To Die, To Sleep, No More

I have always loved the famous Hamlet soliloquy ‘To Be or Not to Be’. At some point I memorized it, though I must refresh it periodically or it slips away.  I have even written a song that addresses the same question.

The question ‘To Be or Not To Be’ postulates the possibility of suicide in the face of the myriad ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’.  The same theme and question come up in the Goethe classic The Sufferings of Young Werther (Die Leiden des Jungen Werther).  The question of whether suicide is justified when a person is tortured by mental anguish, physical infirmities or sickness of the soul is one many poets and scholars have wrestled with over the centuries.

But in this essay, I am not posing the question of whether suicide is an acceptable escape from misery. Fortunately, I am not facing that dilemma.  I am more interested in the corollary questions that Shakespeare introduces in those famous stanzas.  What will one find in that ‘undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns’?  Indeed, ‘what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil’?  I am intrigued by death itself and what it will mean for us, if anything.

Most of our religions and spiritual allegiances assure us that we have an immortal soul that continues to exist after physical death.  This is one of the main consolations of being a person of faith.  It is very disconcerting for most people to imagine that they will cease to exist after death.  And I would dare to hypothesize that even the most cavalier atheist is displaying a bit of false bravado when he or she claims to have no fear of the finality of death.

Attempting to visualize or conceptualize an existence of any form after death leads one to a series of questions that border on the absurd.  What form of being will we be?  Will there be a physical form?  If so, what age would we be?  Would we have the same personality and the same history or memory?  Would we meet family and friends?  Will our pets accompany us?  What would we do on a daily basis once the harp playing and singing gets old?  Would we tire of milk and honey? 

The ‘opiate of the masses’ school of thought on death portrays heaven as an idyllic place that will compensate for the pain and suffering that occurred on planet earth.  This is understandably a powerful and compelling story for the heartbroken and miserable. This is the idea that heaven will replace the brutal world with a loving, compassionate place and an eternal life of good things.

Every mother who has lost a child, every husband whose wife has died young of breast cancer, every person whose loved ones have been brutally taken from them by crime, disease or war; every slave, every victim of abuse, every hapless, luckless denizen of this cruelly arbitrary world, deserves such a recompense. 

But the imagery doesn’t hang together well and breaks down under any real scrutiny.  Would the mother who lost an infant child meet that child as an infant or an adult?  Would she have the opportunity to see that child grow up?  What if her own mother had died when she was a teenager? Would she be a teenager again in the eyes of her mother?  What about the billions of children who died in childbirth and never experienced life at all?  How will they be compensated?  Will they meet their parents for the first time and somehow go through a full life with them?  It seems like it would be better to give them another go at life, which brings up the new complication of reincarnation!

Another big question is how the whole eternity thing works. If heaven is an eternal dwelling, would we perceive time?  What purpose would time have?  How does the space-time continuum fit into this? All of these details quickly become self-contradictory and the whole enterprise becomes acutely unimaginable.

Moreover, the idea of a ‘perfect’ place with everything one needs to be happy also has its challenges.  A brief look at the ultra-rich who should be living the ideal life on earth is strong evidence that too much of a good thing is ultimately kind of bad!

Still, there are some indications that a post-death experience awaits us.  Countless near-death episodes have been recounted with tales of passageways leading to luminous, wonderful places, of powerful feelings of peace and contentment, of seeing deceased loved ones and so on.  There are even scientific studies and institutions that have catalogued these experiences and are attempting to understand them more fully.

I want to believe that I will continue to exist after death.  It would make it easier to die, and that certainly appears to be one of the main benefits of a belief in the afterlife.  Dying is a solo gig for the most part.  No one is sharing the experience.  One is all by oneself.  And very few people seem all that eager to let go of life and embark on that journey.  Most of us would ‘rather bear those ills we have than fly to others we know not of’, or perhaps even worse, to nothing at all.

There is enough mystery in the world to make one hesitant to hold fast to either skepticism or unquestioning belief.  I know enough of quantum physics and cosmology to see that all is not what it appears to be.  I may write whimsically about death but in the end, I respect and echo the earnestness with which most human beings approach the end of their days.  My own speculation and hope are that my spirit does somehow continue to exist, and that in some ethereal way we attain new levels of consciousness, love and compassion.  There is no logical or rational way to imagine it, so I will simply hope for the best.

