If you only watch one documentary for the rest of your life, make it this one. I cannot recommend it emphatically enough. This documentary falls into two main parts. First, it describes how, from a physical standpoint, the advancement of medical technology has revealed and/or created an increasing gray area between life and death. It's no longer accurate to say that nobody ever comes back from the dead, though of course it only happens under very limited circumstances. This, then, leads into the even more interesting part, which is what people experience while they're dead. As I've mentioned before, I don't know why people aren't shouting from the rooftops that we now know for a fact that consciousness continues after death. This is the discovery of the century. This is why, even though my views on God are all over the place, I'm very confident in an afterlife - not because of wishful thinking or a "spiritual witness," but because of what's been reported and observed. It isn't magic. It follows laws like everything else, even if we don't know what the laws are yet.
Of course, nobody's been dead for very long before coming back, so many mysteries remain. I don't want to commit to any specific beliefs without evidence. Here's what I think right now. Our most basic and true form is consciousness, which inhabits a different plane of existence from the physical universe, a more subjective yet more real one. The physical universe is a pale imitation of it, like Plato's cave. Our brains are like radio sets that harness consciousness. Not only do they not produce it themselves, they severely limit and distort it. We'll see and understand so much more the moment we're freed from physical constraints. But in the meantime, there's some reason we're here, even if it's difficult or impossible to see, which I believe is by design. So I don't advocate for trying to cut short our time on this craptastic planet, tempting though that may be. Here's where I diverge sharply from my Mormon upbringing and hew closer to Eastern religions. I was taught that bodies are super awesome and that every disembodied spirit yearns to have one. I mostly just find them disgusting and inconvenient. Some have suggested that we all derive from one big mass of consciousness, that we're the universe coming to know itself and just pretending to be different people, that we're all one entity in the most literal sense. That's beautiful in a way, but I think it actually cheapens love in the long run. If my love for others ultimately boils down to love for myself in a literal sense, then it doesn't seem special or praiseworthy to me anymore. I also think it's great that the world is populated by people with different personalities, talents, interests, and I was going to say opinions, but that's only true to an extent because a lot of opinions make the world a worse place and don't deserve to exist. I hope that in the next world, we will become more one than we are now, but still retain our indiviidual identities and consequently our interpersonal relationships. But I don't have a belief about that, because my hoping won't make it so. I don't believe in a "traditional" heaven and hell, or in the Mormon three-tiered heaven and outer darkness, but then I wonder what's to become of the truly evil people. Because all this stuff sounds lovely, but if Hitler and I are part of the same mass of consciousness and get unified into the same eternal bliss after our deaths, that doesn't sit right with me. Maybe he'll get reincarnated until he gets it right. Someone from the Unitarian Uniersalists raised this point a while ago. She said she doesn't want anyone to burn in hell, not even Trump, and if she were a loving God, she would send him back to Earth as many times as he needed to qualify him for heaven. I like that idea. I really don't want to be reincarnated myself. Having to suffer on this planet all over again with no memory of the helpful things I already learned in my previous life sounds worse than purgatory. It's supposed to suck, which is why the point of Hihduism is to make it stop. Like the oneness thing, it also would render my concern for others a lot less selfless. I could be reincarnated as a gay black woman, so making the world a better place for those demographics would be in my own best interest. I've read some stuff, but I think this was my first time actually seeing and hearing people describe the experiences they've had while they were dead. They brought warmth to my heart and tears to my eyes. According to my Mormon upbringing, this was the Holy Ghost testifying of truth. I know it wasn't. I would have had the same emotional reaction if this documentary were a fictional movie. I had that reaction because these things are uplifting and beautiful. It's just fortuitous that they also happen to be true. Though many mysteries remain, it seems we've begun to empirically discover that despite all the inexplicable suffering and injustice in this blind, uncaring world, the universe, at least in some dimension, is ultimately uplifting and beautiful, and our existence is a happy thing, not a tragic accident.
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Here Follows Some Verses Upon the Burning of Our house, July 10th. 1666. Copied Out of a Loose Paper.
