To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Sunday, August 23, 2020
 
“Yet even as I was suffocating, I did not fail to find peace in cheerful and brave reflections. “ What is this?” said I. “Does death make trial of me so many times? Let it—I have made trial of it as well,” long ago. “When?” you ask. Before I was born. Death is just nonexistence. I know already what that is like: what will exist after me is the same as existed before me. If there is any torment in this thing, then there must have been torment also before we saw the light of day. Yet we did not feel any discomfort at that time.

I ask you this: wouldn’t you say a person was quite stupid if he thought that a lamp was worse off after it was extinguished than before it was lighted? We too are extinguished; we too are lighted. Betweentimes there is something that we feel; on either side is complete lack of concern. Unless I am wrong, dear Lucilius, our mistake is that we think death comes after; in fact, it comes both before and after. Whatever was before us is death. What difference is there between ending and simply not beginning? Both have the same result: nonexistence.”
~ Seneca
-----

I found this passage quite profound. It’s strange that even the most simple and familiar ideas when looked at from a different perspective can provide so much illumination. We know we did not exist before being born but rarely do we think that what we will experience after death, that is nonexistence, is the same as what we experienced before being born, that is, nonexistence. What it is to experience nonexistence after death we do not know but we also do not know what it was like before we were born. Did the moment of birth initiate our existence? If so, then since we have already experienced the state of not existing it shouldn’t be too difficult to do it again. And what if the moment of birth didn’t really initiate our existence but only transferred our essence to physical existence? Well, then that means that the state of death will transfer it back to where it came from.

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 4:32 am 0 comments
HOME