Reconsidering that Crucial Couple of Days Nine Years Ago, When I had Succumbed to a Peculiar Kind of Pneumonia, and even the Doctors Didn't Know but what I Might Die of it...

I was amazed, and gratified, to see how my underlying, latent Buddhist Faith grabbed hold--like   pre-paid, no-fault Accident Insurance--and took over my expectations, point of view and mind-centeredness (if that's different), and immediately made everything (including the prospect of dying) not just all right and perfectly satisfactory, but, frankly, captivating, amusing and entertaining.  I hadn't expected to be amused by the nearness of death. In this regard, I should maybe explain (my fellow Buddhists will understand) that it wasn't so much my Buddhist Faith, as such, as the utter Void at the very Center of my Buddhist Faith--the absolute, unquestioning atheism--which made the peril of extinction, for me, a funny, playful joke.  

To Christians, when they die, confronting the Lake of unquenchable Hellfire that their psychotic God has prepared for them, or to "Tyrants fierce that unrepenting die," such irreverent levity must seem incomprehensible, or   insanely inappropriate.  I suppose that those who are guilty of monstrous or vile sins, and who, on dying, descend to the various Hells that they have thereby chosen for themselves, can scarcely think otherwise.  But the majority of us who lead relatively blameless lives are not afraid of the weighing of our souls against the feather of truth, and however spectacular the scenery we might discover in the Realm of the Blessed, the one thing that would ruin it for us--unspeakably trivialize it, and make it hopelessly cheap--would be some self-aggrandizing fool's signature all over things, marking it as exclusively His.