In silent night when rest I took, For sorrow near I did not look, I wakened was with thund’ring noise And piteous shrieks of dreadful voice. That fearful sound of “fire” and “fire,” Let no man know is my Desire. I, starting up, the light did spy, And to my God my heart did cry To straighten me in my Distress And not to leave me succourless. Then, coming out, behold a space The flame consume my dwelling place. And when I could no longer look, I blest His name that gave and took, That laid my goods now in the dust. Yea, so it was, and so ‘twas just. It was his own, it was not mine, Far be it that I should repine; He might of all justly bereft But yet sufficient for us left. When by the ruins oft I past My sorrowing eyes aside did cast And here and there the places spy Where oft I sate and long did lie. Here stood that trunk, and there that chest, There lay that store I counted best. My pleasant things in ashes lie And them behold no more shall I. Under thy roof no guest shall sit, Nor at thy Table eat a bit. No pleasant talk shall ‘ere be told Nor things recounted done of old. No Candle e'er shall shine in Thee, Nor bridegroom‘s voice e'er heard shall be. In silence ever shalt thou lie, Adieu, Adieu, all’s vanity. Then straight I ‘gin my heart to chide, And did thy wealth on earth abide? Didst fix thy hope on mould'ring dust? The arm of flesh didst make thy trust? Raise up thy thoughts above the sky That dunghill mists away may fly. Thou hast a house on high erect Frameed by that mighty Architect, With glory richly furnished, Stands permanent though this be fled. It‘s purchased and paid for too By Him who hath enough to do. A price so vast as is unknown, Yet by His gift is made thine own; There‘s wealth enough, I need no more, Farewell, my pelf, farewell, my store. The world no longer let me love, My hope and treasure lies above. I was introduced to the poetry of Anne Bradstreet in a college course on early American literature. Her relatable emotions and vulnerability made an impression on me and humanized the Puritans, whom I, like most people, am otherwise inclined to regard as stuck-up, joyless bigots. The professor made us read between the lines and explain how maybe Anne Bradstreet was secretly expressing doubts when she affirmed her faith. I wondered then, as I do now, whether that was really in there or the professor just wanted it to be. Anyway, I've liked this poem even more ever since my own beloved childhood home burned down. I wanted to buy it back someday, but the new owners apparently didn't know how to use a woodstove. And thanks to the previous generations who thoughtlessly screwed mine over, I may never be able to own a home at all. At this time I can't even save up enough to cover summer rent for one of the cheapest places in town. I have family members willing to help me, but if you want to help too, consider buying my book. I've shared this poem at a gathering of friends on the theme of change last fall and at a poetry-sharing meeting of the Cache Valley Unitarian Universalists last week. It's all about priorities, and that message remains strong even though I'm now agnostic about the attached theological claims. If Anne Bradstreet's house hadn't burned down, she still wouldn't have it anymore because she's dead. I'm pretty confident that consciousness persists after death, but I won't try to guess what the afterlife looks like, and I won't assert it with certainty because I'm not dead. I think it's a safe assumption, though, that the only things we can take into this hypothetical vague afterlife are knowledge and relationships, so those should be our top priorities once our basic needs for survival are secured. And if we can't get our basic needs for survival secured, well, at least we won't have to worry about that forever. I don't mean to be flippant, but it's true. We might have healthier perspectives on our suffering if we keep in mind how short and impermanent this life is instead of trying our hardest not to think about it. I also like the part of this poem where she goes full Yoda: "And them behold no more shall I." It's so random. Much to the disappointment of both my regular readers, I'm a bit behind my usual posting schedule because I spent much of the weekend in Salt Lake and also because I've lost so much sleep in the last two weeks that I wish I was dead. The most significant thing to come out of that weekend was that I drank a significant amount of tea for the first time. Because a con man enshrined nineteenth-century pseudoscience as revelation, I was raised with the belief that coffee and tea are unhealthy or somehow sinful, and I'm not even being snarky when I say that belief has been the hardest part of my Mormon upbringing to deconstruct. I have no desire to try coffee because I dislike the smell. I tried a small bit of tea without sugar some time ago, and it was putrid. But this weekend I was killing