October 6th, 2009
It's been a long time since I just sat down and wrote without creeping time limits and without distraction. It's nice to be able to just say what's on my mind without pressure and without an axe to grind. It gives me time to ... find meaning.
Think about it: We are the recorders of our lives. All that passes in front of our eyes, into our ears, across or through our other senses becomes the sum of who we are. But it's foolish to leave it at that, for the mind is much more than the sum of the collected recordings of our lives; our brains synthesize, process, organize, look for meaning in, and categorize those experiences. The cheapest devices in the world can record the sights and sounds, and even to some rudimentary extent, the other sensations that form a part of our lives. But only our brains can make meaning from it.
So much, so many people live between the two most significant points of their lives (Point 1: Where they are born, Point 2: Where they die) merely gathering information. They store it, they might even categorize some of it. But they never take it out and look at any of it. Then they die and all is lost.
Now, people might balk at the notion that we lose it all when we die; they might insist that it all gets bundled up as our soul and sent along to heaven, or whatever afterlife they imagine. But I personally balk at that. I don't believe in any afterlife. I don't believe we all go somewhere collective and share the experiences we had on Earth. After a few thousand years all those memories of experiences would become pretty old and well-worn. Repeating them into eternity (since we're dead and not allowed to have any more) would just turn any notion of heaven into hell instead. Boring, repetitive, tortuous hell ... and no way to escape it.
But why do we create that afterlife anyway? The obvious answer is that we can't handle the cruel reality of knowing that we will come to an abrupt stop at some point in the future. It's a hard reality pill to swallow: Some day everything you are and everything you know and everything you like, hate, fear, aspire towards, avoid, or want will be nothing at all except someone else's memories. We don't like it so much that we delude ourselves into thinking there must be something else not of this world that preserves it all. But how can otherwise intelligent sentient people justify this bizarre and completely unsupported notion? How did we gather together such a fiction about it in the first place?
Well, here's how: As humans, we are accustomed to living life in two somewhat distinct spheres. Our physical selves sit, walk, stand, eat, sleep, climb, fall down, etc., and our (for want of a better word) intellectual selves store memories of these things. As I said above, sometimes we process and make meaning from them too, though that is curiously not a pre-requisite for being alive. It is a feature of good physical design that the head more-or-less occupies the uppermost parts of the body. So we get used to a physical sensation of the mind rising above the body. Body below, mind above.
And if we are used to the physical/intellectual divide on Earth, it makes sense that we would extend that sensation to those imagined afterlives we are so desperate to pretend exist. The body stays on Earth, and the mind, which is already on top of the body, rises to the afterworld.
It's all just a primal, emotional, non-intellectual understanding of the life and its end.
Now, it should just take a few hundred words of thinking and analyzing—that act of taking one's experiences out, drying them off, and studying them a bit—that leads us to a satisfaction over life where we don't need to invent fantasy worlds of afterlife and reincarnation. We don't need to drug ourselves up with notions of "better things in the next life". Even the most miserable, hard-to-fathom experiences feel better after some self-reflection. And the good stuff positively shines.
“The unexamined life is not worth living” Socrates said, and that is just as true whether or not you live in abject poverty and desperate times as when you live in prosperity and relative happiness. I live in the latter world and all around me I see—and, I must admit, participate in—a collectivist ignorance about my own life and my own experiences. This blog notwithstanding, I often forget to examine the details of my experiences and cumulative understanding of the world in favour of just accumulating more. This is a true crime against humanity, for I have so much and yet I spend the leisure time made possible by the extra resources in just acquiring more.
Thanks heavens I took the time to take a quick look at it for at least today.
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