The Ultimate Truth About Life and Death
What Every Living Being Needs to Know
Life is the most beautiful thing you possess, the only thing. Life is the succession of moments from your birth to your death. You choose your life, and you choose how to live it.
You cannot choose where or in what situation you are born.
I do not understand people who are proud of something they had no influence on. It is the same as saying being proud to have two hands. That is not important, is it?
What is important is: what do you do with your hands? Or, what do you do with your life?
Life begins with the first breath you inhale, and life is the breath-taking moments you experience when you exhale for the last time.
You understand life the moment you know you are going to die. The irony. You do not see the possessions, you do not see the luxury, you do not see the fame, you do not see the money.
All you are going to see are the moments… the beautiful moments, the smiles, the love, the adventures. I am creating a lot of them, in the end, that is the only thing that counts, and I think this is the real purpose of life.
Our life is the only thing we really own. This life. We only have one chance to make it special. Meaningful. Beautiful.
This is the only life we know exists. Everything else is speculation. We will never know… At least not in this life.
I always go for what I can know, the rest is a distraction from the truth.
I see life as today. A succession of “today” days. To live a happy and productive life, all you have to do is have a happy and productive day. Lots of them. All of them. Why not? You are the only one who can feel if you are on the right path, if you follow your heart.
The meaning of life is to give meaning to your life.
You give meaning to your life by working in the service of others, doing what you love to do most. With passion. It is your life, it is your decision. That is who you are. That is up to you! You are the only one who can judge yourself.
Time in this life is all you really have, but you never know when it is running out. Maybe today is the last day. Good night. I am satisfied if I die today, for I had a good life. I never expected to be alive today, so I decided to enjoy it a little bit more.
Your Death…
I do not understand why people are afraid of dying. There is only one certainty in life, and that is that you will die. It is inevitable. I think it is sad, and even funny, that the one thing all people have in common, is the one thing that brings the most fear.
If you are afraid of death, you are not living.
Did you know that everyone alive today will be dead in 135 years? This is an ever-present reality. That is not much, less than seven generations. That is the current span of humanity. Nobody gets out of here alive, we are all together in this.
Do you understand that you are never going to experience being dead? “To be” means you are alive. You are never going “to be dead”. You are either alive or you are not alive.
Where there is life, there is no death and where there is death, there is no life.
Simple. Do not be afraid of something you will never experience. If you conquer your fear of death, you will never be afraid of anything. The worst thing that can happen to you is that you will die. But you are going to die anyway! For example, if you are afraid of cats, the best remedy is this:
You go to Africa on safari, spot a lion, wait until it is napping and sneak up on it. Once you reach it, slap it on the butt and run, run, run as fast as you can! If you survive that, then you’ll never be afraid of cats again. If you don’t survive, at least you fell during the conquest of your greatest fear. It is honorable.
The fear of death is the lion you have to tame.
Yes, I have to confess, I am curious about what is there, on the other side. But I am in no hurry, of course. I find peace in the knowledge that one day I will know. Or not. But that does not matter, because then, at that moment, I will no longer be me.
The fact that you are alive means you are dying.
Every day is a day closer to your death. We are all dying, but no one seems to be aware of it. Be aware of it. You are going to spend your time in a different way, rather than just alive, you will “be living your life”.
Death is a necessity of life. Something must not exist in order for something to exist. This axiom always works for everything. It is a balance to form something bigger and better. The next generation.
If death did not exist, I would not be here, and neither would you. Planet Earth would have been completely saturated long ago, and the need for reproduction would not exist. That would be very boring. I prefer a short life full of excitement to an eternity of boredom.
Life and death form a continuous process of repetition, generation after generation, forming the evolution of life.
This process behaves like life: we cannot stop it, it always goes on. Life is much more enjoyable and meaningful if you understand death.
The meaning of life is to understand life and non-life, and to do something that you feel is meaningful. The reward is to feel good about yourself while doing it.
