Meditations on Mortality

We are approaching the year's end and this my last blog article for 2023. I've been on leave for the past few days but I've also been spending time on work, diving deeper into an issue which I never had time to focus on. 

Yesterday, I visited a friend who was admitted to the IJN due to an unexpected heart attack. The news came as a shock to all of us. But I was happy that his situation has stabilised, even though he has to undergo an heart bypass surgery next week. My heart is with him as he navigates this hurdle, at this mature stage of his middle-aged life.

This incident made us all reflect on our mortality. I have done so before in past blog posts: Musings on Mortality and Walking Each Other Home, among others. During the Covid-19 pandemic, I lost two good friends unexpectedly to the disease. David recommended many good books to me and I still have a few of his in my possession (unlike me, who is a book hoarder, he loved giving away his books after reading them). Hengky, was a man of faith and I greatly admired his sincere devotion to his religion. 

Over the past few years, I also got to know that two of my childhood friends have passed on. I played soccer with Fauzi in my primary schooldays, and See Leng was a neighbourhood friend whom I had spent many beautiful days together playing all the games that kids used to play--marbles, kites, tops, yo-yo, skip-ropes, cards, carrom, ping-pong and Monopoly.

The fact that their memories live on in me is a testament to the fact that we all continue to live on and that life is not limited to our short biological existence. Forgive me for lapsing into New Age-speak: we are information and energy.  And once injected into the system, we would have changed, in our small way, the state of the universe. 

Every wave in the ocean affects and is affected by other waves, because we are part of this body of water. We must broaden our perspective on life so that we encompass the ocean, and not limited to that tiny wavelet which rises momentary, only to sink back into oblivion.

Each of us is a unique waveform, built from the superposition of many different harmonics. Every soul that we've come into contact with has injected their frequencies into our spectra. When we've radiated out all our energies, like the sun, we die. 

But our thoughts, ideas and deeds live on in the minds and bodies of the living. Every sentence that you read here, hopefully lodges in your mind and influences every word and action of yours. I live now in you, whether you like it or not.

All religions believe in an ultimate reality that exists beyond death.  We might argue over conceptual ideas like the existence and nature of the soul or whether there's a heaven or reincarnation but we cannot deny that, at this moment we are all conscious. I am conscious, therefore I am. But what is consciousness? Is it just the emergent property of any complex biological system? Or is it some kind of magic sauce that needs to be added to it?

Maybe consciousness is all there is and whatever we experience is just a manifestation or reflection of it. This is Advaita Vedanta at its purest. Waves have no separate existence apart from water. All forms are ultimately 'empty', as the Buddhist would say. We need to rise above the mundane experience of the ego and self, tied to the material body. 

At the close of another year, we meditate on the mortality of our human existence, so that we reinforce our deep-held intuition that we are beyond this illusory world of matter. And it is hoped that with each passing year, this veil of ignorance is removed, if ever so slightly, so that we may ultimately rest in our 'true nature'--whatever that is.