"Leaving" implies both something being left and something else being reached.

Death.  The soul leaves the body.  The body is a shell, nothing more than a vessel for the soul, the fifth, transient element.  For example, we call your body "yours."  Like a possession.  Not yourself.  Do you see what I mean?  "Self" is personality and thought and memories (not memory).  And what is personality and thought and memory?  Chemicals in your brain.  But not even that.  The way those chemicals come together, with the physical tissue of your brain and its orientation in space and time.  But these things, personality and thought and memory, self, are not physical, nor would we ever presume to describe them as such.  Really, how would we describe them?  Abstractions.  Not matter, but abstractions.  It's a small step from abstractions to energy.  After all, how would you describe energy?  Try; it's really damn hard.  Okay, you can say "I don't know" now.  Self is so amorphous, indescribable, intangible, abstract… you get the picture.

Death.  I keep wandering away from it (intentionally, perhaps..?).  Body is a possession, a vessel, a shell.  Even when you're alive.  But it's a possession like a home.  A house or an apartment.  It's very personal, very you. Still, when the soul leaves, it's just a fallen log, a discarded muffin in a muddy parking lot (don't ask), a footprint in wet sand.  It's the physical manifestation of memory, a dead body is.  I want to be cremated.  I want my body to go to the fire.  Well, actually it's between cremation or just being left out for the animals and the plants and the elements.  Air (the great oxidizer) and water (the great eroder) and earth (the great consumer) and fire (the great equalizer) and life.  Other life: dogs and raccoons and birds and worms and beetles and trees and fungi and soil bacteria.  Either way I am returned; even if I was embalmed and locked in a metal box and buried (*shudder shudder*) I would eventually return to the universe as organic molecules and even atoms.  It would just take longer.  Much longer.

One thing about my faith is that it's not particularly comforting.  But that's the thing: that's because it's realistic.  The world is not "made" for us.  We are not "supposed" to be able to survive, thrive in it.

The "meaning" of life is that it works.  There is no great reason.

The soul is recyclable, but not always recycled.  Yes, reincarnation is in here somewhere, but I've got my own bent on it.

But I do know what happens when you die by a hand or a force other than your own.  Sort of.  Obviously I don't know, really.  I mean, no one does.  If only we could remember…  Think of the first law of thermodynamics; conservation of energy and matter.   Add up all the energy and mass on both sides of the chemical equation and they'll match.  Mostly.  I'm not going there, at least in this paragraph.  Besides, I forget what the principle or whatever is called.  Well, what is a soul but… something.  I mean, there aren't specifics, but souls are like the gods; they have to be made of something.  And there's only two things in the universe (don't you even think about it): matter and energy.  Personally I'm leaning toward energy, and it makes sense/sounds good: heat energy, light energy, life energy.  You know?  But the point of this whole idea is that souls can neither be created nor destroyed (perhaps they can be converted, but not going there right now).  Anyway, this means they have to be re-used, and I think they come out the other side looking pretty much the way they did.  It's, like, hard to change energy, man…

Whoa, I just started making sense!  Like, trippy, right?  Betcha didn't see that one coming, huh?

So, souls survive the journey from one body (the deceased) to another (the newly born) pretty much unchanged.  I have no thoughts on the actual method of the journey at this moment; I will just say that Death is neutral among divines (I'm not even sure he qualifies as a divine) and men, and there are Angels [of Death] and Reapers involved.  What; you thought I didn't have a theory?  Silly, silly; you don't know me yet, do ye?  Actually, have you been, like, paying attention?

BTW: I've been writing this to myself.  Because I talk to myself.  I know, circular, but I get hold of an idea and I'm like a terrier with a bone.  Never let it go.  Just sayin'.

So, I don't really know the mechanism, and the importance of that statement is that I don't know why we don't know who/what we were.  I think that now would be the time to point out that souls are present in all living things, so species, even kingdom, is sort of a nonissue.

The Fallibility of Positive Thinking

As expected, school is severely curtailing my writing; be not afraid, because I'm still here!  I'll post at least once a week, when I find time.  And on that thought...

Words have power, as do emotions and ideas.  These things can influence others and even the world around us in ways we cannot comprehend.  But wishing will not always make it so.

