Some Woo Shit

 I've been reading a lot of near death experiences and death bed visions and I'm trying to put together what  the common elements might imply. It's more of a thought experiment than an earnest belief for me, but given that there ARE common elements, I'm curious as to what cohesive picture they might paint, if any. This kind of thing may not be your jam, I understand.

some of the common elements to near death experiences are:

• someone familiar on hand to greet you
• a sense of floating outside the body, then into a tunnel, then into a light
• 360 vision
• the sense that the spirit body is a "bubble" of some sort, but can change shape
• the ability to travel to a place instantly just by thinking
• a non-judgemental life review where actions and impacts are discussed and acknowledged
• meeting a higher being who is in a sense the personification of everything, "the light" (god or something like them)
• instant transmissions of knowledge
• the implication that souls reincarnate over and over to learn how to be better, kinder
• some kind of eternal elsewhere where all souls from all places (including other than earth) spend time relaxing in between incarnations. A Good Place, if you will.
• the specific claims that ALL souls eventually rejoin the light, no matter how evil on earth, it's just the life review for them is a longer, more painful process. but ultimately all souls acknowledge and regret negative behaviors and rejoin the light.
• being given a choice as to stay or go back
• a lot of the NDE experiencers report being told to go back and relay this information to kind of help people chill out (possibly the most interesting element to me).
• many years later the experience is vividly remembered and felt "realer than real"

While, there are frequently discrepancies on how these details are presented, usually seem to match cultural expectations, the broad strokes are remarkably common. Let's assume for the sake of argument that those discrepancies are more just user-specific skins to ease the newly departed back into their spirit forms and that these are to some degree real experiences that give some hints to the structure of the afterlife or a bigger context for the sould. That said, the first things that always jump out at me are

1) Gosh, the afterlife bureaucracy sure makes a lot of mistakes. Why do people keep showing up before their time? Perhaps it is less a screw-up and more that being that close to death thins the walls between world?. Or that being that when your immediate survival is unclear, it can provide the opportunity for the spirit to wander until the matter is decided. idk, but I find it amusing there are so many apparent clerical errors.

2) If the whole point is to forget the spirit world during your time on Earth so you can evolve, why are they sending people back telling them to tell everyone about the afterlife?  Doesn't it defeat the purpose to some degree? the entire point of any of it still seems unclear, so maybe the knowledge that there might be some greater context here is just meant to take the edge off of mortal life, so to speak. Idk, but it strikes me as strange.

I guess it just overall leaves me thinking, to what end? What does it matter that souls incarnate and experience and evolve over an eternity? Perhaps we are bits of a larger consciousness sent out to explore and report back, for the simple joy of exploration or purposes unknown. 

And also, do I find this idea more or less appealing than your traditional Judeo-Christian heaven/hell or the more materialist emergent consciousness that only exists so long as this body does? I don't mind the materialist version, although I don't find it inspiring. If there's truly nothing after we die, it won't bother me much because I won't be around to feel anything about not being around to feel anything. I have long since abandoned the adventist/christian idea of heaven and hell just because it's both too contradictory and too punitive and far too obviously a means of controlling behavior via fear.

I will say the idea that the idea that all souls are eventually reformed and forgiven and return to the whole, if only because that was the only version of god I could see being worth following when I was growing up. In adventism there was this idea of pure grace wrapped up in contradictory thorns, and I always thought some part of the idea of grace made sense to me, at the very least as an aspirational way to try to live. It was just all the other bunk about how a person had to be based on the body they were born with that they kept trying to staple on to it that turned me off.

I guess my worry is that this would all be too boring? Maybe eternity even from this point of view would eventually lose its charms. Maybe the challenge of adversity is why souls choose to incarnate over and over?

What I kind of like about the idea is if it were true, there would not be an extraordinary impact on day to day life. Okay, so there's an afterlife, where we'll get a hug and cleaned up and some time in the rec room before we're sent back again. What of it? True, there's little incentive to be "good" per se in that story but there's also little incentive to be bad. Being bad increases our own suffering for no good reason and being good is its own reward. Weirdly, I find it more motivational than any afterlife structure I've seen so far. It answer the existential Purpose question: learn, grow, be kind. And also the mortality fear: don't worry too much about dying, this ain't your first rodeo and it won't be your last. 

