You fear death?
Why?
In my explorations of beliefs, I have come across many similarities of this universe. The way visible light only happens within such a small range of frequencies, the way subatomic particles balance just so within various forces creating existence, and the poignant yet fleeting connection between creatures resulting in regeneration.
The monotheists violently force others to confirm their exclusive access to the after life, the humanists aspire to stoicism, and the naturalists live within a continuum.
The Grecian idea rings most true to me, that we spend an awful lot of time dead and blip! suddenly we experience life for but a moment and we go back to death. The Celtic worship of the inverted tree likewise places death as the standard, as did the Egyptians and Aztecs. The Dreaming goes even further placing an indefinite barrier between what was, what is, and what will be: now is eternal.
Cosmology was invented 50,000 years ago in Australia.
What is real? What is right?
Homo sapiens is a creature of ideas. We exist with the ideas we enact, manifesting those ideas through the habits, institutions and privilege we create in our societies. Death is used by monotheists to contain people within safe rooms, rooms they build inside our minds.
Where a group of people fear something, and are contained in one space, we create explanations. As one illogical explanation is accepted, others follow. Before we can say ‘error 404: epistemology not found’, we have gods, advertising, capitalism and Pauline Hanson.
Chaos is deemed reasonable. Scrutiny is deemed criminal.
Art and science strengthen with scrutiny; closed-room beliefs, neoliberalism and lies weaken and eventually fail.
So I put it to you to scrutinise what you have been told about death, what you believe about death, and identify what about this universe stands up to scrutiny.
The idea that we spend most of our existence in death, and only being able to make the very slow and limited choice between staying dead or revisiting life, may be scrutinised by drawing similarities from disparate fields: huge expanses of space and suddenly a planet impossibly filled with life; the piano sits silently until a hammer hits a string; the chance encounter which alters a life’s path.
There is so much more to existence than appearing from nothing then going either up or down and, crucially, only if you happen to have been born into a family gripped by those ideas.
Anyone who uses an idea to make you afraid of death is not your friend and is definitely not to be trusted.