A few days ago, I found myself staring at photographs of the Italian catacombs—rows of the long-dead, their bodies propped upright, dressed in their finest, frozen in dignity and decay.
Gruesome yet captivating, they stirred something unsettling in me. I couldn't help but wonder—how many of us are doing the same thing, unconsciously? Not with physical corpses, but with the memories of spiritual masters long gone.
We hang their images on the walls of our minds, revering their teachings as eternal truth, embalming their words as if they were beyond decay. Should the dead not return to the earth, their bodies to dust, their time completed? Why do we insist on preserving them physically and spiritually?
We wash their remains with vinegar, inject them with chemicals, dress them in robes of ceremony, and mount them like sacred artifacts for the living to admire.
I wrote this many years ago, and the thought still haunts me: Have we become slaves to the dead? We fear death so deeply that we plunge ourselves into spiritualism, hoping it will save us from our mortality.
We follow the paths of dead masters with a fervor that borders on desperation, believing they hold the key to our fears. But do they? Is it not strange—perhaps even tragic—that the living should be ruled by the dead?
That our hopes, our actions, our salvation should rest on their words, their visions, their promises? Can the dead truly save us? Or were they merely pointing toward something we must find for ourselves?
Maybe their greatest lesson is not in the paths they laid, but in the courage to carve our own.
To walk forward, not backward.
To stop embalming the past.
To live.
