Wow...um...where to begin?....
Well, to the best of my recollection, no one ever has the choice to be born. That is something determined by outside forces. One day, your number comes up and you appear. For quite awhile after that, you don't really have any control over what to do, where to go, how things work. It's only after a long time that you become aware enough to start formulating theories on how life works, why we are here -if ether even is a specific reason, what happens AFTER this existence ends, etc.
And, if you live a really, really , REALLY long time (my grandma was 104), then you start to go backwards...you lose your memory of all those complicated things that you spent so much time trying to get just right...you become helpless like you were when you first came into the world....and then you die. And when you die, you look different. You don't look like you're asleep. You look...gone. Gone where? -no idea...but wherever you go, the body you had when you were alive will look different when you're dead - It looks uninhabited. Which really makes me question what we really are. Are we just our physical bodies? Or, are our physical bodies just for transportation around the physical world? If this isn't our final existence, then why is it our "middle" existence? What is the purpose of a preliminary life before the next one? Why not just the one? What gives us the right to believe that our individuality will be maintained throughout eternity in some other form, when none of us have any idea why we're here to begin with?
I like to think of humanity as one of the many "work crews" that helps to evolve the planet -like the dinosaurs were before us. Different life forms appear and disappear over just a blink of geologic time. One hundred years to live is considered a long life by human standard...but doesn't even register on a geologic standard of a long time. And none of the life derived from this planet can ever take dominion over it. It has dominion over us. And the Sun has dominion over the Earth. Oddly enough, the hydrogen molecule has dominion over the Sun! Once the hydrogen is gone, so is everything! It's just like gasoline in the gas tank...it will run out. That little molecule has dominion over everything we can ever know in this world! Amazing, isn't it?
Nothing we can know in the physical world is infinite. And yet we like to tell ourselves that we have a way of understanding how infinity works...."When we die, this happens...or that happens... We're going to see grandma again...We will be like we are now, but we won't ever get sick or get old...etc." These are comforting thoughts....
....I'm only certain that the living can look at a dead body of someone they knew in life and see how it looks different -because I have experienced that a few times. However, I don't know if the dead can look at life and see anything.