Maybe the particular purpose where humanity is concerned is that it is simply to see how long it takes a species of excitable primates with some modest reasoning skills to figure out how to chill the fuck out and not trash their own ecosystem. And some higher entity will simply rate and sort us appropriately ("figured it out faster than the giant slugs of the delphic expanse, but slower than the cetaceans of Zebulon 3. B-.")

Ultimately, as with all thoughts about the afterlife, I always come back to this: it kind of doesn't matter! Not that life is without meaning, but the afterlife will take care of itself. If we go into the light, that's what happens, and we're on to our next adventure. If there's nothing, I won't care! I'll be nothing! All that I really know is, afterlives aside, I'll only be in this body in this place in this time this once, so I should make use of what time I have while I am here.

So, do what exactly? I can think of worse starting points than: learn, grow, be kind, and worry less about dying than making sure I have as few regrets as possible when I do. Don't spend too much time worrying over the afterlife, when you have other things to work on. The afterlife will take care of itself one way or another. 

Seems pretty reasonable to me.

The Goodish Place

 I finally managed to finish the Good Place, rewatching the entire series up to where I stopped in season 4. the first two seasons are great, but it goes downhill after that and the last couple episodes were actively annoying to the point where it knocks an entire point off the star rating for me. I love the cast, I love the premise, I love the production values and set design, I just wish they had stuck the landing.

What made the show so exciting was this sense that it had something to say, that it was exploring all these philosophical ideas and was eventually going to land somewhere cohesive and interesting. I'm not sure why I expected a TV show to do what no living philosopher has ever been able to do (answer their own questions satisfactorily), but I am not a philosophy guy, so what do I know?

The culmination of all this talk about ethics and meaning was, frankly, distressing to me. The most perfect afterlife they can think of is one where you get to do everything you've ever wanted and then kill yourself once you're bored. that for a human being, suicide is the answer to eternity. It would be one thing if the show had been largely focused on eastern philosophy for the duration and this was what it built to, but it was very much focused on western and judeo-christian concepts of sin and punishment/reward which it then kind of awkwardly sidles away from, or at the very least coyly refuses to elaborate on. What I'm trying to say is they built a playful and fun but woefully shallow concept of the soul and the afterlife and it was a shaky platform to launch into discussions of meaning and purpose from.

Ultimately, I think they looked at eternity and blinked and chickened out. One question they probably should have answered to provide some context and foundation for any thoughts about meaning they were trying to convey, was why any of it was happening. Why was there an afterlife at all? Who made all the janets? Why were the demons/angels/functionaries of the afterlife at all concerned about whether humans were good or bad? Why are demons suited to eternity but a human being isn't?  Why not have human souls expand and grow in complexity much like Derek in this eternity? maybe they become afterlife functionaries too? the show was so desperate to avoid any hint of religion that they failed to define some important terms to put the events of the show in any sort of context, even though something like a higher power that IS concerned about all these things is frequently implied. But the show frustratingly never answers the question of what its all for. Obviously the writers of a TV show can't solve the meaning of life for us, but in the context of the show, it probably would have helped if the writers would have actually committed to the setting by eventually adding some crucial details. So in a sense, I understand the ending. If I were in an afterlife that poorly thought out, I can understand why people would want a way out. 

Personally, I think it would have all worked better if they'd worked reincarnation into it somehow. The idea that you die and your soul just lingers for not real reason is not too appealing, instead of the tests in the middle place, why not have them reincarnate over and over with some vague sense of previous lives and lessons learned and frame it around that? Instead of an eternity of perfect ease, a long series of lives on earth, with all the ups and downs that come with that? Remembering everything only in between incarnations? I guess my point is, they had a lot of options, and they chose a shrug, and  yet another meditation on mortality that boils down to "death is the only thing that gives life meaning."

