Like a Student Again.

I just came from a Philosophy class.

"What? You're back in school? You never told me anything about going back to school." No, I'm not back in school. This Philosophy course is organized by El Cielito Foundation for "selected" people. Of course, since I work for it, I am privileged enough to be invited.

Man! What an amazing course! I have always been a philo junkie but since I stopped going to school, I stopped attending philo classes too. But with this opportunity - boy! - what a privilege! It's just our first session this evening and it was already super enlightening. Funny how things coincide, but for this class, we talked about TIME, and the concept of time, and with it, the idea of DEATH. See the coincidence of my just going to a wake, talking about death, and now here comes a class that talks about the idea of death.

We talked about a lot of things during the class that I'd like to share with you, but let me focus on death. Death is a mystery. In the same way that our "birth" which should not be the time we came out of our mother's womb but the time the sperm cell and egg cell met, is a mystery (since we cannot pinpoint exactly the time and day we were conceived), death is also a mystery. [The life and death of the person, being a mystery, makes the person a mystery in itself.] How a person dies is a mystery to us all. People ask God for reasons why He took this person's life away so soon and without warning. Isn't it also mysterious that we ask people "who" died and not whose body died. Persons, together with their bodies die. At the same time, though, DEATH is a reality. Being a reality, we have to accept death. If you want to be happy when you die, you must learn to accept death. One thing our professor told us is, acceptance of death requires the full freedom of the person. Realistically speaking, too, death is not that easy to accept. She said that if we want to learn to accept death, we have to think of death at least once a day. Not too long that we only think of our death. We have to practice accepting death day by day.

We are doing the wrong thing when we always brush aside the talk of death. In effect, we are denying the reality of death as if we can deny any other reality like the law of gravity. She also read to us a paragraph explaining to us how much media hide the reality of death for us. They present shows as if death does not exist. Cosmetic manufacturers come up with all sort to cover the lines of our aging. (We even put make-up to our dead as if to make them look alive.) We have bars and night clubs to go to every night as if there is no death. Media projects to us a very distorted view of what death is all about. Thinking about death re-directs our lives towards the real MEANING of our lives. This is also what she was also talking to us about.

The meaning of our lives depends on how we live the past, the present and the future. Briefly, we live the past by remembering the past and learning from it. We live the present by paying attention to each present moment and not getting distracted about the future nor sulking in the past. We live the future, by hoping for something that we want to have or happen. Now, the basis of this hope is crucial because hope is genuine when it is based on the amount of time we give in order to achieve what we hope for, and the action that we commit in order to achieve what we hope for.

Yikes. I have to stop, otherwise, this will be a long lecture. I'll give you more tomorrow. But at least I already gave you some bit on death and meaning of life. Want to have meaning in your life? Ask me. Maybe I can help. :-)