The Mystery of life: Is it only Death?
 
Mohammad Gani

Last week, a cute little girl’s tragic death by a fatal car accident in New Hampshire traumatized New England Bangladeshi community with sudden shocks and emotion. I with my wife were getting ready to go to the funeral home in Watertown, Massachusetts to say final farewell to and prayer for this 4½ year little girl. It has been a beautiful Sunday morning in Boston; the nature has been smiling with the freshness of spring flowers in the gardens and the greens every where.  During 15 minutes  drive from my Cambridge home to the funeral home, I only came out with a sense of unreality and disbelief; a painful sadness of the loss, loss of a love one, a very little one who attracted everyone’s mind and heart. It has been an emotional moment that has torn a grieving mother’s heart off! “I wait for you every morning” said the grieving mother with her choked and shivering voice, a revelation of infinite love and powerful affection that I could hardly explain. My eyes became blurry, then a “darkness of silence” everywhere for moments, then looking at each other. Everyday, hundreds of children are dying of malnutrition, starvation, floods, cyclones and war worldwide. Coming to the terms with death is the greatest challenge we face on this life journey. Death is not only inevitable; it is the one we all can be sure of.
 
So, what is the exact meaning and purpose of our life? Here, I have by-passed these enquiries based on my own or any other religious faith and perspectives. I do not wish to cleverly hide my ignorance under the banner of religions but let my mind expanding and flowing freely towards the meaning of life as I see in our everyday life by our natural instincts, imaginations, common sense-wisdom and intelligence.  Indeed, it is very difficult to comprehend the purpose and the meaning of life. We can come up with wide ranges of ideas to that direction like social, biological, historical, religious, etc, but none of those ideas perhaps will form a perfect model to fully explain meaning of life. Life is a mysterious and complex array of all these variables combined in one way or the other.
 
Is there a purpose of life at all? See, logically there can’t be a purpose of something if in it's absence every thing else can exist.  It would have made no difference to the world if I wasn't born, correct?  Now that I am born, it makes some difference to my family and could be to more people like friends and relatives. My own life could have purpose or some meaning to my families.  However, the existence of life as a whole can not have any precise meaning or purpose.  In a sense, if life wouldn't have started on earth, it wouldn't have made any difference to the rest of our universe.
 
Now, why was life created at all? This question is important because, it separates people who believe in religions from those who believe otherwise (say in evolution). If we believe that life was created, then there is an obvious purpose of life. That purpose lies only in the mind of the creator of our life; whoever or whatever we wish to call HIM (say, God). We can not read God’s mind and/or perhaps God did not wish us knowing all His mysteries and therefore we can never understand why life came to existence and then followed by death. However, still life itself is a predicament and a blessing to all humanity; and in that context, all living things and we are integral part of a system that God has created.

[Please pardon this side comment to our politicians: Our plain belief & faith is that God created Adam first, and then Adam’s partner Eve; they have happily been living in the “Garden of Eden”, probably in the Heaven. Trouble started when the rebelling angel, SATAN managed to instigate Eve persuading Adam to eat forbidden fruits of a tree in that garden. As a punishment, both Adam and Eve were deported to the earth. Otherwise, with the human reproductive ability (if any) of Adam & Eve in the Heaven, perhaps we would have been living in the Heaven today and for ever! We never had to worry about this death in the heaven. But “our Heaven” would then have been over-crowded like Bangladesh. However, it would still be a lot better because there would not be any stupid Hasina and Khaleda there to lead us, I guess!!].
 
Now, those who believe in evolution find no purpose of life except that of a perpetual evolution. To them, their present state is part of the process of evolution that continuously evolve into something higher (or lower) and nobler (or inferior) than present state. With that perspective, we can conclude that we are creatures of crude physique and abilities; and by evolving we are perfected in the ways only “nature” governs. Now, the next question is how and why did the “nature” conceive the idea of forming life and plan it according to the way it had evolved? I pass the response!
 
 Now, what is the meaning and purpose of death or who has created death? Why we were given life only to be taken away after existing for a short period of time? We are not given a moments chance to explore what we have around us. We only begin and we do cut short of what we have not yet even started. We hear of the unfathomable Universe to explore and we will never progress to an appreciable level of understanding it because we are deprived of the right to exist and explore, by death. So, does our life make sense? Who are we or what are we? Are we only a unique bundle of “dust materials” within a special system called life of our own?

We all want to be good children (sometimes), good parents, and good employees.  It is possible that our brain tricks us by manifesting our desires and needs in us and thereby creates a virtual meaning to our life.  It is our constant effort in fulfilling our all possible desires and needs that keep us moving.  It doesn't let us stop, fearing about "death"; an "absolute meaning of life. So, does it make sense to say that each of us has a unique brain where our mind is an image of our brain that develop unique meaning and purpose of life?
 
To me, it is wrong to say religion is based on only belief or faith. It is always commonly based on a series of events that proclaim itself as instance of a greater nature. When our Universe blossomed into existence from an area smaller than a pinpoint (Singularity/Big Bang) some 12 billion years ago, it emerged out of “somewhere” indeed? Modern physics is beginning to speculate on the nature of this generative ground. We do have an intuitive connection with our universe and our capacity to use our intuition is still in its infancy given our early stage of learning. Our physical body does not stop at the edge of our skin, in stead extends into and is inseparable from the universe. Consciousness is found at every level of the Universe and is not confined only within our brains but extends beyond the body and can meaningfully interact with the rest of the universe in both sending and receiving communications. Our Universe is responsive, conscious and alive as we are! Thus it is reasonable to believe in the existence of a mental component of the universe. If we believe in this mental component of the universe, then we can say that we are small pieces of God’s mental apparatus.
 
And finally, since the time separating myself from my great, great, great, grand parents are more than 250 years, thinking of meeting them again could be called ridiculous! In truth, I have a gut feeling that “my soul's life experiences” will be capable of linking up with other souls through some sort of medium that I can't explain. Just as our feelings for our parents are strong, so are theirs for their parents & so on. We wait to be reunited with our loved ones, as they do with theirs. This cycle is never broken. Love, as we know it, could be that connecting medium I am amazingly searching for.
 
 
May God bless Bangladesh and bless us all.