What do you think happens after death?
Reply #16 - February 16, 2014, 02:07 AM
I struggle with this so much, especially when I first contemplated it, it has abated somewhat now, but still lingers on the periphery of my consciousness.
We live, we feel, we laugh, we cry, we love, we lie and then we die. We go back to the state of nothingness that preceded our conception. For us, we go back to the state of nothingness that preceded the Big Bang. For us, the Big Bang never happened, the universe never came into existence, the stars didn't go supernova, the sun didn't flicker into life, the planets didn't start their violent lives, and the seeds of our evolution didn't sprout.
We have always existed as matter, as atoms and will continue to do so as long as the universe remains. But does that not highlight the futility of our being as sentient conglomerations of individual atoms? We exist for at most the best part of a century, we survive at most 100 revolutions around our star. We come into being from a state of non-being, then develop the capacity to contemplate our existence and mortality. For all the promise that life bestows, it turns out to be nothing more than a trick, an illusion and an anomaly. The universe did not intend to bear life, it does not have the capacity to decide against it, and it cannot terminate it once put in motion. We are the great cosmic accident, which as a whole may be irreversible. From the viewpoint of an individual however, it is finite, and if it were the work of sentience, it is cruel. To live means to hope, and that hope is horribly misplaced when one considers that just as none of us existed 200 years ago, none of us will exist two centuries from now. We were once never alive and soon it will be as if we never were once alive.
We leave fragments of our impact on existence, we leave imprints, we leave creed, we leave destruction and we leave signs that we roamed this earth. Or we, our lives and our deaths are completely eroded by the sands of time. Millions have lived, died and been forgotten without leaving a single mark. One must question if these people ever did really live, then one must also accept the same fate for oneself.
And once we are dead, once we don't exist, didn't exist and shall never exist, our struggles and our triumphs shall matter to us no more. If I die now, if I had died in childbirth or in my mother's womb, it would not make a difference. If I die in 10 years, in a century or in a millennium, it shall not make a difference. I could live a life of fulfilment or a life of agony and the end result would always be the same, it would be as if it never happened.
I attempt to argue against our futile existence by striving to leave the best impact I possibly can on the world, whilst simultaneously attempting to do as little damage as possible. I find it would be prudent and poetic to draw a line in the proverbial sand, or to put it a better way: carve my imprint on the earth in a small secluded part of the most remote mountain, so that it does not obtrude on those that do not mourn my passing. Those who do wish to remember, can seek it out and find it. Here I would write a simple message, but one that cannot be refuted or negated, and one that would allow my life to not be as meaningless and temporary as I feared whilst alive. This message would stand forever, never to die and never to cease, it would read: I Was Here
But alas, even for this seemingly never-ending documentation of our being, impermanence strikes. Long after all life on this Earth has vanished, the Sun will die and expand to engulf our world, burning away the sign of our existence that we imprinted upon it.
Topic: What do you think happens after death?