After Death
Almost no one wants to die. Most people want to live long, till a ripe old age. Yet, everyone has to die some day or the other. We all want to set off on a long journey, to travel to somewhere really far-off, but before we reach our hoped-for destination death stops us in our tracks and carries us away.
Why does this happen? Why is it that we want to live long, but yet death arrives, suddenly and without our permission, and blots out all our dreams? Every person has definitely asked himself or herself this question and has tried to find an answer to it. We all want to know why we have to die. We all seek answers to existential questions about life and death.
We can get some clues about the answers to these questions from modern scientific discoveries about DNA. Every person has a certain DNA. Your DNA is a complete encyclopaedia of your personality. It contains information about many things, big and small, related to your personality. If you decode this DNA, you will find that it is much bigger than the most voluminous encyclopaedia.
Yet, intriguingly, the DNA does not contain information about one major aspect of our personality. If you study someone’s DNA, you can get an idea of everything about him except for one thing. And this one thing is when precisely this person will die.
This, then, is nature’s announcement to the effect that man is an eternal creature, a creature that will never die. Man has eternal life. Death does not put an end to him.
Among all living beings, it is only man who has a conception of ‘tomorrow’. Animals live only in the present moment, in ‘today’. No animal has a conception of ‘tomorrow’. Because they have a limited or lower-level consciousness, animals are born in ‘today’ and they also die in the same state. But man is an exceptional creature in this regard. He is the only creature who has an understanding of ‘tomorrow’.
To properly appreciate the import of this point, bear in mind that human beings have unlimited ambitions, and that they die with many of their ambitions remaining unfulfilled. In this sense, every man is a case of unfulfilled desires. In the whole of the cosmos, man is the only such creature. No other creature suffers from this painful dilemma.
This fact tells us that there must certainly be an answer to this dilemma. Human desires and ambitions ought to be fulfilled, just as is the case with all other creatures. This indicates that there is a world that will come after this present one, a world where human beings will find complete fulfilment of their wishes and hopes.
There is another important aspect of this issue—and that is, that the desire for justice is inherent in, or intrinsic to, human nature. By nature, human beings want to be treated justly. They desire justice in this world. They want good people to be fully rewarded for their goodness and evildoers to be suitably punished. This is a basic demand of human nature. This demand, too, requires that there should be another world after this one, where justice finally prevails, because it is not possible for this to happen in this world.
If you keep all this in mind, the concept of the Hereafter will become absolutely real and clear to you. With belief in the hereafter you get a complete answer to every question. Everything falls into place.
