"Care not whether you are cold or warm, if you are doing your duty; or whether you are weary or satisfied with sleep; or whether ill-spoken of or praised, or whether dying or doing anything else; for dying is one of the acts of life; it is enough in this act also to do well what there is to do."
Theory #1: Mind Rebirth, Part 3
Couscous: CB, how your words creep into my mind and finger my id, displacing it like an inquisitive tot might attempt a game of jenga. If we continue to understand one another on such a substratal level as that of the human language then hope springs eternal. No? I think I may have expressed myself incorrectly, for I hasten to add that I do not view the consciousness as ‘ethereal’; that holistic spiritual nonsense just doesn’t take. What I mean to say is that I can not fathom for one second how our world can run solely on the stream of consciousness which currently inhabits it.
The seductive nature of these words: ‘And our very matter will seep into the Earth, and what we once were will become things, perceptions, that we can never conceive of.’ Yes! This is true. For the individuality of this new minds, their ‘byproducts’, will overturn the dregs of the half-fulfilled ideation of our forefathers.
But I don’t view this as progress. I feel it belabours our entire evolution.
Old minds perish with their carriers to make way for new ones, and all the while all we can bequeath is all we can physically/verbally externalise (Our consciousness being neither)? Can you say ‘major setback’? With our knowledge acquistion rate rivalling that of deinococcus radiodurans growth, wouldn’t you say that’s possibly the worst inevitable travesty? The naughtiest universal jape yet?
It’s like having a piece of memory smart alloy, admiring its formidable molecular structure, then shoving it over a burning stove until it all but forgets it. This earth is our burning stove CB, and it’s only until recently I have known that awesome, flagitious smirk to befall me.
Sidenote: it’s ultimately our humanity, our emotional attachment, our various hormone secretions if you like, which will be the cause for the decline of our race. Ha. How’s that for a Catch-22? I often allow my mind to stray along these regions of incompletion. Kinda like sustenance: ‘God is absence. God is the solitude of man.’ Sartre himself wrote these very words, and I find myself wondering whether you see the satire in them now. Fear of mortality is rendered irrelevant, like you say.
But I believe it is so because our minds and those minds before us never really go away. I’m not talking ‘globular structures’, I could be talking about reservoirs, pools, the drainage system behind my toilet bowl. Fuck, why rule out the insane?
I don’t want to join the despairing nihilists in their corner, bumping into walls, saying ‘woah, that’s a wall… guess we should turn around now.’ … Alas, I dare not take up ignorance as a philosophy though it’d be a day at the beach compared to this, how you so eloquently put it, ‘buttfuckery’… Hmmm yes, and those who consider it one are possibly the most ignorant that shall ever live (Heller’s taking his toll on me).
That’s as much as I dare to pontificate, anybody else with a normal constitution would just back the fuck off and let it be. And there be a small ache of hurt when one considers the true magnitude of these existential crises that dawn. I yearn that one day a meeting of the minds will conflate these nuggets of phenomena, the knowledge we’ll never collectively share on Earth, in silent appreciation of the ant hill that once housed them.
What we feel isn’t important, what we feel is utterly unimportant.
Theory #1: Mind Rebirth, Part 2
Cabana Boy: Couscous, I salute the rather schizophrenic consistency of your arguments. You confuse me; you throw the occasional effulgent phrase around that I understand, like “Are our minds in fact a manifestation of the universe itself?” - which I comprehend and agree with, but I can’t tell how to build on it, because you throw me this gibberish of “globular structures”. I got a tickle of joy from your transducer metaphor; like the universe being filled with all these fields of god knows what, and then we’re just these tiny little lumps vibrating and resonating at our own little frequency.
But my dear, I find it confusing that you share my viewpoint and yet treat the consciousness, however metaphorically, as this little sheet of silk that can fly around like Caspar into some massive intergalactic ghost orgy. I do not share your belief that the consciousness is something ethereal, eternal, and indestructible. No, I think it’s simply a byproduct of this strange configuration of atoms life has going on with us humans. But still, my consciousness, baffles me, because I am too stupid to realise anything, to grip onto anything, to deal with my existence, what existence is, and all the other mindfuckery that comes with living in this weird skin.
It’s like I’m this protozoa that’s gone way in over its head, is a little too complex to know how to deal with itself, but my mind is just big enough to see the vague shadow of this vast chasm of whatthefuck that existence presents you with, and far too small to even know where to begin, so my brain just short circuits and zips around and gets confused, like a computer given an insane algorithm it hasn’t the capacity to compute.
And all the while I can see nature smiling a little sadistically, thinking, “silly little ant.” But of course this matriarch doesn’t exist and is just a representation of how buttfucked I feel by the universe sometimes.
It smirks while it buttfucks me, Cous, it smirks.
