Somewhere on this planet every second a human is born. That new vulnerable infant finds itself in the care of older more experienced members of its tribe or extended family who will see to its needs until it is able to care for itself. The conditions and situations that this child is born into can vary greatly in design. It can be born into a wealthy , loving family who are willing to give it the best the world has to offer and nurture it with love and care. It can also be born into squalor in a shanty to a family with many existing mouths to feed and another extra mouth will mean less for the others. The variations on this theme are too numerous too mention but each has its results in the near future.

           The closest thing to an operating manual for humans are those who are the care givers during its time of need. A human who is completely dependent on a another has many needs to be met, food, shelter, love, education, frienship, companionship. If each of these catagories is filled to its capacity then there is fulfillment and saturation, if it is not then you will spend the rest of your life attempting to fill those gaping holes with the missing emotion or something that will be a temporary fix for what ails you. As it stands none of us are able to have all of our needs met fully because chances are the person from whom we recieved care did not get their met. There is a chain reaction of a lack of fullfillment or a dysfunction that is handed from one human to the next in rapid motion. We are all thus an incomplete work in progress. As we attempt to identify what we lack and strive to replenish it our world is also growing and changing at the same time which means we have to multi task to keep up with life as we feed our senses from moment to moment. Our world is also a tricky place where we are told what to think and how to feel in order to fit in mainstream society. A humans life is like rowing a boat as you approach the edge of the rapids with your hands tied behind your back.

        The first few years of your life are relatively simple and the needs fall into several simple catagories that require you recieving with very little pressure on there being reciprication. These needs feed the groundwork for all the other building blocks which will carefully balance themselves on top. your formative years teach you the strength and value of love and trust and help you bond with others of your own kind. Keep in mind that at this point those others have a vested interest in protecting you because you are the future of their gene pool. You dont realize it quite yet but your very existence is a fulfillment of one of their needs to create offspring so they will continue to live even after death. So life and death are very much intwined even at that point, even to a young toddler who can barely take its first steps. What you are taught and how you are taught will vary from family to family and across the globe depending on your cultural background and circumstances. Your care givers whom ever they maybe are your personal manual for living life. You can only learn what you are taught and someday only teach what you learned. You too will someday be a manual for another.

        At some point most children are removed from the safe arms of their parents and the safety of their homes and introduced to the world at large. A world that operates on many levels based upon the manual that has been thrust upon you for several years. The difference between these two worlds is that one may have placed you on a pedestal and loved you just because you were and the other needs you to function and uphold for entirely different reasons, greed and the needs of others. You and others like yourself of the same age and background will now attend school. Education much like family life can vary greatly across the globe but no matter where you are it is secretly molding you in its own image for its own end purpose. This all sounds so sinister coming off my fingertips in the wee hours of morning as I type. Education is a form of indoctrination, you are being given something so that it will someday yeild fruit. You are an investment in the future of mankind but this has its rather itchy underbelly.

        So like a herd of sheep you are rounded up into the enclosure which will be your new home and taught new skills. Many of these skills will prove to be valuable and used in your future daily life. Other ideas that will be stuffed into your impressionable brain will feed the idels of society. You will slowly come to understand your political system and its nuances from an early age based on how and what you are taught and how its instilled in your ever expanding understanding of your world. By the time that you emerge from this sytem your world has been shaped and molded and without realizing how this has come to happen you feel safety within its bounds. The world which you will inherit will reward you for upholding its rules and regulations and those that bear this torch well do well incrimenatlly. Society cannot win them all and there will always be those who will not and cannot fit that mold for one reason or another. A child whos founadtion of love and trust was weak may not be able to bear the weight of all that follows for a great variety of reasons. In our western world you are formally released from this play pen at the age of eighteen or after twelve years of education  to run loose. You now know barely enough to feed yourself and keep yourself out of danger. At this point you are at a physical point of maturation physically and sexually, you have finally blossomed.

