DEATH - Behind the Black Curtain

[PeteNYC]

I haven't posted here for a while, but I wanted to visit my DU friends and share an essay I wrote reflecting on death and dying and why we mourn celebs:

DEATH

When my nephew was six or seven years old, he composed a short poem which still gives me chills -- he had no idea what it meant (or maybe he did) and I have no idea how he wrote it, but it's as deep and dark as anything I've read:

Soon it comes to every person,
See it happen in one black curtain

Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, are names from my youth who have now gone behind the black curtain. Not to mention the far more disturbing murder of Neda Soltani, whose life bled away in front of us, her eyes staring off into that infinite distance only the dying see.

I wrote this on Twitter: "With the loss of anyone famous what we're really mourning is the passage of our own lives, their death a marker on OUR journey."

I wrote it because death is ever-present and life is ever-shrinking. For some of us, death is an obsession, for others, barely an afterthought. My childhood was bombs and bullets and bodies and burning buildings, so I'm of the former. The thought of eternal non-existence is unthinkable, mortifying beyond words. If that's the fate that awaits us, it's a wonder that we don't all curl up and scream in endless horror. Some people do, figuratively.

Death is life's greatest motivator, for good and evil, fueling our futile quest to 'matter' - futile, because the people we seek to 'matter to' are themselves reaching out to us to give them meaning. It's like two jumpers hurtling to earth, each reaching to the other, but neither with a foothold and both doomed to the same end. Some try to matter by helping others, some by hurting others, all with the desire to be remembered, to bridge an unbridgeable gap, to leave some kind of a mark, to prove that they existed...

The rest is here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-daou/death_b_221260.html

[zeemike]

1. A very thought provoking essay.

Death is the great motivator.

I have had this thought that there is no death or ending ot our consciousness only the death of the physical body.
But the physical body has it's on consciousness in a way...in that it is motivated to stay alive. And that is why you can't just hold your breath and kill yourself...the body will not let you.

And this was alluded to by Jesus when he was sweating blood in the garden knowing of his upcoming death...he said " The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak"

[sce56]

2. Yeah I just don't belive in fairy tales.

Best take care of that ticker! I did my over 50 stress test this month the borescoping is coming next month!



No I wont do a Katie those will stay private!

[zeemike]

3. I see those valves flapping it must be OK

But fairy tails don't need our belief to exist...they just do.
There is a train of thought that says that if you can imagine it it, it must have existed at some point in time. But that comes from the many paradoxes we see in our existence.

[sce56]

5. Well I believe the Religious nuts are just controlling people with their fantasies

How many people did David Koresh take with him? How many
were sacrificed in the Mayan world to appease Chack the
god of Rain and all others they would sacrifice to?
Hell they even punished Galileo for his heresy thinking
the Earth was not the center of the Universe and actually
rotated around the Sun! Religion is for those who have no
idea how mother nature really works and if there really
was a guy named Jesus he was probably just like Jim Jones,
David Koresh and many others getting the weak minded to
blindly believe in them based on faith smoke and mirrors!
Now days in modern times you get the holly rollers to sucker
all those people out of their money while the preachers do
the sining for them with the money they conned out of the
fools that believe all of that mumbo jumbo gibberish
Faith yeah right strike me down dead for I do not believe
in him perio
o
o
o
d
d
d Ughhhhhhhh



All bow before the Great Flying Spaghetti Monster

[zeemike]

6. Well assuming that what you say is true.

And the story of Jesus was all made up.
Then what do you think of the things the guy that made it all up?
And why did he insist on calling out the religious leaders of the times and calling them serpents and wolves?
And why did he have Jesus chasing the money changers out of the temple?
And why did he write the Sermon on the mount which is condemning of almost every thing that the present day Pharisees hold to?

There has been a common thread through out history of all spiritual leaders in every country....the leader comes and delivers the message and within a generation that message is corrupted and the authoritarians take over the religion and do it great harm....and it never fails.

[PeteNYC]

4. Thanks

Interesting thoughts.