Onto further paradoxes of agreement: “We are minions of an undetectable force then. Our consciousness recycled into other simple life forms.”
No, we are not minions of an undetectable force. Not showing my strong public speaking side here, but… I can’t think of how to put this. “Force”? I do not believe there is any sort of active higher entity, however superior. Maybe that’s a debate for another time…
Nevertheless, I remember when we went on that long walk, and I babbled on to you about how mortality doesn’t seem scary when one thinks of how one’s atoms, and also fellow people would still be conscious, living NOW, keeping human consciousness going (It was when we were going through that residential hill type place that seems so colourful in retrospect). I felt you vaguely understood me, but now I see we truly have ambled over common ground (yay!) but you have this other spin on it - not surprising, you are another human being after all.
Though we we cannot see it, being restricted to view things through our own eyes only, human consciousness is continuously pulling through time, like a neverending string. So let’s not be too scared of death.
And our very matter will seep into the Earth, and what we once were will become things, perceptions, that we can never conceive of.
Then you bark out these mad words with the conviction of a drill sergeant on the verge of psychosis: “God is the absence of god. God is solitude. God is those croutons that it said on the label were in that salad but that I couldn’t find anywhere.”
And yet they… strip god of its meaning, of the menial skin our ancesters gave it, to reveal this glorious, dazzling muscle underneath; a newborn meaning like a visceral, transcendental epiphany from a breakthrough dose of psychedelics; God is that huge, gleaming abyss exposed when the bucolic fairytales of our forefathers get swept away beneath our feet. And we gawk at it, because inferior lifeforms or not, we see that we are individuals floating around in this…strange continuum…
It is late, I have exhausted my words, and yours have made the interior of my mind look like they’ve been at the mercy of Alex Grey, and a pallette of white, gold, and red.
It’s a nice shade of red. The red of viscera. “Skinned Red”.
PS, We came full circle. Afterbirth, Viscera. Viscera, Afterbirth.
Theory #1: Mind Rebirth, Part 1
Don’t worry, this isn’t anything like afterbirth….
Couscous: The mind never dies. Do you suspect this? Could there be an ongoing cycle of mental consciousness that is not bound by mortality or any other physical prism? To obtain the answer one would need to deconstruct the very strata of the human brain, put a precocious electronic device in the part believed to be the mind thus preserving it, temporarily stop the heart, wait a bit, restart it and in doing so, restart the mind. Would your existing mind still be intact? Or would you have proven that your mind is in fact as fragile and as prone to fatality as the heart and physical self? Would you register your previous mind in your current subconscious? Kinda like a self-buffer letting you, I dunno…not make the same mistakes twice? Like a do-over per se. How freaking awesome would that be! Like yourself watching over yourself! An undying circle of you! Continually improving upon its predecessor!!! This of course can only be relevant if you believe in human regeneration from the ashes of the dead….hey if it worked for Jesus….
Cabana Boy: Consider: when a person dies, at some point their brain activity will cease and that shit will just stop working. Try the whole resurrection thing and you’ll probably just get a vegetable…
I hope I haven’t buttraped this theory. What am I saying - this is an absolute crackpot theory written by a madwoman, but it does sound quite fun. However it doesn’t quite fit how I see things.
We’re just self-replicating molecules that have complexified to a silly extent. Our search for objective truth, or for the true substance of spirituality, is probably a wild goose chase, like getting a bacterium to understand quantum physics. Maybe multiply that rift in mental capacity by 10e77.
Shit man, why do we even try?
Couscous: Probably eh? I never knew you as the kind to settle ;) ITS THE THRILL OF THE CHASE MAN!
Whilst I appreciate that the brain ceases activity postmortem, I speak not of brain death, for that is simply just another human affliction; an uninterrupted way of death as intended. We know the end to that story. The theory in itself remains: MIND DEATH ( I may have been jumping the gun with mind rebirth :P) Are these complexities truly lost? Yeah sure, your brain would by this time be a mess of blood and organ and possibly all the intellect you’ve acquired through life, such as learning a language or indeed quantum physics, obliterated with it.
But your consciousness? How do you kill that off? Is it possible that the ‘interpersonal emotional’ part survives death? And if so, where does it go after it unlatches from its physical bonds? Does is rejoin a globular structure comprised of billions of other minds? Are our minds in fact a manifestation of the universe itself, from which only our physical selves can unlock for a short while? Are we, the human race, mere transducers of an ever growing universal wavelength??? ANTS!!!!! IS THAT ALL WE ARE?? HUH??
We are minions of an undetectable force then. Our consciousness recycled into other simple life forms. Our knowledge lost, our minds reset but our consciousness retained.
Could this substantiate some sort of immortality? Pfftttt who wants to live forever.
God is absence. God is the solitude of man.
"Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!"
howfarwefly
"He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began."
(Source: howfarwefly, via canopyblue)
