TT #5 – HOW TO UNDERSTAND DEATH

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What’s on today: A post inspired by a Thursday Thirteen prompt … PLUS … Links to my recent posts. After reading main feature, why not come back when it’s quiet? This is a magazine, not just a post.
YOU KNOW IT’S THE WRITE WAY

HOW TO UNDERSTAND DEATH

Now let’s not be morbid. Although this post is about death, I hope it is not depressing. Rather, it is about ideas surrounding death and afterlife, some classed as paranormal, others dealing with scientific understanding.
This is my 5th outing with THursday THirteen, and I’m still enjoying it greatly. The idea of a list allows me to condense a variety of aspects of a subject into a quick, easily accessible form. And I hope it lives long, cheating death.

COUNTDOWN

13. Death is the absence of life. But what, I’d like to know, is life? Indeed, it seems to me many people ARE dead in life.

12. The first known human expression came when Neanderthal Man began burying his dead. Some of his funary arrangements survive. But was this because he mourned, or was glad? Either way, appreciation of death seems to be tied up with our emotions.

11. Death forms the central element of most religions. In the east, death is cyclical, in that we come back as another incarnation. In the west, death is a transition to another, immortal, world. Seems like an ethereal utopia to me.

10. Can we die symbolically? Most mystical traditions are based on death and rebirth. Interestingly, research has been done on deep faints, which show we can experience images of afterlife. This is akin to the near death experience.

9. Shamanic practices in tribal cultures involve fasting, dancing and other devices to bring on a hysterical deep faint, thus visiting the ‘afterlife’. Could this psychological phenomenon be the root of the idea of religion?

8. Pascal used mathematics to persuade us to believe in afterlife and God. It was a simple gamble. If it’s true, then we’re prepared. If it’s not true, then it wouldn’t matter anyway. We’re not there to experience it.

7. People are said to come back from death. One expression is the ghost. Is this true, or can variations on hallucination and hysteria answer this phenomenon? If so, then like afterlife above, our understanding of afterlife is psychology.

6. Mediums are said to communicate with the dead. Interestingly, Spiritualism rose to prominence at times of social upheaval, when a lot of people were dying needlessly. The medium can give personal comfort to the bereaved, and maybe also fulfil a social role.

5. Many try to cheat death. One way is the death defying stunt. You see, approaching death is so life enhancing! Now isn’t that really dumb? Or are we all masochistic by nature?

4. Science tries to cheat death. This is done mainly through medical knowledge. We are constantly pushing back the time of death. Will the time come when we won’t die at all, but have our ‘consciousness’ transferred to a machine? Now wouldn’t that be cheating God!

3. While we wait for this, some people decide to be frozen before death, waiting for the time when their illness can be cured. I hope people are right that there’s no soul. ‘Cos if they’re wrong, then when they’re thawed out, they may prove the zombie exists!

2. Is death the end? Interestingly, science says energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed. Does this mean that death cannot be the end of us? Well, you can guarantee that science will find a way to rubbish the idea, regardless of their ‘proof’.

1. Maybe death is a thing about the individual. Maybe it is pure arrogance to think of extinction of ourselves. Life goes on in the species. Perhaps nature, God, whatever, sees the species as continuance, and the individual a simple blink of an eye in its progression.

(c) Anthony North, April 2008

SOME OF MY RECENT POSTS

The Bounce – A short piece of Sci Fi, plus a poem and ‘what is a parallel universe’?

A Gambler’s Life – The good Prof on gambling, and a poem on Him upstairs

Out Of This Mind – An examination of the UFO and their little pilots.

How To Be Torrid – A passionate post in fiction, poetry and fact.

THE BOUNCE

READ MY ULTIMATE MAGAZINE POST - Something posted most days – keep visiting!
What’s on today: A post inspired by a Three Word Wednesday prompt. Have you had a go yet? … PLUS … Our good Prof on parallel universes. And plenty of links.
YOU KNOW IT’S THE WRITE WAY

THE BOUNCE

Some things it is best not to understand.
I never thought I’d hear myself say those words. After all, I’m a scientist. Ha! That’s a laugh. Perhaps I should say, WAS a scientist. But no more …
‘The principle is simple,’ my colleague said as he surveyed the apparatus in the laboratory.

It was a valid experiment, of sorts.

It is known that tens of thousands of people disappear each year without trace, and he had a simple hypothesis for it:
‘Time is measured, and seeing it is measured, it is broken up into units. Now, is this simply a man made concept, or does time, indeed, have gaps between its units? I think the latter, and if so, can we disappear – bounce, as it were – out of our time and into a parallel universe running alongside this one, but occupying our space?’
He discovered a means of attempting to find out in the mysterious world of particle physics, where energy seems to exist in ‘packets’, or quanta, hence the term ‘quantum’. And as he set the machine in motion, and stood within its confines, I doubted his sanity in attempting to move beyond the time unit we experience himself.
Well, predictably, he disappeared. He simply dematerialized before my eyes, and I somehow knew I would never see him again.
Until, that is, that very night, when, awoken from my sleep, he stood before me, translucent.
It was soon apparent what had happened. Whether that parallel world existed, I don’t know. But I do know he now existed just out of time, forever unable to catch up.
As for me, I’m no longer a scientist, plagued always by his form, his echoing, far away screams, and the knowledge of my knowing that ghosts DO exist.

