Endings and Beginnings :: Personal Narrative Essays

Endings and Beginnings   Death, while in many respects an ratiocination, actu entirelyy serves as more of a beginning for all provided the most disheartened of religions or philosophies. Even Socrates, at one and only(a) time near the end of his life, at least, felt this sort of hopefulness. According to Plato, on his deathbed later on having intoxicated the hemlock, Socrates mumbled these last words to Crito I owe a puppet to Asclepius do not forget it. In his time it was customary to offer a cock to Asclepius, the God of Healing, upon recovering from a sickness, so at a time of impending death Socrates was actually thinking of healing in one way or another and beginning anew. When he confronts the idea of his own death earlier, however, in Platos Apology, he says If I were to claim to be wiser than my neighbor in any respect, it would be this that not possessing any unfeigned knowledge of what comes after death, I am also conscious that I do not possess it. On his de athbed, and so, Socrates seems to be offering the cock just in case, a common reason for religion for many dying people.   All religions have death rituals or hopeful ideas of where they pass on end up after their death Hindus seek to escape perennial reincarnation by practicing yoga, by adhering to Vedic scriptures, and by devotion to a personal guru Buddhists seek a state of living Nirvana by following the path of righteousness--if they are not perfectly righteous then they repeat another lifetime that is either good or insalubrious depending upon their actions (karma) in their previous life the Nazareneians believe that if they take Jesus Christ as their savior they may gain access to heaven after their life on earth. Joseph Campbell believed that all of the worlds religions are tied together by the similarity of their myths. Stories of creation, holy trinities, resurrections, deaths, and heavens repeat over and over once again in slightly different forms. He believed, then, that all the worlds religions are the same, but theyre cloaked in different masks that betray the prejudices of the culture. One subject all religions have in common, however, is this When we die, we all go somewhere else in one form or another.   The beginning of a thing is its birth. The end of that thing is its death. Within the broad framework of our lives--the coordinate system that begins at shape up zero and completes some sort of cycle when our bodies stop breathing--we experience an distance number of