time with a couple of friends in Salt Lake's Chinatown market, a place I never knew existed, and they wanted to get some boba tea, so as a matter of principle I pushed past my deep-rooted misgivings and got some too. The first sip was weird. The rest were delicious. It had brown sugar and tapioca pearls, which I didn't notice until the first one came up my straw. Little rubbery balls, not much flavor, but appealing in their own way. Part of me still stupidly expected some kind of physiological reaction to the forbidden drink, but of course there wasn't one because it was just a normal drink. Up yours, Joseph Smith. Then we met up with a couple of other friends and went to a Chinese restaurant that ironically was not in Chinatown. It was a rice noodle soup restaurant, and I think the menu items were more authentic than the ones at Panda Express, but the still left me hungry again a couple of hours later. This soup had beef, cabbage, corn, carrot shavings, cilantro, elephant ear fungus, and a quail egg. I saved the quail egg for last because I knew I wouldn't like it. Also, I was the only one at the table who didn't know how to use chopsticks, so I just struggled through it. I stayed the night at another friend's house, but he didn't get off work until 12:30, so for a while I was alone with his wife who doesn't speak much English, and that was a little awkward, but she was very nice. I watched the Disney version of Hercules, struggled to get to sleep, woke up in the middle of the night, struggled to get back to sleep, and slept until 10:30. That afternoon, all the other friends came over to celebrate Juanuary, a tradition I was there to experience for the first time. Apparently it's just having tacos in January. Then we watched Coco. It occurred to me that Hercules and Coco both depict absolutely horrifying visions of the afterlife. In the former, Hercules gives up his immortality to be with Meg, and it's supposed to be a happy ending, but it's really not because you know that after they die their souls will be condemned to swim around half-comatose in Hades' giant magic toilet forever, along with everyone else who's ever existed. No wonder this religion lost to Christianity. Then in Coco, of course, dead people's souls only continue to exist until every living person has forgotten about them, which will eventually happen to everyone except for Jesus Christ and Genghis Khan. What is even the point of that temporary afterlife, except to prolong and exacerbate the inequality between famous people and normal people? And how did it work before photographs were invented? Speaking of death, the high school I worked at yesterday recently had a suicide, so this week it's doing "Hope Week" with the theme "Life is worth living." (Utah has an above-average youth suicide rate, though you wouldn't know it from the imaginary problems its Republican legislature chooses to address instead.) It had an assembly with Tom Ballard, a guy who cuts hearts out of rocks and distributes them to people to remind them that they're loved. (Not to be confused with Tim Ballard, the grifter and sexual predator who founded Operation Underground Railroad.) He brought heart rocks to give to everyone at the school. I forgot to get one before I left. I know it sounds weird, but he says it's really impacted people and even saved lives, so good for him. After getting the winter off to a dry start, we got a lot of snow in Logan last night. It's supposed to snow for most of this week and get very cold. I'm not a fan, but it will help with the drought. And at least we'll get a few more seconds of sunlight every day. January is an endurance test. I'd like to pass along a couple of articles that I read after someone else passed along this week. First, from Scientific American, Can God Be Proved Mathematically? I almost didn't bother to read it because I care a lot less about whether God exists than I used to. I reached the conclusion a while ago that the universe probably does depend on a higher power that most of us call God for its existence, but I see little evidence that this power is intervening in my life or in world affairs, so whether it merely ignores my prayers or doesn't exist at all makes little difference to me. I still pray every night, but mostly just as a cathartic ritual to talk about my life. I rarely waste my breath asking for things anymore. So I'm far more concerned about what happens after I die, and I know that if consciousness continues, it isn't magic. It follows laws just like the rest of the universe. So if the universe doesn't need God in order to exist, neither does eternal life or reincarnation or whatever. Spoiler alert for the article: some mathematical arguments create a rational foundation for smart people to believe in God, but they don't definitively prove his existence to the satisfaction of other smart people. You probably could have guessed that.