© Anthony North, April 2008

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A liar is a person who always tells the truth – or so he says

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CIRCLES AND CIRCLES

To fall in love is a mysterious affair,
the reasons why, we are not aware;
the passions are deep, and fill us with awe,
until they go and are no more;
and then you meet another true love,
as if she’s sent from Him above;
in and out of love we bounce,
forever trapped, unable to renounce;
yet so many at each hurdle they fell,
as if action in love is parallel,
a strange thing
this love
of which we tell

(c) Anthony North, April 2008

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PROF ISAAC GALISTEIN

What is a Parallel Universe?

We’ve all seen the science fiction. The parallel, or alternative universe is a central theme of the genre, providing many magnificent adventures. But from where does the idea of a parallel universe come from.
All manner of exotic theories have been devised, but the birth of the concept in scientific terms must surely be traced back to an understanding of the subatomic particle.
Unlike the world we experience, the particle world is exceptionally small, and this provides difficulty in accurately measuring its existence. Due to this, depending on how we observer the particle, it can be in a different place every time we do so, as if it can bounce somewhere else.
The math of this mysterious action tells us that we are best to think of the particle as probabilistic, in that it can be in any position possible until the moment of observation, when probability turns into a definite.
And it is a natural extension of this to theorise that with every possible place it COULD be, there may be a similar observation, making it real in some other universe. And thus, with every possible place it could be, a universe comes into being.

Copyright © Protected, Aril 2008

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SOME OF MY RECENT POSTS

A Gambler’s Life – The good Prof on gambling, and a poem on Him upstairs

Out Of This Mind – An examination of the UFO and their little pilots.

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‘Daddy, when I grow up I want to be a celebrity.’
‘No son, it’s got to be one or the other.’

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WHAT WE DREAM OF ‘IS’

On a night we dream, yet so often we are unaware of our dreams. Should we be sleeping lightly at the time, dream recall is possible, and often, those who keep a dream diary can find precognitive elements in their dreams.
Of course, the central question, here, is this: are these dreams really precognitive, in that they see into the future, or do our unconscious thoughts provide imagery and conclusion on decisions we are trying to make?

The latter suggests we decide our future in subtle ways.

We decide unconsciously, and the ‘self’ is actually unaware of this process. Hence, the only precognition involved is a change in our conscious attitude or actions.
I’ve often thought that a society, or culture, can operate in the same way. Taking a Jungian interpretation, does culture contain within itself a form of communal introspection which guides how our society develops?

Such musings are, at present, contemporary.

Physicist and futurist, Professor Michio Kaku, of City University in New York, has been writing recently on subjects that echo the above idea.
‘So many times predictions are made that certain things are impossible only to find
them becoming possible a decade or a few decades later,’ he wrote in his new book,
The Physics of the Impossible …

Have you tried my current affairs blog?

EYE ON THE WORLD

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Latest Posts:

The New Chimera

The Diana Show Is Over?

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Could such predictions be our guide for the future? He uses Star Trekian transportation as an example. Manipulating ‘quantum entanglement’, physicists have already seemed to ‘transport’ a photon some 89 miles.
Would this have happened if Star Trek had not been their precognitive guide? An interesting supposition, which suggests that science unconsciously moves in directions devised, not by rationality, but what we culturally imagine. Indeed, Einstein once said:

‘If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.’

Which brings me to the place of the paranormal in modern culture. Whilst unexplained ‘events’ continue to happen, the scientific ‘culture’ maintains their impossibility. And there is evidence that, due to this, such ‘events’ are occurring less and less.
There is a peculiarity of particle theory that the role of the ‘observer’ is essential in defining the ‘reality’ the particle actually takes. Could it be that it is the same with culture? If we decide something is, or is not, does that make it so?

Such musings could offer a direction for the future of paranormal research.

For it suggests that the non-existence of the paranormal could be proof of its validity, in that it is the ‘idea’ that it isn’t there that makes it disappear.
And equally, it allows the possibility that what is placed in the media could also, eventually, become so. We may well be the creators of our own phenomena. Which leaves the question: does it really exist or not? If it can be dreamt of, the answer is probably yes.

© Anthony North, April 2008

SOME OF MY RECENT POSTS

A Gambler’s Life – The good Prof on gambling, and a poem on Him upstairs

Out Of This Mind – An examination of the UFO and their little pilots.

How To Be Torrid – A passionate post in fiction, poetry and fact.