MUSINGS ON DEATH
I think dying is a terrible idea. I don’t say that lightly. There are reasons why it’s a good idea, chief among them how much room there isn’t. OK, that’s to be looked at. How about death making for an intensity of living, where if you don’t have forever you scramble to accomplish things? I’m not so sold on that except as lame justification for this brutal thing nature does to us. Look at all the species, you may say. They all die.
Well, that doesn’t comfort me, and if I ran the world, given I’ve been in it for so-long-that’s-too-short, I’d put ending death at the top of humanity’s to-do list. One thing in my bedrock is how the post-Judeo/Christian story has the universe perpetually creating itself. It made humans to have something that could appreciate it, but it took a risk cause humans could hurt their world. Given we could destroy everything, how’s about being able to create “everything,” which could include immortality? And, while we’re at it, with animals coming and going, if I ran things our doggies and catties would stick with us forever.
About that no-room problem, as long as this awesomely creative force of the universe was at it, why didn’t it make bodies like Earth to get spun off like satellites into endless orbits, where prior civilizations could just keep going? That would have had to have been in the blueprint, and I can’t help but shake my head at this failure of my universe. Except, of course, failure is useful. It drives progress. So, the universe, if you think of it like a meta-species, would understandably have had some colossal failures where this death thing is the top one. Really. All that education stuffed into people who get wiser all the time only to leave? Come on. What a waste. Too much like Buddhist sand paintings and too little like museums masterpieces that have lasting value.
So, what to do about death after that bad design idea to find ways to go gentle into that dark night? Hearing a near-death recounting can serve. My favorite is Mellen-Thomas’s. I got myself on the bill to speak at a conference in Hawaii because Mellen-Thomas was speaking, and we became passing friends. You know, he was just a guy (he died a couple of years ago), very human, and that was a good thing. It signaled that anyone can connect with ultimate truths. Near death is a whole discipline now. It is comforting. What else? I have in mind’s eye a project called Why I’m Not Afraid to Die. I even got that domain name. And, I got a couple of fearless friends to do short videos. I have too much on my plate to run further with this, but I think it’s a marvelous idea that would be very helpful to almost all of us. You can talk to me about getting that domain name.