Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Dancing on the Ceiling

It's one thing to deal with the fact that we were born into a man-made set of systems that are sometimes corrupt and frequently have goals that are at odds with our own individual values.  For instance, I think one could forgive someone for believing the benchmark for human progress does not lie in how frequently we make very wealthy men slightly more wealthy.  It's quite another thing to move beyond that into resenting being born into a universe with the particular set of laws that seems to govern ours such as gravity, electro-magnetism, strong and weak nuclear forces, entropy and the death of all biological organisms.

"I'm not going to be part of your system of planets orbiting this star, man!  And your magnetism and your gravity wells and your complicated chemical interactions sustaining all biological life!  Your system sucks man!  That's just your opinion, you know!"

I only mention it, because there's this insane little man inside me that won't shut up about it.  I think the first step to sanity in this universe is recognizing I exist within a few inescapable constraints and that my id (or my inner toddler) isn't going to approve.

You know how some people grow up religious or in the closet, and then at some point have to question some of what they believed?  I think I'm in the middle of questioning everything, even gravity.

Current status:  Dancing on the Ceiling.

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Upon further review

As always, it is humbling to read what I have written, then read a punchy essay by people better at writing cohesive, engaging pieces.  I understand that blogs that are short, punchy and to-the-point are more popular, but it's not really what I want to write just yet.  I'd rather try and actually either make an argument for something or hash something out which is going to take more than a few sentences.  Why are people in such a rush, anyway?  Maybe they're usually procrastinating on the internet (*coughs*) and feel guilty about lingering too long on any one site.  So 30 minutes spent on 5 sites feels acceptable, because they only linger on a site for a few minutes before "getting back to work" (clicking the next link down the rabbit hole), whereas 30 minutes spent reading one long essay/article is more problematic to the decisive reader because one has to consciously set aside a sizable block of time to NOT do the thing one is supposed to be doing.  But if it's just one little link . . .

Ahem, in any case, right now I want to avoid short, punchy bullshit devoid of any real substance, and instead write long, thoughtful, but readable essays on whatever bullshit currently takes my fancy.  So, charitably, I think I'm about one for two.  Yeah, that sounds about right.

Friday, November 08, 2013

The first stupid thing I can't stand about existence

There will come a day when this blog isn't solipsistic ridiculousness and borderline unreadable.  Today is not that day.

I don't like living on this planet right now in a lot of ways.  It's kind natural for someone going through a second adolescence/extended mid-life crisis, but I recognize it as silly.  I'm going through the "your system is bullshit man." phase all over again and it's kind of exhausting and embarrassing, which is why I haven't been writing about it much.  In true H fashion, I have mostly dealt with this in the usual way:  flopping on the ground like a fish out of water then lying there quietly, staring at the sky, playing dead.  Which is to say I haven't done much but dissociate with video games, struggle with motivation for doing my job and have again completely lost track of when the sun rises and sets.  Well, I take it back, I'm keenly aware of the sun because I don't wake up (in terms of focus and energy) until it goes down and the only real motivation to sleep is when it threatens to rise again.  Seriously, it's a giant ball of fire that hangs in the sky, I don't know why people aren't more alarmed.

What is new, is that this old fish-flopping vampire me is being watched by a somewhat newer, adultish me, wondering just how long this bullshit is going to go on.  Because that dude would rather not keep doing this until we both die unfulfilled.  There is clearly a part of me which would dearly like to procrastinate on living my life and taking the chances I want to take allllllll the way until my lamentable and unrequested death, which, I think we can all agree, is a terrible plan.  It feels so right to my inner fish, but it's a terrible plan.

So, here I lie, limp, moist, and scaly, wondering what exactly I'm going to do about it.  Laying here doing nothing, hating myself for doing nothing, but hating the world too much as it is to want to involve myself in it is honestly driving me crazy.  And it's increasingly apparent to me that I don't have forever to "figure things out." and maybe I should start working my way through it, whatever it is that I need to work through.  So I'm going to write my way through it as best I can.  Starting with the fact that I don't have forever, because that's bullshit.

I can't stand that I'm going to die and that I'm smart enough to understand that.  It's stupid.  I hate it.  I hate that I'm going to die.  I hate how much and how little I was taught about death and I hate how much I'm having to unlearn about it all now.

I want to say my parents never gave me advice/training on how to deal with mortality, but I think from their point of view they did.  They gave me Jesus, which was supposed to cover that base.  If I believe in Jesus, and fall in line with the myriad bullshit that entails in Adventism, I would get to live forever, and that was all I needed to worry about as far as mortality went.  My basic training was, "Having anxiety about death?  Soothe yourself with Jesus." which is what my parents and relatives still do, and it seems to work well enough for them as far as I can tell.

I suppose it worked for me for a while?  I don't really know if I ever bought into the religion, but I think I did buy in far enough to assume that I was probably going to live forever, somehow, even if some of the specifics of Adventism didn't really pan out.  To be fair to my younger, dumber self, this is a fairly comforting belief, and it relegated thoughts about mortality to an uncomfortable tickle at the back of my mind that rarely needed scratching.

Now, as a proud homosexualist agnostic, I've had to come to terms with it on my own.  I haven't really found the process enjoyable.  I keep having to catch myself, in moments of existential stress, thinking, "Well, I'm sure it will all get sorted out after the second coming . . . " and remind myself that this is a learned response, not a reasoned response.  I don't even suspect on an emotional level that the Adventist eschatology is true anymore, but it's hard to shake the brain-washing training of my childhood.

