I’ve been thinking about mortality quite a bit lately. I’m not sure what exactly brought it on; probably reading articles about religion, atheism, scientific discoveries, and other things that makes one think about what we see and what we do and don’t know. Anyway, I’ve been hit with this feeling of how enormous the amount of time is when you’re not alive and breathing on this planet, as opposed to the short amount of time you do spend doing whatever it is you do while you’re alive.
I’m not sure I can describe the feeling properly. For me, it feels as though you’re sitting in a dark space, and you don’t know how large that space is. The only thing that you can see is yourself, because you happen to be illuminated. You can move about freely, but the only thing visible is yourself, and no matter how far you walk, you never hit a wall, or hear anything, or see anything, not even anything directly at your feet. If you stop moving, everything is still, all is silent, but it’s not the kind of quiet where you can hear your own heartbeat. It’s just kind of empty, maybe white noise at best, kind of like what you get when you wear ear protectors. That’s probably the best way I can describe the feeling I’ve been getting lately when I think about the vastness of time as it relates to my own life.
I can say one thing definitively about that feeling… it scares the hell out of me. It hit me the other night when I was lying in bed, somewhat suddenly, and it actually caused a bit of a panic. It got me to thinking about what comes after death, since we can only experience our life while we’re alive, and no one knows what comes next. There of course is a ton of speculation. Innumerable religions have been founded on the idea of what comes next and how to get there. The one constant is that there is something next, and that who we are as individuals doesn’t just disappear when we die. Lying there, at night, with that feeling hitting me, I very much want to believe that one of those beliefs is true. However, none of them have ever made sense to me, so I can’t subscribe to any religion, along with other reasons, hence my atheism.
However, it has made me wonder, and come up with my own theory. It’s about as plausible as all the rest, although it may get a bit convoluted, so bear with me.
If you look at life as a concept, it all comes in cycles. We’re born, we live, we die. That’s the basic individual life cycle. However, on a larger scale, we see how death can lead to life. We’re born, we live, we die, we return to the Earth, life emerges from our remains in some form. Normally through plant life, but through that, energy is passed on to animal life, which ends up entering that life cycle, which in turn returns back to the plant life cycle.
Ok, so we’ve established that. Seeing that as cyclical, we now turn to our individual consciousness. We, as individual humans, are born with basic consciousness. However, it takes time for that to develop. We are completely unaware of who we are as individuals until some time has passed, and we develop a sense of self. For some, it takes longer than others, but it eventually happens. As we get older, the biggest fear is that we lose our sense of self. The older you get, the more likely this is to happen, but ultimately, we lose our sense of self completely when we die.
During the entire course of our lives, we are converting a massive amount of energy, from the food that we consume, into our actions and thoughts. Physics teaches us that energy and matter cannot be destroyed, just converted into different forms of energy or matter. It also teaches us that due to this, we are all potentially made of star stuff. Probability teaches us that given a long enough stretch of time, anything is possible. There is also a theory floating around out there that the creation and destruction of the universe is also cyclical, as the universe is currently expanding, but will eventually collapse and shrink back down until it reaches critical mass and another big bang happens, thus entering into another cyclical phase.
So what I propose is this. When your consciousness ends, at least the current version of it, you are completely unaware of time. Time is only experienced by us because that’s how we interpret our actions, and how we move about in this dimension. However, after your consciousness ends, all of that energy is converted. Into what, I can’t say, but the energy that once composed who you are still exists, just in a different form. Given a long enough time span, the energy that once was composed as you could potentially reform in the same way, possibly in the next iteration of the universe. However, because you’re not experiencing time, you couldn’t tell this was happening, so you would theoretically wake up after your death, and still be you, and you would never know, except for the radical changes around you.
It’s possible this may have happened already, or it’s possible we are just the first iteration. There’s no way of knowing, but it’s fun to imagine. The hard part is wrapping your mind around it, because it requires the stretching of the imagination into the realm of the infinite, and that’s not a comfortable place to be. Of course, it’s also possible that this really is it, and once we die, there’s nothing at all after, but I like to imagine my theory has some plausibility to it, because it’s comforting in its own warped way.
That being said, I do still prefer to live the current life that I have as if it was finite, and my actions will have consequences that will be defined by what I did while I was alive now. These actions and consequences extend to my family and friends, and whatever effect I have on them will be my legacy, so I have to be sure that what I’m doing now is the right thing for me. There’s no sense in pining for the unknown, when you’re dealing with what you know right now. (That’ll end my little morality blurb for this blog entry).
Now, none of what I said may make any sense. Feel free to interpret it as the ramblings of a madman. I honestly wrote this because thinking about death, for me, is more comforting than just being afraid of it. Dealing with the fear with this weird mental exercise in explaining it with what little knowledge I have is what gives me the comfort needed to combat that weird feeling of vastness that I sometimes get. Better than lying awake in bed all night feeling really tiny.
Told you this blog was for catching all the detritus in my head. Hope you enjoyed some of this bit of weirdness.
