Sharon - Beautifully said and well reasoned! As regards the life and death of organic physical creatures in nature (including us people) you are absolutely right. One forms ideas about it by directly observing it....or by being told things about it by other people...or both. I still say it arose out of the unmanifest (which existed before the "big bang"), but that's just faith on my part.

I also believe that everything is alive in a certain sense...even things which are considered inert, such as rocks or air, but that doesn't mean they are alive in a biological sense or that they are conscious. If you look at their atoms, however, you find them full of active little packets of energy, and I define that energy as a very basic form of life.

So for me, everything is alive, and death is a term which denotes merely the ending of one specific life form as it changes to some other type of living manifestation. A person's body dies, and then its parts disassociate, but the protons, neutrons and electrons that made it up don't die...they go on to form other things. Life never really ends, but it constantly changes, and thus appears to die in an outward sense to someone who is observing the process. Ego identities, however, most certainly die. They are a temporary mask on the face of life.

Just my particular view on that subject...

Of course, I'm crazy... :-)

- LH