Ramblings On Death

I can't wait to die.

Not that I am suicidal, far from that. I've written to lenghts before about my perspective on life, how ''those that choose life are the bravest of all!''

But a part of me can't help but be insanely curious. Intrigued even, of what and how death will be. It's absurd, thinking about it. I may be stating the obvious but death is the opposite of life, that we've been immersed in forever, so of course such a concept is alien and frightening to us.

The rational side of myself embraces reality as a purely objective construct, like a canvas, where subjectivity can arise. What I mean by that is, I reject wholeheartedly any hypothesis such as the ''brain in a jar'' or all the solipsists of the world. The self is nothing more than a natural extension of the universe, of reality, not something separate or higher.

Everything is self-contained in the whole.

I say that, since the concept of an after life is counterintuitive. Why would our consciousness remain when its condition to exist (the body) is destroyed? For the soul to be permanent, persistent, transcient, implies extraordinary presumptions;

Spirituality, the divine, unobservable assumpations about the nature of the world, our place in it, FAITH.

How arrogant of us human beings, to be so full of hubris to think of ourselves worthy of salvation, of eternity, as we trample on the corpses of the whole planet earth, butchering and carelessly destroying the ''lesser'' lives of every beings, plants and animals, rats and ants...

What about their souls, on their way to heaven perhaps, or in eternal punishment for transgressing the divine laws of ants? How absurd. A human is a human, an ant is an ant, and rats are everywhere.

What makes us special, if not for delusion and fear? Now, enough from ants, as fascinating as they are.

Seeing that our brains are basically electric boxes, our minds purely physical phenomenas, I don't see how justifyable the idea that anyone's soul perdure after death, be it in Hell or Heaven or purgatory or whatever.

I suppose the idea is simply comforting. The idea that even through death one remains the same. After all losing what makes you ''you'' is most frightening of all.

Of course people would believe in the most convenient and agreable afterlife possible, since it's all fantasy! Of a lofty eternal paradise of bliss with loved ones, only accessible to those that believe, to those that behave ''properly'' to abitrary rules...

Sorry for getting so cynical. Let me phrase it in a more imaginative way :

It's like telling a fool on a roaming boat that the coming waterfall, deadly and deafening, is nothing to be afraid of. That the incoming, inevitable fall of hundreds of meters to certain doom actually leads to a calm lake.

Of course the fool will believe in the calm lake, even as he falls down and faces death in all its fatality.

Yet funnily enough, wether the fool believes in the calm lake or not, the outcome is the same...

I can't help but wonder if perhaps, upon death, the brain plays a trick on itself, and ''dreams'' of whatever it is it wishes for.

For the devout christian, a sort of distilled, condensed illusion of an eternal blissful afterlife with loved ones in heaven, much akin to a long dream that actually lasts a fraction of a second in reality.

And the wicked, cursed man, falling to despair as he gets to experience his own personal hell, stemming from his buried regrets, experiencing eternal punishment in the very last instant of his life.

The mind making true what it believes, in the very last seconds of life, before the gaping void that is death.

What I'm trying to say is, perhaps the soul, so stubborn and eccentric it is, makes the ''afterlife'' possible and real, but only for itself? In a totally subjective way, much like the existence of the subjective mind in the incomprehensible objective universe it is part of? As a way to cope with the dissolution of the self, of the embrace of the void, of DEATH.

I personaly believe my mind will collapse and become one - once again - with reality, to a faint, blissful state of omniscience. All sense of self and consciousness, lost, nay, shed, much akin to a cocoon. And flying outward to embrace everything the etheral butterfly of my abstract self, takes hold of the universe in a loving, watchful embrace.

Death at last