When a sperm meets an egg, the sperm and the egg each loses it's individual identity. Do you suppose each of them thinks it has "died"? And yet, for us, from our vantage point of view, it is the start of a brand new life ....
When the foetus emerges from the mother's womb, it's entire environment and life-situation changes - from being in a zero-gravity liquid environment, where it received both oxygen and nutrition through the blood, to a world where gravity weighs it down at every step, and it suddenly needs to breathe on its own through the lungs; take nutrition through the mouth (learn to swallow) and excrete through the excretory organs. While going through the experience of being born, is it not like the foetus is experiencing the "death" of one kind of life and taking birth into another kind of life?
Why then do we imagine that what we humans (adults) fear as "death" should be final? It may very well be a transformatory experience, where we take "birth" into another form of living!
The sperm and egg exist as distinct "beings" for a few moments to a few days. The foetus exists as a "being" for approximately 9 months. A human may exist as a "being" for any number of years, let us say going up to four score and ten, or a century! To a mathematical bent of mind, this increase in "lifespan" is in the nature of a geometric or exponential progression. So can we hypothesize that in the next state in which we emerge, after "death" of our life as we know it, the "lifespan" will be still longer?
On a slightly different path now :
The law of conservation of mass, also known as principle of mass/matter conservation is that the mass of a closed system (in the sense of a completely isolated system) will remain constant over time. The mass of an isolated system cannot be changed as a result of processes acting inside the system.
If I were to apply this to the earth, considering the earth as a whole to be a closed system, what happens when I die? Based on my religious background, I would be cremated. This means, that the water in my physical body would escape as water vapour, become a part of the atmospheric humidity and come back to earth as rain / dew etc. Various elements would assume gaseous form and become a part of the atmosphere until they either come back to earth dissolved in rain, or are absorbed by plants in gaseous form itself. The last remaining part of me would become ash and merge "dust unto dust". Thus, each and every bit of my mortal body would come back to earth and be absorbed into the earth, therein to be absorbed into plant life.
This plant life might become food for some life form, including, but not restricted to, human life. For example, if the elements that used to make me are absorbed by a carrot, that carrot may be consumed by a human. If it is absorbed by grass, it may be consumed by a cow, whose milk / meat is consumed by a human. Or it may be absorbed by a tree, which over time, is consumed by some parasitic form of life or merges back into the earth as manure to repeat the cycle. Think about it - what today constitutes my body, may on my death, become a cell in the body of a human, or a cow, or a tree .... or even the plastic shell of a television set or cellphone, which is after all derived from petrochemicals which are of organic origin!
To take the same thought in reverse then, what I am eating today, was at some time a part of some human being somewhere, and a part of a cow or a tiger in another lifetime and a part of a mushroom in yet another lifetime. If every element has a "memory", then the cells of my body have the collective "memory" of being a human, an animal, a plant, a dinosaur, a woolly mammoth .... every form of life from the beginning of time itself, or since the birth of this world of ours! Is this what the Buddha had in mind when he said everything, living and non-living, has a soul?
I now go still further, and look at you and think - of all the cells that comprise you, and all the elements that comprise each cell; and all the cells and elements that comprise me, what are the chances that some of the elements that make up your body and some of the elements that make up my body, in some earlier time, occupied the same body? If I were to compute the probabilities, taking into account how long life has existed on earth and how many living beings there have been on this earth since the beginning of life, I am sure, the probability would be very high indeed. Thus, when I look at you, I see that you have been a part of me in another lifetime, in another age; and I have been a part of you in another lifetime, and in another age. Why then, are we so ready to kill each other today?
When the foetus emerges from the mother's womb, it's entire environment and life-situation changes - from being in a zero-gravity liquid environment, where it received both oxygen and nutrition through the blood, to a world where gravity weighs it down at every step, and it suddenly needs to breathe on its own through the lungs; take nutrition through the mouth (learn to swallow) and excrete through the excretory organs. While going through the experience of being born, is it not like the foetus is experiencing the "death" of one kind of life and taking birth into another kind of life?
Why then do we imagine that what we humans (adults) fear as "death" should be final? It may very well be a transformatory experience, where we take "birth" into another form of living!
The sperm and egg exist as distinct "beings" for a few moments to a few days. The foetus exists as a "being" for approximately 9 months. A human may exist as a "being" for any number of years, let us say going up to four score and ten, or a century! To a mathematical bent of mind, this increase in "lifespan" is in the nature of a geometric or exponential progression. So can we hypothesize that in the next state in which we emerge, after "death" of our life as we know it, the "lifespan" will be still longer?
On a slightly different path now :
The law of conservation of mass, also known as principle of mass/matter conservation is that the mass of a closed system (in the sense of a completely isolated system) will remain constant over time. The mass of an isolated system cannot be changed as a result of processes acting inside the system.
If I were to apply this to the earth, considering the earth as a whole to be a closed system, what happens when I die? Based on my religious background, I would be cremated. This means, that the water in my physical body would escape as water vapour, become a part of the atmospheric humidity and come back to earth as rain / dew etc. Various elements would assume gaseous form and become a part of the atmosphere until they either come back to earth dissolved in rain, or are absorbed by plants in gaseous form itself. The last remaining part of me would become ash and merge "dust unto dust". Thus, each and every bit of my mortal body would come back to earth and be absorbed into the earth, therein to be absorbed into plant life.
This plant life might become food for some life form, including, but not restricted to, human life. For example, if the elements that used to make me are absorbed by a carrot, that carrot may be consumed by a human. If it is absorbed by grass, it may be consumed by a cow, whose milk / meat is consumed by a human. Or it may be absorbed by a tree, which over time, is consumed by some parasitic form of life or merges back into the earth as manure to repeat the cycle. Think about it - what today constitutes my body, may on my death, become a cell in the body of a human, or a cow, or a tree .... or even the plastic shell of a television set or cellphone, which is after all derived from petrochemicals which are of organic origin!
To take the same thought in reverse then, what I am eating today, was at some time a part of some human being somewhere, and a part of a cow or a tiger in another lifetime and a part of a mushroom in yet another lifetime. If every element has a "memory", then the cells of my body have the collective "memory" of being a human, an animal, a plant, a dinosaur, a woolly mammoth .... every form of life from the beginning of time itself, or since the birth of this world of ours! Is this what the Buddha had in mind when he said everything, living and non-living, has a soul?
I now go still further, and look at you and think - of all the cells that comprise you, and all the elements that comprise each cell; and all the cells and elements that comprise me, what are the chances that some of the elements that make up your body and some of the elements that make up my body, in some earlier time, occupied the same body? If I were to compute the probabilities, taking into account how long life has existed on earth and how many living beings there have been on this earth since the beginning of life, I am sure, the probability would be very high indeed. Thus, when I look at you, I see that you have been a part of me in another lifetime, in another age; and I have been a part of you in another lifetime, and in another age. Why then, are we so ready to kill each other today?
