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1+1=1
By Billy | September 5, 2011
Is there a difference between a soul choosing to inhabit a body in a specific place and time and a soul being chosen by God to be where it is when it is? Did your soul exist before you were born and will it exist after you die? Is the great Death we pretend to fear for our entire lives anything more dramatic than the thousand little deaths we experience when we let go of our bad habits, our past traumas, our best friends, or the air in our lungs at any moment?
We tend to think a soul is the thing that makes us who we are. If we have a defining aspect at all — something that declares our speciality among the ocean of existence, that would be the place we should tack down the little label that says, “me,” or, “self,” or, “soul.” And why is it that we think existing in our bodies at this moment, and having the ability to turn chemicals into notions of things like existence — why is this more or less remarkable or unusual than the notion of us existing outside, before, or after our bodies.
My religion these days has been that 1 = 0. It has been that creation is destruction and life is death. It has been that every single opposite that you can suppose not only necessitates its counterpart, but creates, causes, enables, destroys, and in every way possible is it’s other half. Every choice you have made was made for you. You chose your own fate completely. Things are not what they seem; nor are they otherwise. We are a paradox of profoundly simple truths that battle against each other like violin bow and the strings. Maybe the friction between us keeps us from falling apart.
When information enters your eyeballs and tells your brain about it, is that information equal to the object you’re looking at? Is it different from the object you’re seeing? We like to pretend that we’re actually viewing a thing, but really we’re experiencing a conversation between a perceiver and a processor. It’s a little more obvious with taste; does chicken inherently taste like what you think it does, or does it only taste that way because your tongue talks to your brain, and we’ve evolved to experience it in this way? Does salt have an intrinsic and universal way of tasting? (Is it so intrinsic that the periodic table also include how things taste?) Why do we think that what we see has an intrinsic and universal way of looking? Why do we think who we are has an intrinsic and universal way of Being? If your shadow casts a shadow, I bet you couldn’t see it. Is the unseeable, unexperienceable, unnoticeable, unimportant, unreasonable, and unconceivable nonexistent just because we think so? Can something of these sorts exist just because we think so?
Why is your reality so damn rigid?
Topics: Philosophy, Utterly Random | Comments Off on 1+1=1
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