The most basic question is this, 'What?'. What precedes Why and How, before we ask why and how, we ask what first. But the most basic question is the most troubling of all questions. People can ask 'Why life' and go on to work and do their daily activities. People can ask 'How life' and do not even think about life anymore when they carry out their daily life. However when we ask what is life, we stop our daily life for a moment for we are questioning the most basic foundation of our daily life.
What can take many disturbing forms. The big questions like 'What is eternity and death' can trouble us greatly for we fear the unknown and the abyss. But seemingly simpler questions can be equally troubling 'What is yesterday?' Is it a real thing? Or is it just mere memory? What if yesterday does not exist, what if movement and change from yesterday is just mere illusion. 'What is the present?' Is it the only thing that is real? Is it the only place that i exist in? 'What is tomorrow? Is it just an empty thought? Does it exist, or will it exist? The existence and the possibility of non-existence of the yesterday and the tomorrow is equally unknown and disturbing to us as the existence and the possibility of non-existence of eternity and death.
The permutation of the four concepts can be more perplexing.
1 What if yesterday is death
2 What if yesterday is eternity
3 What if tomorrow is death
4 What if tomorrow is eternity
And i end this with a question, 'If we can accept the equally ambiguous tomorrow, why can't we accept eternity and death.
Accepting the equally ambiguous tomorrow has become a 'habit' that people would not really dwell or think about it that much. This is because we have known that after today , the present, there will be future which is tomorrow. Now, we generally accepts the idea of eternity and death. However, the reality about eternity and death themselves, people might find it hard to accept, again because of the uncertainty. This uncertainty is different from the uncertainty about tomorrow. It is because of the great difference in the consequences of the uncertainty. Even though tomorrow is unknown, however, we believe that it's like a new page that something good will still happen. For death, people believe that it is something not good, which results in fear and this cause people to try to "avoid" in a sense. Thus, i believe that this fear drives people to find it hard to accept death. Similarly, for eternity people believe that everything that exists in this world, will end one day. Subconsciously, people again might think that end is sth not good which results in not believing it. However, there is a slight difference in this case because it's not driven by fear, but more like a common sense from what they know.
ReplyDelete