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Resting In Peace [1]

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Date: 2023-11-22

Back when I was ten years old my older brother joined the army. Shortly afterward I discovered the stash of science fiction paperbacks and magazines he had left behind and I geeked out. I was in adolescent bookworm heaven. I absolutely devoured them. Almost every waking minute of every day I had a book in my hands, reading every chance I could get.

I was in reasonably good health but even a ten year old kid has his limits and sometimes after sitting on the couch reading for hours I would feel dizzy when I stood up. My vision would briefly fade out to sparkles on a grey background for a second or two and then it would clear and I would be fine.

One evening I had been reading a short story about advertisers using subliminal, somewhat hypnotic suggestion to hook customers on their product (cigarettes, I think.) Of course that wasn’t really very futuristic, even then advertisers were working on perfecting those techniques, but anyway that was the plot.

It even had the little spiel they were using written out, something like imagine yourself sitting on an ocean beach, with waves coming in and out, in and out….

Well this evening when it was time for me to get up and go out to do chores I stood up and felt the usual dizziness and sparkles but this time instead of trying to shake it off I thought it would be cool to think my way through that little spiel. “Imagine the waves coming in and going out, coming in and going out.”

The next thing I remember is hearing like bells ringing from far away and then I woke up lying on the floor in the kitchen. My mother said I had taken a couple of steps and had collapsed into the pails filled with water that we had to carry out to the barn to do the evening milking.

Well I made a joke of it and took some ribbing.. I had to go upstairs and change my pants, since I had fallen into the pails, and that was that.

But

I didn’t want to come back. I absolutely didn’t want to come back. I was mad that I had returned to my normal life and the everyday junk that goes with it. If i had had any choice I would have gladly abandoned it all, even if it had made my parents and siblings grieve. Their feelings simply did not enter into the equation at all.

I was nowhere near an especially happy child but I was pretty normal at that stage. I had absolutely no death wish. I mean, who even thought of stuff like that? Life was just there and I assumed it was going to go on for the indefinite future. And that was okay. Except this one time.

I did not want to come back.

This was nowhere near a near death experience. I just passed out. And I remember absolutely nothing between the time when I was dizzy and the time I woke up on the floor. So why was it so hard to come back?

This is along leadup to the topic and I apologize for so much personal stuff. But as my health has been fading I have inevitably been thinking of death and stuff. Not morbidly, just as part of the process of being old.

I find it interesting that much common culture speaks of ghosts and haunting, continuing survival of the individual, as a bad thing. Most exorcism of haunting, surviving spirit personalities is based n the idea of laying the ghost or making it ‘move on’ or be at peace, to go away.

Logically, if a loved one survives death shouldn’t we be celebrating that fact and trying to help the ghost re-establish itself among friends and loved ones? Why is a ghost considered to be trapped in an inferior state? Why do we try so hard to make them go away or cease to exist?

As I get older I also find myself filled with memories of my life, important and big stuff but also an enormous mountain of trivia. Do you know I can still sing the Wyatt Earp theme song? Or advertising slogans from the fifties? Or dumb fights I had with kids in grade school? I mean, boring boring boring stuff.

The idea of the continuation of personality, this personality, and living as a spirit forever or even just another hundred years with all this crud floating through my mind is not pleasant. To exist with this sense of self and its flaws, memories, and interests is not appealing at all.

Of course the materialistic atheist would say that we don’t exist a moment past the death of the body and that may well be right. There are certainly worse alternatives than total non-being. In fact that is pretty much what I am saying. Non-being was cool.

But… some mystic meditation exercises are based on the idea of subtracting as much as possible everything we are experiencing- sight, hearing, touch, body sensations, thoughts, emotions, to achieve an awareness which is the absence of everything we normally consider to be ourselves. And ultimately nothing is left but… something is left, and it is desirable.

I am struggling with this idea that there is a sort of background field to the universe, that the various energies, particles, and whatever interacting in space have a basic awareness of their environment that makes it possible for them to interact (an electron has some sense of the other particles surround it so that it can react to them) and that this awareness (I will not say mind or consciousness) is the real Self.

Or, at the worst, that non-being is a pretty cool state.

Just some things I have been thinking on.

I will just ad that I was bullied badly as a child and I have my own form of PTSD. I do not handle conflict well so forgive me if I will just stay out of the comments. I know it is rude but it’s all for the best, really.

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