Death, human wanderers were always fascinated by this concept. Every single society on earth has had their own perspective to death. Then we got extremely interconnected, and perspectives converged into religions. Nowadays religions do the job, explaining death. Abrahamic religions say there will be an afterlife. Indian religions like Hinduism, Buddhism say its reincarnation. If I consider atheism a theological genre, they believe in obscurity.
Even after so much brainstorming over so many millennia, all these are merely hypotheses. We don’t have any kind of decisive data on death. We can believe any hypothesis we want to but we can’t be sure till now. That’s why it is called belief. Like many natural phenomena, we don’t know anything about death for sure. But unlike other unknowns we can’t just ignore it. Whatever death is, it occurs and it takes away people whom we hold dear. We can’t help but think about it.
Human mind is a thinking machine, a rather good one. We don’t know about the algorithms, but it’s extremely efficient. You may argue that you can’t do 123*321. But you can understand your mother tongue, you can read human expressions. You can picture the flight of a ball thrown in the sky. These are extremely complicated tasks but we do these effortlessly. We don’t know the inner workings of the algorithm, but it works on the basis of pattern recognition. Over time we collect a lot of data, crack the pattern day by day and it’s easy. Patterns are also considered as data when you think of the pattern as obvious truth and discover other patterns using it. Also, we can find patterns when there isn’t one. That’s how we found all those constellations in the sky.
In case of death. There is a scarcity of data. We don’t even know how to collect data about it. So, all the hypotheses regarding death are just hypotheses. But nevertheless, these serve their purpose. We can pretend that we know about death. We’re just choosing comfortable hypotheses. Nothing wrong with that.
** off the point discussion. I want to die alone and with a sound health. I want to experience the DMT rush. I don’t want anything or anyone to bother me. I will live that moment with absolute curiosity. Of course, I am afraid of death. But it’s the unknown that frightens me not obscurity or judgement day.
I was moved by a question. “Do you hate someone so much that you wished them dead?”. It’s not that I am not a hateful person. Rather I am an extreme one. But it’s not what I was concerned about at that moment. I was thinking, why do people perceive death as a punishment?
Yes, we can approach death as banishment. It’s a small crime, you are exiled. Big one? Now you are exiled from existence. If we dive deeper. It’s all about pushing them out of their comfort zone, throwing them into the unknown.
Human society is such a strange phenomenon. How mass psychology works! It really put me into wonder. There were such strange views about death, murder, execution, abortion. Of course, It’s just that I can’t relate to their views. I am considering them strange.
Hammurabi law, the oldest written law we have, said that If your action causes death to another persons’ son, your son will be executed. To them It was justice. In South America, Human lives were sacrificed so that the sun keeps circling the earth. In India, wives were burnt to death with the dead body of their husband. In Abrahamic religion, we see legends where a father slaughters his child to please his God. Europe witnessed numerous witch-hunts. To Japanese people hara-kiri is honor. I have read about a very strange kind of abortion. There was a society where parents were allowed to kill their child before they were named. Their child often grew to 10–12. If the child was unhealthy, they could just choose to abort.
All these seem strange to us because we can’t relate to their perspective of death. Though there is one we can relate to. We glorify martyrs, though deaths in war is just as strange. It’s nothing different than the examples stated above. We shame suicide, because we think everyone values life just as we do. We fight between different views about abortion, death penalty. But none of us really knows what death actually is.
