04/12/2024
My take on Karma Dhuen by TheLungten
Life is a fabric tangled together with millions of moments, experiences and life lessons we absorb from the day to day activities. Each sunrise, each conversation, each struggle and victory are all a chapter in the special history that is ourselves. From the everyday chores to the extraordinary moments, what we choose, who we love and how we remember it all matters.
These recollections become a record of who we are, a Silent friend to the ride all the way towards the end.And yet, for all life teaches us, it is short. Death, which is a fact of life and unites all life, is not an end, but a transition. There has always been a mystery of what happens to them.
It is science now that explains the marvellous thing that happens as life expires.When the heart is dead, the brain doesn’t just shut down. Indeed, for up to seven minutes after clinical death, the brain is at full-boiling. The "last burst" of brain activity that follows is the key to one of the greatest mysteries of life.
The brain does this last act of what some people call a film-style reconstruction of the subject’s life.The "life review" is a sort of highlight reel of best times. In close-to-death experience, the experiences of children laughing, a lover touching, a gesture of compassion or even regret all unfold with amazing vividness.
Such memory explosions are said to arise from activation of regions of the brain related to emotion and memory (hippocampus, prefrontal cortex). The brain is, as if in a last-ditch effort, cramming together a lifetime’s experience into an ephemeral thought.Yet the brain doesn’t play a memory card for its last act.
It is hypothesized that the brain releases neurochemicals at these times to create states of calm, bliss or even a spiritual connection. Perhaps that’s why some report near-death experiences as calm or transcendent.
While no one can say what this activity was specifically for, it might just be the brain’s way of passing the man peacefully on, a biological way of smoothing over the divide between life and death.For these seven minutes, which were so few, human life is anything but straightforward.
They tell us that life is not about how long we live but about how much we cherish the things we remember and the people we love. The brain’s last act, the time-machine reimagined, rings out a universal truth: life is short, every moment counts.
Living teaches us to build for this last ride by taking in the splendour of our existence and the people we meet. Although death could be the loss of our bodies, through our memories, actions and lives we touched, a part of us lives on forever.
