True Truth
It's about death, isn't it. The lack of news about MH370, failure to find it. Maybe it will never be found. From time to time someone comes across the wreckage of an airplane lost during World War Two, now seventy years ago. Someone may come across remnants of this Boeing 777 in 2084, creating news of interest to a few. Or, again, it may never be found, a possibility that is almost incomprehensible to us who live in a wonderful age of exploding knowledge and indomitable spirit that we can solve anything, everything. And we are just about right. The human mind is incredible.
The explosion of knowledge in our time is like the Big Bang, unstopping, unstoppable. There is nothing we cannot, will not, eventually know. Or be. Or at least we believe that, even as we don't want to think about or talk about our dying, which we all do but about which we know nothing; or perhaps we do know but are unwilling honestly to go there, not only because it's a challenge to faith but because it goes into the darkness of our deepest fear that perhaps when all is said and done we are not after all.
In a recent post I worried and fussed over what seems to me an unconscionable waste: when we die, what happens to the knowledge, the memories, the goodness, generosity and caring lovingkindness that we are. As opposed to the Visible, which is dust returning to dust, what happens to the Invisible that is our Being? Do answers depend on whether we are interred in a casket, or cremated and scattered or put in an urn and imbedded in USS ARIZONA*, or blown to smithereens or atomized in a nuclear blast? Not just the personality, but our essence, how does our essence interrelate consciousness, ego, superego, id and Freud's or someone's idea that those are not part of the brain, but "systems." It might be that they are part of the brain after all.
The explosion of knowledge in our time is like the Big Bang, unstopping, unstoppable. There is nothing we cannot, will not, eventually know. Or be. Or at least we believe that, even as we don't want to think about or talk about our dying, which we all do but about which we know nothing; or perhaps we do know but are unwilling honestly to go there, not only because it's a challenge to faith but because it goes into the darkness of our deepest fear that perhaps when all is said and done we are not after all.
In a recent post I worried and fussed over what seems to me an unconscionable waste: when we die, what happens to the knowledge, the memories, the goodness, generosity and caring lovingkindness that we are. As opposed to the Visible, which is dust returning to dust, what happens to the Invisible that is our Being? Do answers depend on whether we are interred in a casket, or cremated and scattered or put in an urn and imbedded in USS ARIZONA*, or blown to smithereens or atomized in a nuclear blast? Not just the personality, but our essence, how does our essence interrelate consciousness, ego, superego, id and Freud's or someone's idea that those are not part of the brain, but "systems." It might be that they are part of the brain after all.
Within a day of my pressing “Publish” on that day's post, delanceyplace.com for their daily essay ran an extract from The Guardian of All Things by Michael S. Malone, about memory, biochemical reactions, synthesis of proteins, and how memories and knowledge are encoded in brain neurons. What a marvel of creation we are. And we are what we think, not what we look at in the mirror. Again, we are not what is seen, the Visible, we are not even our Personna, the image we project to others; we are what we think and feel and believe and know and love and hate and laugh at. Is all that lost at death? Apparently so, if it’s all just brain functioning. Would that mean that there is only the Visible after all? What terrible, despairing news if nothing continues, if what we believe regarding after this is nothing but hope, delusion, our inability to imagine our own nonexistence. What about that which our Book of Common Prayer calls “a reasonable and holy hope of eternal life with those we love”? That sort of being requires awareness of some sort, doesn’t it, being with consciousness that involves brain neurons. I'm not thinking fear of death, but that, our nonexistence being inconceivable to us, we rationalize what seems reasonable and caring to us, though we live in a dispassionate creation. Even our own Milky Way, a miniscule particle of the Universe, has no feelings about my being and whether I come or go or am or am not.
Surprising from a member of the religious. Even though I believe, believing with every fiber of my being doesn’t make so. Seek the truth, come whence it may, cost what it will. Cost what it will? Even if the cost is despair?
Truth, or Hope? True truth is not found by predisposed belief grasping to cling to hope and faith that it mistakes for knowledge and proclaims as sure and certain.
Truth, or Hope? True truth is not found by predisposed belief grasping to cling to hope and faith that it mistakes for knowledge and proclaims as sure and certain.
This is getting worse, going nowhere except contemplation, which is my duty as a thinking person, the wondering faithful. What returns to mind yet one more time again: George Gibbs and Emily Webb on their ladders that simulate their being upstairs at their bedroom windows, teenagers talking deepest things and plans and yearnings, some of which because of death will never come true. Then Rebecca tells George about a letter her friend received that its address line finished with "the Earth, the Solar System, the Universe, the Mind of God" and the postman delivered it anyway. George, as I recall, responds in awe, "Gosh." And the Stage Manager, by now the God who is in control, brings Act One to a close.