#399

Oh ho ho! Three hundred and ninety-nine! What a number! And soon, four hundred. Tremendous. Tremendous that I have not died or quit. Cheers to however many more beats are left in our hearts, dear reader. We woke up again, and the day lies before us in its terrible splendor and mundane fatality.

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To flatter myself and the medium outrageously and without a modicum of shame, perhaps you're reading this after I've shuffled off the old mortal coil--you are almost certainly not reading it while it's fresh off the keyboard. But at any rate, I believe the dead people whose transmissions we receive are experiencing a parallel existence; are by dint of being seen, having a bonus look around. 

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Reflecting lately on the scientifically supported idea that, in the Old Testament, is put forth as the notion that we see this world, this life, all truths in the universe as through a glass darkly. Incomplete, limited, refracted, transposed--above all, imperfectly illuminated, for the perfect radiance that is the source of all being cannot exist even in the infinite universe. Only when we are dead is there a chance that we will see the world, the infinite, and one another as we really truly are. Only when we have completed our term in this existence, this being-in-the-universe, and ceased to be.

We may enter an infinite dream. We may enter the void of eternal nonbeing with a cessation of knowledge and suffering that, in the final flickering fraction of a moment, may feel like entering the most perfect sleep of our lives or like waking up for the first time ever. We may begin our time in a new universe, repeat our lives exactly, reincarnate in this world once again, start our term in the infinite span of endless time walking through a billion kilometers of glass desert and swimming across a billion kilometers of apple juice. 

There is no way of knowing. Maybe it is all possible outcomes in a specific and meaninglful order, or randomly, probably set to infinite repeat. Maybe it is something literally unguessable and unimaginable by the apparatus and tools available to the human perspective and no one can tell anyone anything.

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"What can I believe?

How should I live?

What do I hope?"

These are the three questions that subtitle my copy of Walter Kaufmann's Faith of a Heretic. It is an incredible book, and these avenues of inquiry figure largely into its thesis and scope. He has many valuable insights on the possibilites that a fresh look at these questions may offer. 

They are vital questions, ones we should ask ourselves without hewing too closely to long-accepted answers. And when we are ill, we can use them as handholds towards health. I mean that as broadly as I can.

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Off to think about things. Always, every day that I am blessed to be able. Godspeed to you, dear reader, on your own wonderings.

--JL