PHLAC

When a good friend’s father passed away earlier in the week, it prompted no less than a few dialogs with friends about life and death. Nothing new and ground breaking here, just a stab at explaining what it may mean for one person at this juncture of middle-life:

I’m often thinking about consciousness and what it may be, apart from ego. No one knows with certainty if there’s an afterlife in the sense of the same person carrying on into another dimension, and I’m not so sure it’s something I should desire. But the idea of consciousness—that it must always exist somewhere, might suggest that a species which has consciousness and self-awareness is somehow always being alive. It’s the “I” or “me” that poses the problem. As humans with a mind and body that weather pain and suffering, this idea of an afterlife looks more like a projection of an impossible utopia: we don’t want to die, but being alive as we understand it right now is substantiated on having this very body placed in a physical world. We may not want the suffering, but essentially, we still want to be who we are, and the only thing we know to be is human. Imagining some kind of suspended timeless fantasy-existence eludes the logic of that hope. It’s sort of like wishing for a constant heroine high, existing in a euphoric state, useless and pain-free.

With the idea of having consciousness renewed elsewhere, somebody or something has to embody this, but who is it? The “I” or “me” becomes arbitrary. It just is consciousness, that is, until a better explanation arrives. Does consciousness only embody higher life-forms or things that are aware of itself or is it moving through every organism? If I exist without self-awareness then how do I know I’m not a tree, or a porcupine, a combination of the two, or the circus freak? Am I ever really dying or just living through new shapes and forms? Again, the “I” is the problem. I’m not espousing reincarnation or the idea of soul here, only that consciousness is omnipresent.

The only pain of death can be in the fear of it. I can only pick and choose from a philosophy which addresses these concerns as I see fit through different stages of my life. The idea of a Western-based ideology of heaven seems somewhat impractical. Are we stuck with whatever age we die at? If you die at thirteen, are you a perpetual adolescent? If other dimensions of consciousness exist only in glimpses or dreams or are completely unperceivable does this justify an explanation or hope of an afterlife or is it simply all-of-life?