The person who passed these articles along was a Mormon. I didn't argue with him because he wasn't being a jackass, and I try not to argue with people just for the sake of tearing down their beliefs if they're not being jackasses. But here in my own space I'd just like to mention that the God postulated by philosophy and mathematics is not the deity that Mormons believe in. It's not an exalted man with a wife (or wives) whom we're not supposed to talk about or pray to. It's not an object among all the other objects in the universe, located in one physical place. It's an entirely different class of entity, one that contains the cause of its own existence and which, therefore, is uniquely capable of being the cause for everything else's existence. And it's everywhere, not just in the sense that Mormons say God's knowledge and influence are everywhere, but literally everywhere in equal measures at all times. The same arguments that make this God's existence plausible have the opposite effect on the Mormon God, and most Mormons probably don't recognize that because they just say "God" without worrying about the significant differences between how they and other theists define that term. Half of that article is devoted to Kurt Gödel's mathematical proof, the most recent and sophisticated, and then the whole other article is about him. From aeon, We'll Meet Again discusses the arguments that Gödel laid out for his private belief in an afterlife in four letters to his mother. Here he became more philosophical than mathematical. He argued, in summary, that if the world is rationally organized, as we have reason to believe it is for the simple reason that science works, then our existence must continue after death to rectify the irrationality of our miserable lives and wasted potential. He cited the human capacity for learning as the purpose of this afterlife. "In particular," he wrote, "one must imagine that the ‘learning’ occurs in great part first in the next world, namely, in that we remember our experiences from this world and come to understand them really for the first time, so that our this-worldly experiences are - so to speak - only the raw material for learning." That certainly resonates with Mormon beliefs in broad strokes, though Gödel didn't say anything about making spirit babies with multiple wives for eternity. Again, this argument won't convince a determined skeptic, but Gödel's intellect and education ought to have humbled the guy in the comments section who assumed that he'd somehow never considered entropy in his calculations. I only want to touch on one comment from a reader who, after agreeing with Gödel's arguments elsewhere that pure materialism doesn't hold up under logical scrutiny, added, "OTOH, his arguments about intrinsic meaningfulness and purpose sound downright medieval. Darwin showed clearly enough that everything we know as purpose can arise from blind evolution. And we’ve had a century to get used to the idea that our senses of meaning and purpose are not invalidated by their emergent nature. There is no need to posit a cosmic source to validate our feeling them." When I read the word "medieval" I flashed back to what David Bently Hart wrote in The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. He said that different philosophical worldviews never become outdated, just unfashionable. (Some would say that's why philosophy is useless.) Aristotle taught about four different kinds of causes: material (what is it made of), formal (what is its form), efficient (what makes it happen), and final (what is its purpose). These kinds are not exclusive. In the Aristotelian worldview, there's no reason why Darwinian evolution and a cosmic source can't both be causes of our sense of meaning and purpose. I think the former would be the efficient cause and the latter would be the final cause. This view hasn't been disproven, nor can it be; it just isn't fashionable right now because people embrace pure materialism instead. As I read this article, I got a warm, peaceful feeling. According to my Mormon indoctrination, that was the Holy Ghost testifying that Gödel's beliefs were true. But now I know that it was just me testifying that I want them to be true. It's very difficult to keep personal biases out of such things when most of us are deeply programmed to not want our consciousness to be annihilated. But on the other hand, my pessimistic fear that existence is entirely meaningless, unfair, and temporary after all is a bias that might be just as powerful in the opposite direction. I'm pretty confident that there's an afterlife. I'll never again say that I know because I won't know until I'm dead, and then if I'm wrong, I still won't. But my months of existential terror are over for now, I think. I've completed the final pass through my novel, I just have some more description and other touch-ups to add, and then I hope to get it published by Friday, though that partially depends on whether the artist I hired comes through with the cover in time. If he doesn't, I'll be kind of pissed, but it won't be the end of the world. Anyway, I'm very sleep-deprived even by my standards. A couple of nights ago I had multiple nightmares, and I don't even know