Hey, when you're as churchless and unreligious as I am, you take your revelations in any form they might appear.
Today I was driving around, aimlessly switching channels on satellite radio, trying to decide whether listening to news stations or the music of Chill was better for my non-soul.
CNN was still heavy into its obsessive coverage of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane. For a while I tuned into a discussion of the effort to locate the plane's black box device by picking up its battery-powered "pings."
An expert said something along the lines of, "The batteries should last 30 to 45 days. Before they go dead, though, the power of the batteries will begin to fade, making it more difficult to locate the plane."
At that moment something weirdly clicked in my brain. Maybe I had a mini-satori. A Zennish micro taste of enlightenment.
I felt like I was those black box batteries. Or they were me.
I'm running down also. We all are. Everything alive is on a steady downward trajectory that leads to a touchdown on the runway of death. Crash-landing might be a better analogy.
For a few seconds I was at peace. With myself. With the world. WIth life. With death. It was like a weight had lifted off of my psyche. The weight of feeling that I was a separate conscious free-willing entity.
I realized that the batteries powering the black box are simply running down. Deep in the ocean they aren't going through a Woody Allen neurotic anxiety attack. "Oh, no, we're going to die!"
One instant they will be emitting their pings. The next instant they won't be.
No one will mourn the batteries. They did what they were supposed to do for as long as they could. Then they became something else: dead batteries.
If this little tale of mine leaves you with a what the f__k ? feeling, I totally understand. As the saying goes, you had to be there. In my mind. As my mind.
It was just a pleasant insight into... something or other.
Yeah but the batteries' souls will move into other lifeforms depending on whether they collected good karmas or bad karmas in this lifetime. Also, from one perspective, it doesn't really matter as their souls are eternal anyways, the only decision is whether they want to stay in the lower loser realms of suffering and hardship or simply do the homework/meditation and wake up to the higher realms of existence where only peace, love, joy and happiness doth existeth.
Posted by: ThatThingThatYouDo | April 10, 2014 at 03:01 PM
“Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.'
'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit.
'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.'
'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?'
'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”
― Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit
Posted by: june schlebusch | April 13, 2014 at 03:57 AM
First of all, thank you for your blog. I stumbled upon it after researching detective's comments about religion from the show "True detectives". And I am reading it now and I am enjoying myself greatly.
I came to the liberating understanding of no God and no religion through physicist Vic Stenger and ex-priest Blase Bonpane. I find it comforting to be on my own in this world (without supernatural power of God).
However I still have struggles in my life (which are not related to whether there is God or not). And my struggles are completely emotional in nature.
When Ive read this post, I kept thinking about how much I hate 1/3 of my day that I get to spend with my son after I pick him up after school. I find myself overpowered by the emotions telling me that I should be doing something better with my life at the moment. And although like you said, that something could be equally important or unimportant, I could be sitting on a couch watching TV or picking my nose all by myself.
I just can't think of myself spending time with my son as something important. There is absolutely no satisfaction in it. I feel more content doing nothing by myself. Rather than doing something with him.
But I understand, that my view doesn't contradict your post. And rationally, I agree that what I do in the evening with my son is as important as any other alternative.
Can I ask you to comment on that, if you might have any insight and if somehow sounds familiar to you. Ideally, maybe you could offer me some solution to being more contious more often, although thats what I inherently have been doing by understanding life through science and reading your blog, for instance.
Maybe my post can inspire you with another cosmic insight.
Posted by: Ania | June 13, 2014 at 02:41 PM