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files from an over-active mind
Let's talk about some of the innumerable weird things I have done in my life.
When I was about 16 -- maybe 17, it's hard to tell because my birthday falls in the middle of the year -- I was obsessed with the idea of karma. I know next to nothing about the idea of reincarnation, or the Hindu/Buddhist/etc belief of saṃsāra or rebirth. Just that the idea is when you die you are accounted for what you did in life and it determines your new life. Somehow I always felt I'd be reborn as something wholly undesirable, but that's just the lack of self-esteem talking. But that idea isn't what I'm talking about.
Karma is the closest word I can get to what I spent many hours thinking about, despite, as I've said, the disconnect from the religious concept. More like general cause and effect. It used to drive me insane to think that there is no such thing as balance or symmetry of any kind in the universe. My favorite example was a man trapped in a fire in the middle of a building with the same amount of stairs to the top and bottom. Each has a seemingly "equal" path, but a different outcome. If he leaves via downstairs he could be saved. If he moves to the upstairs, he'll be engulfed into flames. Both of these choices in action are equal but with wholly unequal outcomes.
Everyone would tell me, so? What does it matter? And I would say, don't you see the point? How can there be selectivity like that? What determines which flowers in a garden bloom first, reach the sun first? What does it mean? It meant, to me, that I couldn't have too many good days without worrying when I'd have a bad day. Like waiting for rain after a drought. It's been too many days without, just naturally it should happen any time ...
And literally, the concept that any bad move I made could be balanced out without something bad happening to me would make me sick. That was still a lingering idea from my religious past, I suppose. But I couldn't even think about these things on a philosophical level, I had to be driven nuts by the idea that nothing in life was equal. The only way I kept myself from being a superstitious mess was to just realize in the end, life is life. Life is random. Otherwise how does one justify children dying from violence and the murderers living to pass away peacefully in their sleep at 80? You can't try and justify the madness of life.
Even today, I'll still think about things like what constitutes right and wrong, and if there is a universal interpretation. It falls under the blanket concept that everything in life is determined by two classes, one "good" power and one "bad" and that's weird, to me. Because, to me, there isn't two halves of life fighting one another, there is a thousand little pieces all falling together to make a big picture. The universe, life, everything is a puzzle that is never solvable. No puzzle I've ever seen has been made of two pieces.
When I was about 16 -- maybe 17, it's hard to tell because my birthday falls in the middle of the year -- I was obsessed with the idea of karma. I know next to nothing about the idea of reincarnation, or the Hindu/Buddhist/etc belief of saṃsāra or rebirth. Just that the idea is when you die you are accounted for what you did in life and it determines your new life. Somehow I always felt I'd be reborn as something wholly undesirable, but that's just the lack of self-esteem talking. But that idea isn't what I'm talking about.
Karma is the closest word I can get to what I spent many hours thinking about, despite, as I've said, the disconnect from the religious concept. More like general cause and effect. It used to drive me insane to think that there is no such thing as balance or symmetry of any kind in the universe. My favorite example was a man trapped in a fire in the middle of a building with the same amount of stairs to the top and bottom. Each has a seemingly "equal" path, but a different outcome. If he leaves via downstairs he could be saved. If he moves to the upstairs, he'll be engulfed into flames. Both of these choices in action are equal but with wholly unequal outcomes.
Everyone would tell me, so? What does it matter? And I would say, don't you see the point? How can there be selectivity like that? What determines which flowers in a garden bloom first, reach the sun first? What does it mean? It meant, to me, that I couldn't have too many good days without worrying when I'd have a bad day. Like waiting for rain after a drought. It's been too many days without, just naturally it should happen any time ...
And literally, the concept that any bad move I made could be balanced out without something bad happening to me would make me sick. That was still a lingering idea from my religious past, I suppose. But I couldn't even think about these things on a philosophical level, I had to be driven nuts by the idea that nothing in life was equal. The only way I kept myself from being a superstitious mess was to just realize in the end, life is life. Life is random. Otherwise how does one justify children dying from violence and the murderers living to pass away peacefully in their sleep at 80? You can't try and justify the madness of life.
Even today, I'll still think about things like what constitutes right and wrong, and if there is a universal interpretation. It falls under the blanket concept that everything in life is determined by two classes, one "good" power and one "bad" and that's weird, to me. Because, to me, there isn't two halves of life fighting one another, there is a thousand little pieces all falling together to make a big picture. The universe, life, everything is a puzzle that is never solvable. No puzzle I've ever seen has been made of two pieces.