Several kossacks and online activist pals are presently confronting terminal illness. This is for them.
I can only think of death as the mystery of mysteries, much as our kind always has, the great unknown. I’m forever surprised at people’s certainty about things, particularly with respect to such weighty matters as mortality or the nature of existence. There is so much that we don’t know about virtually everything that it should humble us. What happens when we die? We pretend to know this but we don’t. This question is but one of many that are unknown and possibly even unknowable.
People sometimes seem to make snap judgments about profound and mysterious matters while branding all other viewpoints as folly. I think it is a common failing, a cultural blind spot so to speak, to have little or no consciousness of all that we don’t know. We are so often wrapped up in our pride for all that we have come to know, understand and be able to do that we forget that what we know is nothing compared to what we don’t. To lose sight of the great unknown is to miss the magic of this place and the magic of our lives. We forget that we live our lives engulfed in mystery. We don’t come close to having all the answers about much of anything really...we just pretend to. By any objective measure, we have unraveled an exceedingly small part of the riddle of our existence. There is much mystery, and I would say magic, in this universe of ours.
The hardheaded and scientifically-inclined among you might say, ‘I do NOT believe in magic – not even remotely!’ Then you are likely not cosmologists or particle physicists. To follow those guys is to veer very close to the magical, if not to bump right up against it. Perhaps I use the term too loosely. At any rate, the narrative of modern science has grown far stranger than our most fevered religious dreams of yore.
An odd series of events are said to occur at the point of death. This grows out of the well-known phenomena of the Near Death Experience. With respect to NDEs, death is likely one of two things: either the beginning of some sort of cosmic journey or the beginning of one hell of a cosmic dream.
All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.
Jack Kerouac
We inhabit a profoundly mysterious, even bizarre universe. The ultimate strangeness of it all may even be beyond human comprehension. We may not be sufficiently well equipped to understand it. Our brains may not be built for it.
Physicists now speak of a ten or eleven dimensional universe and the very real possibility of endless other universes, each with its own laws of physics and so on. So there may be endless worlds including parallel universes, worlds altogether unlike ours and worlds spookily like it, possibly even entangled with it on some quantum level or other.
What does it all mean? Who knows? But it’s humbling to know so little in such a multiverse as this...or it should be.
We believe our universe to be about 14 billion years old, or a little less. We’ve learned a lot over the past few decades about this strange place, thanks mostly to NASA’s orbiting observatories like the Hubble, the Spitzer and the many other science programs and projects. Yet in terms of what there is to know we’ve only scratched the surface. Everything we learn blooms into a million new questions, the mysteries dwarf our knowledge...and that may always be true. We’re not sure how knowable the uni multi-verse is.
The Carina Nebula...
In our particular universe, we believe we understand that energy is neither created nor destroyed. So what happens to the force of nature that animates us, what happens to our energy when we die? Everything a person is beyond the protoplasm: their being, their chi, their soul if you will (and I know some of you won’t), their personality, their anima, their passion, their love. Is it all here one instant and gone the next, never to exist again in any form anywhere? The question has mystified us from our earliest beginnings. If you are no longer mystified, it could be a lack of imagination. We simply do not know enough to be smug about such things.
I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.
Jack Kerouac
Since I admit that I do not know, and recognize that I may never know, here’s how I like to think of it: it matters that we have lived and it matters how we have lived. I believe we leave a lot of energy behind us, swirls and eddies in the form of other people’s memories, other people’s DNA in some cases, the consequences of our actions and perhaps other kinds of seeds we have planted along the way. Certainly metaphorically, if not actually in some fashion, our energy is a permanent part of the space/time continuum...about which I am reminded we know so very little.
God is the mystery that lies at the heart of the universe said Einstein. And it is a great and overwhelming mystery indeed. One can only be humbled.
I hope when I am at death’s door that I can just be humble before the great mystery and grateful to have lived at all. I hope to avoid raging at the dying of the light. Death is part of the deal. The price of consciousness. The meaning of sentience.
To those of you who are there, realize that we are coming along behind you just as those who came before. You are not alone. This is where the journey leads.
So if I offer you a prayer, don’t be offended. I am praying to the deep and unknown universe for you and I and all of us - and for everything that is good...in this universe and the next.
I’m glad to have known you in this life...even a little.
You’ve got to admit, it’s a hell of a ride...though less suffering would be nice.
Please be in peace.
Then Almitra spoke, saying, "We would ask now of Death."
And he said:
You would know the secret of death.
But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?
The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.
If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.
For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.
In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond;
And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.
Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honor.
Is the sheered not joyful beneath his trembling, that he shall wear the mark of the king?
Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
...
from Gibran’s The Prophet
The Sombrero Galaxy...