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[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

You have beautifully explained the phenomenon of 'death' in the chapter, 'There Is No Problem of Evil' in your book, 'In It Together.' I wanted to ask. is death necessarily a phenomenon of deterioration, decay, and disintegration, or, can we transform our process of dying into something higher?

Hi, Surabhi Rani,

Thank you for your question.

I think that, simply by definition, death necessarily is a phenomenon of deterioration, decay, and disintegration. I see that as a tautology. In other words, it's not a scientific nor empirical. It's not an informative statesmen. It's just what the words mean. Death is simply the 5 letter label that we we use to represent deterioration, decay, and destruction of a thing with thinghood that we happen to classify as a 'living' thing.

In other words, it's just the concept of 'destruction' applied specifically to living things as opposed all physical things. Likewise, birth is the concept of creation applied specifically to living things as opposed to all things.

In other words, death is just a subset of destruction, and birth is just a subset of creation.

Thus, typically anything we can say about death we can generalized and say about destruction in general. Likewise, typically anything we can say about birth we can generalized and say about creation in general.

For example, a house being built is like the house being born. A house being destroyed is like the house dying.

For anyone who is struggling to understand birth and death, or struggling to understand, accept, or deal with some aspect about them, I'd suggest simply eliminating the words death and birth from their vocabulary. Just say creation and destruction instead.

Humans, rabbits, and biological viruses like covid can all be created and destroyed, just the same way houses, cars, mountains, rivers, ponds, oceans, planets, and stars can all be created and destroyed.

Of course, creation (and birth) and destruction (and death) only exist as concepts within a certain conceptual model of reality. In a way, they don't actually exist in reality.

There are sort of analogues to borders on a map or lines of longitude and latitude on a map in that way. A model of reality is like a map of reality. It's an imaginary simplified analogy of reality.

In the reality it maps/models, the borders don't actually exist, meaning creation and destruction don't actually exist. That fact is represented when people switch their model and accurately say, "nothing is created nor destroyed".

Some people would say that nothing is created or destroyed but rather things only change.

However, I say that change is also an illusion, or, rather, something that only exists within a certain model/map of reality (namely a known-to-be-wrong Newtonian model).

In reality, models aside, time doesn't exist, and thus neither does change.

Instead, what we often model as change within time in our time-ridden known-to-be-wrong Newtonian mapping of reality is more accurately described as simply difference.

Some parts of timeless 4D spacetime are different than other parts. In other words, things are different at different spots in spacetime.

But even the word 'things' in that last sentence can be misleading or flat-out wrong depending on how it is interpreted.

Outside of our models, there are no things. In other words, in the strictest most absolute sense, in reality, there are no things. Thinghood--like time, change, creation, and destruction--only exists within our models/maps of reality. They emerge from the imaginary borders we project on reality, meaning the imaginary borders and visions that exist in our oversimplifying mapping/modeling of reality.

Thinghood is the false self of something. In other words, thinghood is the unreal self of something. It's the ego of something. It's what let's talk about a thing in itself. It's what lets us refer to something with the word 'it' or even the word 'something'. It's imaginary. It's part of model.

In reality, there is only one self; there is only one reality. It is without time, change, creation, or destruction. It's interconnected and interdependent, in a way we can think of us mutually causal, but with an understanding the causality is atemporal. You couldn't chance one little spec of reality without--due to the butterfly effect--completely changing everything.

Even the tiniest single flap of a fly's wings on the tiniest planet billions of miles away from us and billions of years in our past or future cannot be changed without the entire universe being changed and, perhaps, falling apart and becoming impossible and non-existent.

Even the tinest detail is as equally important as the whole thing because it's all interdependent and interconnected and unchanging and unchangeable.

It's like a big huge accurate math equation on a chalkboard; you can't change even one tiny little number or letter or symbol without breaking the whole thing. Every little piece is crucial. Together, exactly as it unchanging and eternally is, it's perfect and right, but with the slightest change it is wrong. Every little piece is needed, exactly as it is, for it to be right, true, and existent at all.


With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes