In the strangest of places, if you look at it right.
- Hunter/Garcia, "Scarlet Begonias"
... you'll die when you die ...
- Grand Funk Railroad, "I Can Feel Him in the Morning"
The truth about our lives is all around us, and the untruth about them too. We have to decide which to hear -- the quiet sanity of the world as it is, or the insistent holler of the world as we, or somebody, wants it to be.
The truth never communicates itself to us. More precisely, we can never hear the truth when it's hard, even if it talks right to us. It's not that the truth plays games with us, the way various gods are thought to toy with their would-be protectees. The reality of human existence is not being coy with us, not obscuring itself in any way. It is we who decline to see what our eyes and ears tell us.
What our eyes and ears tell us is that when someone dies, their body ceases to function. That's what we know. The supposition that there is a "soul" or other component of the individual that continues to exist is quite silly, and easily explained. To a primitive, the body's ceasing to function must itself have seemed miraculous. How explain the fact that a living breathing feeling organism suddenly ceases to be any of those things, just stops working? It is quite natural for people without knowledge of biology to suppose that some animate principal that lived inside the body has now left it. This is not an insane idea, just a mistaken one -- or more precisely, one for which there is no support other than uncountable tons of wishful thinking.
There are many reasons to want to believe our personality survives death. None of them are good enough to blind ourselves to the obvious fact of the matter, which is that when we die we no more survive than a fire does after it burns out.
