DEATH: What's Life Got to do, Got to Do with it?

Death has been on my mind the last couple of months.  But in fact, I've thought about and written about death a lot over the years.  Below is something I wrote so many years ago, I can't find the document on any of our computers -- only the hard copy which I've retyped!

What will happen when this body gives out?  Where or what will the "I" that I've lived with so long go to, or do, or be, or not be?  How many people in how many ages and cultures have asked those questions?  Yet, for as smart as we are, as insightful or knowledgeable as we might be, we don't have an inkling of an answer for that one.  All we have are the ideas and hopes that we are brought up with and hear about from this side of death.  And those ideas differ from religion to religion, culture to culture.  Each answer effecting not only what we think will happen, but how we live our lives now as a result.

Take the Muslim view:  this is the one and only time a person comes around.  What you do with this "one precious life" as the poet Mary Oliver calls it, will determine what happens to you -- the you that is eternal and fully, individually you.  there's no coming back, no 'do over.'  For Muslims, there will be a day, Akira, of judgment, of reckoning.  On that day, that one day, all souls from all time and places will be judged by God and that will determine whether one goes to heaven or hell.  Says the Qur'an about that day:

"Then a soul will know what it has given and what it has held back...
What can I tell you about the day of reckoning?
Again, what can I tell you of the day of reckoning?
A day no soul has a say for another
and the decision is at that time with God." (Sura 82, The Tearing)

So, your actions and your intentions in this lifetime have long term consequences!

Compare that to Hinduism in which life is a constant 'do over.'  You didn't get it right the first time?  Back on the wheel of life to try again -- and again and again and again.  There are consequences to your actions here too.  But there is no judge who will determine what happens.  It's strictly cause and effect.  Like driving a car.  If I move the steering wheel left, the car goes left.  If I put the foot on the brake, the car stops.  If I treat people well, I will be treated well.  If I am greedy and mean, I will suffer the consequences -- perhaps not in this life, but in the next.

Whether we are Hindu or not, we all understand that when it comes events in this life.  When I look at baby pictures of myself, I don't look like the same person and in many ways I'm not.  Something continues to the next stage -- adolescence, adulthood or old age, even if it doesn't ook or act the same.  But how I was treated as a baby, the love I did or didn't get, the things I did or didn't do then, determine to an extent who I am today and who I will be when I'm older.  Just extend that idea beyond death and one has a clearer picture of the Hindu understanding of what happens to us after death.  The atman, the energy force that resides in this lifetime in our bodies will continue on to some other form based on our actions -- good or bad -- that determine what will happen to us in our next life.  The  goal, however, is that one day our atman will be released from the cycle of rebirths and rejoin the great ocean of energy known as Brahman.  Say the Katha Upanishad, an ancient Hindu Scripture:

"Lo! I will declare to thee this mystery of Brahman never failing.
And of what the self [atman] becomes when it comes to the hour of death.
Some to the womb return,
Embodied souls, to receive another body;
Others pass to lifeless stone in accordance with their works
In accordance with the tradition they had heard."

Christians are more similar to the Muslim view.  The person who dies will be resurrected as whom they are and they will either go to heaven or hell.  But there is a difference between the physical and the spiritual.  Said Paul in his beautiful (and very Greek) letter to the Corinthians:

"What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.  and what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain... So it is with the resurrection of the dead.  What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.  It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory.  It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.  It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.  If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body." (I Cor. 15.35-44)

Indigenous cultures, the original natives of many places such as Africa, Asia and the Americas, seem to have similar ideas to each other as to what happens after death.  In all of those traditions the spirit or ghost of the deceased becomes more powerful and more influential in the life of the community.  the Akan of Africa, for example, believe that:

"There is a reciprocal relationship between the dead and the living and both sides have a role to play in keeping the relationship alive... the dead have a duty to protect, intervene, and mediate on behalf of the living, and as it is believed that death increases one's powers, the dead are able to offer more help and assistance." (Professor Kofi Asare Opoku, Nananom Nsamanfo: The Akan and their Ancestors, AAR, 2000)

When Robert Coles, the noted child psychiatrist who has studied the beliefs of children of many different cultures interviewed a young Hopi girl, she made it clear that to her people, the ancestors who had already died, were living on the mesa and communicated with the living people through birds.

Jews are perhaps the only group that does not clearly delineate what happens to a person after death.  In the Torah, the first five books of both the Jewish and Christian bibles, God says "I set before thee life and deth, choose life."  And so, the whole focus of Judaism has been this world, this life.  For a group as loquacious as the Talmudic rabbis, who argues about all kinds of things, they were relatively silent on what happens after death.  One sees both the ideas of resurrection and reincarnation in Jewish texts.  But as my Jewish grandfather used to say, "There's enough to worry about here, you think we need to worry about what happens next?"  and yet, for a culture that doesn't focus on what happens after, there are all kinds of practices related to the care of the dead.

For Buddhist, there is no death because there is no me -- change happens all the time so the "me" that existed before, doesn't exist anymore anyway.,  It's kind of like my skin.  I know that this largest organ of my body sloughs off as new skin grows, so that the skin that was me seven weeks ago is not the same skin that is me now.  We are, according to the Buddhists, nothing but skandha, a collection of strands that have temporarily come together, for now, and that will dissipate like a cloud, when the time comes.  Or, like a candle that lights another candle, the energy will transfer.  Of course, that might be what the historical Buddha said, and it might be what many Buddhists around the world think.  But there are other Buddhists, Pure Land Buddhists for example, that have quite a different view.  For them, we will go to a place, the Pure Land, if we live right and if our intentions at the moment of death are focused and pure.

Despite real differences in views of reality before and after death, there seems to be some similarities among cultures as well.  all traditions believe that there are consequences to our actions and that how we treat ourselves and others matter.  This life, whether the one and only or one of many, is a test to see if we can be good and care for others.  And all people, no matter what they think happens to someone when they die, grieve for the loss of loved ones.  We may believe they may go on to something else, something better.  But the wailing for a dead child is the same in Hinduism as it is anywhere else.  There is a Buddhist story about a woman whose son died and, distraught, she goes to the Buddha pleading with him to bring her child back to life.  the Buddha agrees -- "But first", he says, "You must find a household that has not been touched by death."  the woman begins her search, knocking on every door in town.  "No" says each place.  "We lost a parent, an uncle, a child, a brother, a sister."  Finally the woman realizes what the Buddha wanted her to learn:  There is no one who is untouched by the death of a loved one.  Somehow, that knowledge itself made it a bit easier for her to accept.

Ultimately, however, we humans are left with what the Spanish philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno, identified as the "tragic sense of life."  Because the "man of flesh and bone, the man who is born, suffers, and dies -- above all who dies .. wishes never to die and that longing of ours never to die is or actual essence." (The Tragic Sense of Life)

I don't know what will happen when this body gives out.  I do know what people think will happen.  And perhaps that in itself is a comfort.  It certainly is a mystery!