Warning–non tech-related, quasi-philosophical, meta-existential, blah blah, so read at your own risk. Subtitled, need to write a technology post so this gets off my home page.
I can’t sleep. I’m kept awake by a series of haunting revelations in the form of what I can only describe as “the right questions” that seem to explain the nature of life and reality in a profound juxtaposition of perfect clarity and haunting mystery.
We all die. All of us must wrestle and come to terms with the fundamental mysteries of reality. Whether you call it philosophy or religion, something needs to click into place inside our brains–a framework on which we can use to reconcile what seems to be the ultimate futility of life itself as the years blow by with such callous speed.
What is life, anyway? Why do we consider the concept of our individual lives to be fundamentally equal to our conscious mind?
We say that a fire dies. Is the life of the fire it’s own existence, or is it more deeply, the consuming of the wood, and the eminence of heat and light? I tremble as I think about it! We clench our consciousness as if it were the essence of life! Somehow we are so afraid to lose it, that if we die, go into the ground, lose our ability to traverse through time, feel, interact, reason–that we DIE. Is that death!? Maybe not!
Our bodies are just husks–sublime, mechanical devices that burn food. So are our brains, our minds, and our consciousnesses, that was born at a period of time, lives through periods of time, and will at a period of time, die. Does the fact that we die at one period of time negate the fact that we are alive at another?! If the nature of our existence transcends time, when the time comes that we die, are we not still alive?! (That is, we are no longer conscious, but our existence has been etched into the fabric of space-time!) Our choices forever impact the universe, and CANNOT BE REVERSED.
We, dead, are a four-dimensional being, a being who’s existence simply IS. Life now is a process of growing that being. Our growth is complete when we die. Then we exist.
When a fire dies, the heat and light it emits exist, and have permanent impact. The life of the flame is not defined essentially by its own self-awareness.
Eternal life–what is it? Jesus defines it as simply, “knowing God”. Does this confuse you?! How can I hear this and not feel the uncanny mystery of this truth at the core of my assumptions about reality? Life, is simply knowing God? This begs a redefinition of the very word, meaning, and nature of life itself.
What is consciousness? Why is it so important to us? Self-awareness, reason, memories. We somehow place our identities in how we feel and what makes us laugh. What gives us the framework to do this? It’s as if a flame would base its value on some obscure properties of its existence rather than the heat and light it emits, is it not!? So we die and are no longer conscious in time. What does it matter?! We say that we “have lived”–can we not say at the moment of death, “I now LIVE”?! I have completed my growth through time, and I now EXIST?! Is not this four-dimensional being of our lives not OUR VERY SOUL?!
I move to separate the seemingly fundamental equality of the terms life, consciousness, identity, and soul.
I move to think of time as it is–equal in dimensional tangibility as height, width and depth. We can only see a slice of time at once with our current faculties, and this limitation is the construct of what we so dearly cling to as “consciousness”.
Our choices are IRREVOCABLE. They have such a profound impact on our identity! If we make a choice yesterday, and it’s a bad one, we shake it off, and say, “well, I’m a new man today”–as if our identity is limited to this slice of time. If every day is a ring that we stack on a post, unique in size and shape, at the end of our lives we will see a sculpture of individual identity.
We are fluid beings, and can only grow and change so much in each slice of time–like a fire rapidly changes shape, but slowly grows from a small flame, to a giant bonfire, to embers, to ashes. We are instructed to daily “renew our minds.” This terminology is just adequate. Every immeasurable slice of time that passes, not only do our thoughts and choices define what we think in the next slice, but they are building and growing what someday will define us as our identity. Our consciousness thereof is questionable as we define consciousness.
I laugh inside when religions define the afterlife so neatly wrapped–”oh, I’ll see them in Heaven”. YOU HAVE NOT A CLUE how you will see, if you will see, what you will see. I’m sure even more today than ever that the book of Revelation is more profound truth than we can attempt to rationally deserialize from the “three-dimensionally-flattened” view of John’s revelations. It’s like flatting a three-dimensional object to a two-dimensional drawing and attempting to examine it’s backside.
Whether you ascribe to a theistic or non-theistic world view, you must come to reconcile life in the contexts of origin, meaning, purpose and destiny. The questions of consciousness, ethics, and what happens after you die simply must be addressed. I say this, because even if you can somehow brush them off now as if you don’t care, you will care sooner or later. I’m not saying all this to proselytize, or to “save you”–this is simply a self-serving act of somehow attempting to articulate the rage inside! Tonight feels like the culmination of years of thought to me, so inadequately expressed, yet, to me, life-defining. Even if you don’t believe in God, think of the wonder of the ability to transcend time and experience the essence of the dimension of time all at once–what it must look like. The timelines of all the men and women of history, their interaction, your life–all visible at once as a sculpture entitled “humankind”.
…And it seems to be the magic number for now. I’ve been using this version for a while and it seems stable and complete enough to actually use f’real. If you don’t know what it is, 
