(1). Forget Afterlife, Get A Beforelife.
Noel Coward once said his idea of heaven was an unending cocktail party in which all the guests were twenty years old. Almost all faith systems have their own versions of the afterlife, both good and bad, heaven and hell.
Atheists pooh-pooh concepts of any sort of life-after-death as sentimental superstition, spiritual comfort food like chicken soup for the soul. However, a British scientist now claims that he has formulated a theory based on experiments which suggests that in the punctuation of being and non-being what we call death is not a full stop but a comma.
The scientist bases his hypothesis on the Principle of Uncertainty first posited by physicist Heisenberg in 1927, which basically says that at the subatomic level, observation of a molecular event changes that event. In other words, perception of phenomena can change the phenomena perceived. The world is what we make it.
If our perception of it makes the phenomenal world, our world cannot exist after our 'death'. Each existence is a self-contained eternity, beyond which there can be no space or time, or 'death'.
The idea of the world as perception is not new. The eighteenth century empiricist philosopher Hume said that what we called the world was not 'out there' but only in our perception. For example, there is not objective existence of the colour red. Our sensory faculities create the colour red, along with everything else in the universe. So what is 'red' for you might be very different from the 'red' created by any perception. Your 'red', the entirety of the world created by your perception of it, cannot outline the consciousness that perceives it, it cannot outlive your 'death'.
The world that through individual sense perception each of us creates for ourselves cannot outlive us to bear witness to our 'death'. Beyond the space and time we create for ourselves, there can be no other space or time to put a period, a full stop, to our existence. In this sense, we are all 'immortal'.
Critics might fault such reasoning as an example of what philosophers call solipsism, the belief or view that the perceiving self is the only thing which exists. Such an argument however, inevitably gives rise to the counterclaim that, like everything else, both solipsism and any critique of it are also products of a self which perceives.
Those of us who long for an eternal afterlife, somewhere 'out there', are like absent-minded people who look for their spectacles without realising that they are wearing them. The 'afterlife' we seek is this life itself, outside and apart from which there can be no other.
As Carl Sagan said, the mysteries and wonders of a supernatural afterlife that religions conjure for us pale into banal significance in comparison with the far more profound mysteries and wonders which constitute the ongoing miracle that we myopically overlook in setting our sights on a heaven beyond the horizon, the ongoing miracle of our earthly existence, of our day-to-day lives right here.
Is there life after death? Perhaps a more pertinent question to ask is if there's life before death, a before-life? Because that's the only life worth living, which is something we tend to forget.
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(2). Everyone Comes With An Expiry Date.
Different people retire at different stages but generally, there is such a thing called retirement because our body has reached a certain level of incapability. So you bring your work down to a lower level simply because if you push it beyond that, you may 'retire' in a different way soon! Once you retire, there must be a shift of focus from economic and family concerns to something more spirituality oriented. The physical body has come with an expiry date.
Once you are over a certain age, however well taken care of you are, you are still a fragile life. Tomorrow morning, the whole equation of your life can change physically. We hope it doesn't come to you but it is a possibility. Millions of people are going through it. Thinking it won't happen to you is living in a fool's paradise. Knowing the possibility and doing the right thing so that it doesn't happen to you is the sensible thing.
So it is time you activate the other aspect which goes beyond this physical body. That is the spiritual part of you. For a person who knows only the body, old age is the greatest misery and fear. Everything becomes meaningless and burdensome when the body is threatened and begins to creak and groan. But if you have tasted something beyond the physical body, old age will not be a problem, it will be a blessing.
So once you reach a certain point in your life, you must allow at least a certain quota of your energy and life in that direction. If you put the whole of your life and energy in that direction there is nothing like it, but at least a little bit of your life should pursue that. You should have done it right from day one because if you are a keen observer of life, from the very first day you are born there is a reminder of your expiry date. If you are not such a keen observer, by the time you are fifty, there are sufficient reminders. As the body becomes more fragile by the day, if you don't take these reminders into consideration and look beyond the possibilities of being physical, it would be a foolish way to exist.
Old age just won't matter if something within you is very vibrant. When the moment of death comes, you can smile and go without any sense of loss because it is not a loss. If life happens, death is a natural process. Being afraid of a natural process is unnatural. This fear has come because of a certain sense of a certain sense of ignorance and unawareness. We are not in touch with reality and we have gotten deeply identified with this body. This has happened because we have not explored other dimensions. That is why, often, experience of life leaves most people wounded instead of wise. But if people with so much experience behind them could make their life's experience into wisdom, their wisdom could be useful for the world in so many different ways.
No matter what kind of teachings other people give you, whether somebody tells you that you are Atman, Paramatman or whatever else, if your experience is limited to the physical body, the fear of losing it is natural. If we had explored and established ourselves in other dimensions of experience, the body would not be such a big issue. It becomes an easy thing to handle. Life or death won't make such a big difference.
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