It Sees Me

"This is not the way it should be."

That thought comes often of late. It might be about the war, or the weather, or the roads, or school, or my belly, or a plethora of other things that dissatisfy. The vague feeling that something fundamental needs to - is about to - change is my constant companion. It's not an Obama kind of change or a new mission statement from the sprawling bureacracies in which we all live - it's more like waking up one day and realizing that the colors you've been seeing all your life are actually wrong, and today, for some reason, you can see them all as they truly are. As you take that in you realize that your socks have never matched your outfit - not once. You also see that roses are actually green, and the sky is a pale pink, and your raisin bran is a purplish color - which wouldn't be so bad if the milk wasn't bright orange.

This kind of change - a fundamental shift in the perception of reality - is what I'm being confronted with right now. No, not confronted - threatened is a better way to describe it. A view of it all threatens to leap out and crush the comfortable samsara I've created for myself. The sudden knowledge that IT is not as I thought, or as I believed, or even as I've imagined it could be is startling, and hopeful, and full of the fearful anticipation of having to learn everything over again.

Trying to not look doesn't help. Staying busy doesn't either. Wearing sunglasses to block eye contact, and an iPod to block out sound - also futile. It's behind my eyelids and in my dreams and in the Xbox and on my credit card statement and in my gas tank and on your hair. It's within these symbols that you recognize as letters corresponding to sounds that make the words that stand for ideas that convey this blog post to your mind. It's in thinking of yourself as an entity with a mind, or a mind within an entity, and it wants you to see itself, in all it's prickly truth, in the bright pink sunshine.

So far, I'm not a fan of reality getting uppity like this with me. I admit I asked for it, what with all the meditating and the reading and the thinking, but I figured it was like the lottery - how many people actually win? Now that it has taken notice and looked me right in the eye, I'd like to quietly go back to stumbling toward death in the meaningless fashion to which I am accustomed. Even though I know it's an illusion, I like my socks to match.

Eternity, continued...

I should clarify - I know where I stand on this, but like any good sociologist I want to sample the population. Thanks to those who responded here.

The common thread in those responses seems to be that we agree that no one knows for sure - yet many people claim that they do! Evangelical preachers, prophets, imams, gurus, etc. have all claimed to "know" about the afterlife because they have seen it, been to it, or been in direct contact with the powers that run it. How do we reconcile these reports? Is it all just wishful thinking, that for some turns into delusion? Do we just write those people off as whackos, or have they had some kind of spiritual experience that we haven't?

More discussion, please.

Eternity

Our theories of the eternal are as valuable as are those of a chick which has not broken its way through its shell might form of the outside world.
- Buddha

I've been thinking about eternity a lot lately. Perhaps it's because I am deathly ill with the flu that has laid one of my roommates out since Friday... or perhaps it's because I have taken too much NyQuil lately. Either way, it's been on my mind, and like my man B-money said above, we have almost no clue.

My ego cherishes hope that there is something after this place. My rationality, however, is unable to escape the idea that we are just simple biological systems, and when we break down too much, it's over. I struggle, like so many before me, to find some middle ground between the two... but striking a balance between eternity and finality seems impossible. I envy the fundamentalist who is so completely absorbed in his faith that he feels no fear of death. To be so certain of the destination would be bliss... but to accept all of the dislogic that goes along with those beliefs would be like self-inflicted Alzheimer's for me.

Like the good little liberal arts scholar that I am, I am doing more research. I'm investigating the feelings of the Flock on this topic - and if you're reading this you're a member. Please post your answers to the following questions:

1) Is there an afterlife?
2) How do you know?

Any answer you feel strongly about will do; prose, verse, claymation, interpretive dance, etc. For entertainment and enlightenment purposes only - please, no wagering.

Drunk

The true meaning of the precepts is not just that one should refrain from drinking alcohol, but also from getting drunk on nirvana. - Bassui

There are almost certainly readers of this blog, who won't get what old Bassui was getting at with this.

There are those who will get what he was saying, but not why I'm posting it.

There are those who will understand it, and my reasons.

If you're not in that last group, no worries - it's probably not for you.