One of us will die inside these arms...
Today I awoke to the bittersweet sounds of Naked as we Came.
As I listened to this song (a song about, for those who know it not, the notion of spending your whole life with someone so that you know you are going to die together) I started thinking...
...I started thinking how sad it is that, in this life, every great thing must come with something awful.
There is no such thing as perfect happiness unaccompanied by abject sorrow; winning without losers; wealth without poverty.
I was thinking how sad it is that I could find a love so perfect that I could know beyond any doubt that it is the love I want for the rest of my life, and yet have to spend my life knowing that one day it will be gone. One day, one of us will have to deal with the complete loss of the other.
It also started me thinking about why that is so sad for us, and what I thought was this; we don't know what comes after death.
If we knew that after death we could be reborn, or if we knew we went to heaven, or... if we just KNEW, then maybe it'd be easier to handle. But we don't.
Is death a complete and eternal cessation of existence? Do we just cease to be?
Or is death some type of 'joining to the universal conscious', but not in the creepy 'borg assimilation' kinda way?
Is death something you go through...
...utterly alone?
My theory on death has always been that you just dream. You don't even know that you are dead because, much like in dreams, you think they're real. So you go on dreaming forever, thinking forever that you are real and alive. This tied in to my brain with the concept of heaven and hell, or being 'tortured by one's demons'. For example: if a man has spent his life doing things he felt or knew to be wrong, then he might spend eternity dreaming that he is being repayed for that debt; punished, tortured.. or whatever it is his brain thinks he deserves. Or if a man feels content with his life, he may dream of happy things.
And another thought pops into my crowded brain at this moment: what if you have those lucid moments where you go 'hang on, i'm dead! i know i'm dead and i'm only death-dreaming this and it's not real!'
See, that'd suck! You'd be stuck there and not able to do anything about it and you'd kinda go 'this sucks!'
UNLESS... because those lucid moments are the BEST! I just recalled... because the moment you realise it's just a dream, you can take charge of it! You can go 'right, now this is going to happen and this... and you know what else? Now I'm gonna have SUPER POWERS! Alright! And.. and... CHICKS!' etc.
Ahh I'm losing it.
Too many damn thoughts in my head for me to get them out clearly, or even one of them.
My point was: life is a sad thing; it brings great joy and great sorrow. Yin and Yang. Good and Evil. Happiness and Misery.
Forever and ever.
Amen.
As I listened to this song (a song about, for those who know it not, the notion of spending your whole life with someone so that you know you are going to die together) I started thinking...
...I started thinking how sad it is that, in this life, every great thing must come with something awful.
There is no such thing as perfect happiness unaccompanied by abject sorrow; winning without losers; wealth without poverty.
I was thinking how sad it is that I could find a love so perfect that I could know beyond any doubt that it is the love I want for the rest of my life, and yet have to spend my life knowing that one day it will be gone. One day, one of us will have to deal with the complete loss of the other.
It also started me thinking about why that is so sad for us, and what I thought was this; we don't know what comes after death.
If we knew that after death we could be reborn, or if we knew we went to heaven, or... if we just KNEW, then maybe it'd be easier to handle. But we don't.
Is death a complete and eternal cessation of existence? Do we just cease to be?
Or is death some type of 'joining to the universal conscious', but not in the creepy 'borg assimilation' kinda way?
Is death something you go through...
...utterly alone?
My theory on death has always been that you just dream. You don't even know that you are dead because, much like in dreams, you think they're real. So you go on dreaming forever, thinking forever that you are real and alive. This tied in to my brain with the concept of heaven and hell, or being 'tortured by one's demons'. For example: if a man has spent his life doing things he felt or knew to be wrong, then he might spend eternity dreaming that he is being repayed for that debt; punished, tortured.. or whatever it is his brain thinks he deserves. Or if a man feels content with his life, he may dream of happy things.
And another thought pops into my crowded brain at this moment: what if you have those lucid moments where you go 'hang on, i'm dead! i know i'm dead and i'm only death-dreaming this and it's not real!'
See, that'd suck! You'd be stuck there and not able to do anything about it and you'd kinda go 'this sucks!'
UNLESS... because those lucid moments are the BEST! I just recalled... because the moment you realise it's just a dream, you can take charge of it! You can go 'right, now this is going to happen and this... and you know what else? Now I'm gonna have SUPER POWERS! Alright! And.. and... CHICKS!' etc.
Ahh I'm losing it.
Too many damn thoughts in my head for me to get them out clearly, or even one of them.
My point was: life is a sad thing; it brings great joy and great sorrow. Yin and Yang. Good and Evil. Happiness and Misery.
Forever and ever.
Amen.
posted by Arithon @ 7:52 PM
10 Comments:
At 22:22,
blank slate said…
What the hell is the deal with all the life rhetorics? I blame Lil Kim, she started it.
Anyway, whilst I'm not going to say anything about the main theme of the rhetoric, I am going to pick you up on the whole uncertainy of death thing.
Dead is dead. The End. Consciousness is reliant on brain function. Brain function is reliant on brain cells being alive. If all your brain cells are belong to us, then you cannot have brain funcion. If you do not have brain function then you cannot obtain/retain consciousness. If you do not have consciousness you are generally dead. The only exception is the case of cyrogenic freezing where brain function and therefore consciousness is halted but, reputedly, cellular destruction is avoided.
