If time, outside of space, is just a tool to codify our perceptions into past and future, and if our perceptions, as our minds fail, lose their external reference, is it possible that as you die and your brain loses its fuel, that you spend all of perceived eternity in euphoria?
Discuss
I’m considering, what with all this new personal free time, learning a martial art. Emphasis on the art. I already know how to beat someone’s ass, break their arm, kill them, etc. People are fragile and it usually comes down to a 50/20/20/10 split of motivation, experience, aerobic fitness, and overall distemper in a fight.
I want to pursue the art and the spiritual aspect. I don’t want to be violent or hurt anyone. Walking along a quiet circle somewhere around the Hong Kong City Park, I saw people of all ages practicing Tai Chi. Most of them were pretty good (that shit is harder than it looks), but this one very old man in particular was on a whole other plane. He had such control and poise. Every movement of every muscle in his entire body was planned and executed flawlessly in the morning sunlight surrounded by koi ponds and city sprawl. Only in creatures nigh unto death have I seen an animal become more beautiful. The Mainland Asian martial arts seem to be more religion than violence.
Discuss
The Western Arts, the vicious Krav Maga, the destruction centered Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, the banal and suburbanly ridiculous MMA, all lack that aspect. There is an MMA gym near my house. The white, thirty something men struggling in vain to purchase some sort of notability in their brutally banal existence train there. Most of them own late model Harleys that they love with the sick affection half living and mostly empty men give to the amusement machines they associate with–boats, motorcycles, enormous televisions. Their toys, both the shiny metallic machines and the shiny metallic women, are unnaturally new and fresh looking, with expensive accessories festooned about their structure.
Discuss
The end of one of the Four Letters:
But we are also both lost forever to one another. We too proud souls, the souls who will not surrender and will not fail, we are joined together by all the currents of fate, but not by time. We two proud souls, the sort that fight on and get damaged and torn, will always have a temporary home with each other, but never a permanent rest. We are lost. You are forever lost from me and lost to your children and your life and your home. And I am lost to you forever, though I plan to drop by every so often.
I am lost to you for this life of living out of hotels or living out under the stars and finding what the earth has hidden. While you are lost to life itself, I am lost and gone forever, out here wandering the all day lonesome.
Out on these fields of heaven.
Discuss
First, my brain hurts reading these plus I’ve just had a strong drink. Second, I feel like I’ve been given a homework assignment that’s due this evening and I should ask for an extension.
1. Possibly. If you believe in euphoria.
2. I’m smiling re the emphasis on the art. Don’t ask… I think you’ve expressed it very well and you should do it.
3. Would like me to make you a Martini?
4. Ah, but in those moments of connection, you’ve both found… home.
Comment by Cléa — August 21, 2008 @ 2:39 am |
>>is it possible that as you die and your brain loses its fuel, that you spend all of perceived eternity in euphoria
Or agony & terror.
Comment by anaglyph — August 21, 2008 @ 2:13 pm |
Cléa: You have a small extension, provided it was a good drink.
1. Euphoria in this sense is just the chemical haze of your brain as it shuts off. Or as it gets washed in hot peppers or choked. Have you ever run until you passed out?
2. The Tai Chi would be a little difficult for me. I’m not blessed with the lithe and flexible build that practitioners usually have. Bull in a china shop comes to mind.
4. Just like home, I can only be still with her so long before I start wanting to wander off.
Anaglyph: I wonder how much how you die has to do with it. I mean, your brain is finite, but the perceptions might stretch out into some approximation of forever. I’ve never seen a person losing air or blood not get loopy, but maybe that’s different if it’s from something painful.
Comment by Casey — August 21, 2008 @ 3:03 pm |
I’ve wondered something similar myself; whether there is some kind of consciousness ‘event horizon’ where your awareness slows down to imperceptibility. I hope not, because it means people who die in horrible ways are doomed to an eternal experience of the End.
Actually, that’s really creeped me out.
Comment by anaglyph — August 21, 2008 @ 6:07 pm |
I came to the exact same shudder. If a person died by something like falling, would his last forever thought be vertigo and terror?
Good work on the “event horizon” analogy, that’s what I was searching for.
That also opened up the question, is there consciousness antimatter? I guess what I mean is, is there a place where your conscious mind basically inverts in on itself? And does this only happen at death? I mean, I’ve seen and felt demons and monsters and ghosts and all kinds of stuff when I wake up in one of those dream hiccups. How much does your consciousness act like the universe that created it?
Comment by Casey — August 21, 2008 @ 8:36 pm |
Consciousness must be the central mystery of the human condition. Without it we would just be automatons. In a way, you can see the great scope of it in the general population – all those on automatic are basically just eating, sleeping and fucking and never going anywhere else. And never even thinking about whether there is anything else. Which makes them exactly the same as animals. Not that I’m making a judgement call – maybe that’s the way it’s meant to be, and the rest of us who wonder are just aberrations.
Comment by anaglyph — August 21, 2008 @ 11:10 pm |
I sometimes wish I was one of those people that sticks to eating, sleeping, fucking and the things that one can do to directly influence the quantity and quality of all of those. I don’t think though, that we are aberrant in nature. I concluded a while back that every single person in a society, dreamers, workers, the less than intelligent, the perverts, all have to be here for some reason. Not to say I believe that there is some master plan to their existence. More along the lines of, if they are here, and there’s more than just a couple that could be written off to mutation, then there must be an evolutionary reason they are part of society.
While evolution doesn’t command that everything has a purpose, it does do away with the purposeless.
Comment by Casey — August 22, 2008 @ 2:14 pm |