Our lives are inverted. Life is inside out.
For a moment, imagine that we are trying to keep the dead dead. Suppose that the aim of life is not for it to end in death, but rather to keep the dead in their place—to keep them from living, so that we can continue to live.
The search for immortality is all wrong. After all, what is it exactly that we are doing that the dead are not?
How do we know that the dead are not pondering the same questions about the living? Things are not moving toward us; no, they are moving away from us.
We cannot reach out and grab anything, for it is other things that let go of us. Go ahead: reach out and grab the previous moment, and the next… I mean, the last. Who is leaving who? In the end, what is the difference—are they not all the same?
The dead were never living and we shall never die—rather, each moment we are alive. It is the dead who are in fact dead, remember? Can you remember the dead? Can you see them? Are they in front of you? Can you touch them? Can you interact with them? Can you posit their (former) existence? Are they really in the ground, and are you really above it? Who is really on which side? After all, we can only experience one at a time, can we not?
Imagine a tunnel populated with this moment, and the last, and the next. Now imagine its direction is reversed. Now play both forward and backward at once. Nondirectionality is amusing to play with, but what if the rain fell upwards, and what if you fell in its puddle? Where would you be now? Has the rain lived and died?
That being said, what is life, and what is death? Did the dead ever know what the rainfall was? Every step taken in attempt to flee its own precipitation will result in a fate that the rain cannot escape, or rather, one that the dead cannot escape. Where does each end of the tunnel begin and end? Eureka! We shall build museums with fronts and backs, and when an untold amount of time has passed, the sins of yesteryear will lay adrift and dispersed, but we shall collect and organize them to make them unrecognizable by those of present suffering: the living.
Faith is not like sandcastles on the shore near rocking waves. If one imagined their unique image of their palace resting on the shore it would be for them, and them alone—free to reimagine whatever details come to be—out of harm’s way.