost, but instead returned to the greater Universe.
Questions:
What do you do in fear of death? Does it help? Hurt?
What blessing has mortality brought to your life?
How can you live without certainty? Would life be better if we knew of how we would die?
How we handle the knowledge of mortality defines us in many ways. We spend our lives striving for immortality, hoping for survival against all reality. Yet in truth many of us desire certainty even more than immortality, desire to know the date and time of our death, and to know how it will happen and how to pass painlessly and with grace. Such knowledge cannot exist, of course, because even if we knew our own body's original time limit, we constantly do things to change that and shorten and lengthen our timeframe.
This uncertainty and brevity of life, far from the apparent curse people see it as, is actually a great blessing in disguise. Only because we do not know the time of our death can we risk it, always in the hopes that it won't be this time, won't be us. We strive and struggle against the unknown, to learn, and grow, and become better than we were. This drive for immortality, not in the body, but in the minds of others, drives both the best and the worst of human behavior. We seek the immortality of opinion, of remembrance, and that seeking can guide us in many directions of life.
We exist, and strive, for a reason. As part of the Divine, we are separately-willed individuals that work to improve ourselves and the Universe around us when we are at our best. These drives to strive, to grow, to change and improve ourselves and others, push us only because we have a time limit, because we cannot put these desires off indefinitely, but must work at them from a young age if we hope to achieve them.
All words, however, are cold comfort when faced with mortality and the mortality of our loved ones. The Divine can seem cold and uncaring compared to personal pain and hardship. Yet, the Divine suffers, as we do, with each death, and rejoices with us in each life. Our Flame is that of the Divine, never lost or forgotten, even when we leave our bodies and cease to be separate, and are again one with the Universe.
The loss of ourselves, of our individuality, is scary to many people. We value our identities, our separateness from each other, even as we bemoan it. Anything that threatens our separateness, our knowledge of self, is a potential threat even as it is a potential gift. And so we fear death, knowing that we will no longer be ourselves when we do not wear our bodies, and fearing what we might be without them. We try to find ways to save our individuality even beyond death, beyond all knowledge into the realm of hope and faith.
But the Universe does not conform to our will and desires, much as we wish it did. Our lives end, but we are never forgotten or lost, but instead returned to the greater Universe.
Questions:
What do you do in fear of death? Does it help? Hurt?
What blessing has mortality brought to your life?
How can you live without certainty? Would life be better if we knew of how we would die?
posted by Vieva @ 5:21 PM
1 Comments:
At 1:23 PM,
Star said…
Death and Life, 10/3/05 (see, I TOLD you I was really far behind):
>>>Such knowledge cannot exist, of course, because even if we knew our own body's original time limit, we constantly do things to change that and shorten and lengthen our timeframe.<<<
Does each body come with a pre-set time limit, then, which is altered by the things we do in our life? I mean, is there some sort of starting point for this? I don't know what my answer to that question would be, but the basic idea here kind of really appeals to me. That there is some sort of predetermination, but that we change it as we go.
Of course, the question that naturally leads into is whether the predetermination or starting point actually matter if we change it all the time anyway. :) So maybe it's irrelevant.
I'm still wrapping my head around what you have to say about how having an unknown time limit motivates us. I think there's definitely something in there that feels right, but I haven't quite worked around to exactly what it is yet. I wonder if it's more than just needing to get stuff done before we die, though... I have some thought also floating around about what would happen if we did know. I think at some point there would be a kind of, "Oh, well, I might as well not do this, because I'm just going to die tomorrow anyway and then what good has it done me?" And I think that having the unknown deadline drives us to avoid that kind of thinking, too, because what if we're wrong? What if tomorrow comes and goes and we're not dead, and now we have to live with whatever we did or didn't do that we expected death to render irrelevant?
Questions:
1. What do I do in fear of death, and does it help or hurt. Well, the most obvious things are things that keep me physically alive. I exercise to keep my heart and lungs and muscles in good shape, so that they can keep working as long as possible. I eat foods that will keep my body healthy. I wear my seatbelt and don't use a hairdryer when I'm in the bathtub. That kind of thing. I think these things help. As far as securing my legacy or whatever... I don't know. I don't think I've done much there in the big picture. But I have made friends and I do have family, at least some of whom can reasonably be expected to outlive me. I will live on in their memories even if I do not live on in the memory of society at large. Again I can't think of a way this would hurt myself or anyone else (unless you count one of us having to be sad when the other passes), so I guess it helps. It helps make life bearable now and ensure that someone will remember me when I'm gone.
2. What blessings has mortality brought me. It's not something that I'm often explicitly aware of, so that's difficult to say. I know that at the times when I have been aware of it--usually when someone else is dying--it's brought an appreciation of life, if I can use a bit of a cliche here.
3. How can I live without certainty, and would life be better if we knew how we'd die. I can live without certainty because I have no other choice. I adapt to what I am given and what I can reasonably achieve with it, which doesn't include certainty about death. I think that in some specific situations knowing how one is going to die would be good--it would be somewhat of a stress reliever should one find oneself in a life-or-death situation knowing that it wasn't the time or the place! But for the most part I think we would get lazy, especially as the day neared. As I said above, if we're going to die tomorrow what does it matter whether we go to work today? What does it matter that we never finished that research project? What does it matter that we never gave any thought to how to improve our lives? Death is almost here--what's done is done, for good or for ill. Not enough time to find that cure for cancer, so why bother. And of course there's also the question of having death hanging over you as the day approaches. That would be awful, I think, to have it just sort of hovering, waiting, with no hope of it being postponed. (Then again, if this happened to everyone maybe we'd adapt to it and not be so scared of death!) I think for the most part not knowing is the better thing.
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