Looking fordward to eternity.

It was an interesting week, philosophically speaking. I finally decided on a retirement target date. It's been a question that has caused me some concern, but not for reasons that you might think.

What causes me to have apprehension is the finality of retirement.  While a few people retire from the service and show up occasionally to reconnect with old friends, many have just vanished. They remain only as memories to some. I've been at my station since the summer of 1999. I have seen  many people retire. As people move on, they are replaced by fresh faces.  In 1999, I was still very junior on the seniority list. Today, I am No. 4. I may move up to No. 3 because No. 2 is set to retire before the year is out.

While most people look forward to retirement, it's caused me anxiety. It means that I'm moving towards the last stage of life. I don't fear death, but like any living creature, I avoid it at all costs. Frankly, considering the stupidity of my youth, I'm lucky to have made it this far. I remember walking down the pier at Naval Station Norfolk. I had been so busy with things that I had forgotten it was my 27th birthday.  I remember being impressed that I had lived "so long".

With retirement just a few years away, I am literally facing my own mortality. I remembered the Latin phrase, "Momento mori" . Even as I write this, I can feel that anxiety, as I  relive the memory.

Then, on Sunday morning, I woke up. The anxiety was gone. My mind was clear and at peace. Then my body felt different. It wss as though a huge weight was taken off my shoulders.
 
Yes, the day to day struggle continues. I still have to work. I still have to pay bills. I still have to work out. This is mot the end. As Churchill said at the end of the Battle of Britain, "It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the begining."
That is now how I see this. I'm simply entering the next stage of life. Life is but an adventure.  I boldly go where I have never gone before.

So this brings me what's next. At some point, I will die. All life functions will cease and the process of physical decomposition will commence. What happens then? How am I supposed to know? 

Ozzy Osbourne said it best in the song "I Don't Know" from his 1980 solo debut studio album "Blizzard of Oz":

"Everyone goes through changes
Looking to find the truth
Don't look at me for answers
Don't ask me, I don't know"

So who does know? It depends on who you ask.
If you ask Jim Bob, María, Mahfuz, Adejumoke, or Xiu, they might tell you with great confidence what happens after you die - all based on what they've been told to believe and reinforced by cultural dogma. What does science say?

Stephen Hawking, PhD, suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Most people with this disease die within five years. He defied the odds and continued for 55 years! Despite his longevity, he knew it was a death sentence. That didn't cause him to run towards a religious belief. Before he died, he said, “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers. That is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

So is this the last word on the subject? Despite being a world renowned physicist, he did not prove nor disprove the existence of an afterlife, he simply offered his opinion. 

Does the Bible offer proof of an afterlife? Some consider the Bible "the word of God" and every word to be absolutely true. Yet, the Bible mentions unicorns nine times and we know they don't exist. The Bible claims that the sun moves around the earth and we know that's not true. The Bible mentions "four corners of the earth" and that if you go to a high mountain, you can see every kingdom as if the Earth were flat, which we know it isn't. 

People have also been pronounced "clinically dead" and have reported visions of what they believe is "proof" of an afterlife. That has also been effectively been debunked.
You aren't actually dead. It's called a "Near Death Experience". Your heart and respiratoration may have stopped, but your brain can live for up to three minutes. After that, the neurons in your brain begin to die. All neural connections  are lost and who we were is gone forever. 

The visions of tunnels and loved ones is not considered supernatural,  but rather a natural phenomenon happening within our brain rather than some cosmic or supernatural force coming from the outside.*

Studies show that there is brain activity for up to 30 seconds after the heart stops. 
According to Dr. Jessica Andrews-Hanna (University of Arizona), in noting the brain activity of a patient who had died, “it is striking that the brain wave patterns leading up to this man’s death were similar to those associated with memory, dreaming, and other thought processes involving crosstalk between many brain regions.” **

At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ***, scientists study the most basic components of the universe. The are literally unlocking the secrets of the universe.

In the study of particle physics, physicist Brian Cox, PhD, had this to say about ghosts and afterlife. "Before we ask the first question, I want to make a statement: We are not here to debate the existence of ghosts because they don't exist."

He continued to clarify his statement, "If we want some sort of pattern that carries information about our living cells to persist then we must specify precisely what medium carries that pattern and how it interacts with the matter particles out of which our bodies are made. We must, in other words, invent an extension to the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has escaped detection at the Large Hadron Collider. That's almost inconceivable at the energy scales typical of the particle interactions in our bodies."

So what happens when I die? Apparently nothing, and to most, that would be the most frightening thing ever!


* What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about the Brain

**
When are we really dead? New study sheds light

*** https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider  




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