The Future of Burial
In February 2022 I said I would plan my trips in 2022 around visits to graveyards and I planned this blog for a year later to say how it had gone.
I had planned to go to the Paris catacombs in March 22 and a trip later in the year to Arnos Vale cemetery in Bristol, then maybe to Highgate Cemetary in London, but none of these trips happened. I was also going to include the graveyard at St Peter's Church Portishead, plus I was going to include the plague burial grounds in Bristol and/or London. Anyway, perhaps these trips will take place sometime. I will keep the page on the website there just in case I manage to add to them.
Burial
My view on burial at the start of the 2022 was that cremation is the right thing to do. The loss of land and space due to burial seems to me to be wrong. It still does. I don't think we need to reserve land for people who don't exist physically.
We treat some burial grounds with vast respect, making them untouchable, yet the roundabout in the picture above is apparently one of the largest mediaeval burial grounds in Bristol, so in other cases we can clearly move on from allocating space to the dead.
But I think my views on death and burial may be altering slightly.
Although I was raised in an active Church of England household, I would broadly identify more with Atheism. I watch Ricky Gervais, famous for his atheist views and nod and laugh along. Gervais is a strong believer in science and the scientific method and as such expects some form of proof for the existence of a god. I too find the thought of some wise omnipresent bearded old white guy sitting in the clouds implausible, and much more likely to be something created by wealthy powerful elites to control the masses during mediaeval times.
However, I fully appreciate peoples need to believe in god, and church attendance and spirituality do make a lot of sense to me. Its clinically proven that church attendance adds years to your average life expectancy, so in reality, if we all want to live longer, we should all go to church. But its not actually church, its the behaviours, values and principles of church going that are the positive things and you can get the same at any clubs and other social activities. Perhaps even gym membership is a modern equivalent of church attendance.
Coming together with other people, belief that there is something better, belief in the common good within humans, helping your neighbour and those in need. These values are common to all the worlds great religions, Abraham gave rise to Judaism on one hand, and Islam on the other, Judaism eventually giving rise to Christianity, whilst in South and East Asia, the same stories are either created and fed west and twisted into Christianity, or re-packaged and adapted for local populations, but in essence, carrying similar themes. They are probably part of the reason humans, as a species, weak, stupid and vulnerable as we are in comparison to sabre toothed tigers, have come to survive and dominate the planet.
But nonetheless, I still fall down on the side of science and agree with fellow Bristolian and one of the founders of quantum physics, Paul Dirac who said:
I cannot understand why we idle discussing religion. If we are honest—and scientists have to be—we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can't for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as to why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards—in heaven if not on earth—all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins.
Bristolian Paul Dirac
Life After Death
But this is all talk about religion, and practicing religion, what I am talking about in this blog is death, and specifically, life after death. Something that most religions tend to accept in some form or other. I have no scientific proof that there is life after death, so I would have to say I have never really bought into the concept. As Ricky Gervais points out, you knew nothing before you were born, its the same after death, nothing.
But at this point, I start to stray from this view. One reason for straying is because having a positive belief that there is something else, something better, helps maintain a healthy mindset, so why not, if only for the sake of a better and more positive today, believe in somethin. But my other reason for questioning things is because if there is one thing we should know by now, its that we know very little. All throughout history we think we've known it all, only to be shown we know nothing.
Scientists who act as if science has discovered the full and final answer of everything are more damaging and dangerous than priests. When gravity was mathematically shown to exist by Newton, it was called out as being utterly absurd.... by Newton, who, despite his brilliance, knew that it was missing elements that made its existence and his explanations of it incomplete. That is the same as our knowledge today. My personal finger in the air guess of what science knows of our existence is that we might be around 5-10% of knowing everything we need to know about our physical and metaphysical existence. But equally, it could be 0.00000001%. I really don't know. I just don't believe it to be anything like 95% done. And thinking so would seem to me to be arrogant and foolish.
There are two subjects which highlight how little we know which make me question whether there is something else. They are:
Quantum Physics
Mushrooms
Quantum Physics
Quantum Physics is just the latest thing that shows us that we know very little. Einstein was unable to explain it and didn't want to accept it, but since his era, we are seeing examples of time 'missing'; of connections across universes, cats being both alive and dead at the same time; of particles appearing and disappearing, as if there is some kind of hidden world that we do not have access to and cannot see or explain. All of this makes my head hurt and I do not really understand any of it, but what I take from it is this: There is more things we cannot explain than we can.
