My grandfather and I were close, he was an artist, a tool user with psychedelics: spiritual in the searching sense that means rejected commodity religion. But he believed in something larger than this life. Often we'd chill along the riverbanks where my grandparents lived, we'd smoke a joint, drink some wine, maybe burn some incense, and do what humans have done for eons: discuss eternity. Oh we'd talk about everything -- girls, art, science careers, what living a good life might entail.
And so to be relevant to this thread and your question, we talked God, death, and a possible afterlife. He read books about near death experiences, and watched youtubes of passionate people describing their profound death experiences, how once people entered into the stages of death, no one seemed to want to return to their own bodies. Go to the light, says every NDEr.
Staring at the stars, my grandfather would discuss the sensitive topic of his own death, and he liked to make the promise to me to return a sign somehow. Throw me a bone, a call out from beyond, give me a signal there's more to this than random meaninglessness. If an afterlife exists, he said, and I have any ability to give you signs from beyond, I'll do it, I'll try, I'll try to give you a sign.
"Like what?"
"You'll know," he said, "I won't be subtle."
We made little formal ceremonies, like stoned kids.
Fast forward a few years, he got one of the dreaded diseases of aging: dementia: he faded, he lost everything, and eventually he suffered a painful death.
I've returned to our spot along the riverbank many times, and I've sat and listened. I've waited. I've blamed myself for being too deaf or too blind or too insensitive or stupid to receive my grandfather's signs from beyond. I've cried, I've yelled at the night, I've hated the indifferent river waves, the occasional bat swinging above.
Still: nothing.
Any hint, any sign, any indication that he was able to pass a sign along, of course, has failed. I'm still listening, though, still blaming my own limitations. What has succeeded is more silence, darkness and no signs from an afterlife from my beloved, mystical grandfather who would give it to me if he could. The universe spins on indifferently.
Of course, my little story doesn't touch upon whether any afterlife exists or not. Here we are bound by necessity of anecdote, n=1 everyone, that's it, believe in God or don't, have faith or don't, what choice have we? But the silence, more than dogma of any disbelieving science or believing religion, tells me that we have the present moment.
If an afterlife exists then I hope it exists also for all beings, not just humans, the most violent, dangerous animals on earth, but I hope a pleasant afterlife exists for all kingdoms of life -- animals, plants, fungi, even bacteria should get their fair shake at endless love and peace. There's certainly not much of it here -- look at the innocent babies caught in Syria, or Congo, or look at the inevitable extinction of plants and animals worldwide as we humans keep destroying our only home. Pushed as we are by evolutionary forces and gravity and laws and oxygen and fighting for reproductive mates, territories, food and homes, all the rest -- how could it be otherwise? Dream of a better life here on earth for our progeny, and if afterlife exists, then yay.
If Death is Kind
Perhaps if death is kind, and there can be returning,
We will come back to earth some fragrant night,
And take these lanes to find the sea, and bending
Breathe the same honeysuckle, low and white.
We will come down at night to these resounding beaches
And the long gentle thunder of the sea,
Here for a single hour in the wide starlight
We shall be happy, for the dead are free.
~ Sara Teasdale
Edited by sthira, 19 December 2016 - 07:01 PM.