The Cosmic Cycle: Insights into What Death Might Mean to the Universe

In my previous post, I touched briefly on the cosmic view of biomechanical death and the life cycle, and what those concepts might look like to our universe at large.  Before I can talk about that, though, I have to talk about what death doesn't look like to the cosmos.  

First and foremost, the cycles of birth and death are an integral part of universal renewal - everything everywhere is reaffirming itself forever without end - plants die and returned to the soil from which they spring; animals perish and their flesh returns once again the Earth that nourished them through life.  Oceans breach the shores and recede in their tides; wind whips across the plains and them subsides into its rest.  The ebb and flow of life is everywhere, all the time, all at once.  

Human are a part of this cycle as well.  We have long fancied ourselves as separate from it, but this is not the case.  Our sense of removal has been constructed from a misunderstood relationship; we view ourselves as conquerors of the Earth, not a part of its natural machinery.  But to what do we owe our prosperity?  Fossil fuels?  Do they not come from the Earth?  And our synthesis of any processes or systems that the Earth has produced: are they not mirrors of the cosmic cycle itself? We are not original; we are recycled material from infinite layers of cosmic experience. We are the universal consciousness experiencing its own manifestation over and over again without end.  We are not just part of the Earth; we are inseparable from it. 

Our cosmos, it then stands to reason, does not view these cycles with the same measure of sentimentality that we do.  We associate biomechanical death with feelings of loss and bereavement.   Rightly so; when we can no longer physically experience the presence of a loved one or friend, we feel bereft; lost sometimes.   But our cosmos is like a well-oiled machine; recycling and reusing every bit of energy and matter it contains= over and over again endlessly. There is no waste!  And I'm sure you've heard the expression "there's nothing new under the sun," right?  Well, as it turns out, that's philosophically and thermodynamically true! To us, birth is a celebration and death is an unfortunate but unavoidable event that we have learned to either ignore, fear or hate, depending on our cultural narrative.    Our universe, however, is not limited to such binary paradigms, and views beginnigs and endings much differently, if indeed the word "view" can apply to such a concept at all. 

To our cosmos, we are ingredients - think of it as a large, living recipe:  leaving out any one ingredient from its appropriate process/cycle from the recipe creates an unsavory and unwelcome flavor.   But when ingredients are added at their appointed time and season, and remain imbedded in the production through the full measure of their meaningful contribution, the recipe is savory and delicious.   Ingredients do not expire; they are not born, and they do not experience death.   

We are an integral part of a whole system - threads in a tapestry whose patterns far exceed our capacity to fully understand. 

How can we, then, be the exception to this?  If all matter is neither created nor destroyed, how we can - made of matter and energy such as we are - be subject to death?  We cannot be. We are not.   It is only our limited view of the cosmos that defines these events for us in these terms.  We lack understanding of the fullness of our experience here, because we have confined ourselves within the realm of what we can see, touch, taste, hear, smell, etc.  We - collectively - have assigned the term "reality" to these tactile experiences, without fully understadning how severely it limits us to a fuller relationships with our plant, its people, and our universe as a whole.   

But the nature of realty, consciousness, the cosmos - all our beyond our current limitations.  They rest on a horizon far ahead of us, I'm afraid. And until we grow tired of the limitations imposed upon us by our own collective worldview, the nature of all of this will remain only an illusive hint of mystery shadowed in the mist of a future we may never fully acheive.