"Death smiles at us all....the only thing we can do is smile back" says Russel Crowe in The Gladiator, when Ceaser asks him if he's not afraid of death.
So why is it that we dread death?
I cannot talk for others but i can surely tell you that i am scared to death of DEATH! It's not the fear of death itself that i am scared of. It has got to do with the fact that i shall never ever be able to meet all my loved ones. I cannot even imagine what my wife would do without me. Ahem..a bit of a bold statement there, you think?? Well, we are like that! We cannot think of a life without each other. What about my little daughter?? Well, she's too small to understand all this. My mother, brother & sister??? I am sure they will be shattered beyond repair. But LIFE moves on. You got to move along, otherwise it will leave you far behind.
This thought has been bothering me from the past 2 weeks. And i have been meaning to unload the burden of such thought via this blog. Can't tell wifey. Her blood pressure will shoot up to the moon. So i figured the next best thing to a wife is ...... my BLOG! Who else??!! They weren't kidding then, when they said blogging is addictive. It's a little slow in the beginning but catches speed later on. After that you can't get off.
How true then, that we cannot do anything when death beckons. Yea, we should smile. Sure! Smile... when the light in front of you is fading and darkness is blanketing your vision! Smile....when you are holding your dear ones hand and know that you won't be able to feel again! Smile.....when your heart's breaking into a zillion tiny pieces. Man!!! How can anyone do that? Can anyone do it...??? Smile??
They say in Hindu lore that our soul stays back on earth for 10 days. It (the aatma) keeps begging the soldiers of Yama to please, please let it stay back and see to its heart's content its loved ones for one LAST time. It cries and cries along with its beloved ones down there. It does not want to go to Yama, but His soldiers are relentless. They unleash the Paashaan (the whip) and drag the aatma. It keeps looking back again and again for whatever glimpses it can see of its loved ones. How for one last time it wants to go and hug its people! The unbearable pain it endures when it is made clear to it that there's no going back!
Can any living being survive that? No wonder they are as dead as DEAD when they have to go through such harrowing time.
Does somebody believe in afterlife? Is there indeed a place called an afterlife? What do souls do there? Do they exist there in the same human form they had when living on earth? What activities go on there? Are there any cars, buildings, roads, phones, water, food, sky, wind, fire ..... etc...in the city of afterlife? If there ever was an afterlife, it must be a very crowded place! Think of all the civilization who died. How do the GODs manage such humongous traffic! Really, this concept of afterlife starkly opposes the Hindu theory of re-birth. I mean, if i was to be reborn on this earth again - not necessarily as a human though - then there will be no place called the afterlife. The cycle of being reborn again would just have continued without any interval - how temporary it might be. Then why did our wise talk so much about afterlife? Surely there must be something concrete to it. Otherwise our wise - who had the concept of TIME and DIMENSION long before our Western counterparts learned to speak - were not such fools. Then the only explanation of justifying the existence of afterlife will be that it is a temporary resting place where a person's deeds and misdeeds are calculated, punishments served accordingly, and then dispatched back to earth again with some form of a living thing's 'body', of course with all the previous memory deleted! It runs like a well oiled machine, does the God's machine. It has to ! Imagine taking birth as a PIG with all your previous human life memory intact. You would be looking at SHIT and telling to yourself 'I can't eat that SHIT.....PIGS do' !!!! Some fun the onlookers would have watching the poor soul.
It's really amazing how quickly i shift gears from all serious and grim talk to stomach splitting comedy!
Now back to being serious. Well, it all looks so strikingly similar to the Wachowski brother's epic movie 'The Matrix'. I mean, look here closely and what do we got? A near perfect similarity to our Hindu theories of afterlife and Karma. Our aatmas are nothing but some global Programes whose core structure never changes (the soul never dies), into which various functions are written. Now the programs run according to the functions which are placed in it. If the function of a chimpanzee is written into the program then it displays the character of the above animal. If the function of a dog is written it happily wags it's tail and fetches!. So on and so forth for various other animals and various other humans. Here's the legend, if you like it, for those who do not know a damn thing about afterlife, aatma and karma.
Aatma == Global Program; Body == Function written in the program; Life == Matrix; World == Mainframe; God == Universe's most genius PROGRAMMER !!.......& Rajesh == A bloody fool ..!!!
.....more later on the subject which prompted me to blog.
Rajesh G Pandhrapurkar
