Ends and BeginningsDeath, while in many ways an "end," actually serves more as a beginning for all but the most pessimistic religions or philosophies. Even Socrates, at least once near the end of his life, felt this type of hope. According to Plato, on his deathbed after drinking hemlock, Socrates muttered these last words to Crito: "I owe a cock to Asclepius; do not forget it." In his time it was customary to offer a rooster to Asclepius, the god of healing, after recovering from an illness, so in a moment of imminent death Socrates actually thought he would get well in one way or another and start over again. However, when earlier, in Plato's Apology, he addresses the idea of ​​his own death, he says: "If I were to claim to be in any respect wiser than my neighbor, it would be this: that I possess no real knowledge of what happens after death, I am also aware that I do not possess it." On his deathbed, therefore, Socrates appears to offer the rooster just in case, a religious motif common to many dying people. All religions have death rituals or hopeful ideas about where they will end up after death: Hindus repeatedly try to escape reincarnation by practicing yoga, adhering to Vedic scriptures, and through devotion to a personal guru; Buddhists seek a state of life in Nirvana by following the path of righteousness: if they are not perfectly righteous, they repeat another life which is good or bad depending on their actions (karma) in the previous life; Christians believe that if they take Jesus Christ as their savior they will be able to gain access to heaven after their life on earth. Joseph Campbell believed that all the world's religions were linked together by the similarity of their myths. Stories of creation, holy trinities, resurrections, deaths, and heavens repeat over and over again in slightly different forms. He believed, therefore, that all the religions of the world are the same, but they are cloaked in different masks that betray the prejudices of the culture. One thing all religions have in common, however, is this: when we die, we all go elsewhere, in one form or another. The beginning of a thing is its birth. The end of that thing is its death. In the broad framework of our lives – the coordinate system that begins at age zero and completes a kind of cycle when our bodies stop breathing – we experience an infinite number of