Originally Posted by
Alder
Being "put in a hole to rot" does sound unpleasant and scary. I don't know if this will help or not, but let me give you a radically different way to think about it: Your body is mostly made out of water. Each molecule of that water is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Do you remember learning about the water cycle in biology class? The water that is on earth right now is the same water that condensed from water vapor four billion years ago and became the oceans. For the last four billion years, those molecules have been moving around, taking form after form. Right now, a molecule of water in one of your brain cells was once part of a powerful thunderstorm. A molecule in a capillary in your toe was once part of a glacier. A molecule in your liver was part of a tidal wave. And a molecule in the blood flowing down your right arm right now was a tiny dewdrop on a fern that was eaten by an apatosaurus, which ultimately died and (as you say) rotted, returning its body water back to the soil, to percolate through and come out of a spring as a stream, flowing down to the river and then back to Abuela Mar, the grandmother ocean. When you walk by the ocean, you are walking beside that great reservoir of Being, physical being regardless of your spiritual beliefs. If you can't go down to the ocean, just sit beside a stream for a while.
I hope I'm not freaking you out more by telling you this stuff. I find it comforting to know that for all the various parts of my body, death is nothing scary. It's routine! The molecules of my body have been oak trees and saber tooth tigers and mice and bacteria and even parts of other people in the past! They've taken form after form before, and they'll take form after form after those molecules leave my body. Most of them will even leave my body long before I die, as sweat or urine or tears or toenail clippings. Really, there is no point, on a molecular level, where I leave off and the rest of the Universe begins, and the Universe isn't going to die any time soon. To me it's comforting. But I realize I'm something of an odd duck, so I can only hope that this way of looking at it will be helpful to you too.
If we look beyond this little earth we live on, as Carl Sagan said, "We are all star stuff." Hydrogen is the basic building block of the universe, and we are made of that, but also carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, and other elements, and all those other elements only came into being by fusion reactions deep in the cores of stars much bigger and older than our sun. If those stars had not been willing to die in intense supernovae, throwing those atoms out into the universe to become other things, we wouldn't be here.
So that's a different way of looking at death from the point of view of the body. What about the spirit? What is the spirit? Most people when they talk about their souls are actually thinking about their minds, their thoughts, their sense of consciousness, their ego or sense of "me"-ness. But that isn't immortal. It changes, doesn't it? Five years ago, when you were twelve, the thoughts you had, the way you thought about yourself and who you are, was very different. When you are 22, it will be very different then. So what of that gets to live forever and go to heaven? Well, that's the puzzler. But as you start to reach for that most basic part of yourself that is always you no matter what, that doesn't stop being you just because you take a drink and take on some new water molecules, that doesn't stop being you just because you pee and offload some old water molecules that used to be part of your bloodstream, that doesn't stop being you because your thoughts and ideas and feelings and relationships change, and you grow, and look at yourself in new ways; as you try to find that part of yourself that never dies, if you look long and hard enough, and are willing to love and accept yourself in all your limited humanness and fallibility and mortality, you will find the following to be true about that core of your being that lasts forever:
1. It does exist!!!!!!
2. It is very small, too small for you to be able to tell what shape it is, or say it is this or that or fast or slow or green or purple.
3. It is very big, and everything else about you, body and mind and everything, fits into it.
4. You can't find the border of it. There is no clear place where it leaves off and the rest of the Universe begins.
5. That's why it lasts forever, because it is part of what I like to call Oneness, or the Universe, or the Goddess.
This fear you have is actually a gift. It is a call to adventure (and I use that expression in the sense Joseph Campbell used it in The Hero with a Thousand Faces), it is like Gandalf knocking on the door of your little hobbit hole, inviting you to go off on some crazy journey through the world, discovering what the meaning of this strange mortal life we humans have on this planet really is. So blessings on your adventure! I'll leave you with the thought that it isn't about learning not to be afraid of death, it's about learning how to live a passionate, wonderful life even with your fear--that's true bravery. And I'll leave you with these two quotes from the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu:
Heaven and earth last forever.
Why do heaven and earth last forever?
They are unborn, so ever living.
and
The highest good is like water.
It gives life to ten thousand things and does not strive.
It flows in places men reject, and so is like the Tao.