And even with the small amount of knowledge we have about quantum physics, we are already seeing the potential for other worlds, or other states of existence that we as yet, cannot access.
And then there is the basics of physics. That essentially, all matter is energy, we are all just a random vibration of atoms that in terms of the universe are happening in the blink of an eye. I still don't know what that means for consciousness, that remains unexplained. Why is it me experiencing myself as me? I don't know. I can't explain that. I'm not sure any scientist can yet explain the experience of consciousness as compared to not being conscious as I know it during the period I call 'being alive'.
But perhaps all this means there are other states, states where the consciousness that I currently have still exists. One where I can still remember the experiences of my children, my family and of people I love and who loved me. The important things that make up the best parts of my current consciousness, the bits which given the chance, and given endless time as a healthy human, I'd never want to lose.
Mushrooms
Mushrooms, these things make me question everything. Its mould that breaks down the dead physical world and makes it useable again for the living world. But its also a network, one which spans the globe transmitting information and nutrients to whatever connects with it. When I look at a picture of a mycelial network, and the neural pathways in the brain I can't help but think that its not a coincidence that these things look the same. Did perhaps one form based on another?
One theory is that our prehistoric ancestors were tree dwelling apes. Our current evidence shows the first homo sapien emerging in Africa around 300,000 years ago. In the hundred of thousands of years before that, more simple brained apes would have existed in the canopy of forests. Although this is real speculation and recently tools that pre-date homo sapiens have been found, which may mean pre-human apes were more sophisticated than we previously thought.
Venturing to the forest floor would have been extremely hazardous given our innate stupidity and vulnerability as creatures. But equally, there would have been a vast abundance of foot and rotten food on the forest floor. Fossils show us that in many forests, the abundance of rotting food on the floor would have effectively made it a fermenting swamp.
Around the same time that our brains evolved into the early homo brains, one more complex than the apes, with the self awareness and ability to write introspective blogs, there is also evidence that we came down from the canopy of the trees and started consuming the food on the floor. Effectively we started consuming fermented, highly alcoholic drug induced fruits and fluid, and whatever fungi and mold came with that from simple yeast, something we are still eating and drinking today, to whatever hallucinogenic substances existed.
Is it a coincidence that our brain expanded when we consumed these mind altering substances, developing in a pattern that matched the pre-existing complex mycelial networks we were consuming? Who knows. And given the Victorian and puritanical phase of scientific research we have been going through since 1960, it's hardly likely that we will see any new research on this any time soon. But for me, I think there could be something in this. Perhaps there is some power and reason for these complex networks that existed before we did and which will exist long after us.
Cremation
Which brings me back to cremation. It takes a few hours of burning fossil fuels to effectively burn a human body, something roughly equivalent to a 500 mile car drive in terms of emissions. And burning the body means that the opportunity for the mycelial networks to recover and absorb what they want from your carcass is changed.
So I think I am going to explore a different burial. One which does not use fossil fuel. One which does not require a piece of hallowed land on which nothing else can take place for a couple of hundred years. And still one without any attendees. But perhaps one which does allow an absorption back into the earth and reintegration with the mycelial network and and adaptation from the atoms that currently give rise to my body into perhaps the building blocks of other existences that we currently don't yet understand.
Life After Death
This all comes back to being in line with most standard religious beliefs. That there is actually something else. Something after this, and something more. That consciousness continues, maybe not in the form we experience today, but in some as yet unknown way. Perhaps that truth is out there and one day it can be proven by a scientific experiment, which will essentially confirm what we've been saying for a few thousand years.
So I think my beliefs are that there is life after death, not life in the way we currently understand, but some other way. We are just a temporary vibration of molecules who temporarily occupy a chemical and biological soup, that doesn't really last for long. But when that gives up, we continue to vibrate and maybe experience a reality which today, we cannot understand, but we vibrate into eternity in a way which makes our life on earth seem like the side show.
But until then, its important to remember that whilst you can think about death and talk about death, its life thats the real gift, I will go back to this quote from a book about capitalism which ended in a surprising way talking about our existence:
It is not death that's the tragedy. It's failing to live. Everybody dies. But not everybody lives.
Rebecca Henderson in Reimagining Capitalism.
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