 

 

Texas Heralds America's Own 'Cultural Revolution'

Neighbor spying on neighbor.  Indoctrinated children betraying their own parents.  A cadre of the ideologically unhinged and would-be bounty hunters searching for women, doctors, nurses, social workers and even drivers who they suspect of violating their version of religious law.

Yes, Texas has codified its own version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.  Bravo! 

The shocking nature of this new move by the anti-abortion zealots is a sign of the extremes to which these people will go to implement their self-righteous crusade.  The fact that five of the supreme court justices refused to immediately reject this radical vigilante-encouraging law is extremely sobering.

There is something about deputized citizens, bounties and vigilante justice that is supremely distasteful.  It is antithetical to a sense of fair play and due process.  It conjures up images of Nazi Germany, the KGB and many other totalitarian regimes where neighbors are encouraged and even paid to turn in their neighbors for perceived infractions or disloyalty.

The religious right may have gone a step too far with this attempt to circumvent our judicial system.  The incredulity, outrage and anger that it has engendered could cause a wave of reaction in independents and middle America and find expression at the polls.

I am not sure what these extremists ultimately hope to accomplish.  The availability of pharmaceutical abortions and the willingness of people to help women find and fund alternative places for ending pregnancies will probably reduce the impact dramatically.  Moreover, there has been a continuous decline in the rate of abortions in the USA since a peak was reached in the 1981.

Here is an extract from the Wikipedia article on abortion in the USA:

In 1973, the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalized abortion in all 50 states. Thoughout the 1970s, the abortion rate rose almost 80%, peaking at 29.3 abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age according to the Guttmacher Institute and at 25 abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age according to the CDC.

From 1981 through 2017, the abortion rate fell approximately in half. It did not fall every single year, but it has not risen two years in a row since 1979 and 1980. The abortion rate fell below the 1973 rate in 2012 and continued to fall through 2017. 

Abortion foes would be so much wiser to encourage these downward trends of abortions by promoting sex education and birth control, especially the newer IUDs that provide highly reliable birth control without the risk of non-compliance that pills, condoms or other means entail.

That presumes that the goal of abortion opponents is truly to reduce abortions and not simply to wage a culture war that projects their own insecurities about a changing and uncertain world.  If they really want to save lives, I would recommend they put their energy towards reversing climate change.  The number of future victims of that onrushing calamity, all of whom will be cognitive, self-aware human beings, will dwarf the number of aborted fetuses.

 

Living in the Moment

I have often heard people say that they are trying harder to ‘live in the moment’.  It seems that we have all become acutely aware that most of the time we are focused on either the past or the future rather than the present.  We suspect that it would be better for us to more fully experience the current moment of our lives rather than be distracted by thoughts of the past or future, or other daydreams.

But what does it really mean to ‘live in the moment’?  Does it imply that we must actually be thinking about or analyzing what we are doing and examining our state of mind and feelings?  Can one be ‘in the moment’ without telling oneself to be ‘in the moment’?  Can we experience something fully without our thoughts conducting a monologue about that experience?

When one is involved in a vigorous activity, such as playing a sport or practicing a musical instrument, background thoughts seem to disappear.  The more the activity requires effort and concentration, the less one is able to conduct the usual soliloquy of conscious thought.  But when one performs less demanding activities, such as listening to music or going on a hike, one often finds that significant periods of time go by without one being at all aware of the activity.  We daydream, fret about a coming event, or analyze something that happened in the past.  Instead of fully experiencing the thoughts, sensations and emotions of that activity, we are distracted and lose whatever benefit those moments might otherwise have brought.

One example is the act of eating.  I have often noticed that I will look forward to eating something but discover after I have finished that I was distracted by other thoughts or social interactions and didn’t fully savor the food.  When I focus my full attention on the act of eating, I get much more enjoyment, especially if the food is something special.  But unfortunately, this is difficult to do when one is in a social setting or watching TV.  Even eating alone, the typical thought distractions that one has may get in the way of that enjoyment.

Distractions - whether daydreams, anticipation, memories or worries - are always waiting impatiently at the doorway of our consciousness.  We have all developed a bad habit of letting them in because much of our time is spent in mundane activity that does not offer any great joy ‘in the moment’.  It requires a certain discipline and training to refocus our mind when we are doing something that merits our full attention.  But life will probably be much more satisfying if we manage to do so.