why. First, I either woke up and had sleep paralysis or dreamed I had sleep paralysis and then woke up. I imagined a shapeless white ghost thing coming through my window, and then a vague black demon thing standing over me while I couldn't move. I've read about sleep paralysis, and I don't believe in demons in large part because everything that people used to blame on them has been explained by natural phenomena like sleep paralysis, and it only lasted a few seconds, but it was still terrifying. Then I dreamed that lightning struck hundreds of times simultaneously, all over the sky, and I thought about how much it would hurt to get hit by lightning, and I wondered how anyone could survive that, and I remembered that I was more likely to get hit by lightning twice than attacked by a shark, and I decided that if I was going to get hit by lightning twice, I didn't want to live. It's weird how sometimes my thoughts in dreams are entirely coherent like that. It makes me think my brain is still working too hard. So anyway, this post is basically filler to keep up my goal of writing one every week, and I will continue by mentioning some other things from my Spotify Wrapped that I would have mentioned last week if I hadn't been in a hurry. Spotify said that I'm a "Shapeshifter," and described my listening habits as "eclectic." That's exactly the word I would use to describe it. I also used to use that word for my political philosophy, but then I realized that one side of the spectrum is a much, much, much, much, much bigger problem than the other one. (Hint: it's the one dedicated to fighting against social equality and education.) These were my top five songs, none of which are by my top five artists, because I'm a Shapeshifter. Cerrone - SupernatureA fun Halloween disco track that clocks in at almost ten minutes but is worth it for the way it starts small and layers instruments on each other to gradually build up to the good part. I like it when songs do that. And that's the closest I'll ever get to sounding like a legitimate music critic. Completely out of nowhere, Duran Duran covered it on a Halloween album just a couple of months ago. Omega - Gyöngyhajú lány (The girl with pearly hair)A hauntingly beautiful fantasy song from the sixties that sounds like it must have always sounded old. An English version was released a few years later, but the lyrics are so hard for me to make out that I find it barely more comprehensible than the original Hungarian. Vogon Poetry - Atomic SkiesA fun song about the Fallout games. If you, like me, have never played the Fallout games, then it still works as a fun song about living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. We'd better practice having a positive attitude about that sort of thing. Yarmak - RagnarokI encountered this banger as the backing track for a compilation posted in r/ukraine of the Ukrainian military prepping to kick Russia's ass. According to Google Translate, this is what the artist said about the song on YouTube: "These lines were written just a few days before going to war. It contains my entire inner state, and I want to convey this state to every brother. A great battle is ahead, after which not only our country will change, but the whole world as well. This is a real war between the warriors of light and the forces of evil, the battle of angels against demons, people against the dead. Each of us must accept and walk this path. Today, the future of the planet is being created in Ukraine, and we must do everything in our power to defeat the horde of darkness. Perhaps this will give someone motivation, know that I will not only be by your side in song, but also physically at the front with my unit. It's time to return yours! This is not a track, not a composition, not a song - this is a spell of immortality!" Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - If We Were VampiresAccording to this song, maybe love is more precious because it can't last forever because we're all going to die someday. It was always beautiful to me, but it became more poignant after I lost my faith and had to take it more seriously. I still think it's possible that human identities and relationships will persist after death, but I'm no longer confident of that, and I am confident that whatever the afterlife may look like, Joseph Smith's eternal sex fantasy is not it. I heard this song a lot because I have three versions of it on five playlists - my 2010s playlist, my Halloween playlist, my fall vibe playlist, my nostalgia playlist, and my death playlist. It works on many levels. I just realized that I should also add it to my twue wuv pwaywist. |
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- Amelia Whitlock "I don't know how well you know Christopher Randall Nicholson, but... he's trolling. You should read his blog. It's delightful." - David Young About the AuthorC. Randall Nicholson is a white cisgender Christian male, so you can hate him without guilt, but he's also autistic and asexual, so you can't, unless you're an anti-vaxxer, in which case the feeling is mutual. This blog is where he periodically rants about life, the universe, and/or everything. Archives
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