I am dying to find out what my next home will be like. Actually, I will need to die first before I can find out. Can’t I wait? Of course, I can wait – until I am sent my wings. But, I will have to make sure that some misguided medico does not interfere, claiming a legal right to over-ride my written instructions not to be resuscitated if I am thereby unable to live a normal self-sufficient life.
I might have to remind such a medico that, while the Hippocratic Oath requires him not to damage or take a human life in his practice, he is not required to ‘save’ a life that would then be consigned to a bed in a nursing home or be left in a vegetative state. In my world, we do not have low-wage maids to look after the aged.
As an octogenarian who has lived about 7 years past his statistical use-by date, I am aware that for every year my life is now extended, some other persons will have to die before reaching their use-by dates, thereby causing great anguish to others. As an octogenarian who has led a highly interactive and contributory life all his adult life – even creating new community organisations, or leading others, or making a substantive contribution here and there to what is known as civil society, I do want to explore a new frontier. I need challenge, even to the point of challenging some of my own beliefs.
However, within my own belief systems, have I not already been in the spirit world before, and on many occasions? Of course I have. But, did I have the same focus I now have to seek to understand the Cosmos (the ‘multiverse’) and the place of mankind in it? Hindu cosmology (not everyone’s cup of char) says we do have a significant place in the Ciosmos, in spite of the Cosmos and its contents either being ‘suspended’ or destroyed every so many billion years, to be renewed or reactivated for a similar following period. This process is said to be cyclical; that is, repeated into infinity! It is certainly an intriguing concept – but not capable of proof or disproof!
This is what I am dying to find out. As that well-known retired actor said on t.v., ‘Weird or what?’
RAJA ARASA RATNAM 