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There exists a fundamental desire to avoid death is in all living lifeforms. In many cultures, humans avoid the idea, and only struggle with it late in life when it looms close, when they become desperate to justify their life as worthy. In some Buddhist and Hindu practices, followers are encouraged to visualize their rotting bodies and embrace death as simply a transition of life from one form to another. Other cultures like the ancient Egyptians and countless empires past and present seek immortality through conquest and death of others. In modern news, body counts are used as a measure of how the species is doing in it’s struggle against death. Here’s a interesting trailer of a documentary that explores this idea, and the consequences of the human capability to attempt to escape the grasp of death:

Flight From Death - The Quest for Immortality (available as a rental on DVD)

The mystery of the afterlife leaves it upon the imagination what to believe. Carl Jung spoke of death as a conundrum of the psyche:

A funny animation that looks at the consequences of the human species on the Earth:

In this excerpt from Waking Life (watch the full movie if you haven’t already!), the speaker has a pessimistic perspective of humans, bound by their base instincts, and cursed with the capability to apply them on a universal scale:

The few saints, philosophers that he talks about are here to teach. In nature, the cycle of life and death is simply an inconsquential shift of energy that is nessecary to produce change. Mystics like Rumi have seen death as a reunion with the eternal energy that is the universe:

I died from minerality and became vegetable;

And From vegetativeness I died and became animal.

I died from animality and became man.

Then why fear disappearance through death?

Next time I shall die

Bringing forth wings and feathers like angels;

After that, soaring higher than angels -

What you cannot imagine,

I shall be that.

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