Mortality.
Brought on by stress, and by the FULL realization of my premature frailness, and the realization perhaps that finally, I am not invincible. After talking with believers and nonbelievers and reading articles and looking up who is and is not and trying to identify patterns...
I've finally reaffirmed my belief that there is in fact a God. I don't pretend to understand it, I don't pretend to know how it works... all I do know is that I believe in the admirable teachings religion can bring, and accept that just as with ANY organization, that there are people who are in it for the wrong reasons.
Basically, I let myself be afraid of death, let myself feel that terrible choking grip on my throat just thinking about popping out of reality, forever, just gone. Scientifically speaking from that standpoint, then, we're all just walking piles of DNA being directed by electrical impulses and chemicals, and that our behavior can be mapped out, explained, and ultimately, will show us to be nothing more than biological machines with very flawed programming... and that when we die, we simply break down into our base component parts.
Well, I sure as hell don't believe that, because if that's true, then we--all life, for that matter--are the worst built machines EVER because while we are built to reproduce and attempt to evade death, a lot of programming was added on with no apparent purpose--emotions that don't make sense from a purely biochemical standpoint... and not just humans... because I still stand by my personal experiences with animals. You'd have to be empty inside to not be able to tell that when a cat rubs up against you or jumps in your lap at an inappropriate time or a dog plops its head down on your knee and looks up at you in /that/ way... that there's no love there. Animals give and feel love, too.
This is not born out of desperation, or some chemical imbalance that just prevents me from accepting the idea of blinking out of existence. I was all but ready to announce myself as athiest a few days ago, when after doing some more reading, and, incidentally, not on purely religious sites, I came across just so many holes in just about every argument for and against that I had to take into account the vast majority of people who have had near-death experiences and came out from them with clarity, serenity, and most importantly, no fear.... and applying that to what I had read about space-time and the basic laws of physics (which I took advanced classes in during high school and was good at, thank you very much.).
Steven Hawking writes that it is possible for the universe to not have a beginning and end without a point of creation... that the universe is inifinte and just IS, that it has always existed, and takes up an infinite amount of space. (personally, I kind of find this theory hard to swallow, because it only makes sense on paper, and no matter how small matter gets, no matter how dense, it is still one of the core physical laws of the universe; matter cannot be created nor destroyed.... no matter how minute.). We also know that we need our brains to think, to percieve data, to react to things... in a biological way.
However, looking at primary perception, after seeing the story about the artist born without eyes understanding perspective... after reading the story about the woman who, under EKG monitoring, recalled events that took place during zero brain activity... the similarity of experiences of people who have had out-of-body experiences, and the supposed failed experiment of putting a readable message overtop of an emergency room table... all these have given me a very clear belief of a very pleasant image of what will happen after I take my last breath.
Conciousness cannot be categorized. It defies description. We know we have it, but we don't know why... and we can only percieve it in ourselves, as much as we would love to be able to jump right into someone else's body to feel what they feel... scientifically, this is impossible, because according to the purest of science, there's nothing to transport. It's something intangible we know we have... and want to hold onto, because it's all we can understand. We have chemicals and electrical impulses that reinforce our will to live as long as possible and breed. Biologically, people shouldn't be affected by near-death experiences to the point that have been documented.... but they are. Death is the great barrier, the ultimate unknown, and only the dead can experience it... and the reason I brought up the marquee with the hidden message that apparently no one has been able to read... is because this brought on the clearest idea of an afterlife I can come up with.
Freedom.
No hormones to dictate behavior. No more aging body, no more pain, no more hunger, no barrier between us and the universe, or eachother. The brain, however, is needed to /read/... and I don't think we'll be doing any of that in the great beyond... and quite frankly, I'd find it kind of ...unsettling to think that a person might be able to read the hidden message... because that would mean that after we were through with this life, that we'd have to do it over again, because we'd remain completely unchanged... please, God, NO. Once is enough. We won't need to read. We will have an infinite universe without boundaries and without an end to experience on whatever level pure consiousness can. This is just how I imagine things will be, because I don't believe that in the afterlife that I'll be unchanged. I will be. Even the bible says that things will be different. As Captain Picard says, we are part of a reality we cannot even begin to understand, and that it is waiting for us.
I am not a walking talking pile of DNA you can predict with mathematics and biochemistry... and as I can only percieve my own existence, I can only say one thing with certainty:
My conciousness came from SOMEWHERE... just as I cannot percieve my own creation... in a universe that 'just is' as Hawkings puts it, infinite possibilities with no limits with no exact point of origin... I hope I have something useful to contribute when I go back.
And hey, if I'm wrong... either I'm going to have to do a lot of appologizing, or I won't know what hit me because I won't exist... and I have better things to do with my time here than stay huddled up in some corner counting down the seconds and making sure nobody and nothing gets too close to me so it can't kill me.
And if it turns out I'm totally off base and things just get wackier from here on in, I hope I get reincarnated about 300 years from now so I can wear a Starfleet Uniform and it won't be a costume.
And besides... I have undeniable proof of the existence of a soul.
Cookies exist.
So does pizza... and... mashed potatoes, too. Toasted mashmellows... uhh.... buffallo chicken wings..... oh... it's suppertime...
Sorry... philosophical ramblings cut short by foods.
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crappy
