Preface: End Of Another Lifetime.
And so I die, again, standing in a blood soaked field, as far as the eyes can see, atop a small mound of impaled and dismembered corpses. The putrid rustic stench of blood and rot I had become used to due to the decades of being on the battlefield.
The sounds—slowly growing distant—of the buzzing of flies both close and distant, the crows cawed and vultures, both circling overhead and those below screamed, around the field feeding on the corpses.
Drenched in blood, of my own and the ones that I claimed, stab wounds on my person. A haggard breathing which now made the pain that had been taken away by the rush hit me with full force. The three swords and the seven arrows—one sticking in my eye, broken off down the middle—still lodged in me makes me feel uncomfortable. Plus the blood in my lungs and other inside parts now rushing up, thick and slimy dripping out of my mouth, makes the uncomfortable feeling intense. It’s not a new sensation. I’ve felt it countless times. I feel cold.
A life of nothing but turmoil and hell finally about to end. I don’t know what to feel, anymore.
Should I be happy that it finally happened?
Or should I be scared, sad that it is? Or what it means after it does, what comes after?
…
Can’t… I can’t feel my anything. My grip on my trusty partner, my sword, loosens and falls with a thud to the corpses beneath my feet.
My legs are failing me, my balance. The sight of corpses around me is fast being replaced by the instead of blue—a dark and red that were hovered above spanning the entire sky.
A spurt of blood escapes my mouth the moment I drop. It was almost non-existent, the feeling, but it seemed like the moment I fell the sword and arrows lodged in my back were pushed deeper.
Why does this keep happening to me?
I just want to close my eyes and see nothing, feel nothing…
Every single time this happens. I just want to live peaceful and die a true death! To die in the true sense;
My eyes feel heavy and hazy. I feel sleepy. I just want to close my eyes and go to sleep. Just for a few minutes. But if I do, it’ll be over…
Well whatever. The chances of survival with this amount of damage is impossible anyway.
But what of those I fought to protect. The family I have in this era—this place, my wife, the twins: the boy and girl; and the one on the way. Do I just leave them?
It’s not something new, now is it?
Even those here have left theirs as well, fought to protect them. So why should I be any different. I’ve left many that way, trying so much not to have any but I did and just like the others I leave these ones as well.
It seems I wouldn’t be coming home, yet again.
Let’s just close our eyes and sleep. Hopefully I can have a wonderful dream.
The only thing that resounds in my ear is the dulling sounds of my slowing heartbeat, my breathing becoming slow and soft…
Numb as I already am I feel sluggish, like my brain is slowing down to a dull. Words feel so jumbled. Memories flashing through… I don’t hear it anymore, my heartbeat. I hear a soft short but long hush, breathing stopped…
My… mind is turning… black…
Once… again… another… curtain… closes.
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… And soon another will open.
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Question: Meaning to the Suffering of Lifetimes.
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Where do souls go once we die?
Where did we even begin?
Are we set to wonder the spiritual side of of ‘creation’ for the days predetermined by those supernaturalists, causing unexplainable phenomena?
Or is there truly an end to which we stay free from these sufferings we feel in the physical world, a place in the afterlife we call: Paradise?
Or are we meant to endure endless sufferings that is said to be a karmic retribution from the accumulation of our despicable deeds we have done before our untimely/timely deaths?
Or rather…
Are we meant to live an endless life of repetitive suffering we face being alive in countless places and time?
At one point in my lifetimes I asked myself.
I can’t help but wonder; what is the endgame to such painful, pitiful existence?
Just thinking about it made me shudder.
And to what end do we need to go through these sufferings?
——: Achieving perfection? To have the perfect human/the perfect self?! To what goal is it for said achievement?
Would the endless pain and torture create such a being, perfect in all ways? Or twisted individuals who are nothing more than expendables?
Is there a point to it all? Is there really a point to living? Being alive? What you call an existence?
The notion: ‘we a created for a purpose’ eludes me. Not if that purpose is more than living in an endless succession of pain in our countless lives.
It feels more likely that what ever ‘divine aseity’ brought about our existence has only one purpose for us, that is; for their amusement.
——A. W
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Intermission: The Pause in the Cycle, Rest.
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The afterlife.
A state of being in which people pass after death. A manifestation of one’s soul when we exit the physical world. An unspecified location which exists in but isn’t off the physical world and has little to no affect to each other. Such a place which the supernaturalists say we roam once we have exited the flesh.
Is there really an afterlife?
My answer. Possibly… But the concept brings only one place to mind…
Paradise.
A place where we go to rest from the physical world, living in an eternity of utter bliss. The sentiment sounds far fetched and all too boring. The prospect alone, of leaving in happiness and no pain no sorrows with no excitement makes nothing but a delusion dreamt up by some fanatic hoping to escape the hardship of their own life, clinging on to that sliver of hope that they would be release from that harsh reality.
Would that be called living, feeling nothing, but joy? No thrill and drama which is called life, a rather monotonous existence. Better wiping our existence or leaving us to living on in that cycle.
Yet that phrase ‘no sorrow’ stands out to me, sounding much like the outcome of our continuous existence when we become husks void of emotions, our true self.
Some say it is a place that we go to based on our ‘good’ deeds in our lives. Is that true? If that’s the case what is good? And what is bad?
A contradiction. Say, if, I killed and later it was found out to have been done to save another. Is it good or bad? It might look like a simple matter but the fact I could carry that out is questionable. In my perspective each carries the same weight. This ideal based on the perspective of the observer.
Others say the world is only granted to those with faith. Faith? Faith in what exactly? The validity of our birth, existence, creation, purpose is but a mystery. Our very existence questions the sanity of any divine being.
What’s there to say that place even exists.
Damnation! Hell!
A world in the spiritual plane in which we are punished for our sins.
Yet why not a place also believed that our faith would lead?
Said to be a place of fire and brimstone, the home and prison of the supernatural beings called demons, a place where we are subjected to the most heinous torture. Doesn’t such a place sound familiar. Yes, our very ‘living’. That is hell. Subjected to endless living, grim and torturous experiences; experiencing pain and death over and over again. How is that not an eternity of hell? Does this ‘life’ we live not carry the very concept of both spiritual planes? Even the concept of heaven itself is hell. To live monotonously, empty without any fulfillment.
Is there certainty that these places exist? Or is it a near death hallucination in part due to the harsh experiences of those ever closer to death’s door, hoping they could at least be compensated for those harshness?
Or one created to scare the masses into believing in a a fictional being, called ‘god’, to control them? Or even orchestrated by a fraudulent entity believing themselves a superior being vying for absolute control and dominance?
The idea of both places was created to halt further thoughts down the line of depression to everyone alive. And the concept behind the idea: being good or bad, is to at least reduce the damage in the hearts and mind of people knowing the true insignificance of existence and keep them from overthinking for themselves.
However, there is one place I am certain of. In a sense, a perfect description of where we go…
… Purgatory. The threshold, the void, Limbo…
A place of rest where are souls go after death, except not with the rule of having to either go to the two planes through a vouch, said to be a prayer from some priest. It’s nothing more than a pause to a cog which we call the cycle of life. The threshold between the physical planes where our souls wait and after which that, which is to come after the processing.
There is no Paradise. There is no Hell. Only recurrence!
Death is a state of being, no more than a pause, a break, rest in the cycle which is called existence. There is no ascension or descent. There is only life; a state in which both notions already reside.