Havel - Life after Death

He's not Christian.  His belief system and philosophical vocabulary are heavily shaped by Phenomenology and Existentialism.  And yet, similar to his belief in "something" transcendent that gives meaning to existence which he hesitates to call God, Havel also voices a conviction in the survival of "what matters" in a person beyond that end we call death --


 "....human existence not only extends beyond the physical existence of its bearer, it clearly goes even beyond the physical existence of the experience of it by others.  Nothing that has once happened can un-happen; everything that once was, in whatever form, still is - forever lodged in the "memory of Being."  And everything we consider real, actual, present, is only a small and vaguely defined island in the ocean of 'imaginary,' 'potential,' or 'past' Being.  It is from this matrix alone that it draws its substance and its meaning; only against this background can we experience it in the way we do.  Along with everything that ever happened in whatever way (or could or should have happened) and what can now no longer un-happen, human personality, human existence too will endure, once and for all, in the 'memory of Being.'  In other words, not only will it not cease to exist when its 'owner' goes into another room, or is imprisoned, or when everyone else has forgotten about him, but it will not cease to exist even when he dies, nor even when the last man who ever knew him or knew that someone like him ever existed, forgets about him or dies.  Nothing can ever erase from the history of Being a human personality that once was; it exists in that history forever."

"But it exists there - and this is the most important aspect of the whole matter - in a radically different way from everything else, from my Parma cutlet in the Rotisserie, for example, which is indubitably a part of that history as well.  The point is that human existence, as I have tried to indicate, is not just something that has simply happened; it is an 'image of the world,' an 'aspect of the world's Being,' a 'challenge to the world,' and as such - it seems to me - it necessarily forms a very special node in the tissue of Being.  It is not simply something separate and individual, enclosed within itself and limited to itself, but it is, repeatedly, the whole world.  It is as if it were a light constantly reilluminating the world; a crystal in which the world is constantly being reflected; a point upon which all of Being's lines of force constantly appear to converge, centripetally, as it were.  Human existence, I would say, is not just a particular fact or datum, but a kind of gospel as well, pointing to the absolute and, in a way that has no precedent, manifesting the mystery of the world and the question of its meaning."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga