As someone who suffers with anxieties and the odd panic attack, I often have strange thoughts running around my head, things such as;
“How many times do I check the door is locked before it actually becomes locked?”
“Have my hair straighteners magically plugged themselves in, switched themselves on and are now burning through my dressing table?”
And my personal favourite…
“How might I die today?”
One of the most common fears among humans is of dying, our instinct is to survive and so we fear death. As I have quite an anxious mind I find myself thinking about death quite often and what might happen to us when we die.
I don’t believe in heaven, it would be nice for such a place to exist, where we all get to be reunited in the afterlife but I find the idea unlikely.
My son believes in reincarnation and this is something that seems more plausible. We all have an energy, a soul, a spirit of some kind, call it what you will. Einstein explained that ‘energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change from one form to another’.
I know this doesn’t prove anything by way of what happens to us after death and I am aware that we create happy scenarios to comfort ourselves in times of grief and to also make ourselves feel better about our own future demise. But as we are all energy we must go somewhere when we die and this sums it up perfectly…
You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed.
You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every bit of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.
And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you.
And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.
You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly.
– Aaron Freeman
Whatever you believe is perfectly good, you can believe that we all turn in to jellyfish and continue on our journey in the sea. Since scientists estimate that there are over 300,000 species of jellyfish yet to be discovered and already 2,000 species that we know of, this isn’t beyond plausible.
Jellyfish aside, just continue to believe what makes you happy, if that’s heaven for you or simply returning to stardust as long as you are happy in life and you’re living opposed to waiting then that’s all there is to it. No need to be afraid, we’re all heading in the same direction, some just get there quicker than others.
Please feel free to share your belief with me, no matter how bizarre or simple ∞
Made A Hames 