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Something Cannot Become Nothing

 


“Picture a wave. In the ocean. You can see it, measure it—its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it's there. You can see it, you know what it is. It's a wave.

And then it crashes on the shore and it's gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while. You know, it's one conception of death for Buddhists: the wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it's supposed to be.” - Chidi Anagonye

This was one of the quotes in the last episode of one of the best TV shows ever made—The Good Place.

Rewatching the whole show again and coming to the end made me think about death. People say, “Nothing can come from nothing,” and this notion makes sense, at least on our plane of existence. For something to exist, it needs a creator to make it or a parent material from which it is made. You can ask, where does the parent material come from? And that's where everyone hits an impasse—maybe it always existed? Maybe it came from God, but what made God? I don't want to get into that now. What I want to talk about is a question that no one knows the answer to: what happens after we die?

If nothing can be made from nothing, then by that logic something cannot become nothing, because nothing cannot exist when something is there, right? It got me thinking. With all our current knowledge about the physicality of death—what we can see—we know that when one dies, our body decomposes when buried. Our flesh, organs, blood, all of it dissolves into the soil, the earth. It nourishes it, helps the plants and the organisms that thrive there grow, and in turn nurtures the living. Our body still lives on—sure, maybe not exactly, but in a way it does—just not as what it once was.

When cremated, our body turns to ash. Our body may not exist in the same way it did before, but it's still there—even if it's as lifeless as the embers.

If our consciousness is energy—if it's something separate from our body, something that is not physical but still exists—then energy, by the laws of physics, can't be destroyed either.

Every single time, we don't “cease” to exist; we just stop existing in the same way we were used to. We take a different form—a form yet unknown to the mind but is certain to exist.

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