Death, The Lion King & The Secrets Of The Cosmos.

Death. It never really struck me that I would one day have a funeral. That I would be in a casket with friends and loved ones looking at me, with smelly, caked up, makeup on my face and a suit with the back cut to shreds with my ass resting gently on the silk lined casket. I have George Carlin of all people to blame for this revelation. We all know we will one day die, but it never really hit me, until this one night, of which I will explain to you now.

One late night, while coming down from a high from Cannabis.
I decided to turn on the television after the friends who had smoked me up left. I was flipping channels on the Television. I came across an old HBO special with George Carlin, and he was talking about death and funerals. The bit was funny, but then while sitting on my couch at 3 or so in the morning, I had a sense of vertigo, and it dawned on me for real, I would one day die. It was soul crushing.

Everyone I know, will die too. Every human being I know of, my friends, family, the celebrities, musicians, teachers, politicians will all die. But my death is what I feared most. It really dawned on me as I heard the laughter from the audience recorded a few decades ago travelling through the air and being picked up by my ears. I will die.

Now my view of death isn't candy coated, I don't really buy the whole heaven thing, or moving onto a better place in general. I think of death like this. Do you remember what life was like before you were born? No? Neither do I. When I think of life before I was born,I just see, imagine rather, a dark, black void. I think death is like that. When you die it all comes back full circle. Death is like the time when before you were born. I can't help but be reminded of The Lion King and the circle of life.

I used to put The Lion King VHS on before I went to bed as a kid, almost every night. The one message from the movie, that has stuck with me, is the circle of life. It really does make sense. I imagine my birth as the starting point, my life and the events that shape it as points along the circumference of the circle, and finally when death knocks at my front door, I am near right where I had started, a little bit near the point where I was born. Between not existing and existing.

The idea of darkness, of not existing, for eternity frightens me beyond belief. As a living human being who has interests in many things, and a profound desire to see the human species tackle the problems that face us, I want to see the outcome. I want to see us prevail, I want to see how we live now will impact the future. I wish life wasn't so short, because most of the stuff I want to witness, I will probably not witness in my lifetime. We as a species are too concerned with childish things, like pride in one nation over another, endless war for profit, over different ideologies. It's all very childish. Like kids in a sandbox fighting over their turf or for the best toy.

We have so much potential as a species, we have accomplished quite a bit, but we are capable of so much more and it just saddens me that I will not see the fruit of our labor. But at the moment I don't even know if we are on the right track, but I worry about future generations, possibly even my kids, if I have any. And their kids, kids. People don't think that far ahead, but we should.

I may be rambling a bit, but I just want our species to realize we all inhabit a little round object floating through space, we orbit a star, an ordinary star in a non special place in The Milky Way Galaxy. We are minuscule compared to other things in the outer Universe, yet we fight and kill over the smallest of things. I'd hate for another civilization, perhaps of alien origin, to find out that with all the potential we had, we became caught up in trivial things and never met our full potential.

I'd like to see our species realize we are all one, we all are inhabitants of the planet Earth. And it won't be here forever, we need to learn to love each other and explore the Cosmos in peace, together as one, and learn the secrets that await us.