But I've been searching anyway, as an adult who can ostensibly make up his own mind about things, and honestly, even without a comfort blanket about eternal life, I've never felt more okay about the fact that I'm going to die as I am right now, even though, on principle I still think it's bullshit.  Having been injured and operated on in a variety of exciting and popular ways, injury is less frightening to me now, than when I had only read about it.  I expect that to be true of death as well, although I'm not sure how rational that expectation is.  I guess I'm slowly developing a sense of what I can control and what I can't, and the idea that at some point I will be unable to stop myself from dying and my only choice will be to suffer and agonize over it or accept it and let the experience happen is strangely calming.  It's still bullshit to be sentient and mortal simultaneously and I hate it, but that thought is calming nonetheless.

I've done a lot of reading on the subject in the last year or two, about what happens after death according to various philosophies/religions, and it's obvious that no one really knows, and anyone who claims to is trying to sell you something.  I find I reject the Christian narrative almost entirely, because all the legalism and sin and punishment and salvation and rewards in heaven nonsense, seems, at best, like convenient social engineering to keep people well-behaved and content to suffer.  In any case, it doesn't make sense to me.

I like the practice of buddhism, and the philosophy because it rings true, but I'm not remotely sold on the supernatural aspects of the buddha.

Islam is right out, although I'm sure it contains some good core principles much like Christianity.

As for the dogmatic materialists, I concede consciousness might be entirely brain-generated, and it's quite possible the perceptions that I have when I'm awake are all there is, and that when the brain dies, all that is me goes with it.  However, I don't have their confidence on the matter.  For a bunch of of self-described skeptics, they sure have some strong beliefs on an afterlife nobody really has any evidence for.  Don't even get me started on the singularity idiots who think immortality as cyborg/computer program is a natural and foreseeable evolution of technology.  That motherboard is not your mother.  It might be a good idea to wait on predictions of consciousness transfer until we have a basic understanding of what consciousness is and the specific mechanisms behind it.

As for the spiritualists, who knows.  Lots of people claim to have seen ghosts (like 38% in the US I heard this week? [citation needed]), lots of people claim to have had near death experiences where they find their consciousness has a non-physical aspect that detaches from the body and continues after their body dies, but no one has much in the way of proof on any of that.  I am sure many of them are making it up, or didn't see what they thought they saw, and I suspect some of them may be relating truthful experiences, but how truthful I don't know.  The "beings" they tend to talk to frequently mention there's only so much they can say, because we aren't meant to know if there's anything beyond, or what it might be.  So whether ghosts or NDE's have much to tell us about a possible afterlife I don't know, but I haven't seen a reason to rule them out entirely, nor have I seen a reason to start conducting seances in order to start a rich exchange of ideas with the spirit world.

What came out of my reading on ghosts and out-of-body experiences though, was an introduction to theosophy, which was an idea fashionable in the spiritist heyday of the late 1800s.  Which, unless I am mistaken, is the idea that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, and we are all old souls, who have been reincarnating through a series of increasingly complicated organisms in some kind of cosmic search for "enlightenment" whatever that may be.  And once we've reincarnated as a human a few times on this planet and learned whatever it is we needed to learn here, we move on through a succession of ethereal realms until ... oneness?  Transcendence?  Some new bullshit?  I don't really believe this either, but I must admit, I kind of like the idea.  It appeals to my particular sensibilities.

In short, I haven't figured out what happens after I die, and I live in a society which is not particularly good at helping their fellow sentients cope with their own mortality, so the fat lot of good the rest of you have been to me on this one.  The materialists might be right, but "Be a man and walk into nothingness with your head held high." is not a particularly helpful advice on coping with the problem emtionally.  And I have a pretty low patience for people who claim to know all about what happens at the end of all things, but can offer me precisely nothing in terms of proof.  Just reassurances and tradition and hand-waving meant to soothe and co-opt me.

I think I feel into the trap of thinking that I was somehow removed from nature, either through technology or Jesus or some other specialness.  But the truth is, we follow the same pattern as every other thing that lives on this planet.  We're born, we're cute as a button as children, obnoxious, violent and sexy as we bloom and reproduce, and then we fade, clawing and screaming or with our hands in the air enjoying the ride, until the matter that makes us finally breaks down and returns to the earth.  I still hate the idea that I'm not special enough to live forever, but when I think of it that way, as a natural part of life that we are all designed for, it's not quite so bad.

As for potential afterlives, that is an unknown that will be known (or not!) once I'm dead, but do I HAVE to know for sure what lies beyond before I get there?  Probably not, although I'd like to.  It's just as well, I guess.  The universe seems to be playing that one pretty close to the vest.

So I don't know, and you don't know, and maybe we're not meant to know, and maybe we just can't know by definition.  But, as a life skill, we have to cope with the fact that none of us seems to get out of here alive, and I am working on that.  But I hate it.  I hate that I have to die, and I hate that you have to die, and I that everyone's so shitty about it one way or another and that nobody really likes to talk about it.  And I hate that while I know rationally that I'm not so special as to deserve eternal ongoingness, emotionally I'm the center of the goddamn universe, and the tension between those two sides of me is hard to navigate most days.  And the more I think about it, the more I realize that it's not dying I fear so much, as dying with the things I want to to still undone.  Dying, I can't do so much about.  But things still undone?  I have some power there.  Although I suspect it will require more of me than laying here quietly on this metaphorical existential river bank, impotently shaking my fin at the world.

I'm gonna die, and I'd better get off my ass soon if I want to get some things done.  Well shit.  That's not something a fish likes to hear.