       Your formal indoctrination or brainwashing has now ended and you are free to do as you please. At this point your body is coming under the full force of the chemicals running through your veins. You are discovering your newely blossomed sexual abilities, a young fresh new body, raging hormones and a repertoireof things to try with this body that you have not done before. For the next two decades you become your own best toy. You discover how your body functions and your lured by new sensations that will imprint on both your mind and body what it wants to experience again and again. Many of the decisions that you make will be all about these new sensations. Most of us learn that for some reason it feels good to pairbond, love and sex and the feelings that result from them form a secondary aspect to our existing personality. We want to be wanted and we want to fill anothers needs and slowly we begin to re enact the early chapters of our owners manual. With a new strong body, a mate to sexaully partner with and the light of the new world before us the possibilities seem endless. We feel invincable and the end of our life cycle is so far ahead that for all purposes its almost as though it does not exist.

      The next two decades or so of your life are spent duplicating the life you were given by creating pairbonds that result in a family and children. You attempt to validate yourself in the eyes of society by reaching the current mainstream standards that represent the times in which you live. Unknowingly you sign all the hidden contracts that saddle you for years to come with financial burdens intended to create wealth and security which in reality have sold your soul to the highest bidder. You are now too busy trying to live the life of your dreams while staying ahead of each financial due date. You slowly begin to discover that money rules the universe andthose who worship money lose their path in life but in the early years we all feel that we can over come these influences. You are riding the hampstermill of life and the light at the end of the tunnel is not getting any closer. This paragraph may feel real negative but at some point we have all felt these forces tugging at us.

       Somewhere approching your forties or crossing that landmark things take a drastic turn. One day you either make a choice to climb off the hampster mill of your own accord or you trip and fall and lose the desire to climb back up. By this time you are no longer a spring chicken and half of your anticipated government endorced life span has trickled away. You are a little worn around the edges and slightly dazed and confused, but with a good polish you still can shine and dazzle. Thoughts are running through your mind that you dont dare share with others. You are not sure if the life you have been leading has been yours. You were once so sure of things , so determined so ready to believe the bill of goods you had been sold. Your perfect family now does not feel that way. You created several offspring anticipating that you and your partner in life would be the model parents. The two of you together would provide and create the perfect environment for your children. These children would represent all wrongs in your life put right. What was once missing in your life would be planted in theirs, so they could grow up to be perfect adults. So where did you go wrong? Inspite of all your valient efforts nature took its own course by throwing up road blocks. You tried to guide them in the right direction, spare them the pain, give them what you had not had, so why do they not see? Why do you feel that they dont appreciate all your hard work? They even seem to resent your intrusion yet they expect you to provide for them financially. Your perfect marriage that once sustained you through rough seas is not the perfect marriage anymore. Somewhere along the way you grew apart and lost interest in jumping through rings of fire together. The lusty passion that lit your eyes and your heart is now just ashes of a disappating fire long gone out. It was all so perfect and it was supposed to last forever, so what happened? Your job that was once a challenge which fuel your ambition is now like a thorn in your side. You no longer see yourself moving up the ladder to win the prize waiting foryou at the summit, you lack the motivation and the desire to climb any further. You have hidden dreams of running away from all of this to a remote island where noone knows who you are. A place where monday does not exist and where your boss does not have the address of.

       You are at a place commonly reffered to as the mid life crisis. Some reassure you that if you dont do anything rash you will go back to being your normal self, whatever that was. You dont want to disappoint anyone so you are willing to entertain that thought. Your failure to continue with this storyline has upset everyone associated with you because if you dont complete this story you aremessing uptheir storyline and they are not happy with that idea. What that tells you is that alot of people need you everyday to make their lives happen in different ways. The pressure is mounting for you to not let them down but you suddenly feel that you owe it to yourself to live life in a way which makes you happy. Why cant they all be happy for you being happy? why has your desire for a new life placed fear and anger in your way? Suddenly the journey is no longer a journey because at every corner their is a road block with unhappy neighbors holding pitchforks. Your unwillingness to do things in the same old way has brought things to a standstill. Longterm friendships , close ties and even your marriage are at risk. You are presented with choices that dont seem like choices but ultimatums and what will make you happy will cut you off for ever from those who have shared your journey up to this point. Your previous life and life choices where taken for granted and offered security and peace of mind for those who counted on them.

