Father continues to speak: “The stomach asks for no reassurance that it will tomorrow be fed, and thus live another day, as neither does your body in-toto when you lie down for sleep at night, beg to be told of its next morning resurrection to a state of wakefulness. Only one part of man is involved in the resurrection stories; the feature that makes man man-the-monarch-of-physical-reality, the intangible, second guards who protect the king.
The first guards, those instinctively programmed to instantly respond without thinking to threats to the king, have no need for, nor any interest in, reassuring stories of resurrection. As with any real samurai, they do their duty unhesitatingly; unflinchingly do they defend their liege, and indeed, death in doing so is not feared, but taken as proof of their fidelity. No, my son, it is only the second guards, those responsible for noting and remembering threatening experiences outside the programmed responses of the first guards, and planning for unexpected ones to come; it is they alone who crave and consume resurrection stories. But why?
Your muscles are not afraid of death. Their molecules have an inherent awareness of life’s endless cycles, since they, (and atoms in the non-viable realm), are at its base. Most of the brain’s cells must have the same innate, silent awareness that within life, there can be no non-life. But the minority area of the brain that produces man’s thought-based consciousness, acts for all the world as though it is totally ignorant of what the rest of his body so obviously knows: life is alive, and within life there is nothing that does not live and persist, be it atoms, molecules, even ideas.
The cells of your liver need not fear for their future, for even after your body as a whole is laid in that eventual hole, they are ‘aware’ or at least they are not NOT aware, that they will survive and soon be part of another mobile form. The cells that constitute the areas of the brain responsible for you having thoughts, memories and plans all but cry out in fear of extinction; they plead for reassurance, and hence, the resurrection stories.
Curious comes this affair, for where do the cells of consciousness have to turn for such comforting tales but to themselves. None other in this universe can compose such poetic tonics. There is nothing in all of reality to tell them that everything will be all right – except themselves, which, on the face of it, would seem certainly, ‘not-to-do’ – for if you are already burdened with uncertainly, how can you then reassure yourself?”
J.