A little speculation
Up to this point, we have discussed the rational, what we can know and reason about. Everything that follows is speculation, philosophy to put it more elegantly.
But it remains the same: an idea based on what we observe and define as modern scientists, while understanding that we are trying to explain something inexplicable.
Essentially, it is foolish to try to explain the inexplicable, but if you are aware of your own foolishness, you are intelligent.
The point is that often, when trying to explain questions without verifiable answers, one arrives at other conclusions from the one we were trying to solve. The issue is that there will always be an unresolved question.
And what is that question?
The truth is that knowing what that question is may not be interesting, because that question is ever-changing, or better expressed: it does not matter what the question itself is, there will always be a question for which we do not have the answer.
If we find an answer to that question, other questions will arise. And this perpetual curiosity is what motivates thinkers, driving humanity forward in its evolution.
So I will also offer a version of what exists or what is there after death…
What is there beyond death?
As I mentioned earlier in this essay, the truth is that I do not know. And while nobody knows for sure, eventually we will all know at some point after this life. Sometime we will know, or not. What we do know is that our time on this planet leaves a mark.
I am not referring to a country’s administration, or the contributions we make to family or humanity, but rather that our existence is recorded in our DNA.
DNA is a code that carries all the information of every known form of life on this planet. It dates back to the very beginning of life itself.
We can already decipher our ancestors by analyzing the little information that humanity has been able to decode so far.
To date, only 2% of the genetic code has been reasoned and understood. 98% remains. Even so, we are just beginning to understand something about it. What we do know is that we can decipher our ancestors’ DNA. Father and mother, grandparents and grandmothers, and thus trace back to the past of your lineage.
There comes a point in every human’s past when we reach a common ancestor. That common ancestor of each of us is recorded in our DNA.
There is scientific evidence that all humans are family. If we keep investigating back in the timeline of DNA history, there comes a point when all animals have a common ancestor.
In other words, all living beings are related. They, or rather we, have a common ancestor. That was billions of years ago. When the only form of life that existed on this planet was bacteria.
We could say that all animals and plants descend from the same form of bacterial life. That is encoded in DNA. We can read it. That is already clear and revealed. Like every form of life, it is linked within itself and originates from the same common ancestor.
But the point that catches my attention is that the entire process is recorded in every form of life. It is all described in the DNA code.
There must be a reason it can be read and understood. The reason is obvious: so that something or someone can read it.
Maybe my question is…
Who? It is not a coincidence that it is there. It has a function, a purpose for which it is designed that way, but for whom?
For the one who can read it, or for the one who designed it that way?
It may be that when the universe ends, all that data will be collected, and thus we can know exactly what happened throughout the life of the universe with life in the universe.
And you will tell me, but that will take millions of years. That is true. But, time has a very strange peculiarity. It is tied to the being that lives it. Time is personal and not absolute, as Albert Einstein has already demonstrated with his famous theory of relativity.
When you die, your time ceases to exist!
In other words, those millions of years will never occur for you. It may be that at the moment you die, you are resurrected instantly, if you are one of the good ones, obviously, but millions of years have passed between those two events without you noticing.
It is an unprovable theory, but possible. It combines the narratives of religions, the knowledge of science, and the creativity of philosophy into a coherent and probable explanation.
For now, until a better solution is found, I use it to define my philosophy of life based on natural philosophy.
Does it answer your initial question? Or do you have another theory?
“The content of this article includes excerpts from my book, One Theory About Everything: The Natural Philosophy of Life and Love.”
“Author Bio: Adrian Catron is a philosopher and author investigating life’s profound questions with an holistic and unconventional lens.
His debut book, “One Theory About Everything: The Natural Philosophy of Life and Love,” offers a unifying framework that explores the deep connections between the human microcosm and the vast cosmos.
You can find more of my work on my Substack Newsletter
or download the chapter of the same book. What is Love? for FREE!