Even that strikes me as posturing though. "death is the only thing that gives life meaning" is more something we say to ourselves to cope with knowledge of our own mortality. I don't see how mortality imparts meaning, although I do see how it imparts urgency to the proceedings. We are not living in forever so we'd best get to it. I think if we had the capacity to live to 400 years old in good health and vitality we wouldn't be thinking, "ah, if only I had died 300 years ago to give this all some meaning." Meaning comes from all kinds of things. It may be true that for creatures with our brains and our bodies as they are now that we would handle certain kinds of eternities poorly, but I'm not sure it stands to reason that any long-term extension of consciousness would lead to boredom and madness. I can imagine an enduring body and an infinite universe providing quite a bit of entertainment, frankly. Which brings up another question, why in all of eternity did they never leave earth? Again, the vision here is weirdly limited.

Beyond that, we should probably also be careful to distinguish between the natural ennui of age and the value-added ennui of stressful world we've created for each other. We're all very tired, I understand, but we've also created a very narrow and stressful range of options for living that are difficult to cope with (in the name of religion or economics or good old fashioned bigotry). We might think more kindly of eternity if we didn't exhaust each other so much as a matter of principle.

But I do go on. Suffice to say, while I thought the first two seasons were really good, ultimately the show kind of chickens out and goes up its own navel into nothing in the grand tradition of philosophy. Glad I watched it, but ultimately disappointing. Alas. 

the bucket list

 The thing that strikes me after every one of my existential anxiety episodes is less the fear of dying, which remains, but more dying like this, as the person I am with the life I have. Not to put myself down, per se, but I don't enjoy my life even though I recognize it as the steady accumulation of conscious choices. I'm kind of a loser I think? Which is not to hate myself and not to say that I am somehow intrinsically unworthy of love, but I have no social life. I haven't had a date in a few years, I haven't had sex in eight years, and I have no prospects. After 12 years in Portland I have no close network of friends, no community I value and feel valued by. No greater purpose than to avoid suffering by creating the world's biggest personal space bubble. This is not the ideal I pictured for myself when I was younger. I wanted space from everyone and I got it. What a terrible thing to get what you've always wanted. I just think it would be embarrassing to die having figured this little of life out is all. 

A major part of the issue is I have no idea what I want out of life or who I want to be in the world. All I know is I have a deep distaste of american society and kind of general weariness with how selfish and shallow people tend to be. Hard to connect with people with such a sour, disconnected attitude.

So in the interests getting over myself and having some conscious thoughts about what I want, here is a non-exhaustive list of things I would feel bad about not accomplishing or finding before I kick the bucket:

• a community I value where I am valued, a sense of belonging somewhere on this planet
• a sense of purpose
• a successful and meaningful long-term romantic relationship
• learning a second language well enough to read fiction in it
• Learning piano well enough to cover some of my favorite songs (my favorite songs are not complicated)
• a small house/cabin with a porch (requires getting more serious about making money, blech)
• actually getting in shape, just to feel better about being in this body
• making a lot more time for reading
• actually try to write
• actually try to paint
• extended trip to Norway
• finding that pool with the waterfall
• finding a way to exist without this quiet sense of existential panic at all times

I don't know, I am not living in forever any more than anyone else is. Might be useful to live like I believe that and get out of my own way. It's vaguely embarrassing to admit this basic shit is what my life is missing, but hard to fix a problem I studiously avoid noticing, you know?

serenity now

 It's weird to be home, as it is always weird to be home after leaving adventism. My reaction is usually just to shut down and get through it and this extra medical stuff with my mom (she's recovering well so far) provokes a baseline anxiety level which also shuts me down, so I guess the net effect is I am doing the necessary to help my mom and stay positive and otherwise my mind is just anxiety static white noise.

Which is unfortunate, because living in neutral with a smooth brain broadcasting static has been the solution to my problems, a tactic that has not worked out well for me. To fully mix the metaphor, I left Adventism's orbit and shot out into space, apparently hoping I'd fall within the gravitational pull of another belief system or identity in another million years or so, without doing a quick double-check on the average human lifespan.

