Death is nothing

TODAY BEING All Souls Day, it is a good occasion to get much-needed respite from the insanity of our politics and reflect on that sovereign law of life from which there is no escape: death, the grim reaper, that great leveler of all playing fields, who recognizes neither king nor pauper, cares not whether you are rich or poor, beautiful or ugly. All must surrender to it, sooner or later.

Epicurus, that delightfully elegant and witty Greek philosopher better known for his advocacy of a sensual, sybaritic lifestyle, surprised not a few of his peers when he ventured into unfamiliar ground and declared: “Death is nothing…” That’s because all pleasures of the flesh and mind—in fact all thoughts—cease upon the death of the physical body. So why fear the ghosts of infinite darkness when it’s all over?

That, in a nutshell, was his pragmatic contribution to the subject that grips us ordinary mortals like a vise, from adulthood to our final moments on Earth.

Hold on, don’t go away, dear reader. There is more and it gets better. Modern science has taken Epicurus’ musings to another, mind-blowing level: Death is not only nothing but is absolutely meaningless, a nonevent in the totality of creation. With the dazzling discoveries of science in space, time, motion, gravity and particle behavior, death has acquired a radical dimension and meaning.

What science says is both a feel-good or feel-bad read, depending on one’s mood, values and outlook.

In science’s objective, all-embracing definition of death, our physical body does not really perish after our last breath and the rites of cremation or burial, but is merely transformed

into another living, active energy form, which means a virtually timeless cycle of comings and goings, a kind of never-ending, back-and-forth transmigration of indestructible matter into mass and energy. Because form is substance and substance is form.

If we apply this insight to the human landscape and the physical world outside us, this is what the conundrum really means: that the holocaust, the horrific carnage that claimed the lives of six million Jews in Hitler’s ovens and concentration camps, never really took place; that no one actually perished in the nuclear blast in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; that no one really died when the mighty Titanic sank after colliding with an iceberg; and that similarly, the huge human toll exacted by the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia never happened. All that occurred were trivial, indeed virtually undetectable energy conversions. The same iron law of energy applies to all “deaths” on Earth since the emergence of intelligent life.

Obviously, science is completely blind to John Donne’s classic poem, “No Man is an Island,” where he movingly declared: “The death of any man diminishes me.”

Indeed, in the mind-boggling immensity of the universe, even the death of our planet and solar system, or even our entire Milky Way, would be no more than a tiny energy flicker. Going further, in a multiverse of endless universes science now boldly thinks of, the very death of our particular cosmos would also be an unnoticeable and meaningless event. That’s what the number “uncountable billions” (of universes) can do to humble the human mind, its finest creations, and most cherished values.

Such cold, ego-deflating scientific theories and laws bordering on the absurd may be true, but they are nevertheless quite unsettling. Being human, most of us are understandably obsessed with the holy grail of immortality and living forever in paradise with our divine maker when our worldly life is done. Even if it’s just a fairy tale, who doesn’t want to entertain thoughts of being reunited with departed loved ones after death? Even the most cynical diehard skeptic dreams it.

To get away from the travails of life and futile afterlife dreams, I sometimes suspend all disbelief and escape momentarily into my imaginary world of Greek mythology, to maintain my sense of humor and sanity.

If I had lived in the times depicted in the epic poems of Homer, when the world was inhabited by mortals like ourselves and mighty gods who held sway over the elements of earth, fire, wind and water—the very stuff of life—I would have whispered to my kind, The gods envy us:

…Respect the gods but do not tremble before them. Hold your heads high in their presence because in truth, though they won’t admit it, the gods envy us!

Strangely and ironically, because we are mortals, doomed at any moment!

Laugh not for it is this very fleeting, precarious existence that makes us more powerful than the gods who are chained forever to the great rock of immortality—whence there is no escape; indestructible beings who shall never know the true meaning of triumph and tragedy, happiness and despair, beauty and ugliness, good and evil.

How can they when these values, goods and pleasures are rooted in human frailty? Perhaps, in the beginning of time, when their senses were not yet jaded by countless millennia of supernatural power, the gods also possessed our innocence, and zest for life? Living each day as if it were our last, knowing that any moment may be our final breath on Earth empowers us to great heights of thought, emotion, and deed.

Living moment to moment on the tightrope of life is to embrace and fully treasure the best and worst of life, be it pain or joy. For one cannot exist without the other.

Yes, the gods must envy us!

Sorry for getting carried away, patient reader. Nov. 2 never fails to cast a strange, hypnotic spell over me.

Narciso Reyes Jr. ([email protected]) is an international book author and former diplomat. He lived in Beijing in 1978-81 as bureau chief of the Philippine News Agency.