I was going to work today, but decided to stay home and watch the rain. I’ve structured my life in such a way that that sort of thing is not difficult.
What follows will most likely be a bit of a stream of consciousness. Do with it what you will.
I was looking at trees reflected in the rainwater on the street, and realized that the reflection extends a considerable amount in both directions. The “reflection” depends entirely on where you are standing, and it might make an interesting art project to photograph a reflection from a hundred slightly different angles and compile them. It has likely been done, but that may be an idea for someone.
Then it occurred to me that a shadow is really the emergent property of light interacting with something solid. Psychically, this would be something relative fixed, “solid”, unmoving, unflowing within us. We dissolve shadows through flow, through acceptance, through presence, through allowing.
Then I got to thinking again what it would be like to KNOW we are infinite. Imagine beings who mostly exist in another dimension, but who once had lives and physical extent on some planet far away.
Imagine KNOWING you are going to live forever. What do you do? Would not amnesia perhaps be one of the first things you invent? I don’t know what it is like to live in bliss, which many mystics tell us is the true nature of Reality–Sat in Sanskrit–but perhaps as an individual, as a discrete particle of an emanating God, various ideas occur, one of which might be to have all sorts of experiences.
Doris Lessing, in her book Shikasta, describes and Earth which is populated by happy humans directed in various ways by benevolent aliens who mainly exist in another dimension, who have mastered the spiritual arts. At a certain point it all crashes down. In the narrative, as I recall it (and I read this book 30 years ago and probably need to reread it), the alignment of stars change in such a way that the world is broken, which is the meaning of “Shikasta” in the text. A malevolent alien species achieves relative dominance, and pushes everything and everyone towards conflict and pain.
Here is an idea: what if the benevolent aliens ALLOWED this to happen, just to see how it all plays out? As in infinite being, short term pain–which can’t last on this Earth more than 100 years or so at most–is not a large problem.
What if the Earth exists as a place INTENDED on some level as a sort of Purgatory, not as punishment, but for interesting and diverse experiences? What does it feel like to torture someone? To be tortured? This is a place where everything is possible, but time delimited. It all ends, and from a perspective of millions of years, in the blink of an eye.
What if being human is, to an infinite being, much like taking a hallucinogenic drug? You identify fully with the experience, you inhabit it, but then it ends?
My own views are tending somewhat in this direction. Fully a hundred years ago (and a bit more) William James proposed that our physical brains are a sort of radio, which receives transmissions from elsewhere. If you get brain damage, the radio is damaged, but the signal remains intact we don’t really know where, or how, or what that means. But it helped him explain both his own considerable knowledge about medicine and the behavioral and perceptual effects of neurological damage and his experiences with mediums who were doing things he could not explain either as fraud, or using any of the conventional cognitive tools of reductive materialistic science.
Our advances in physical science have made us arrogant in many ways. We are like children playing with dangerous toys we don’t really understand, not least because we do not understand ourselves, and what we really are.
Nothing in our physics prevents any of this. As Werner Heisenberg–who was much smarter than just about anyone who COULD be reading this–commented “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
There are some more very good quotes here: http://lightoftruth.in/column/heisenberg-god-bottom-glass/
One more: “Where no guiding ideals are left to point the way, the scale of values disappears and with it the meaning of our deeds and sufferings, and at the end can lie only negation and despair. Religion is therefore the foundation of ethics, and ethics the presupposition of life.”
I would comment that I might not use the word “religion”, but truly advanced HUMAN science, which understands our deep reality, and the nature of human embodiment and places [sic] in the universe.