Science
can explain HOW of things, but it cannot explain WHY of certain things (For example,
why did life arise from non-life and evolved from simpler creatures to more
complex life forms only to die and disappear?) So are the conflicted religions
whose chief concern is in safeguarding each one’s separate identity.
Next
option is to look for pearls among the stones—using power of our own reason.
Leave behind even our own old style of looking at death as the opposite of
life. Let us start on a clean slate: Though Jesus himself foretold truth will
be overpowered by interpolators (Mathew 13:24-30), fortunately his perception of
death remains intact: “Unless a seed falls into earth and dies, it cannot
produce any grains.” His taking the unmistakable principle behind the eternal seed-tree
mechanism makes all the difference—physical apparatus of the seed dies but life
continues (which he further reiterated, with absolute clarity, through the
famous parable of Lazarus and Rich man). Thus for Jesus, death was an expression
of life, the most critical defining feature of life. When you die, you are
making the ultimate undeniable assertion that you have been alive. In fact,
death is even a precondition to life. You yourself are the proof. When you were
in your mother’s womb, you thought it was your only world what you thought as the most comfortable place for you to be in. At
the time of delivery, when you were pushed out, you thought in that trauma that
you were experiencing a form of death, only to realize later that your life was
continuing in a totally different world. This was the guarantee for some thinking
people that death is not the end, but only an exit from the world to some other
form of life—may be at yet another plane or dimension (which are irrelevant at
this time, hence are best left as a surprise).
This type of reasoning
will only help us (never harm us). For example William Shakespeare started his
life as an ordinary person working for a drama troop, and his work was to raise
the curtain and to pull it down at the appointed times. However, at some point
of time, he began to think that he was more than his physical body and should
tap the enormous power that sustains his mortal coil—and the rest is history. Look
at one of his golden words: “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in
reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable!
In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!” (Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2, Page 13) He experienced firsthand another piece of truth
hidden in the Bible: “Eternity” resides in each one’s physical body.
(Ecclesiastes 3:11)
Kahlil Gibran alludes to
the same when he wrote: “Your children are not your children … they come
through you but not from you … You may give them your love but not your
thoughts, for
they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for
their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.” List goes on and on: “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) “I would love to believe that when I die ….
some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue.” (Carl Sagan) “In the end, nothing is lost. Every event, for good or evil, has effects
forever.” (Will Durant).
