Would you buy an ethos from this man? Hell, would you buy a burrito from this man?
I believe that we are all here to learn something. Something specific to each of us.
I believe that consciousness, “soul”, if you will, is immortal. And that each one has to spend a whole lot of time trapped inside human form to learn the often-very-painful lessons that, as a body of experience, constitute wisdom.
I believe that when someone dies it is because they have achieved what they were put here to achieve in the first place. They learned what they needed to learn, earned whatever divine merit badge they needed to earn, and then got to transcend.
Some require mere moments. Others take 100 years or more. They have to do this again and again, with no memory of the previous times, until they acquire the full coterie of wisdom required to level up.
I know this is all mighty specific, but I, a once oh-so-mouthy atheist, have had my perspective changed over time. I have had a fair amount of experiences during which my senses were telling me one thing (“this is the world as it exists, this is objective reality”) and other people were telling me I was not experiencing reality, as they saw it, at all.
Complicated? Crazy? I don’t think so. The entire theme of this blog is that we all, to one degree or another, have a lensbias. Every experience we have ever had: every sweet moment, every bitter disappointment, every small moment of synchronous flow…they all rise to give their testimony, their perspective, on the incoming sense data of your life.
It’s effortless. You don’t know it’s happening. It’s automatic, having been honed over the entire course of evolutionary history. The switches switch, the circuits open and close, the lights blink and diffuse. All before you have a single conscious thought.
And this fresh patina on your worldview is the merest whitewash over what happens before it kicks in. Prior to that, millions of years of cerebral evolution asserts the authority of its breathtakingly vast experiential library. Countless ancestors have lived and died, essentially, to pass this brain baton to you.
After these skull-bound genius/instinct god processes do their spectacular chemical/electrical magic, you finally get your say.
And in decision after decision, you’re dying of metaphorical thirst.
The Dude reminds you that this is just, like, my opinion, man.
The automatic higher-brain function that is really in charge has located a river 384 miles away, invented and built a chewing-gum-and-Funyuns-fueled hoverboard to get you there, convinced the hobgoblin who guards it to give you a free hydration trial, and operated the dazzlingly efficient body hydraulics that allow you to bow your head to the surface of the water.
Then the very final step: It activates the wee peanut part of your brain that you interact with. It flashes a big, simple sign. I THIRSTY. You realize you’re thirsty. You’d better exercise your considerable powers of intellect and critical thinking. Rivers are made of water. Water is wet. I THIRSTY.
You slurp happily, impressed with your resourcefulness and confident you are in control of your destiny, master of your realms, within and without.
A Matrix within a dream within a parallel universe lost in a whisper. Here and happening gone in a moment, over and over again. All in your own head.
And all in service of the real goal: learn what you’re here to learn in this planetary parlor game, this giant higher-consciousness training ground that is life on Earth.
The chances that I’m wrong about all of this? 99.9% repeating. Almost 100%. But it’s my current operating theory based on my own experiences. I believe it.
I find it so much fun to think about, talk about, and write about. What an incredible thing is to be us: highly refined monkey-beings who have no idea how they got here, what they’re supposed to accomplish while they’re here, or where they’re going to end up when they die.
All while flying through a perhaps-infinite universe, which may itself be one of infinite parallel universes, on a rock traveling 67,000 miles per hour.
Thanks for taking the ride with me. Onward, ever onward, into our progressive future.
lensbias 