It's a tree or a loaf of bread or a star...

Thinking through reincarnation. A carnation is a flower but it's also a type of milk...dairy! I've been left with a bit of a thing for dairy after spending so long steeped in it. If you aren't imagining my good self soaking in dairy product then...you are now :-P.

So you remember all that stuff I wrote about the question? Well I'm feeling a little different about the whole subject. It's probably because my system has been invaded by a virus! Yep the rhino has breached my personal perimeter, there is no way to write that that doesn't make it sound in some way sexual. Maybe it's all in my head. Trying to write to Kanye was a bad idea I just get distracted and want to bust a move. I'll be right back...

It's damn near impossible to hear that beat and not want to get to your feet! You can allocate the credit/blame for Kanye popping up in the post to @Swap120. His fish Kanye West passed into the great beyond today. God speed mini fishy Kanye. That brings me on nicely to my thoughts on what happens when you kick the bucket according to Hinduism and Buddhism, reincarnation. So the short version is do good and you come back in a better position and vice versa. Assume that it's true and follow my train of thought.

I'm in quite a privileged position, I've got it easy. So I must have done a lot of good in my previous life/lives to earn this. Good for me. Assuming that a bacterial consciousness can move on to become a human consciousness somewhat confuses me. Bacteria are single celled organisms so if we assume each discrete organism has a separate consciousness. But humans and other animals are made up of many, many cells. A single cell has a mean weight of 1 nanogram so if you weigh 100kg then it you have around 100 trillion cells. If the rules are the same then each cell has a consciousness so if you weigh 100 kg then you are lugging around 100 trillion separate consciousnesses...confusing.

This bit I find ever so interesting. Mutualism and  symbiosis. If we look at the human cell it contains a bunch of interesting stuff. Cytoplasm, ribosomes, dna, rna, mitochondria etc here's a lovely article in case you are a massive nerd like me :D It's the mitochondria that interest me in particular. They are the power plant of the cell, it's where all the wonderful ATP is produced that keeps us chugging along. This is a link to wikipedia as it is by far the most comprehensive ting I've found on mitochondria. As you probably know the DNA that carrys the information to make up the human body is stored in the nucleus of the cell. Mitochondria have their own DNA, it's in a loop. Loopy DNA is associated with bacteria! So every cell of the body has mitochondria which is kinda like having a cell within a cell.

So cells, souls, conciousness. How does it add up? Well each cell has it's conciousness and then there is the bit between the ears. The bit that remembers a lot and insists on recalling it all at the most inopportune moments. I'll not name names but I did see a little ting about being unable to sleep a couple of days ago. Because the old noodle won't cycle down. I can definitely relate. The night of the 14th of Feb was a sleepless night for me. Drag your minds out the romantic gutter twas nothing of the sort but a harsh embrace from the heavens. It was of course a full moon. On the day of a full moon and those leading up to it I find sleep to be fleeting. I am a grade A lunatic, get it? My mind races and as of late I have become accepting, I think.

During this time of racey mind madness I glimpsed something. The idea of illusion has long been batted about. This life is all smoke and mirrors. It's not really real. Life? What's all that then? Well boil it down and it comes to chemistry. Things seeking to be stable result in reactions etc. These reactions form into increasingly complex bullshit that results in walking talking abominations. Welcome to the human race a bunch of chemical soup that got a little out of hand.

Mental projection and regression the root of all suffering. Pain is in the here and now but suffering? Mental suffering is reliving the past or anticipating the future. Now the past is done and dusted and the future is yet to be. So if you are suffering the past of the future then you are suffering something entirely fictional. Now fiction in the sense that it doesn't exist. Rather mad...no?

So onwards to this creature/character that is you, me and everyone else. This thing exists in the now. The now is all there is so if anything exists at all it has to be in the now. So now is all there is but because of the "powers" of the mind we think there was a yesterday and assume there will be a tomorrow. We all know what happens when we assume right boys and girls? You make and ASS out of U & ME. Ass. I don't want to be serious it's ever so tedious! But this is about the fundamentals

Now I'm lost I don't know what's next. So I've gotten to the truth that now is all there is so what? Meaning...is what I want. Meaning, meaning, MEANING. Now here's the dirty little secret. Tim Minchin told me it. Yep the Aussie joke pedlar with a penchant for piano dropped this truth bomb on me on the Youtube! There is none. It's something of a cosmic joke ba dum bum tsss! If you consider the ultimate end of it all based on our current understanding it'll all even out into something of a uniform jumble. That is to say the concentration of energy will be the same everywhere.

Now what meaning could there be when the end of it all is that? So no meaning. So what's the point? I don't know. Not what you or I wanted to hear as why do anything if it's all ultimately pointless? Well there is a bit of a funny twist that's been added. And that would be joy. To laugh, joke, smile and smirk. All those expressions of happiness that we take for granted. We spend a lot of time not being that way too. Too much time. If there is not point then you may as well enjoy it. Pretty much the same conclusion I came to before. But this time I got there from a mad moon based rant.

Lunacy ;-)

The Question

From here where they've got a buttload of covers

The question is of course a, I was going to say superhero but he's not. Doesn't have super powers so lets go with sleuth/crimefighter. He was also briefly a black lantern but let's not get into that. I'm not referring to this suave investigator when I say the question. I've been plagued by it since I was eight. Nearly two decades of pondering and I haven't got an answer. Well I have a answer that makes sense but it's such a tragedy.