So here i am, dealing with very real shit, completely unprepared, having made a point of not preparing myself for anything the last couple decades realizing that maybe this is why people end up finding communities and partners so that they have someone's hand to squeeze when things get scarier.

The adventist community is and is not my community. I will always understand it, it will always be a part of me, but I don't share the belief system and feel an active urge to run when the convo turns religious (for a wide variety of very good reasons), so even here I am mostly facilitating my mom's community as they reach out to help or support her, but I am not directly participating myself. I am skimming the top of the adventist bubble, helping where i can. 

And the only person really appropriate to talk to about a lot of this would be a partner, which I don't have and have not even tried to have for the greater part of a decade, and i have slowly withdrawn from a lot of my social circles, catastrophically so during covid, and as it turns out I need my space but I don't need or like to be in another solar system.* 

Anyway, I need to change if I don't want it to be this way any time shit gets real. I don't like this society much but I need to find some kind of identity and purpose regardless, and hopefully a community, and hopefully a partner (or, less likely but still within the realm of possibility) partners. 

When I was younger and on the smart kid track I thought I was destined for great things, but frankly I'm not sure great things are something I'm ever going to be interested in doing. As I get older, the simple life seems more than fine and I realize, very much to my surprise, that really what I care about is being part of a community where I feel comfortable and where I belong, and the real issue here is I just haven't found that yet. And while I do have good friends whom I love dearly, modern day life has scattered us to the four winds and I don't think my "hey, let's all live on a commune" pitch is going to go over too well.

Meanwhile, I am sitting here thinking while my mother naps and recovers from her surgery and I realize I need to do more but all I hear is this anxiety static. So I tell myself I can't really do anything about it at the moment, (I am not really going out too much to reduce potential disease vectoring for a post-op patient), but hasn't that been what I've been telling myself for 8 years? I give myself too many excuses for doing a lot more nothing.

Anyway, my brain is static, but what I AM doing is getting on the exercise bike in the garage and some basic exercises (it's far too hot to go outside much) and slowly cranking back the sleep schedule. I have come to the truly regrettable conclusion that if I start exercising I will probably think and feel better. Although, I am still prone to staying up late as a way of avoiding adventism I am finding, so that's a work in progress.

Anyway, something's stirring. This sucks, and I don't like what I made of my life or myself, but it's nothing anyone else can change. I keep hoping I'll have some kind of epiphany that clears away the static, but I don't think it works like that. the culmination of a series of choices is only going to be corrected by a series of different choices.

I think I'm just going to try and keep writing until either there's less static or the ideas get more coherent. So, you know, business as usual for this blog.** I'm sorry and you're welcome.

*I think we're up to four half-assed metaphors.

** should all this be done in an offline journal? Probably!

An unbiased chronicle of complicated matters

In the beginning, God hovered over the surface of the water. Well, not THE beginning, if you want to get all technical about it. For quite some time matter had been spinning, orbiting, condensing, expanding, and shooting truly offensive nocturnal emissions of noise and light into the void where anyone could see it. Except there wasn't anyone to see it, it just kind of happened and that was that. It had begun, but so what?

After several billion years of this, the measurement of one orbit of one planet of one star out of countless gazillions, something peered in from just outside space, with curious and envious eyes. Had a being been there and attuned to the right wavelengths and vibrations and other woo woo bullshit, they might have seen the Breach. The sense of something nearby but infinitely far away suddenly pressed up against the universal membrane and then something like a tiny pink tentacle poking through above one planet orbiting one star in one galaxy.

Had this neutral observer continued to look, they would have seen it rapidly expand downward until it hovered just over the face of the water. Ever so gently drifting down into this filthy amino soup until contact was made and something was imparted. Exchanged. Tiny tendrils of life seeping outwards from the God appendage, until eventually oceans were covered in a luminous net of information streaming back and forth to and from the Great Tentacle in the Sky.

