Death is Not the End: Understanding the Transition between Lives

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Rubin Museum of Art Wheel of Life, a 19th-century artwork in pigments on cloth, from Tibet or Mongolia

Great Australian Albums series 2 (2008) – The Screen Guide". Screen Australia . Retrieved 11 November 2022. Even our genes will eventually fade, and all that we are will become clay. Do you find such oblivion disheartening? You’re not alone, but you may take solace in the fact that part of you will continue on long after your death. Your energy. Most religious people agree that death is not the end, but many have different ideas about what happens after life. Christians and Muslims generally believe that when they die God judges them and their souls go to a place of reward or punishment . Sky burial in Mongolia and Tibet. Many Vajrayana Buddhists in Mongolia and Tibet believe in the transmigration of spirits after death — that the soul moves on, while the body becomes an empty vessel. To return it to the earth, the body is chopped into pieces and placed on a mountaintop, which exposes it to the elements — including vultures. It’s a practice that’s been done for thousands of years and, according to a recent report, about 80% of Tibetans still choose it. [ The Buddhist Channel] The Drigung Monastery is famous for performing sky burials. Photo by Antoine Taveneau/CC BY-SA.

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Yet a small number of researchers, including me, are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start. As stated in the Encyclopedia of Popular Music, the album shares no single recording session. This created a tone that the Encyclopedia described as, "raucous to pensive to sombre in a heartbeat." [9]

Humans are a bit different. We invest heavily in our young, so we require a longer lifespan to continue parental care. But human lives outpace their fecundity by many years. This extended lifespan allows us to invest time, care, and resources in grandchildren (who share our genes). This is known as the grandmother effect.

10) Why do we die?

Christian visitors will find the Rubin Museum a model of invitation when it comes to learning about religious traditions not their own, specifically to Christianity in the current temporary exhibition, “ Death is not the End”: a comparison of attitudes between Buddhism and Christianity when it comes to death, dying, and the afterlife. Provoked, we are told, by the Covid-19 pandemic, its three sections take in the Human Condition, States In-Between, and After-Life. Each places art and objects from Himalayan Buddhism alongside others from Christianity (largely Western), all with detailed descriptions and additional display boards on various themes. All four of the Gospel accounts are clear that Jesus actually died. This was physical death after which his body was sealed in a stone tomb. And all four Gospels recount his resurrection, witnessed first by Mary Magdalene, then by his disciples. Through Christ’s resurrection, the power of death was defeated, and through faith we are assured that we too will share in Christ’s resurrection life (Romans 15:12-22). We will be with him in his Father’s house. Suffering is a part of life Christians call this heaven or hell . Catholic Christians believe in purgatory, which is place for people who are not evil enough for eternal punishment in hell, but not good enough for heaven. In purgatory they are purified to be accepted into heaven.

Protestantism isn’t without a visual culture around death, or a ritual culture for that matter (which is also a theme in this exhibition), but Catholicism is the more abundant place to look for them. The visitor may, therefore, again take away from the exhibition something important from what is not depicted, or at least from what is at least under-represented, namely that Christianity is a bustlingly diverse range of traditions, going beyond the largely Catholic centre of gravity on display here, not only in the direction of Protestantism, but also with Orthodoxy in its various forms. No one was trying to commend Buddhism over Christianity, and I think that the curators sincerely wanted to be true to Christianity on its own terms. It is just that the concepts that came naturally to mind, in presenting these works of art, were Buddhist ones, naturally enough. That shows, and it is fascinating. People who live to be 110 years old, called super-centenarians, are a rare breed. Those who live to be 120 rarer still. The longest-living human on record was Jeanne Calment, a Frenchwoman who lived an astounding 122 years. In the English music press, Select 's Clark Collis remarked that Murder Ballads "weaves itself together into a meditation on death that is both beautiful and genuinely unnerving." [14] Dave Henderson of Q observed that "musically, the Bad Seeds touch on tinkling cabaret jazz, country-paced morbidity and every morose station between." [12] Murder Ballads ranked number 16 on Melody Maker 's list of 1996's Albums of the Year and number 7 in the NME 's 1996 critics' poll. [17] [18] Where the Wild Roses Grow", a duet featuring Cave singing with Kylie Minogue, was a hit single and received two ARIA Awards in 1996. Other prominent guest musicians on the album include PJ Harvey and Shane MacGowan.The common view of death as a great mystery usually is brushed aside as an emotionally fueled desire to believe that death isn’t the end of the road. And indeed, a prominent school of research in social psychology called terror management theory contends that afterlife beliefs, as well as less obvious beliefs, behaviors and attitudes, exist to assuage what would otherwise be crippling anxiety about the ego’s inexistence. Christians, I expect, will generally agree upon that. It is not so much a common view of Christianity on display in this exhibition, however, as, rather, a distinctively Catholic one. There are reasons for that. Catholic theologians have typically said far more about the intermediate state between death and resurrection than Protestants have, and there is also a far greater tendency in Catholicism to attempt to depict that in paint or ink. EXHIBITIONS such as this one matter because inter-religious literacy is an act of charity towards our neighbours. It helps us to understand what matters to them, and how they see life. In the case under discussion here, it helps us to understand how our neighbours mourn, and how they prepare for death. Such literacy, as we have seen, can also help us to understand and explain our own faith more clearly.