What’s It All About Anyway
The eternal infernal question nobody has the answer to
No matter how old we are, no matter how smart we are, how rich we are, or which country we live in, we humans always come around to the same question at some point in our lives. What exactly is life all about?
Like what’s the point? Where does it all end up? Why are we even here? Everybody wonders, but nobody knows for sure, and this is a universal constant that stretches across all borders, boundaries, and societies.
We hope, we pray, and we meditate, each of us in our own way. We wonder and worry and puzzle about finding the answer to this question. We fret and we fuss, we gamble and we ramble, we hem and we haw, but the bright words never come.
The right words, the ones that will explain the mystery, satisfy our curiosity, answer our questions, and resolve the riddle always elude us.
But it is a question without an answer, a riddle with very few clues, this mystery we all so desperately want to solve.
It is baffling, mysterious, elusive, maddening, and yet irresistible. We all so desperately want to know the answer to the meaning of life.
We need to know if all of our hard work, and all of our prayers, sacrifices, and efforts are worthwhile. That if we live the good life, we will be rewarded in the next life, whatever form that will take.
Stats indicate well over half the world believes in an afterlife of some kind. Archeological evidence indicates that this belief in an afterlife goes back at least 12,000 years.
Because that is when people started to be buried with useful objects to help them out in the afterlife.
There are various religions and belief systems all over the world who think they know the answer, but nobody knows for sure. Where is the proof in the pudding, the final definitive answer? There is none.
In America, the majority of people are Christians, the most prevalent religion in the United States.
The majority of these Christians are Protestants or Roman Catholics, but there are a lot of other religions that are nipping at their heels.
The problem is that each and every one of these religions and splinter groups and subsets of Christianity all firmly believe that they are the only right ones, the only true believers.
How can all of them be right?
Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists are the predominant religions in other parts of the world. And once again, they think that they are the only right religions with all the right answers.
Again, how can all of them be right?
All members of these religions believe in the afterlife, or life after death. This is a core belief that the essence of a person will continue to exist after the death of their physical body.
That our consciousness will simply transform into another state of being. The scientific law of conservation of mass states that “matter can not be created or destroyed.” It just takes a different shape, like smoke after a tree burns.
The sticking point is what the afterlife will be like, which differs according to your own beliefs.
A popular belief now is that we will be reincarnated, by the laws of karma, and be reborn into another body according to our actions in this life.
Reincarnation is central to Hinduism, Buddhism, and parts of Judaism as well as the beliefs of indigenous people in both the Americas and Australia. Christians and members of Islam do not believe in reincarnation.
A lot of attention is also centering today on NDEs or Near Death Experiences, where people who are pronounced clinically dead but then come back to life tell their tale.
They swear they see their bodies from the outside, pass into a bright, welcoming light, and sometimes pass through a tunnel before returning.
I think we will all be transformed into whatever afterlife we believe in, in this life. So it’s up to us to decide.
Whatever it is, wherever we go or don’t go we will all find out in due time.
Just be good, for goodness sake. Find joy in every day. We are all connected…