my maker would be my mum and dad together, i don't believe in the other sort. i'm at peace with them. i'm happy with myself and my beliefs.
Then go back to your very first mum and pops (yes the first two of all humans)... and ask yourself if you are at peace with them for bringing you into this world.
It's easy to say you are at peace now... but what happens if you lost your job because of a recession, your wife leaves you for your best friend, you lose custody of your kids because you have developped depression, the bank is foreclosing your house...
We all have moments that we are not at peace with the world. Maybe thats the point of the world.. who knows. When I was speaking of 'making peace' I was also talking about the day we die (not only every living day). We have to accept the hardest thing of all: leaving the only place we know and have learned to enjoy for something else... or maybe nothing?
As Heidegger said, the only sure thing in our life, is our death.
Death is the final measurement of your life. The ancient greeks thought that you could only talk of the reputation of a dead man, for nobody has a fixed reputation when he is alive.
Some people live their lives like they will live forever and it is only on their death beds that they finally, some with surpirse, realize that 'time is up'.
On related note, there is this thing called : "Total Pain syndrome"
We saw it in my university course intitled: Psychology of death and of the dying.
It is a syndrome found in some terminal patients (cancer, aids etc..). The primary symptom is feeling 'total pain'. Eventhought the cancer\illness should not produce pain in certain areas of the body, the patient complains of an immense volume of pain that is present in all of his body. The second symptom is that drugs have almost no effect. Eventhough a regular dose of morphine will attenuate any other terminal patient.. these patients still report pain. And even if doctors keep giving medication, the pain seldomly goes away. This has led to patients receiving lethal doses of morphine... and not feeling relieved or dying!
Once psychologists were brought into the picture to study the phenomenon, they found that a clear majority of the TP syndrome sufferers did not accept their illness and imminent death. They felt that their lives were meanningless, illegitimetly taken away and feared what would happen after their death.
On the other hand, terminal patients who were reported to have accepted their death did not suffer from TP syndrome.
This doesn't prove God or anything of the sort... I'm just saying that something seems to ask of us, in our psyche, to be at peace with our existence and then our later inexistence in the world.
In addition, but not related to TP syndrome, my university teacher talked to us about her terminaly ill father that passed away a couple of years before. He coudln't talk anymore because the muscle involvment to talk caused him to much pain.
The teacher was sleeping at the hospital in order to alert the family if he was to pass away. She woke up around 2 o'clock in the morning and saw her father with his two arms in the air (towards the sky\ceilling) and with a huge smile on his face.
He died that day a couple of hours later without ever waking from his sleep.
Her comment:
"I don't know what he saw, but for him to move like that and feel no pain was inexplicable. And if you would have seen that smile on his face, you would have known that he wasn't at all afraid."
Prisme
"Our death is the key to explaining our lives"
-greek thought.