I only deal in the case of brain cell death, this is true death, and it is irreversible. So death is the irreversible cessation of consciousness and nothing happens afterwards, except decomposition. No frickin dreaming, no afterlife, NOTHING.
Saying we do not know what lies after death is simply the foolish mortal way of putting off dealing with the inevitable, and it has hindered society and civilisation through the curse of religion for millenia. Wake up DAMN YOU! WAKE UP ALL OF YOU! YOUR NOT SITTING ON THE FENCE, YOUR STANDING ON THE STEADILY RETRACTING DIVING BOARD REFUSING TO JUMP IN FOR FEAR OF THE FALL! AND YOUR MISSING THE FUN OF THE SPLASH AND THE SWIMMING AND THE RUSSIAN JUDGE FUCKING YOU OVER AND DENYING YOU GOLD!
PG out
At 00:01,
Anonymous said…
so this is freaky......on my computer at least this blog post shows up as having no comments. Yet here's my comment.....maybe I shouldn't have selected the 'easter egg' option when posting......
At 17:26,
Arithon said…
"YOUR NOT SITTING.."
I believe you meant "You're not sitting..."
:-)
At 00:58,
Arithon said…
It seems strange to me that you'd bother to write such a long comment and not put just a little more effort in to make your grammar correct so you come across slightly more intelligent.
As my year 11 english teacher pointed out to me: if I don't make the effort to edit my writing appropriately, why should anyone make the effort to read it? If I didn't have the respect for them to make my writing good, why should they have the respect for me to care what I have to say?
Written communication is easy enough to misinterpret without using the wrong words and ignoring punctuation.
And anyway... if we let the rules slide in one medium, then god knows where we could end up! Just imagine how bad this could get... if an electronic message media were to be created, people might start ABBREVIATING WORDS ALL OVER THE PLACE, REPLACING WORDS WITH LETTERS AND LETTERS WITH NUMBERS!
4 now u best b gd @ ritin 2 me
*shudder*
At 01:01,
Arithon said…
Oh and I fixed up your little 'whoopsie' with the double post for ya... don't worry - we all have bad days.
;-)
At 02:52,
blank slate said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
At 03:20,
blank slate said…
It seems strange to me that someone would read such a universal truth and then respond with some glib comment on punctuation.
Either such a person
A: Cannot comprehend what is being said so seeks out what they can understand, however simple that may be.
B: Cannot be bothered forming an intelligent or witty reply, in which case why bother at all?
C: Cannot pick apart the faultless logic, but will not agree because they prefer to remain on the diving board. So instead, they choose to pick on whatever minor grammatical flaw they can find to try and claim some intellectual superiority when they are, in fact, a gnat. With bad hair.
Audience: OOOOOOOOOOOOHHHH!
Alright that last bit was a little harsh. Maybe I should have stopped at gnat. I mean a man can go, “A Gnat?! Me! How dare he! He’s already in the wrong domain, let alone kingdom, phylum, subphylum, class, order, family, genus or species! What a silly person!” Whereas “Bad hair! Me! How dare he! I’m clearly....oh. Gosh. Look at that. Bugger.”
But you know what? You pick on punctuation dude, you make it personal. And you know what else? Someone needed to say it! There! I’ve let the kit out of the caboodle, AT LAST! I’m just doing you a favour if anything. It’s like my year 11 English teacher told me, “If you can accomplish looking like George McFly with very little effort...you got a problem.”
PG Out
At 20:22,
Arithon said…
Aww come now PG - insults? Why would a man, secure in himself and his strengths and weaknesses, need to resort to insults merely because someone pointed out a mistake he had made?
Unless... you're NOT secure in yourself...
And bad hair? NO ONE thinks I have bad hair ;)
At 02:09,
blank slate said…
...and why would a man with terrible hair point out such a 'mistake' in the first place? You, once again, have failed to address the main arguments in my latest post as you did the original.
And as you will simply continue to be a facetious fuck, much in the vein of Audrey, (Though not to the whole narcissistic/histrionic personality disorder extreme she takes it to.) rather then ever engage your grey matter beyond that shallow level you use for unoriginal self-reflective nonsense, witless cynicisms, and an endless barrage of movie and TV quotes to substitute for an inability to hold a conversation beyond "Hello", I'm leaving this and getting the hell outta here.
Like....all the way to Mt Gambier out of here. THAT's the level of disgust I have for you at the moment.........
And yes for all you impartial observers (like there are any observers out there let alone impartial ones) this has been building up and has only CULIMNATED with arithon's hypocritical attempt to condescendingly 'fix' a punctuation error. Though I do maintain that in itself is reason alone for declaration for war.
I'm going and I won't be back round here...it's the only way to end this as I'm sure Arithon would refuse to quit until he had the last word. Now he's assured of that dubious honour...
For the last time on this blog, PG Out
At 16:54,
Anonymous said…
"culminated", you mean...
But you'll be missed PG.
Maybe I'll stop by YOUR blog sometime... :)
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