Along the lines of "Smile or Die," too often we put faith in the power of reason or right.  "It'll all work out in the end," we assure ourselves.  We (at least, people my age) grew up with Disney princesses who were beautiful and just and always got the guy in the end while saving the kingdom, Power Rangers who were granted magical powers to do righteous battle with the slimy forces of evil, and our parents and teachers telling us "you can be anything you want when you grow up;" even Pokemon is a story about an ordinary kid beating the odds and saving the world from injustice.  And because we were kids the adults around us would have been foolish to let on that the world isn't always shiny and fair, because we would have thrown hissy fits.

But now I see people my age and older buying into the childlike delusion that "everything will be alright."  I don't mean to sound pessimistic; there is good in the world (I suppose depending on how you define "good"), and most people could benefit from a little positive thinking.  I accept the evidence for the placebo effect, and I believe that the right attitude can help you fight disease.  Well, its effectiveness has been demonstrated.  Many forms of Eastern Asian medicine talk about chi.  I call it the fifth element.  But if you have chronic bronchitis, or stomach cancer, or hepatitis, it's not a miracle cure.  Just thought I'd mention this.

Sometimes, no matter how hard you wish on that shooting star and click your heels together and imagine a better world, the world is not going to get better unless you get up and do something about it.

More thoughts on positive thinking (no pun intended)...

To Do Or Not To Do, Because Is It Really My Decision In the End?

Not really a question, in my opinion.  Today I'm going to talk about: free will!

Hmmm... free will...  That's a tricky one.  No, I'm not a conspiracy theorist; I won't try to convince you that the government is controlling your mind through little chips they put in your feet when you're a newborn and they draw blood.  No Al-foil hats here.  I would venture to suggest that my views on free will are unique, because I base them on my view of the multiverse and multiple realities as discrete time-bubbles, or moments, and as of yet I haven't heard anyone else suggest this (although there is string theory, but I haven't heard anyone link it to free will yet).  Well, here goes nothing...

According to my concept of the multiverse (I really need to come up with a more concise name for "my concept of the multiverse") everything that will exist already does exist (as does everything that has existed and everything that does exist [which may seem redundant, but actually isn't]).  Life (/time/continuity/the path/whatever) is like a game of connect the dots; life draws a line from dot to dot.  If you prefer to think about things having an inherent chronology, you can picture the dots as lining up in the semblance of a straight line (or a wavy line or zig-zaggy, but generally going in one direction).  This is how I usually picture it, although I don't like the idea of organizing things into chronology.

Since each moment already exists, and each one will occur in a reality, at some point, free will is kind of a moot point.  The basic concept of choice is that something won't happen, and if everything is going to happen anyway, choice really doesn't matter so much.

Silver Lining Time! Somewhere, somewhen, somehow, something will always go "right."  Furthermore, something "good" will always happen to you (somewhere)!

Yeah, the silver lining doesn't really work for me, either.  So I thought a bit more, and instead of being totally defeatist, realized this: although free will as a whole does not exist, free will for the individual realities does.  Free will exists in an entity's choices that lead to each moment.  For instance, you may choose to take the right fork in the road, and that will lead you to one reality.  Or, you may choose to take the road less travelled [in a yellow wood], and that will lead you to a different reality.  Yes, both realities exist(ed) but you chose which one to move on to.  It's sort of like the road itself; both forks of the road exist [in a yellow wood] but you only experience one of them based on the choice you make.  Where the analogy fails is when you turn around on the road and backtrack to take the other fork.  NO backtracking! (Since we're still viewing this as a chronological line of dots, there is a "back.")

Since I don't feel like arguing with Augustine tonight, I'm just gonna leave it at that.  But you should definitely shout if you want me 'n Augustine to duke it out!

realities (aka the multiverse)

I need to meditate more on my concept of reality.  Because I think of realities as personal and individual, I thought there was not center.  But then how does anything happen at all?  The easy answer is that there's one central happening.  A core.  But that can't be, because what happens is subjective.  It's like Plato's Forms.  The problem with the Forms is the inevitability of infinite regression.  The Forms are what's real, adn all we see/experience are the shadows.  But since the shadows are a reality in themselves and are different from the "truth," there must be some embodiment of the difference.

My realities are parallel only in the sense that they exist.  Actually they aren't parallel at all; they are discrete events, strung together like a filmstrip or a flipbook.  So is there fate?  No.  Everything that will ever exist exists now (not that there's a present) but the path a consciousness takes is fairly random.  Not random, of course, because of the bell curve and parsimony and Occam's Razor, but far more random (or apparently random) than consciously concievable.