I am about to go bed and had this interesting thought... Catholic theology professes the reality that an an intermediary place called purgatory exists immediately after death to purify the soul for entry into heaven by way of "widening gyre" like Dante's circles of purgatorio and heaven, people through painful awareness and suffering get rid of imperfections until they are pure enough to enter into the heavenly realm of perfect love and goodness... Many Eastern religions profess that for people to attain enlightenment, they must migrate from the wheel of Samsara "the long night of fractured identity" by way of multiple reincarnations to purge the self of the multiple layers of carnality into the Nirvana of the uniting with the complimentary paradox of all and nothing... suspending all rules of belief, if both were right, there is a possibility that we died a long time in a "real life" when we truly knew ourselves and our true identity but somehow fell into darkness, and this existence is a purgatorio of trying to find understand ourselves through the direct experience of many facets of ourselves and of the universal human experience across a spectrum of many lives. We could wrestle the angel of our discontent until we received our blessing of peace and rest in the infinity of a unified self. When you consider your life, and how short it is, and how you seem to change along life's road but deep down inside remain the same, seventy years in this space time continuum seems too short a time to truly experience life. And truly, how do we know that when we sleep, that our dreams are not another life that we live. That when we lie down in that other world, we wake here with fragile remnants of another place. I don't know. I believe there is a "somewhere else", another reality other than this one. I don't think though that the afterlife is merely"a depositary of souls". No religion, belief, faith, or lack of faith has a monopoly on the truth. A human being, let alone the world is much too beautiful and complex for a simple explanation, whether the coldly scientific or traditionally dogmatic religious. If you could catch someone without "intellectual clothes" on, they would probably say they just want to be happy, that they want to be truly who they were born to be. We are all searching for our original face, the one we had before we were even physically created. Rumi says it best: "Love is the religion, the universe its book." I think most of us live like we are putting together a piece of furniture without instructions. I think we are better than that, that we were born to "break the sound barrier, to kick ass and take names" so to speak. My whole "42" moment here, (douglas adams, I salute you), is not I guess about an interesting thought wandering through my tired mind at the end of the day. It is the attempted articulation that life is not a short sprint, a PT test over in an hour. This can't be all there is... people are too amazing to come prepackaged with the standard instructional DVD manual. Purgatorio, reincarnation, ecstasy or annihilation, I believe that Heisenberg was onto something with his quantum mechanical uncertainty principle: certain pairs of physical properties, like position and momentum, cannot both be known to arbitrary precision. That is, the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known."
Ultimately, I hope we all leave the door open and the window unbarred. Our fingers will be cold and the wind will swirl the papers off our desk, but the sunrise will be brilliant and light up our room. I'd rather stare at the sun for an hour and live with the memory of light than live in perpetual darkness stumbling over shadows.
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