Analogy of life (and death) with a train journey

From time immemorial philosophers have tried to understand, theorise life and have tried to draw analogy from various processes - especially a journey or voyage.

That life is analogous to a journey is not a tough thing to perceive; butunderstanding the death part is a bit tricky. Folks, to me the life appears to be analogous to the travel in an eternal train journey in which we mortals have embarking and disembarking timings assigned (many of you - especially the atheists may differ on the topic of a third party control over the above!) which we may or may not be aware of. The travel in the train corresponds to the duration of life; the embarkation corresponds to birth (not berth!) and disembarkation the death. The beauty is that once we settle down in a berth after our birth, we wish to have our journey eternal without a disembarkation as we do not know what it would be like after getting out - and more so because we can no more interact with our co-passengers in the travel domain and we think that all our memories about the travel would be washed out, deleted, reset etc. It is the fear of the unknown. One who can conquer this fear can conquer the fear of death - Mruthyunjaya!

The process of death can correspond to different possible modes of disembarkation -

the super-power dislodging you in a state of sleep or in a state of wakefulness but with your reluctance in most cases, or a violent way say an accident or terrible physical pain. In these cases, the life is snatched away. But imagine, if you can prepare yourself to the fact that death may be inevitable and consent to the taking it back by the super power, the disembarkation would be least painful and would not resemble the case of someone thrown out of the train by a train ticket examiner. This requires a lot of guts, wisdom and detachment.
Of course, there can be a case of the travel becoming unbearable for someone who might jump out of a (burning) train. That corresponds to suicide. If someone throws him out, it is murder.
If other non human causes are involved, it is called an accident. Finally, if one is thrown of the train but manages to get back into it after say a brief interlude, it is said to be a miracle and is called resurrection.

Again the operation of the life train by the super power may have some punctuations (afterall god too needs some break yaar!) which may be called the mahapralayams punctuating the ages or the yugams as they are called.

more later

srini