The Misidentification of Key Concepts Related to Death and Dying.

I had someone ask me the other day why I write about death so much, or why I even think about it.

The person who asked me about this gave me an odd look, as if there is something anomalous about my wanting to chat about death and dying.  Further, when I gave my response, he looked aghast, as if I'd offended him somehow.

My response was this:  I want to talk about death so that it looses its power. I want people to stop being afraid. I want people to realize that there is no end - it is only a fiction we have been told so long that we have learned to repeat it.   

After he closed his mouth, he said, "well, I don't want to think about it. I'm an atheist."

This was a puzzling comment to me, because my writing here (and even my thoughts on death and consciousness) have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any religion or god.   I wasn't certain how his atheism eliminated from him the desire to understand death or to even think about it.   I wasn't prepared to argue any cause, because to me this isn't something worth arguing over, but generally speaking, atheism supports the concept that there is no continuation after death, and more specifically it denies the existence of anything that may be extra-natural, such as a soul or a spirit.   

We use familiar words like spirit or death to fill in the gaps
in our understanding that surround consciousness and dying. 

If we remove the bit about continuation after death, then I can agree with the premise of atheism on the bit about the soul or spirit.   I will say that I believe these were words have been employed to describe the ultimate seat of consciousness, and that we have historically used these terms to describe something for which we have a limited understanding. There is nothing wrong with this; we do it all the time.  Another word we use in this way is the word death, ironically.  We call the event of the cessation of biorhythms death because we cannot fully understand what happens.   We believe - correctly - that it is defined externally by the cessation of a heartbeat and brain waves.  And if this is all we look at, then our view is correct.  

However, my point - even to my atheist friend  - is that there is more. We have always defined consciousness as a soul or spirit, and we did so because we lacked the framework for anything better.  We couldn't quite discern what a soul or a spirit was - at least not through science. So we left that to the spiritual traditions of the world, and atheism's view of that was that it did/does not exist.    But now, we can look at consciousness with science, and we can definite it better, and it doesn't need to be relegated to the dusty back rooms where we put the things we don't understand.   We can now recognize consciousness as something that may be qualifiable (if not yet quantifiable) and we can embrace its uncertainty a bit more than we ever have before.   This puts us light years ahead in terms of our experiences.   

Since we're so far along with understanding consciousness, then, it is like that the very next leap we will take is a deeper and better understanding of death and dying - and that this phenomenon will become more mainstream; whereas now it is confined to the backwater of our awareness, changes on the horizon will bring it to the forefront of our focus, and we may then move into a greater understanding of it. 

And this is why dialogue around this is important.  It isn't merely conversation. It's the beginning of removing a stigma of fear and insecurity. It's the beginning of our understanding about life, consciousness, and even spacetime itself and the very nature of reality.