Death/Rebirth

Everyone has their own personal approach to spirituality, even if it is to say, "Spirituality is a load of crap, I have no interest in it." I'm sympathetic with that attitude, because I've become increasingly reluctant to use that term, spirituality. It's difficult to find substitutes, given that the word is so commonly used to denote looking for meaning in life in some sort of non-materialistic fashion. I mean, an avid gambler finds meaning in placing bets, but few people would consider that a spiritual pursuit. I suppose it doesn't really matter if there isn't a coherent widely-agreed upon definition…

If you can't stand this heretical, ungodly, religion-bashing blog, I've got some good news for you. The Death Clock app says I'm going to die in December 2039. (I don't expect to be writing blog posts after I die, unless an atheist miracle happens.)  The bad news is that this is about 14 1/2 years from now. So you're going to have to put up with many more blog posts that you dislike. The Death Clock app calls their when-you're-going-to-die prediction "Save the Date." Church of the Churchless haters might want to start making plans for a Yay He's Finally…

I used to have a strong fear of death. So much so, as I described in a 2004 HinesSight post ("Give me liberty or give me gerbil"), I made an attorney say gerbil rather than death whenever she needed to refer to my eventual demise.  Kathleen Evans, the attorney, did a masterful job at a whiteboard injecting into our legal-impaired brains the gist (but not the details, blessedly) of why what we did in 1993 still made sense in 2004, even with arcane changes in some estate and tax laws whose sole purpose seemed to be to make things so…

Near-death experiences fascinate me. Maybe a bit less now than they used to, as the older I get, the more accepting I am of the undeniable reality that I'm not going to live forever.  But I used to devour books about near-death experiences with relish back when I really didn't like the thought of dying.  Recently I read a review in the Washington Post of a book that I would have loved to read in the days I was more afraid of death than I am now, "Sebastian Junger was a skeptic of the afterlife. Then he nearly died." That's…

Some things are impossible to imagine, because we have no experience of anything akin to that thing. This is why, as I noted in a recent blog post, we can't imagine what the cosmos would be like without consciousness existing within it, because our attempt at imagining takes place within our consciousness.  It's also why, no matter how hard I or anyone else may try, we can't imagine what things will be like after we're dead, because our attempt at imagining takes place while we're alive. So our living consciousness is an inescapable barrier to knowing what, if anything, lies…

I'm no poet, but I admire poetry. Some evidence is that after my wife got tired of watching Dickinson on Apple TV+, a streaming series about the poet Emily Dickinson, I continued on until I'd seen every episode of the first three seasons. I loved how Dickinson looked at life in such a fresh and creative fashion, even taking into account how loosely the series probably adhered to the literal facts of Emily Dickinson.  For example, she spent quite a bit of time in a carriage with Death, a cool Black guy who was overworked, particularly after the Civil War…

Apartment buildings can be rebuilt. So can hospitals, shopping centers, elder care homes, and all the other structures being destroyed by Russia's purposeful bombing of civilian areas, a clear war crime. What can't be undone are the many thousands of deaths: soldiers on both sides, plus women, children, the elderly, and other Ukrainians unable to flee Putin's invasion. That's heartbreaking.  After Russia started this war, I've had this thought whenever I feel like my day isn't going well: I do have some problems, but I'm alive, and I don't have to worry about a missile demolishing my home. There's a…

Here's an essay from The Atlantic, "A Neuroscientist Prepares For Death." I'm a subscriber, so I don't know if non-subscribers can read this amazing essay. Click on the link and see if it works for you. If not, I've copied in what David J. Linden wrote below. He makes some cogent observations about why almost all religions believe in an afterlife. A Neuroscientist Prepares for Death About the author: David J. Linden is a neuroscience professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute. His most recent book is Unique: The New Science of…

Over on my HinesSight blog, yesterday I wrote "My wife's sister died today. It was a good death." I'll copy it in here. We're all going to die. That's 100% certain. Death follows life with a cosmic inevitability. The big question is: Will we die a good death? This morning my wife, Laurel, learned that her older sister, Lynn, had died last night. Naturally there were tears. But not much sorrow. Because Lynn died a good death.  In fact, a very good death. Exactly the way most of us would want to go, Laurel and I definitely included. Lynn and…

A New York Times opinion piece makes an excellent point about near-death experiences that applies equally to all kinds of spiritual, mystical, and religious experiences. There's plenty of evidence that people have these sorts of experiences. So that makes them real in a limited sense. It's the same sort of reality that arises when someone goes to a country music concert and absolutely loves it. Their mind produces a feeling of subjective pleasure from being at the concert.  However, this doesn't mean that the concert was objectively lovable. Someone who doesn't like country music could be sitting right next to the…

I'm not a big fan of death. Being alive strikes me as, well, a heck of a lot more appealing. More than infinitely so, in fact, since the difference between (1) being alive, and (2) dead and gone forever, is the same as the difference between something and nothing.  How many zeros does it take to equal one? The answer is... not even an infinity, because no amount of nothing can equal even the smallest something. But since death is inevitable, the next best thing is to not fear it. Or at least, not to fear it too much. Which…