Many religions make death the main focus of their beliefs. This is understandable since death is a very frightful and mysterious process. Death is our greatest sorrow and this often makes us very open to irrational ideas of an ever lasting life. Alan Watts described wishing for an eternal life akin to wishing for a chronic and never ending insomnia. With this in mind, maybe we should all be careful what we wish for.
When most of us think of the part of ourselves that is ourselves, we usually think of our conscious mind. It is the sensation of consciousness that many of us would like to be eternal. Some may call the sensation of consciousness the soul or spirit. Interestingly, science currently has no explanation for what consciousness actually is or where it actually resides. One thing is clear however, consciousness is not something that is very robust. Consciousness can be easily lost as a result of injury or illness. So if it is possible to lose consciousness without even dying, it seems unlikely we could experience consciousness without life.
Knowing that eternal life is mankind's greatest desire, it seems astonishing that the ancient Taoists never followed the trend of promising a never ending life. However, the Taoist masters always limited themselves to what they could observe in Nature and never speculated on something that was impossible for them to know. Apart for observing the recycling of our bodily elements, the Taoists never commented on what happens to us after our death.
The Taoists address our fear of death from a very unique perspective. Rather than theorize, the Taoist Masters simply asked us to trust Nature in death as we trust Nature in life. If we fully identify with Nature and trust it as the ultimate reality, then whatever occurs after death will be as it should be. There is no reason to believe Nature would forsake us once we die. If we have total and unquestioning trust in the wisdom of Nature, there is no need to worry or speculate on death.
It the words of Chuang Tzu (pronounced "Juang Suh") "how do we know the dead are not amazed that they struggled to continue living?" Could it be that dying after a long life or a long illness is similar to falling sleep after a long day of rigorous labour? As with the satisfaction we feel when sleep descends upon us after a long difficult day, the dying may feel the same satisfaction to escape all the sufferings of consciousness.
The Taoist masters believed consciousness was an illusion and death was simply the end of this illusion. However, the elements that constitute our form are eternal and go on to materialize in other forms and possibly other consciousness. We are constructed from the atoms of every living thing that has ever existed on earth. At the atomic level it is easy to understand all things; future, past, and present; are One.
It must also be observed we have already once been dead. If death is seen as a period of non-existence, then the time before our conception should be seen in the same light. It seems reasonable to assume that babies yet to be conceived are in the same place as our deceased loved ones. Maybe we could learn to view our impending deaths with the same trivial concern we have for the period before our conception?
We often consider death as a malfunction of Nature and something that should never happen. We need to cultivate a trust in the processes of Nature, of which death is one.
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