You Won't Know Until You're Dead

One of the most frustrating things is watching someone continue down the road to perdition. Frustrating because one may have many of the right answers and the right strategies to help that person get on track and lead a productive life and therefore avoid the hell (if there is a hell) that they'll inevitably be faced with if they continue down that road. But the only way to do that is to get the person that's hell bent on destroying themselves out of their destructive environment. Similar to taking a kid out of the inner city and sending him to boot camp. The old carrot and the stick routine. Rewards and punishment. Everyone is familiar with the drill.

The rewards necessarily have to be more enticing than the behavior, mindset, and life style, that will get the hell-bound punished. It's a slow and seemingly inexorable process. A truly dirty, heart wrenching, and thankless job. We immediately inject ourselves into a situation where a person with a gun is about to commit suicide. In that case, we have no qualms about jumping in and rescuing that person. However the only difference between the person with the gun and the person that continues to walk the road to perdition is the time lapse between life and death. Why are we then not as willing to jump in and rescue the slow suicide victim?

Suicides, like everyone else, have no idea of what they'll face once they're dead. Indeed once they cross the fine line between life and death, there's no turning back. Their decision is final and eternal. Suicide is not a rational act just as continuing to walk the path toward perdition is not a rational act. No one knows what awaits them in death until they're dead. And no one knows what awaits them in hell. We can only take rational decisions based on prior knowledge and experience. We have no prior knowledge or experience of what occurs once we're dead. We have no prior knowledge or experience of hell--only what we think hell might be like.

For many on their death beds, regrets swim around in their heads. Regrets often times to the point where the dying drown in their sorrows. No one knows what awaits them once the inevitable occurs. No one knows whether there's a God, a Devil, a Heaven, or a Hell. No one knows whether there's a Karma, a reincarnation, or a simple peaceful non-existence consequent and subsequent to death. We can speculate and philosophize and engage in wishful thinking all that we want when it comes to this life and the next life if there is in fact a next life. But all of that amounts to nothing but intellectual gymnastics. We know absolutely nothing about death or life after death until we've experienced it. Anyone that claims to know is full of crap. Once we experience death, it's too late to avoid death. It's quite possible that we really don't know anything at all until we're dead.