I think I've written about the question before. Most of these are just vastly reworded versions of previous posts. Now I've said that you just have to go back and read my entire back catalog, right? :-P A feat that would take even the most herculean of readers a few days, weeks, months? How fast would a herculean reader be? Hercules was strong but fast? I suppose explosive strength and speed go hand in hand. Anyways I'm quite a fast reader but I'm terrible at finishing books. I currently have six or seven books on the go. I dip into them and then forget about them. Oh here's where I wrote about the question before. Those life changing moments!

The question is of course what's next? Not what's next for me but for us all, ultimately. I heard it put rather bluntly and elegantly by my favourite mystic. The body is walking in one direction only...straight towards the grave. Physically the form you identify as me will die. As a child we all hold idea that the next step is heaven, well most of us do. I am a hindu but because I grew up a predominantly christian culture when I thought of afterlife, I thought of heaven. But now I don't know what to believe.

Nicked it from here. I think Satan got the short end of the stick. But that's a story for another day.

Leads me neatly to belief and knowledge. The difference between the two...proof? No proof like mathematical proof, am I right? Don't get too excited or worried, I'm not about to dive into some elaborate mathematics about life and death. But tell me this dear reader, do you believe you have two arms?

How many's that?

100% of you???

Now tell me do you believe you have two arms OR do you know you have two arms? Another bit of spiel I nicked from the mystic. You can say what you like about him but he sure can spin a yarn!

So my reason leads to believe that at the end of life there is nothing. The lights go out and they don't come back on again. It still scares me a little, the thought of eternity in the void. Well it wouldn't be in the void, just darkess, nothing... I am such a ray of sunshine in the depths of the British winter, no? But knowing it will all end could come as a comfort for some, the struggle of day to day life. But to others it's a tragedy that this fabulous ride has to ever come to an end. Makes me think that there is truth in the old adage that time flies when you are having fun. If you are miserable minutes feel like hours and days feel like entire eternities! Alternatively if you are joyful your life flies by in the blink of an eye! Slow and painful or fast and fabulous?

Knowing this won't last, provides some rather compelling motivation to make the most of it. At least that would be the most joyful way to live it out. I mean you're at this awesome party for x amount of time, should you live it up or should you mope in the corner cos it's cloudy/rainy/you don't have enough cash/a big enough car/ etc!? Life's too short to be annoyed with every fool, tool, dullard etc. Fume free as my esteemed associate Mark Taylor would say.

Anyone know what these lovely contraptions are?

They are of course fume cupboards, particularly useful when working with smelly/poisonous chemicals. I think they may serve as a welcome deterrent to fuming in general, stop it or you'll have to in the fume cupboard. Are we all savvy with the law of conservation of energy? Energy cannot be created or destroyed it can only be changed from one form to another. For example chemical energy can be converted into light, heat and sound. Burn a candle and the wax does exactly that. Heat doesn't really exist. Not sure if that's the best way of expressing that but heat is an expression of the kinetic energy something has.

It's from this law that the idea of reincarnation being practically true occurred to me. As is the way I am not the first person to arrive at this idea. One U.G. Kirshnamurti said as much on death. "When clinical death takes place the body breaks itself down into it's constituent elements and that provides the basis for the continuity of life." I'd have waffled forever trying to express that idea. UG was a genius! Everything that can be considered as a human being is of the body, even the mind is contained within. When death occurs the system loses all heat to the surroundings and is broken down at the cellular level. But if it is not sealed off then it is absorbed back into nature and will become "alive" once again.

Yep circle of life people. There's a lot to be learnt from a disney movie ;-). And how awesome is James Earl Jones' voice! So in that way the body is immortal. It just continues to shift from one form to another. But what of the personality? Whatever energy makes up the personality is recycled as well. So that really dies, by this line of reasoning. What is personality exactly? How do you define a personality? Characteristics and or qualities, put a bunch of those together and there's a personality. Is that really all we boil down to? Finding that a rather dull tbh.

Not checked up to see how accurate this is!

Anyone seen breaking bad? Or Full Metal Alchemist?In both there is a run down of the elements that make up the human body. The pic above shows that that's it. But as mentioned before that's not what makes up a human being. There's the bit between the ears, that dwells in the brain, that writes poetry, music and produces fabulous art. That bit is also physical format it in a particular way and you have me, fiddle with that a bit and there's you.

This is a line of reasoning that I find interesting. How many dimensions do we exist in? three right? Those are the physical dimensions. But you are probably aware of the fourth dimension, time. And we move through that as well. This video explains this much better. How many dimensions did you follow it up to? I got to seven before I felt rather confused and like my head was going to explode. Wonder what a twelfth level intellect can comprehend. So a fifth dimensional being would be able to perceive the entire lifespan of an object in an instant. Being able to move in higher dimensions opens up an interesting can of worms.

This can is labelled cause and effect. Cause precedes effect but not if you can move about in higher dimensions. Everything is apparent at once so the cause and the effect are happening at the same time. All rather confusing and makes me feel not so smart. I did briefly forget why I got into this at all! But I've remembered, yay! The cause would be be the body and the effect would be the personality.  There is a rather interesting article here:

http://apeaceful-warrior.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/a-book-titled-biocentrism-how-life-and.html

It goes into quantum physics and that's something I don't even pretend to understand. Inflationary theory, parallel worlds etc. sure I can appreciate the idea but the quantum world confuses me like nothing else.

I have not come to any conclusions as the only way to know is to go. Not quite ready to call it day so it may be a while before I step into the void. Much to do, see, hear, smell, feel and write before I kick the bucket. Reminds me of the black guy in Gladiator, "Not yet..."