On Life and Death
A comment on Hacker news recently spurred a discussion on death and the general fear of death we all encounter and perceive throughout our lifetimes. I’m not sure why people fear the finiteness of life though and I’ve honestly never understood why so many human beings dread it. A comment there though did provide a perfect voice for what I do feel and I figured that I’d share it here – for it’s a beautifully expressed and provides a great statement on why life isn’t necessarily what we perceive it to be and why we shouldn’t really feel like our flame will be ‘extinguished’ during death:
Imagine we go to the beach, and we observe the waves. A wave is born in the sea, then rolls forward until it dies on the beach. Each wave is different, and how sad it is that it's gone once it reaches the beach.
The thing is, a wave is basically some water particles and energy. The water particles don't go away, and as we know from physics, neither does the energy. So how can a wave die when all of its components don't die?
The truth is, a wave doesn't really exist. It's a concept in our head. "Here is some part of water that is higher than the rest, let's call it a wave". And now the wave can be "born" in the sea and "die" at the beach. But in fact nothing was created nor removed. It's just a concept. Everything is in fact interconnected. The disconnected parts that we see are concepts in our head. A tree, the sun, the rain, grass ... Nothing stands on its own.
You and me and everyone here, we are just concepts like the wave. What are you composed of? Some DNA from your ancestors, some cultural influence, the plants and animals you eat, the water you drink. After the concept of "you" dies, everything is still here. Everything that you were composed of is still here.
You're not an entity on your own. You are interconnected with everything around you. You are the water you drink and the water is you. Your thoughts are the thoughts of your ancestors, of your fellow humans, and your thoughts are theirs. So even if the waves die on the beach, the sea is still there.
And therefore the waves are also still there.
In other words – our material existence is an illusion, and even our perception of ‘self’ is an illusion as well. We are the universe – the whole of cosmic evolution itself. We are not a small wave within it. We are it. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t cherish our time here though. It simply means that we should instead embrace the perceived finiteness of being and the beauty and interconnection present within the fabric of reality.
"A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." - Albert Einstein