In today's world, preparing for death is a very practical matter. And it's not so much about death as it is about getting earthly matters in order for those we leave behind: insurance policies, assets, funeral arrangements, last wishes, and maybe a bucket-list item or two.
Death Imagery and Denial
The symbology around death and the afterlife changes with the times. In the ancient world, imagery was of a dark and murky place like the River Styx of Greek mythology or a blazing inferno of suffering and torment as portrayed in Dante's Divine Comedy. Over millenia, as Christianity matured, the fires of hell were offset by a greater focus on a heavenly eternity (above), while hell raged below for the worst of the worst, and for those not irretrievably lost, a temporary way station or purgatory existed (nowhere in particular).
In the twenty-first century, death imagery ranges from visions of heaven and hell (a Christian hold-over) to mental icons of dollar signs or "401-Ks" to disembodied minds uploaded into the Ethernet to decomposed organic matter from which trees and flowers might spring. But these are not so much symbols of death as they are symbols of the denial of death.
Death denial is ubiquitous in our society. It is the not-so-subtle impetus behind the rapidly accelerating technological revolution that drives social change in fields like robotics, biomedical engineering, computer modeling, and even aerospace exploration. It's all about cheating death, eternal physicality and, at the least, prolonging the "inevitable" to the bitter end.
Life Without Death
Death denial is a mental state. But it begs the question: What would life be without death or even just the prolongation of human life by decades or perhaps centuries. Consider biblical stories and genealogies from the Book of Genesis that suggest people lived for hundreds of years before the flood. Apparently Noah lived the longest, more than 900 years! Even if we interpret these historical accounts as symbolic or metaphorical, the human quest for extreme longevity or even immortality isn't just science "fiction." It is part and parcel of the technological evolution of human society.
The idea of a fountain of youth may be steeped in folklore and mythology, but 21st-century science has taken the reins of the quest for immortality. Prolongevity and life-extension are thriving specializations in the sciences, health and wellness industries, and virtual computing. Gerontologists and life coaches propose modest achievable solutions for healthy aging, but "slowing" aging is not cheating death.
The immortalists, transhumanists, and longevitists have much loftier, extreme, even superhuman goals. They postulate that future breakthroughs could lead to indefinite lifespans for humanity. Promising advances are already happening in tissue rejuvenation, stem cells, regenerative medicine, molecular repair, gene therapy, pharmaceuticals, organ replacement, and xenotransplantations.
Researchers set the current biological limit of human life at 125 years. It may seem shocking to many, but the number of people living past 100 has tripled in the last thirty years and is expected to quadruple in the next few decades. Limitless lifespan may not be as far out of reach as one would imagine and the ethicists are taking notice.
The Ethics of Prolongevity
The ramifications of extreme life extension are being debated by bioethicists today, just as successful cloning was preceded by decades of heated argument before Dolly the sheep became a worldwide phenom in the 1990s.
Ethical issues surrounding the concept of prolongevity run the gamut from overpopulation and resource scarcity to inequalities in access to life-extending technologies. We've already been chasing our tails with these moral dilemmas for decades. But imagine the impact of increasing the human lifespan by a factor of five or ten, or whatever number we would consider "limitless-ness." Of course, the ramifications are unimaginable
Extreme life extension could lead to slower generational turnover and social stagnation. The idea of work and productivity would be turned on its head. Coexistence of multiple generation adults would skew the workforce resulting in dramatic increases in unemployment among the young? Existential crises would abound.
And what about reproductivity? What about children at all? Would the child's value as a means to psychological longevity evaporate? Might overpopulation concerns actually revert to fears of ultimate species extinction based on diminishing birth rates? Would we lose our ability to know what it means to be human? How would it effect our understanding of reality and time and life and death. What, in fact, would constitute death in such scenarios?
The Purpose of Death
Practically speaking, these extreme scenarios are unlikely anytime soon. As it stands, human efforts to extend life are more about extending humanity's healthspan, i.e., putting the focus on healthy aging, not number of years lived. If these efforts are successful, the average lifespan will increase in natural course. Death denial will likely persist, however, as lifespan inches upward. And the questions around the purpose of death will fade and the whitewashed answers will continue to pacify: "Death's purpose is to make life more meaningful." Period.
But as the phrase attributed to Socrates goes: a life unexamined is not worth living, And I would posit, that death unexamined or devoid of self-reflection likewise is absent of meaning. And for that matter, a birth unexamined becomes as random an occurrence as science has led us to believe.
