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THE END ? OR A NEW BEGINNING ? ( Page 2 )
There is no End
When I die, it may be the end of the world for me, but it will not be my end. It only seems that I die - it is only my body that ceases to function and begins to decay. My true self, my spirit, is imperishable and immortal and so cannot and shall not die. I shall live on. The death of my body will be the beginning of a new life for me. It will be the liberation of the self from the bondages of the body. The soul will feel like a bird let out of its cage. It will be like stepping out of the boat onto the shores of the fatherland after a long voyage through unchartered waters or like reaching home after a long and tedious pilgrimage.
That death is the passage to another life, a transition to immortality, was the firm belief of many ancient cultures and this is what had prompted them to have elaborate burial practices. The mummification practised in Egypt some 5000 years ago as well as a different and cruder form of mummification practised by the people who lived on the western shores of South America some 7000 years ago are the best examples of these. Nor can we rule these out as the meaningless rituals of barbarians. The people of ancient times seemed to have better knowledge of the nature of self than the people of today. No other treatise had ever equalled the discourses on the nature of the Supreme Being, the self of man, of the cosmos and on similar themes, found in the Indian Scriptures, the Upanishads. This could be because they knew they were different from the animals around them and they wondered the cause for the difference and arrived at the basic facts of human nature, may be with the help of what we call divine inspiration. The people of today have no time to think of such questions. This may be because they do not find themselves very different from the animals and like the animals they spend all their time and energy pursuing the material needs of the body.
People of today who are religiously minded will all agree that there is life after death. There are also some vague ideas of judgement and heaven. Reward for the good and punishment for the evil is to be reflected in the nature or quality of afterlife. Hence the significance of the concept of judgement. While reflecting on judgement the Christian view of a last judgement often causes confusion. What is exactly meant by the term “last judgement”? When I die, am I not judged fit or unfit for heaven and shown the way to heaven or hell? Is this not the judgement that matters? Or do I have to wait for the “end of the world” when the last person on earth also has died, to be judged? If so what happens meanwhile? Is there to be an “awaiting trial status”? If so, for how long? Could this mean that the disciples of Jesus like Peter and John are also in the same status? Are they not yet with God? Is it possible that they are waiting for the last judgement to join God? What about the prophets, Isaiah, Moses and the like? Are they in heaven or in limbo? Another question that comes to mind, while reflecting on heaven and hell, is about “eternity”.
How long is that? How can one imagine being in the same state, heaven or not, for endless time, millions after millions of millennia?
A Matter of Time
All these questions revolve around the concept of time, its length, duration or measurement. To find an answer to these questions, to make sense of the concept of eternity and infinity we must answer the question: “What is time?” Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to this question. Scientists and philosophers, as far as I am aware, have failed to give a proper definition of time. According to one scientist: “Time is what a clock measures; nothing more, nothing less.” Even if he said this in seriousness, even if he was not joking, this is not much helpful as a definition. Though difficult to define, we know something about time. It is not an absolute quantity; it is relative. According to Einstein, it is one of the dimensions of the space-time continuum. In other words, time has no existence without space. But space itself is relative to matter. In one account of the Big-Bang origin of the universe I read; “At that instant was created matter and energy, space and time.” In other words, time was created with matter and space, in the beginning. Before the creation of the world, some 13 or 14 billion years ago, there was no such thing as time. The obvious conclusion is that after the end of the world there will be no time either. When I die, that will be the end of the world for me. That will be the end of time for me. I will be liberated of time even as I am liberated of matter and space. For those who survive me on the earth there will still be time and they may count in months and years the time that has lapsed after my death. But as for me no more counting the days and years and millennia. For the spirit, past present and future, all will be rolled into one. Thus we may assume that there is no such thing as a time interval, of so many years, centuries or millennia, for the spirit, whether it is between death and judgement or as eternity. One second or one century or one millennium all will be the same.
This is true of space also. The spirit that is independent of matter and space has no size or mass. There is no here and there for it, no near and far. Fr. Paredam, an elderly priest, on being told that I took Physics as my major at the university, asked me with his characteristic mischievous smile; “ What is the greatest speed?” My answer that the speed of light at 300 000 km per second was the greatest speed did not satisfy him. “The greatest speed is omnipresence”, he said. In astronomical terms light is very slow. It takes more than four years to travel from here to the nearest of stars. But it takes no time at all for God or a spirit to travel from here to any other star or galaxy. That is omnipresence, being everywhere at the same time.
The saying that thousand years of man is like one day for the Self or Jinn brings out to some extent the idea of relativity of time. Interestingly enough this has a parallel in cosmology. What happened in the first nanosecond (one billionth of a second) of creation is as significant as what has happened in the last 10 billion years, in terms of cosmic evolution. Hence, we may say that for God one billionth of a second and 10 billion years are all the same whereas we cannot visualise something happening in a millisecond (one thousandth of a second) even. The matter of space is not any different. The microcosm, the world of electrons, quarks, gluons, neutrinos and nucleons as well as the macrocosm, the world of galaxies, quasars and black holes are equally clear in God’s eyes (if I may use that phrase) and there is no scale difference. He does not need microscope or telescope to see these, nor does the spirit once it is free of the body. Death, therefore, will not be the end of things but rather the beginning of this new and exiting life of freedom - freedom from matter, space and time, freedom to enjoy the endless beauty and goodness of God - freedom from anxiety and misery, freedom for experiencing unending joy and peace.