Tuesday, April 11, 2017

DEATH AND THE PURSUIT OF ETERNITY - Part II

LIFE

Being born was not a choice any of us personally had a say in. Our being conceived was, at the very least, a decision consciously or unconsciously made by our parents who then choose to see it through and, barring any natural event which could have ended our birth, we entered this world whether we wanted to or not.  Life gets thrust upon us as we get thrust into life.

Most of us grow up embracing life - no matter what  it brings.  While we have no choice in being born, the conditions of one's birth is not the sole predictor of how life will turn out because choice plays a role in our development.   Although our personal choices are limited by our faculties and environment, we have choice within the parameter of being human.

The human mind, as it currently is, with all of its perceived limitations and weaknesses is and has been the single most important tool we humans possess in meeting our personal and collective needs. It permits us to adapt to a variety of situations that life throws our way.

The hope is with bioengineering and the ability to merge with AI technology some limitations will be lessened if not eliminated in the future, but as pointed out in another post, the human mind is readily addicted to ease and can inadvertently put a hold on the natural evolution of being.

As new and as innovative all of  technological advances appear, there is a sense we've been down this path before.  I believe the role of theism and its mythic stories is intended, in part, to prevent us from getting ahead of ourselves, to provide a paradigm for asking important life-sustaining questions that guide us in finding answers to help preserve and sustain natural life on this planet.

In the pursuit of eternal life, the question becomes if this is the only life to be lived?

As much as I like this life and don't want to die, is there more to life than this life?

For all practical purposes and from a purely personal perspective this life was a complete surprise.  Of course, I have no recall of being born but reflecting on the fact that I exist conjures up a sense of surprise.

Do more surprises await?

THE FUNCTION OF DEATH

We humans have a strange relationship with death.   We personify it as a god or a god-like creature or force that gathers us at the time of our demise.  In Christianity, death is personified as the "enemy." In Abrahamic monotheism, the belief is that God's intent was for humans to live forever. The only reason we die is because our first parents screwed up.  According to the Christian doctrine of original sin, we've been screwed ever since.

The concept of eternal life on this planet in Abrahamic monotheism comes from the warning our mythic first parents would know death the moment they ate the forbidden fruit of knowledge.  Eternal life on this planet  is a deduction made from that warning.  The creation story of humankind is a myth telling us why we experience suffering, not why we die.  Death becomes part of that suffering; something we worry about and some spend a lifetime trying to avoid.

Yet, this and stories like it tease the mind with the thought that we have been deprived, if not robbed of our rightful status of being immortal.  The fear of death is so strong that we live in denial which takes on many forms.

I believe death is, always has been, and always will be a part of life as the end state of this life - that life in this universe is finite.  Planets die, stars die, galaxies get swallowed up by their dark holes. Death is a function of existence.  It is nothing more or nothing less than that.  It is not a punishment, in and of itself, like causing someone to die can be.  Death is being dead.  What happens after death, if anything, is anybody's guess.

Death is the end of physical existence, the end of physical suffering and the mental angst associated with it. That much we know - and there is value in knowing that death serves that function.  The reservation most have about death is whether the mind or soul dies.

Culturally, these have been treated as animating and identifying properties of the physical being which separates from the physical body at the time of its death.   Mind and soul are not necessarily synonymous terms, as soul is sometimes considered one's life force and mind one's collective sense of being.

As the mind possesses what appears to be both organic and inorganic properties, it's hard to determine if our thoughts and memories die with our brains or if such things are being stored in some sort of cosmic cloud that can be accessed after death; much like information gathered on a computer can be regained should that computer die and it's information accessed by different or new computer from the internet's cloud.

Theoretically, as long as this universe exists the resonance of our being remains traceable.  The past is always detectable and is why scientists can study the origins of the universe.  While the mass of the universe expands and changes, it remains constant according to Lavosier's conservation of mass.

The question is whether thoughts and memories have mass.  If thoughts are observable as energized particles that can be traced in neural imaging they, theoretically at least, have an equivalency with mass, or is memory and thought merely conveyed by energy?

My point is that becoming an individual life form is a unique emerging of a universal constant that was present from the dawn of time.  What we are made of may be thought of as eternal matter and energy, existing at the dawn of time.  In essence there is no new mass or new energy, just new fluctuating manifestations of it; such as, ourselves.

While the universe is composed of constants, it does not act consistently.  Its mass evolves, devolves, expands and contracts as it generates and degenerates energy.  Life and death are part of this universal process.

The question is whether in the short span of our universal existence something "other" is taking place. The human mind hints at such a possibility as evident in our ability to imagine.

Where does the energy of life go when it is expended?

Does it remain constant like mass?

"Being" appears to be a universal constant, what happens to the "beingness" -  the energy that manifests the identity of individual beings that cease to be?

Are there dimensions of being that this stage we call life is totally incapable of perceiving?

Is death merely a threshold as some imagine it to be, the start of a new beginning?

Until next time, stay faithful.




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