Written by admin on 2009-04-23T05:50:58+0000">April 23, 2009 – 5:50 am
When his number was up, Timothy Leary, the king of the counterculture, embraced dying as one of the greatest journeys man can make. Just after midnight on May 31, 1996, surrounded by close friends, Leary went into the great beyond. His last words were, “Why not?… Yeah.”
Leary had long expressed interest in being put into a deep freeze via cryonics after his death, with the hope of being “reanimated” sometime in a science-fiction future. He reportedly had a change of heart a few weeks before his actual departure because he had “other plans” for his after-death. Instead, his remains were boosted into orbit aboard a Pegasus rocket.
There’s not much anyone really knows about what happens when we die-try though we may to find out what’s really behind the curtain before we actually have to step backstage ourselves. From attending our first day of Catholic school to picking up our first prophecy by Kahlil Gibran, most of us have given at least some chunk of thought to the great beyond. And most of us believe that something-whether it’s coming back here for another try or lying in the big eternal bed made from our earthly deeds- awaits us in the afterlife. But since most folks don’t come back once they go, we’re forced to rely on faith rather than facts about the life hereafter.
Even things that should be cut-and-dried about death and dying-things like when death actually occurs in the body-aren’t as simple as you’d think. Though scientists have a pretty good idea about how we die, attitudes about when a person is officially dead are not only radically different among various cultures but also have even changed and continue to change within our own.
*23/36/5*
