Today I was listening to some lectures about death and reflecting on Altered Carbon and kind of diving down a wormhole about death in general. It's interesting how much death influences and plays a part in our lives, but the overall connotation seems to be that death is a negative thing. Personally, I don't really feel that it's a positive or negative thing on its own, it just is, but I wanted to explore some ideas about death and share them here.
On the actual concept of death or the experience of dying, I wonder how much of the negativity surrounding it is based on fear of the unknown. It seems that throughout our lives many people avoid the unknown aspect and try to prepare for some morally regulated heaven or hell version of the afterlife. The contradiction to that is believing in nothingness, but I think that concept is in general irrelevant because nothingness isn't an experience. Essentially, if we believe that when we die that we simply cease to exist, then there is no point whatsoever in worrying about that as we won't be around to experience it anyway. Nothing we do in life or any legacy we leave behind will matter to nothingness.
Then there's the whole problem of attachment and letting go. It seems to be part of the human experience that we must all learn how to grieve and process the emotions of letting go of loved ones or else we are consumed by grief, regret, and misery. No one can really say what is right or wrong in that regard as we all must manage in our own way, but perhaps part of the trouble of letting go is our own fear of the unknown. Closure is a fleeting thing and we rarely get life and death to start or stop of our own accord.
So if we move past the emotional attachment part of the discussion and the beliefs in nothingness, perhaps the heaven or hell line of thought colors many perspectives on the concept of the afterlife negatively. Believing that we have to live our lives in some constrained way taught by man to reap some kind of unfathomable reward after death is obviously going to cause some tension. Many of us could never be our true selves for most of our lives for fear of punishment or missing out on the great prize, which leads to resentment or anxiety relating to death.
From my perspective, I prefer to accept it as a known unknown. If I know that I have no way of knowing 100% what happens after we die then it's kind of irrelevant to me. I feel no need to allow any other human to dictate my perspective of death and I don't believe nothingness is an experience that a consciousness can have, so whatever happens afterwards is either another experience that I can't compare my current existence with or it's nothing, which is beyond my comprehension, so I figure that one way or another, I'll just deal with it when it comes.
I do believe that death is fundamentally necessary though. Perhaps I'd rather the people I perceive as good not die or at least not suffer before death, but I have no control over that. If you have read or watched Altered Carbon, it pursues some of the issues that I foresee with immortality. The wealthy or corrupt would live forever and continue to oppress the poor or less fortunate. Perhaps we are all corruptible and death is the only thing that keeps us all in check in the grand scheme of things. Either way it's beyond my control and I don't live my life afraid to die, but it certainly makes for some interesting food for thought. Namaste.