We are the children of death

“We Are the Children of Death”

Well, one could say, “Not true.” I was born from life… well, yes… but where were you before your parents met? You were in the realms of possibility, the realm of death, as life had not yet incarnated your possibility into being. Frankenstein could argue he is made of dead flesh brought to life; actually, having passed the state of aliveness, he became immortal, indestructible, and, like the legendary cat, he has more than one life, always coming back from death, with or without his will. He cannot die.

Then he has two dramas: he is born of dead flesh, so how can he be alive? And then, he is kind of alive, but he cannot even have a proper death.

We should reflect: while we are physically alive from our inception, when do we become alive in the spiritual sense? Not remembering our first years, does this amnesia count as a non-conscious phase? Consciousness seems to include the memory of itself over a span of time. The consciousness of today is influenced by the consciousness of yesterday, and the day before, and so on, until the first break of consciousness, the moment we watch our hands and realise, “I’m alive!” I guess many have had this epiphany, the official beginning of their “self.”

We are children of death, not only physically but psychically. A project is nothing until it begins, intertwined with the strings of reality, the cords of “materiality.”

Considering that from death we come, to death we go… we are born morally irresponsible because we did not choose the world we live in. But as humans who can feel suffering, understand the world we are in, feel love, and the thousands of variations of human sentiments, we naturally become responsible for our own “soul,” let’s call it that. Each human “soul” is a representation of universality, an example of the natural order. The human soul is a fragment of the humanity soul that has been forged across ages. Friendship, love, jealousy, envy, the will to sacrifice, detachment—all this sentimental rainbow is the basic toolbox for one to go through life, living under the moral imperative of its humanness.

Humaneness discovery is the first quest of the individual soul. By experiencing the whole range of sentiments, one can understand what it takes to have a good life and align the core of the soul to the axis of good deeds.

Then, is living up to our personal moral standards the qualification of a “good life”? A mass murderer can be happy because he lives up to his standards, as a saint would be… does it mean that the life of the first one is more desirable? Does it mean that the life of the second is worthier?

Moral standards are like mathematics: you can have the right response but the wrong logic. If you look at the results, they are similar, but the moral action embedded in the motives can be wrong. You may have the right response with the wrong calculus once… but surely, if you follow the same path, you will be almost certainly wrong the second time. As we say, even a stopped watch shows the right hour once per day. Morality is logically descending from the highest values to the smallest ones, by a principle of precedence.

I would put universal harmony as the first principle. No action should be contrary to the universal harmony embedded in the design of nature itself. We, as humans, can see this as “beauty.” No action should be “ugly,” meaning having deception inside.

Let’s take an amputation: if made by a doctor because the patient needs it, then it is not contrary to harmony. The action of cutting a limb is to save a life. While, let’s say, a cannibal does the same action, well, then it depends on the motives. Let’s say it is for his pleasure, meaning useless pain for one pleasure; we will qualify the action as ugly from our point of view. Still, from the cannibal’s point of view, this action is maybe part of some dark aesthetics we cannot comprehend.

Let’s take the human sacrifices of the Aztecs: they were done for a greater order, in order to appease the gods and fulfill the highest form of explicit morality: respect for religious precepts. We can see that the same event can be qualified as moral or immoral depending on the frame of reference.

So, as a society, the first thing is to define what our highest frame of universal morality should be, the one we apply to our actions. I personally would go with the morality that permits the individual to grow and discover the whole range of possibilities of his character, in order to walk on the path of self-realisation, the realisation of his uniqueness as the best human ever in his own skin.

When a human self-realises, or “finds himself,” he has accomplished the goal of his life, the true birth of his character. We already have the blueprint for this realisation at the individual level. Thousands of years of spiritual practice come to us from all around the world with the same principles: respect for nature, for society as a whole, and respect for one’s own limitations. Any proven moral system is valid, as with time it was refined by society in order to give any newborn human a way of realisation of universal harmony within himself, to achieve perfect contentment in his life, that is, becoming a realised human being.

We will never resurrect anew, but as an old self brought back to life, like Frankenstein. We will then have the actual eternity to live forever, in the state we choose. Imagine there is an impossibility to die or not to be reborn, an impossibility to forget who you are forever; is this not like a prison either? The will to be resuscitated is like the will to stay asleep another five minutes in the morning bed, but imagine an eternity where you hit the snooze button forever. The first hour is a necessity; the rest would be a catastrophic torture. Take any human: he will not live forever because at some point he will be fed up with hitting the snooze button and will want to start his day anew, finally.

So eternity is humanly and psychologically impossible otherwise than by having a kind of reset, a kind of death of the old self in order to be born anew, the same software but with different variables.

Going back to morality, or the realisation of the self, only a realised self can bear eternity. That is why, in some religious dogmas, they say that life is an eternal beginning anew to perfect one’s path until the final “liberation.” And what is this liberation other than reaching the soul-tempered quality necessary to live forever without suffering, without being trapped in eternity?

Then indeed, as the Bible says, mortality is the consequence of the self’s imperfection, which accumulates sins and deviations from the harmonic universal law. Only the sinless souls, those who followed the path of liberation and achieved self-realisation, the genuine unique souls, will be liberated and live in “heaven.” Heaven is not a place for dead souls, but for souls that are able to live forever. As for the rest, hell is not a place of death either; hell is here on earth and in the always-beginning-anew, because of the imperfections that forbid us to be born forever.

The universe gives us the spark of life, but it is up to us to maintain it and become life itself, for each new life, each new human born on the Earth, is a new chance you are given to set eternity itself Alive.

Maybe the universe reproduces itself by giving us a spark of consciousness, which we can lead to total realization; and then we give birth to a new universe where we are the creator, the super-consciousness that gives birth to all.