Boredom is a good thing for it makes me think about boring things: death and resurrection.
Since this is Good Friday, and the music playing in the barangay's PA system is a soundtrack from the cenakulo, lots of horns, timpani, etc. kinda put me in the frame of mind because this is what is lent all about: death and resurrection.
I am already in my middle age and the idea or the reality of death is already in the peripherals of my mind. It's creeping in and there are times that I have dreams about death, not nightmares but more of a feeling of disassociation or flying and fleeing from reality, like a ghost. There's nothing scary about being extinguished in death, what is scary is the idea of the consciousness surviving into the unknown.
I remember having nightmares about death. Hell has been so hammered in my mind that it left me with an morbid fear of death, or going to hell. But death is a reality that will come upon everyone; it is the great equalizer. The idea that there's a place out there where the good would be rewarded and the veil would be punished is comforting but as to their reality...I guess that's beyond proof.
We don't know what happens after death. No scientific instruments have been able to probe into the afterlife and no one has been able come back from the afterlife to life and describe what is after after death. Sure there are many reports about near death experience (NDE) but there are many explanations for the NDE's out of body experiences, hallucinations from the anesthesia is one of them. Or people coming back from death but it's never been scientifically proven that these people really died.
The fear of death is really the fear of the unknown. One way people have dealt with death is by looking at it spiritually. Death is the crossing from the physical reality to the spiritual realm. I think most religion have this feature in their belief system: life after death.
Not only is life after death all about existing into another realm of reality, it is also predicated on the idea of rewards and punishment: morality. Remove the idea of heaven and hell from religions and they will die quickly and permanently. Religions exists because they play and prey on the believers hope for immortality in heaven or nirvana or its equivalent. This is the real foundation of religion: fear.
Remove the object of fear and you remove the fear. of course the act of removing this fear is difficult because the fear of death and hell has been deeply ingrained in the psyche. But there are those who have overcome this fear and have lived an exemplary moral life, in fact it could be said that they lives a life holier than than that of the believers. The idea that the deletion of the idea (or reality) of heaven and hell would lead to an amoral and chaotic society is unfounded.
Death is real. Do we think about it? It cannot be helped...
Resurrection?
Immortality is something to think about and it is quite tempting. I am not going to ask whether it is true or not, I don't want to offend my fundamentalist friends.
The question is: what is special about it?
There's eternal repetitions. Going back to the same experience again and again and imagine this happening to you in eternity.
What gives meaning to life is its temporal limit.
Anyway...there are a lot of things to think about life and death but as it is, we are existing in this world without our choice. Our circumstances are but product of accidents (or designed by God if you're a religious). Whether we believe in life after death , resurrection, eternal damnation, or annihilation, doesn't matter for now.What is important is that we live, we go about our lives. What we do with our existence would provide meaning for it.
Or...life is absurd, which fine with me too. Causality is just a mental construct.
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