I Finally Understand The Ending of LOST

As you read, feel free to listen to the music from the show that I listened to as I wrote this, available at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3O59xXMBkI

I first watched LOST when it aired on TV, back in 2004 to 2010. I recently took to re-watching the show, having truly enjoyed it. The first time I didn’t quite understand the ending, and at that time, I had not fully adopted my pagan spirituality yet. Now I get it.

The show begins with the symbol of the All-Seeing-Eye that represents the eye of providence, as Jack Shepard opens his eye on “the island”. Fittingly, when the show come to a close, the last shot is of Jack’s eye as he dies, as he shuts his eye.

At first, one might notice the Christian symbols, both metaphoric, like the white and black rocks of good versus evil, and literal, Jack’s dad’s name, Christian Shepard.

The island itself is a source of life, a source of light, a source that must be protected, where a guardian protects it, like Jacob.

When I first saw the series, somehow I could not see the other occult symbols, the pagan ones, or ones that were not evidently Christian. Also, since I was going through a searching of myself journey as well, I could not appreciate the Christian symbols at the time. It is interesting to me that now, since I have fully found my pagan spirituality, I can appreciate all the show’s symbols, including the Christian ones. I guess I too needed to “let go,” like John, like Jack.

I’m not going to recap the entire series, this is not what this post is about, but if you strip away all the symbols, you are left with the harrowing journey the characters went through to discover themselves. As Christian tells Jack, “You needed all of them as much as they needed you.”

While the backstory of Jacob and his brother explains how the “monster” came to be, and many other elements explain certain details about the island, I had never fully grasped what the alternate reality was truly. I think when I first watched the finale, I was so enthralled in the moment of how touching it was when everyone finds each other again, and how much it made me cry (and I cried even more the second time around), at the very end, when they are all in the Church, I was left wondering why would they want to die now and move on, now that they had found each other again. Jack says it himself, he was dead too, but in my mind, I still thought that this was where they’d been sent after the island had been saved. Somehow, I had not understood every detail from that series, that last season, or that finale. And as the years went by, I had forgotten many details.

But that alternate is not a parallel reality of existence, as I had thought, a parallel time that erased what had happened on the island. It is an in-between place, a place where they all went when they died, some sooner than others, some much later, because the island had impacted their lives so much, and the island is where so many of them either found themselves or made terrible mistakes.

What happened on the island, happened. And those who died, died when they did, and those who left, left, those who stayed and survived, stayed and survived and lived until they died at some point beyond what the story tells us. The island was real, and what happened to everyone there was also real. And when they died, they went to the alternate realm, the in-between place, where they could find each other again, a place that does not exist in the tangible world but somewhere beyond space and time, a place where they could make amends and reconcile, and find those whom they loved, before finally moving on into the beyond.