Too Bad I Know Things
2006-05-05, 16:31

Driving home from a brush-up rehearsal on Wednesday night, preparing to merge onto the highway southbound toward home, I found myself in the midst of an existential crisis - one of those mouth agape, holy-crap-how-do-I-deal-with-this, serious thought bubbles of questioning everything that is.

I was listening to Jack Johnson's In Between Dreams CD (an excellent album), loaned from the library, and there's a song about hearing from his friend that he's going to die. "They gave him two weeks to live, I'd give him more if I could." The tone of the song got my over-caffeinated mental ball rolling, and suddenly I found myself trying to grasp, imagine the feeling of, non-existence, the concept of Not Being. I'd call it a moment of epiphany, but those are usually accompanied by some sort of resolution, a 'Eureka!' kind of moment. I found no answers, though maybe my questions became a little clearer.

This isn't the first time I've tried looking Death in the face (in the philosophical sense, not the jump-over-a-crevasse-on-a-motorbike or recovered-from-an-accident or kidnapped-by-terrorists sense). I think the first time I really thought about the concept of my no longer being was when I was eighteen, relaxing (meditating, maybe) in my basement, lost in a stream of thought. It hit me with a whap suddenly that I was going to die one day, and I was filled with fear and dread. But I got better.

My standing attitude these days is that I'll find out what Death's all about when I get there, because there's no other way to find out. No religion can prepare you, truly. Or can it?

Being the pragmatic but hopeful atheist that I am, I don't expect any Pearly Gates or lakes of fire at the end. My heart will not be weighed against a feather. I will not come back as a cow. But my scientific-based mind still has questions beyond the scope of the known.

Some say that our brain, during the process of death, creates the Ultimate Last Dream, the collective of all our being, racing to process all it can and ease the way of passing on, as it were, and struggling to comprehend the end, make a resolution of it. If that's the case, how fast does the mind run this process? If time is a matter of perspective, who's to say that those end moments do not seem like an eternity? Of course, that hardly seems likely, because the end comes regardless of perspective, and if you live in another existence in your own mind, you'll have to deal with dying all over again when that comes to a close.

Scientifically, energy is never lost, just converted into another form. What if the energy that comprises our conscious mind is merely converted into another state? I don't think that one could 'exist' in this state, at least not in the way we comprehend the concept, because we'd no longer have neurons controlling the flow of energy and thus not have the ability to process input or stored data into original thought. We'd be in a stasis of sorts, locked in the position the energy was at the moment of death, and more than likely that energy would dissipate quickly. Then again, we as a species certainly don't fully understand the nature of energy, so who knows? Maybe that explains the nature of ghosts - energy echoes locked in a stasis of retained memory patterns, only perceived when living beings attain certain brainwave states. I feel the same way about the concept of transferring the mind to a computer, the technological holy grail of immortality; unless the system is adaptable and will allow for artificial control and redirection of energy flow, only a stasis could be achieved (which is fine, especially if that pattern could then somehow be transferred back into another brain, which seems conceivably impossible, because you'd have to build the brain cell by cell to exactly match the arrangement of the stored mind and then activate all umpteen trillion cells all simultaneously), and I'd hate to be awake and aware of that situation - not that I think you could be.

Or maybe that very energy, after losing form, reignites in another being, into another life, assuming the guise of reincarnation. Maybe how we form our consciousness in this life attunes our energy toward a certain kind of being in the next go 'round. I could almost subscribe to some version of this, after a healthy suspension of disbelief.

And maybe, just maybe, there is some sort of other place of existence, one that philosophy and religion has been trying to grasp based on what we can glean of the world around us, which isn't all that much. Maybe there is a place for our minds to go after the body gives out. It really calls into question the very concept of Existence - what it is, how it started, where it's going. What am I? What is the purpose of consciousness? Why do we, as conscious beings, allow ourselves to suffer, against the very ordinance of nature? Why do we need constructs to maintain our society? Is society itself just a leftover or extension of the evolutionary process? Do we emulate the constructs of eons past in our daily lives? If so, what is the next step?

Must. Have. Answers.

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