There is no life without birth, no life without death, and no death without life. It is the continuum of our physical existence. This baffles and terrifies us and we are bereft of understanding the why and the how of it. But if birth, life, and death are part of an inextricable whole, then the question of meaning or purpose must apply to it all.
Of birth, we ask the questions: What am I? How did I get here?
Of life, we ask the questions: Who am I? What is my purpose?
Of death, we ask the questions: Why must I die? Where will I go?
It All Comes Down to Our Beliefs
The answer to any or all of these existential questions continually escapes us. So we hold on to religious beliefs that we learned as children and that keep us childlike, often for a lifetime. We find ourselves adrift in a physical world of beauty and wonder but one of danger and uncertainty.
We believe that we are separate and alone and vulnerable to the whims of nature or the ravages of those with evil intent. We believe we must fight to survive, so we build fortresses and cities and nations and armies to protect ourselves. We fear living and we are terrified of dying. We believe that death is an end and that we are helpless before a potentially angry, punishing God.
This was not always so. Other human civilizations that existed in other historical timelines knew who and what they were. They were aware of the source from which they came and that they were as one with All That Is. The concept of separateness did not exist.
Today, mankind has forgotten or turned away or blotted out that knowing. Ironically, it may be science, not religion, that will bring us back to a point of remembering the power of our beliefs.
The relatively new but rapidly expanding field of Consciousness Studies confirms the premise that mind (thought) creates reality. It is not the other way around. We are not born into a physical reality already in place. Individual and collective consciousness brings it into being. Consciousness is not in the brain or manufactured by the brain. Consciousness precedes brain tissue or any other aspect of physical reality.
This understanding has not really trickled down to the non-scientific community as yet. And it will be a hard sell. But to find purposefulness and meaning in this journey of life, from our birthing to our death, we must reconnect with what we know intrinsically. We can overcome the forgetting and even the denial. This knowing is accessible to us all.
How to Prepare for Life After Death
We could say that the conscious self is a manifestation of All That Is. We come from oneness and will return to it after death. We are not swallowed up by it. We are of one source yet we remain an individual conscious self with our beliefs and memories and experiences intact. Death is not an end. It is a continuation of self, a self unfocused on its physical reality.
We are in a sense eternal. But that is not a fixed state of being. Consciousness is not about living forever or existing in a forever afterlife. Consciousness is about "becoming." Our interlude as physical beings is part of that becoming. It is a time-bound experience of continued unfolding. As such it is limitless.
By binding ourselves to unexamined beliefs, individual or collective, fabricated or factual, child-like or soundly reasoned, we are yoked to artificial constraints and barriers that stifle the purposeful act of becoming.
The "becoming" of a soul or conscious self is its purpose. Period.
Our physicality and the veil of forgetfulness that descends at an early age challenges us to maintain a focus on who and what we are. Humanity can no longer look away or deny its own divinity. We must remember!
To do that we must examine our beliefs about self, about our collective reality, about the unknown that frightens us, and the death we so desperately wish to outrun. What are my core beliefs? Where did I learn them? Do they benefit me in any way now?
We must examine our beliefs not just about physical reality and the amorphous unknown, but our beliefs about the non-physical aspects of our existence. I mean, for instance, the dream-states of the sleeping self and the day-dreaming self, the meditative mind and out-of-body travels or moments of dejà vu, and those paranormal or extra-sensory experiences that seem to defy the definition of our reality. Examine your beliefs about what is possible and ask yourself: "is it possible that, in fact, experience transcends belief!"
Consider this: If you want to know what death is like, then become aware of your own consciousness as it is divorced from physical activities. Seth Books: The Eternal Validity of the Soul.
We must start this process of self examination as early as possible. In fact, it is incumbent upon parents to examine their core beliefs about the nature of the newborn, the physical and emotional experiences of the child "before" birth in-utero and in the pre-verbal stage of infancy.
Parents must open themselves to the non-corporeal experiences that the sentient child may share about life before birth, even life before conception, doing so telepathically, through play, or in words once they can use language. By doing this, parents can set the stage for a child's lifetime of healthy and necessary self examination.
You can prepare for death throughout life no matter the duration of that life. By examining your beliefs and acknowledging your experiences you may be pleasantly surprised to find that you are awakened to an awareness that the "unknown" is a part of you now. It was a part of you before this physical birth, and will be part of you after physical death.
Thanks for listening.
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Preparing for Death