Existence After Death, and Before

I am trying to avoid the standard term - Life After Death, or Afterlife - principally because I belief that, after death, life as we know it does not or will not exist.

Life as we know it is life with the physical form for people - and even that I do not think human beings have not even accepted life in all human forms to the same.

So, I think the best that we can try to discuss is existence after death.

Wisdom dictates that we do not discuss what we do not know.

Siddhartha kept what his disciples have called the "Noble Silence" - he just won't not talk about it.

Confucius scolded his students: "You don't even what life is all about, you want to talk about life after death!"

From the scientific point of view, or rather to come to grips with possibilities in the scientific terms that we now understand: Life as we know it is life in dimensions we know - basically sensory dimensions. The blind has one dimension less. The blind and deaf has two dimensions less. The blind and deaf and dumb as three dimensions less. The blind and deaf and dumb and no-touch as four dimensions less. And so on. But there is life as we know it.

Once we die, logic tells us that there could be other dimensions - which are totally different from the dimensions that we do know. Now, this is purely speculative and we really do not know what that "existence" is even if we encounter it.

If that is the case, then we really do not care.

What do we really care in this existence?

I think there are two basic concerns in this existence - this bodily existence, and hence the concerns only deal with the survival of the physical form: nutrients to sustain the body and sex for the continued survival of the genetic proteins.

It is quite interesting to realise that life as we know it knows that each particular bodily or physical form will not survive forever (and this realisation should really knock out lot of nonsense from the activities of some human beings as they waste a huge chunk of their lives trying to prolong their lives).

At the end of the day, it is the prolonging of the survival of genetic proteins that is of interest to life-form in general. While human beings would worry about the future of the human race, in such concerns as over the environment as we know it, it probably should be realised by individual members of the human race that the human race may probably be just a blip in the long history of the existence and survival of life-form.

I have this little theory that as life-form is dwindling in the variety of its manifestations as well as its sizes. I can imagine a time when there is literally an infinite variety of life-forms, from the very big to the minuscule, and that somehow the environment has turned hostile for some or most of them, and the present environment is only good for human beings and some other life-forms. No doubt, the environment will continue to change (I won't say evolve because I do not think the changes are always marginal nor smooth) and human beings will surely disappear from this earth and this world, and all the worldly concerns we have now will also disappear and there will peace on this earth and in their world without the clamour and shenanigans of human critters. (I would like to read the stories told by germs, bacteria and parasites about how they through centuries or millennia have destroyed the evil giants called human beings - which just kept reappearing until some asteroids or other destroyed them for good.)

So, if we are just proteins and other fatty acids and molecules - just as the television or the radio or the handphone or the computer or the internet - then really the existence as we know it is nothing but an illusion caused by the accidental combination of sub-particles which happen to auto-animate and giving the impression to human beings that human beings are really alive - in the way human beings understand life to be. (I can imagine the mountains laughing at the silly human beings, and while having a smoke unwittingly created a volcanic eruption which killed some human beings nearby.)

Our problem is that we choose to see the things we want to see, within the small confines of our narrow perception, and think that the views and realisation - and illumination and enlightenment - that we have derived and obtained for ourselves are such big deals - when they really are not. They do not matter, to us nor to others.

When everything is deconstructed down to their basic components, we are nothing but little bits and pieces that come into shape - and dare I say being - as a result of movement, a shake, a vibration which gives rise to energy - which is a tautology as energy is anything that can cause a movement.

The biggest puzzle for the human mind is how that movement comes about. Who made that first move? Or should it be, how did (does?) that first movement come about?

Some sacred texts say it was a breath. Or it could easily be the release of gas.

Things come into being when conditions are right. But all kinds of things come into all kinds of being as all kinds of conditions exist.

Whether the conditions that come together are the conditions that we want is quite another matter. It is as if we have a say or control. We could be beyond our depth.

My final thought is this: As we do not know where we came from when we were born, we would not know where we would go when we die.

The truth may be that we neither came nor go.

We flicker - and we are lost to the flame.