Iamwhomiam wrote:Ah! and there's the rub, There is no everlasting life in this world, in your physical body; we all die. This there is no escape from; it is reality. Indeed, we begin swirling round and round as soon as we're born. It is called life, the swirl. And everyone's is different, and yet the same. And we each try our best steer our boat to the calmest eddies and yet we all meet the same end.
There
is everlasting life. It's called descent. We are the pinpoint extreme in a long, long chain of everlasting (so far) life. The end of life is so far in the future as to not exist. Individually, we all die, we all get sucked into the vortex. In the meantime, it is a longstanding and honorable tradition to want to ride the swirl for as long as possible, to have fun doing it, to avoid being painfully and prematurely eaten by sharks, and to help others do the same.
Perhaps it may be time to contemplate your own death? or that of a very close loved one. We can pretend "it's forever," but really, we all know it's not. Some seem to feel my words negative, a poor, fatalist attitude. Fatalist, yes, but not negative. Hope can, as Wombat said, have a very real effect.
Unnecessarily fatalist is one thing, necessarily another!
As for contemplating death, how about this thing that I wrote the other night but could not bring myself to post, just in case posting it would somehow trigger madness in others or worse, trigger the falling away of the delusion if it is one, puncture this precious spell, if it is one. My apologies in advance if this world really is a purgatorial matrix and reading this ruins the fun, lol:
Those of you who followed the TV show Lost will get this, and those of you who didn't but intend to catch up on it someday, BEWARE: MAJOR SPOILER ALERT. Seriously, stop reading if you somehow had evaded all spoilers up until now and don't want the show ruined. Also, I'm about to swear a lot. At God. Fair warning.
Okay? Okay.
You know how the finale revealed that the last season had all been only a dream world purgatory where all the passengers who had died and ever were to die were living dream lives until they were ready to realize and accept that they were, in fact, dead? And then rejoice in now being able to be with all their buddies and loved ones again, in a fucking church, before walking together into the light of pure heavenly transcendence? Or some such facile, schmaltzy bullshit? Which ruined the entire season and, depending on how one interprets the preceding seasons, which ruined the entire show?
Well, just for the record: In the infinitesimally unlikely event that this world, ours, here, now, is just such a dream world purgatory that some almighty deity or divine universal principle has provided for us in preparation for an awakening to our own already-deadness and a grand finale of tranquil fuzzy ghost hugs and one last walk together into the blinding light of everlasting peace, I just want to say in advance to whatever God or gods would have designed such a world exactly what so many communicated to J.J. Abrams in the aftermath of the show's finale: "Fuck you for wasting our time, this fucking sucks, LAME, I want all that time back, you completely fucked over your audience, you suck as an auteur, what a stupid fucking ending to a great show, this makes everything that happened before utterly pointless, are you seriously this unimaginative, you're a fraud, and lastly, LAME."
Thankfully, the chance of our entire world being such a super-fucking-lame "it was all a dream" trope is probably even less than infinitesimal. I mean, in what kind of morphic purgatory would we fart, or sit for hours watching Downton Abbey, or need to rescue horrifically-abused dogs, or repeatedly misspell words like "referral" and "contractor"? Descartes forestalled and disproved all-consuming solipsism by reminding himself that he was continuously thinking. Simple enough, it did the trick. Well, here is as valid a proof to disprove the notion, should one ever for any unknown reason fear succumbing to it, that this world is just a complex, hokey afterlife haphazardly pulled from the ass of an artistically-challenged God: "We fart, and it stinks, therefore we are not already dead and residing in God's bad idea of an afterlife." There, that should take care of that pesky, non-existent fear. You're welcome!
I have contemplated death in the more usual ways, too.
Had loved ones die, though not unnaturally, thankfully, so far.
I both fear and accept death, every waking hour.
To repeat,
Personally, Hope is like having a sail to lead you away from troubled waters and useful to help calm one's mind, as long as you ignore you're caught in a whirlpool.
4thB, "If I'm trapped in a whirlpool, my chances of figuring a way out of it are better if I have some hope it is possible. If I sit on the bow of my boat with supreme unjudgmental acceptance, then I have absolutely zero chance of not drowning. "
Thing is, 4B, ya just can't get out of dyin'. As I said, "Much better to project (hope for) a wonderful future."
And as far your second sentence, I think sitting nonjudgementally on the bow of the boat (life) and letting it take you where it will is about as Zen as one could get and I highly recommend that approach to life and death.
I don't recommend the opposite. But I do recommend a healthy balance.
Try to win every game, make the playoffs every season, even if you are down by 100 runs or 1000 games. Have fun during every at-bat, every pitch. Throw a tantrum at the umpire every now and then. Curse the fucking Yankees and try to outmaneuver them, every year. If the last inning of the last game sends you home, then oh well, it was fun. And there's always next year, the next life! On the other hand, on the bright side, sometimes this metaphorically happens:
"Or just be here now, without expectations, taking each day for it's own, without judgment."Some people spend their life hoping it will be somehow different if only they hope hard enough and others just live without such aspirations or regrets.
Everyone has been bounced around by life, even those whose were once thought well planned out.
I would never discourage anyone from their hoping, considering of course, they were hoping for something I agreed with morally. Hope serves its purpose for those who find it helpful to hope.
To me though, it is fairy empty of any true meaning, much like "sorry."
Bless you, General Patton.
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Fair enough.
