Life After Death?

There is a memorable quote about death by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the Swiss American psychiatrist and author of “On Death and Dying”:

“I've told my children that when I die, to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me, death is a graduation.”

This positive view of death reminds me of a fascinating concept by Plato, one of my favorite philosophers. Of course he couldn’t have been a Christian, for he lived from the 400s to the 300s BC, but for him this world was only a kind of prison of the soul, and we  existed in the “true world” only before birth and after death.

As he put it in his famous allegory, “It is birth which is the sleeping and the forgetting since the soul, in being born into the body goes from a state of great awareness to a much less conscious one and in the meantime forgets the truths it knew while in its previous out-of-body state.”

And only in death would we be able to return to that earlier state.

I remember how I enjoyed learning about Plato’s explanation for all of this through his fascinating allegory of life here on earth.

Though we do not realize it, he said, during our whole lives we are imprisoned in a cave and can only face the back wall. We therefore can see only shadows of the true world of eternity. Because we can never look behind us into the true world beyond, we mistakenly think that the shadows we can see are the only reality.

In this allegory, Plato makes one of the “prisoners” move out of the cave into the true blinding light. He is not allowed to remain there for long, however, because he is told he must go back to “rescue” his fellow human beings. He goes back and tries to help people realize that there is another, more wonderful world. Instead of believing him, however, those still in the cave are resistant and even attack him.

The Bible also has several hints that we exist before birth. In Psalm 139, for example, it says,

My frame was not hidden from you

  when I was made in the secret place.

When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,

your eyes saw my unformed body.

All the days ordained for me

  were written in your book

  before one of them came to be.

My own response to all of this is simply that I don’t know what came before my life or what will happen after it. I am simply thankful to have been born and to be enjoying this life to the fullest. I can hope that after I die I will have what Elisabeth calls “a graduation.” I can hope, like Plato, that I will move beyond the shadows to “the true world of eternity.” And of course I can also hope to move on to what Jesus calls “eternal life” where I will be in a totally happy world, reunited with all of those I have loved in this world.

But finally, as a Unitarian, I are simply thankful to be alive. I therefore feel strongly that I should concentrate not upon going to heaven but rather upon trying to improve life here on earth.

[A note by the blogger: You may have notieced that I've changed the title of the blog. I'm embarrassed to admit that I confused 'inter alia' with 'et cetera' and can plead only that I never benefited from schooling in Latin. - Andrew]