        You have now reached a point where you feel you are now working backwards. All the things that you learned about life dont ring true anymore. Your visions of the future you would have seem fuzzy and your ability to move towards a goal with great ease does not seem possible. You are not quite sure what to call this destination,there is no road sign for your current location in time and space. If you place a thumb tack in the wall to pinpoint your spiritual coordinates google wiould bring up the word lost. At this point in time you have also lost your innocence  towards the condition known as death. you have lost moters, fathers, siblings and friends who have seemingly vanished never to be seen again. But this is all supposed to make sense because from birth you have been raised to accept this condition called death.When you were younger death only seemed to happen to old and sick people now its taking your friends and loved ones leaving you step closer to its door. You try and be brave by telling yourself that this is just the way things work and this is far bigger and way more complicated than you can handle. You think back to a time when you had not been concieved, a time when the world did not know you existed. Suddenly you realize that even without you the daily doings on this planet were not interrupted, so its safe to say in your absence they will continue also.

         You think back to the last funeral you attended. You remember the grieving family and the seemingly endless tears. One day this person had been a parent, a father, a lover, a husband, an employee and the next all of that had stopped but for his memory. This person had worked hard to create a life for his family financially and emotionally and for all his efforts he had not been able to stop death. Within days of his death those left behind had wiped their tears and moved forward with their lives and in a few more weeks it was as if he had never been. You wonder about his last moments on earth, if they were filled with pain and sadness and if he could see the aftermath would he be surprised and sad. Think of the billions of people who have lived and died on this planet of which no sign remains. We are so emmersed in our lives that its hard to imagine a world without us, Yet sadly things wont miss a beat. Even when very important people die, after the tributes and tribulation the world goes back to business and suddenly years later we look back in shock that so much time has gone by since they were here last.

         The realization that we are mortal and running out of time is an interesting feeling and different people deal with it in different ways. Some make sudden drastic changes for the best, some pretend they are teenagers and try to make up for lost time. Some develope a strong sense of denial and firmly place their heads in the sand and pretend that if they cannot see death it cannot see them. Some freeze and panic not knowing which way to turn lest it should be the wrong way. And a few turn and look death in the face and realize its a good time to meet your future friend and get aquainted before you meet face to face. Death is the last frontier not conquered. There are a few ways to start your journey in understanding death, there is science and then there is religion and frankly they have not come to any concrete conclusions either. For thousands of years mankind has broken into factions and argued and fought bloody battles as to which god rules supreme and that debate has not yet been resolved in a peaceful manner. Science seems to want to talk itself out of the truth when confronted with it. So if the big guys cant decide how is a simple peson like you to reach a conclusion? Is god elusive? Is ddeath the end? Is there a peponderance of truth that yeilds in either direction? If there is a truth why has it been withheld and who is responsible?

       So you read the paragraphs above and you thought to yourself that your life does not sound as bad as te one above, so be it. You have to admit there is more than an element of truth and a ring of truth. Your life might be better or it may be worst but all lives fall in a timeline and by the nature of being human the variations to the theme are few. You are born and then in due course and with the passage of time you die, happily, wealthy, sad or hungry, you die. No amount of fame or fortune will make a special acception for your case. look at Elvis, he died on the toilet. He could not even have privacy in death. But seriously we all come to a point when life does not have the answers that we need and we have to either accept that fact or decide that we are not going to stop where the others have. I came to this point in my journey two years ago and its hard to believe what has come to pass during this time. I wanted to create a website where we look at death from all angles without fear . Whether you have lost a love one and are currently grieving or you are simply feeling an emptiness inside that needs to be answered I hope to be a part of your journey.