To those whose minds have been poisoned from childhood with this religious conviction, this most awful of beliefs, I cry: "Throw off these tyrants of the mind. Emancipate yourselves from this fearful ignorance and mental bondage!" What a burden will be lifted from their lives and what a glorious freedom they will experience!
If we are to die, let us die in perfect calmness and in perfect peace. Let us become firmly convinced that, once we are dead, no thought, no act, can possibly harm us. We are beyond the pale of Nature's pangs. We, the individuals that we were, are free from everything. We are at rest, and forever.
X
But after this life with all our pains and sorrows, what then? What is there to repay us for living?
I answer:
Nothing!
I have no misgivings about the "future." I am firmly convinced that there is no "after life," that when we "breathe our last" we arrive at our eternity. We are "one with yesterday's seven thousand years." We are like the flower which, "once blown, forever dies."
I firmly believe that life as now manifested in our bodies is a combustible force identical with that of any other form of life. No less so than the "seed" of the flower is different from the "germ" of the wheat.