On Death

Death is possibly my most favourite topic to muse. Perhaps, because I know next to nothing about it, and that enables me to think about it with the utmost freedom.

Death is also, I think, the most pervasive of all motifs found in any culture and all. Our inquiry to know death lead us to various branches of knowledge and literature throughout the ages.

Inquiry begets myths as much as wisdom. Psychologically, death is a taunting foe. We have created afterlife, existence after death. With the advent of complex ethics, we have divided afterlife in heaven and hell and then with the sense of the futility of all this, we have created ideas like Moksha or Nirvana. Is it so, that we want to perish as much as we don't?

I, in my animal-self, bear some instinctive fear of death. However, I have known people to die voluntarily. In antiquity, Socrates died for his philosophical integrity. He chose to end the very life he lived so beautifully for 70 years to prove that he lived it beautifully. Of course, he believed in an afterlife. However, he also said that he doesn't know death.

And then, people die for various reasons. For countries, nations, and beliefs. Whatever the cause is, noble to some and idiotic to others, can compel a person to die for a purpose in a world where nothing matters.

And then I've seen people who died, killed for some disgusting reason or no reason at all.

This contrast, balance, triviality, incomprehensibility, and a relation of the fulfilment in life and death never cease to amaze me.

Lately, it occurred to me, one's understanding of death is the most important foundation of one's philosophy of life. For those who believe in afterlife, it is a stoppage in a longer way. But, it is an important stoppage, a nexus point. Because, what is beyond that no one can tell. This, along with some other factors (e.g. belief system, cunning), create one's Ethos.s. Those who don't believe in afterlife, similarly response with what they think about death. The Craft of Dying by Lyn H. Lofland contains some such accounts.