Tara’s Reviews > In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife > Status Update

We’re all on the side of a mountain, shocked by how fast it’s gotten dark; the only question is whether we’re with people we love or not. There is no other thing — no belief or religion or faith — there is just that. Just the knowledge that when we finally close our eyes, someone will be there to watch over us as we head out into that great, soaring night.

Eventually you will be all alone with doctors shrugging because they’ve run out of things to do, and the person you really are thumping frantically in your chest: the successes and catastrophes and affairs and hangovers and genuine loves and small betrayals and flashes of courage and the river of fear running beneath it all, and of course the vast stretches of wasted time that are part of even the most amazing life

We assume that life is the most real thing we will ever experience, but it might turn out to be the least real, the least meaningful. The idea that you will appreciate life more after almost dying is a cheap bit of wisdom easily asserted by people who have never been near death. When you drill down into it— which you must— we are really talking about an appreciation of death rather than of life.

Liszinski‘s plea was that not only do you deprive God of dignity by insisting He be something He can’t—self creating—but you also strip society of the benefits of reason.

“ … Piety was introduced by the impious. The fear of God was spread by the unafraid so that the people would be afraid of them in the end. Simple folk are cheated by the more cunning with the fabrication of God for their own oppression.”
—Casimir Liszinski
2/2

“We beseech you … do you not extinguish the light of Reason, do you not oust the sun from this world, do you not pull down your God from the sky, when attributing to him the impossible. Man is the creator of God, and God is a concept and creation of man. God is not existent. …”
1/2

What if the great mysteries of the world—the spirits and ghost and coincidences and telepathy and predictive dreams and everything else that humans have always noticed but couldn’t quite make sense of—actually had a rational explanation?
How would that possibly work?

It’s not remotely likely, but then neither is anything.
…
Given that existence itself is almost infinitely unlikely, what if there were some kind of post death existence? What if the dead were not entirely gone, in the sense that we understand that word, and the living were not entirely bound by time and space?

So, abandoning likelihood for a moment, one might try out the idea that death is simply where the veil of belief gets rent to reveal a greater system beyond. Reality may just be a boundary we can’t see past. The dead might be all around, flitting back and forth as the dying take their leave. Imagine their frantic efforts around floods and earthquakes. Around an epidemics. Around Dachau.

The overwhelming likelihood is that our sense of another reality is just a comforting illusion that helps us live our lives. But what appears to be likely or unlikely is a terrible strategy for finding out what is true. Our understanding of reality might be as limited as a dog‘s understanding of television.