Matter, caught in this net of foreign influence, began to jiggle and wiggle and recombine and interact in increasingly  complicated and filthy ways, which led to more matter and more complicated matter and quickly spiraled well beyond the limits of good taste and sportsmanship. But they did and so they could and they could and so they did and the web of of tendrils connecting matter to the God Appendage, which  someone with an obsessive need to label everything might call "the Web of Life",  effortlessly kept pace, spinning from one to two and from two to more and then later to a whole hell of a lot more. And while there wasn't anything resembling thought happening the general vibe was that what happened in the primordial ocean STAYED in the primordial ocean, except for the bits the Great Tentacle sucked greedily in into the Breach.

Of course, it wasn't all fun and games. The wiggling would eventually stop and the information the tendril would withdraw and return to the network that fed the Great Tentacle, returning what had passed down back up the chain, back through the Breach and outside of what would eventually come to be known as spacetime. But matter wiggled against matter, creating more matter, and they all got a bit fatter and the party wiggled on.

As matter found new shapes to wiggle into it gained a impression, and then over quite a long time a sense, a sort of general vibe, an awareness, and eventually what you might finally call a sort of consciousness, at least sometimes. Kinda. I guess. 

As luck would have it, over the same period of time it had refined the wiggling appendages through trial and error, first as tendrils in homage to the Great Web and then fins, and flippers, and so on. In a truly shocking coincidence, the first bit of complicated matter, a creature you might say, to develop legs also happened to be the first to develop a sense of shame.

Disgusted with the absolutely depraved nature of life in those swinging seas, the first creature took its first tentative steps on land. Unfortunately, it had not had the good sense to develop lungs first, so back into those wretched waves it went. But still the proof of concept was sound, and eventually the wet little hedonists wiggled onto the rocks and sand, late to the party more sedate forms of life with a stronger sense of propriety had started several millennia earlier. It didn't matter, a party's a party.

And so the tendrils of the Great Tentacle in the Sky covered the earth, sending increasingly complicated and steady streams of information to and from the Breach. A vast consciousness had enmeshed itself in an active but sterile universe and established a beachhead. And it was good. If you were the kind of pervert who was into that kind of thing.

Crunch, Crunch, Crunch

 One of my earliest memories is mortal terror. Lying in my bed, in the dark, in Phoenix, Arizona, listening to the thump, thump, thump of my pulse as my ear lay against my pillow. It came with a clear mental image or a feeling of walking in the dark in the snow. Each pulse beat a crunch, crunch, crunch as I walked.  I couldn't bear to hear it.

This must have been shortly after I learned about mortality because I was consumed with anxiety to listen to it (and if I am being honest, other nights since). This was me, this was my life, this fragile thing, this crunch, crunch, crunch through the snow, alone in the dark, walking towards nothing. That big nothing.

I called for my mother, who assured me it would be a long time from now and prayed with me, as good mothers do.

Five nights ago, I hugged my mother good night and told her I loved her and felt her sob quietly, in mortal terror of surgery the next day. And I have every night since sat with her in the ICU, as she faces her own walk through the snow.

I don't know what we walk towards, but we don't walk alone.

Goblin Mode

 I broke up with my last boyfriend 7ish* years ago, and then kind of gave up. let's just take it as a given that I should have been in therapy most of that time even though I've been too cheap to actually pay for it. that wasn't his fault, it's just a choice I made. I decided I could spare a month of "Goblin Mode" as the kids are calling it, and 84 months later am starting to think this wasn't a good life choice. Beware Goblin Mode kids, apathy has its own stubborn momentum.

I can make few claims to time well spent. Spending time well is not the true spirit of Goblin Mode. And I've gotten the exactly the kind of life I would expect after investing nothing in it. And yet, for some mysterious reason, I feel unsatisfied. Strange.

I do not know myself, and so I do not know where or who I fit with. It's as simple as that, I think. Don't know what I'm running from, don't know what I'm running towards. Which is how you end up running in circles. Goblin mode!

*Maybe eight? Idk, time has no meaning anymore.