“By space the universe encompasses me and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.”
― Blaise Pascal
If you have experienced the death of an important person around you, you must know what I am talking about. From the memorial ceremony in the funeral home to sending the loved one into the incinerator and taking out the ashes and sending them back to their hometown, everything feels like a dream and feels unreal. When you see your loved one’s body being burned into bones, the staff at the funeral home will ask you to take out the bones and put them on a piece of red cloth. He would then use a hammer to break large chunks of bone into pieces before placing them in a machine and squeezing them. Obviously a few days ago he was happily chatting with you, but now there is nothing but ashes, and a person's life is finally squeezed into a small urn.
It seems like everything ends after death.
But after death, is it all over?
“The human being is only a reed, the most feeble in nature; but this is a thinking reed. It isn't necessary for the entire universe to arm itself in order to crush him; a whiff of vapor, a taste of water, suffices to kill him. But when the universe crushes him, the human being becomes still more noble than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and the advantage that the universe has over him. The universe, it does not have a clue.
"All our dignity consists, then, in thought. This is the basis on which we must raise ourselves, and not space and time, which we would not know how to fill. Let us make it our task, then, to think well: here is the principle of morality.”
― Pascal