Perhaps the best thing about Type O Negative’s Dead Again is the album’s title. Actually, sometimes I’m a bit slow, and it took me more than a couple of years to realize that the title is probably a play on the phrase “Born Again.”
To be born again means something different to an evangelical Christian than it does, say, to a Hindu. But captured in the idea is the concept of a second chance. Both are, in fact, different ways of being “reincarnated,” if I can use the term rather loosely.
The concept of being dead again, however, is somewhat more obscure. Sure, people that are reincarnated must theoretically die over and over again, or do they? I don’t know much about the actual belief, but as I imagine it, when a person dies, their reincarnated essence automatically and simultaneously “zaps” into another body at the same moment. Therefore, the death is little more than illusionary. It’s a matter of simple physics, right?
This is all getting rather deep. TON’s pun, simplified, most likely refers only to the idea of being spiritually dead.
Is it possible to be spiritually dead?
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes, and all is born again.” – Sylvia Plath
To be born again means something different to an evangelical Christian than it does, say, to a Hindu. But captured in the idea is the concept of a second chance. Both are, in fact, different ways of being “reincarnated,” if I can use the term rather loosely.
The concept of being dead again, however, is somewhat more obscure. Sure, people that are reincarnated must theoretically die over and over again, or do they? I don’t know much about the actual belief, but as I imagine it, when a person dies, their reincarnated essence automatically and simultaneously “zaps” into another body at the same moment. Therefore, the death is little more than illusionary. It’s a matter of simple physics, right?
This is all getting rather deep. TON’s pun, simplified, most likely refers only to the idea of being spiritually dead.
Is it possible to be spiritually dead?
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes, and all is born again.” – Sylvia Plath
I knew a Hindu whose wife died. He was really broken up about it. He went home to India not too long after that and when he returned to Illinois, he had married. He claimed that his new wife was the reincarnation of his old wife. But she had been alive several years while his former wife was still alive. Interesting. Well at least to me. This man is also a brilliant applied mathematician. Strange how we can hold in one relatively small brain competing ways of thinking.
ReplyDelete