Aging Capriciously

No one or at least hardly anyone wants to die.  Suicides included, no one really wants to die earlier than they expect to.  We don’t choose death, we chose life.  We want immortality.  We want to live forever and ever.  Ideally, we would like to live forever in a young, healthy and happy state, surrounded by our friends and loved ones.  Let all our enemies perish and if there is a hell, let them go there, while we go to heaven.

“Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.” — Abraham Lincoln

The question that we all ask at some point in our lives is: “What’s next?”  After this life, is there another life?  Some like Houdini said he would come back if he could.  There is no reported evidence that he managed to succeed.  Thus, even the great Houdini himself could not manage the feat!  Two years ago, I attended a séance in Kentucky.  There were about 20 of us at this séance and two young girls were the intermediaries or mediums.  We were at the old Wickland mansion in Bardstown Kentucky where a young slave woman had once lived along with three former Kentucky governors.  Somehow, these two young local women had found a “channel” to this former slave and were able to converse with her.  We were all there with the expectation that the “channel” could be opened and we could somehow share in this supernatural experience.

This blog is best read while listening to Jonas Frisk sing Wings of Eternity (click on link)

Lights flickered, candles glowed, one of the young girls (they were twins) seemed to go into a trance.  Pretty soon, her interlocutor (an older woman who communicated with the young girls when they were communicating with the former slave) told us that Sally (I am using fictitious names here) was now in touch with Anna the former slave woman.  Sally appeared to be talking to Anna.  Our interlocutor asked if we had any questions that we wanted to ask Anna.  Several people volunteered questions and Sally gave replies that Anna told her in response to the questions.  The séance went on for about an hour with each person taking turns to ask questions and communicate with the dead.  After Anna went back to wherever dead souls go, we all adjourned to the upstairs dining room for coffee and snacks.

“If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky

I would guess about half of the attendees felt they had communicated with the dead while half of us thought it was mostly entertainment and acting.  Perhaps the sisters really believed that they were talking to the dead, but believing and reality are two different things.  I saw no evidence of any dead person talking or of any real communication with the hereafter.  Thus, the question “is there life after death.”  The evidence all suggests no. No life. No immortality. No heaven. No hell. No coming back. No eternity no ever after.

“I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of that After-life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return’d to me,
And answer’d: ‘I Myself am Heav’n and Hell”
― Omar Khayyam

But what if we have the wrong conception of life after death?  What if we think that life after death is going to be some continuation of life as we have conceived it on earth.  Whether we return sentience or we morph into frogs or some other species, we are all basing our ideas of the hereafter on concepts we are familiar with.  We are thinking about “life after death” as strictly a continuation of life on earth.  Some of us think we will be sitting at the right hand of God and listening to his or her speeches on ethics.  Some of us think we will be playing around with 20 vestal virgins.  Some us think, Jesus Christ will be walking around and talking about faith, hope and charity with us.  Some of us think, we will be reunited with our loved ones. (If this latter case is true, I feel sorry for Mickey Rooney who had 8 wives).  Some us think we will born again as a prince or frog depending on the life we lived on earth.  Each of these conceptions is a continuation of our ideas of life as we know it now.  But what if there is another type of sentience?

We all know that as humans we can only hear and see a small spectrum of the sound and light frequencies.  There are frequencies both above and below our normal hearing ranges.  What if the same was true of our thought ranges?  What if there were ranges of thought well above what we can think and perhaps well below?  Ideas and concepts that are hidden to us because they are out of our ability range.  We cannot fathom what it would mean to think differently because we think as rational human beings.

“I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.” ― Carl Sagan

What if there was some other type of thought besides rational thought?  Let me give an example of what this might mean.  Let us go back to Houdini and his inability to communicate after death.  Houdini dies with the desire to commune back to earth if possible.  However, upon death, his thought patterns become vastly different from anything we can conceive of.  Houdini’s life force lives on but his rational thought has been replaced by something else.  Houdini’s new thought processes see no value or reason or desire to communicate with human beings.  We cannot conceive of thought patterns like this because they are beyond our range of understanding.

“There is no such thing as magic, supernatural, miracle; only something that’s still beyond logic of the observer.” — Toba Beta, 

If such thought patterns can exist, perhaps sentience after the death of our mortal lives on earth can go on.  However, it will not be anything that we long for or dream of today.  We will not become angels or born again as frogs or toads.  If life after death does exist, it must be something totally alien and foreign to any conception that we have of it now.  Present conceptions of heaven and hell notwithstanding, I believe that  life will go on and must go on, but any continuation of life in terms of immortality and eternity seems well beyond either our desires or ability to understand.   I love the idea that I will meet up with Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and be able to discuss philosophy and ethics with them.  However, I cannot put much faith in such a possibility.  Desires of humans often seem to trump logic.  We all want immortality, but it is either reserved for the gods or life as we cannot begin to comprehend it.

“Oh how wrong we were to think immortality meant never dying” — ― Gerard Way

Time for Questions:

Do you believe in life after death? What kind of life do you think exists after death? How did you arrive at this perspective?  What if someone convinced you that there was no life after death? How would this change your life? Why?

Life is just beginning.