Tell Me All Your Thoughts on God...
Jan. 21st, 2015 11:42 pm![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
air_n_darknessAn old friend and I were catching up today, and he asked me today what my thoughts were on death, what I thought happened to us when we die, etc. He mentioned that, while he was agnostic/borderline atheist, he wasn't too keen on the idea of there just being... nothing at the end of our personal journey. He knows that I am a witch of sorts, though I've never really gone into too much detail of it all with him, I don't think. Since we were talking via IM, I gave a quick and dirty abridged version before I had to get back to my chores, but, as the day ran on, I've felt I needed to... expand upon it. Be more specific, maybe? Regardless, it seems the thing to do.
We're born, we live a little while, we die, leaving marks upon the World both great and small, remembered and forgotten in equal measure. Such is the way of the weft and the weave, each soul a strand of the greater pattern, a pattern which evolves and changes with each addition, each subtraction, each choice. Each soul is spun from the same mass of soulstuff, at once both limitless and finite. Limitless, in that it can never be used up completely; energy can be neither created nor destroyed, merely recycled, and once the mortal shells have fallen, the majority of that soulstuff returns to the whole, leaving only the barest trace of what it was- its Thread- to mark its place in the ordered pattern. Finite, in that there is still only so much soulstuff, so much raw material, so that it becomes near impossible to spin a new thread that does not incorporate a portion of the recycled material, to greater or lesser degree. As such, the knowledge of what was can be passed to what is, and to what will be, genetic memory, of a sort, new eyes to look at the same problems and create new solutions.
We are spun and cut for the express purpose of learning, to learn all that can and might be possible in this great and varied universe. The Tapestry, which has been simplified to be called that of the Fates, of past, present, and future, is so much more. It is a catalog of the experiment of creation, of free will, and all that is, from the brightest star in the heavens to the smallest microbe deep in the Earth's crust has a thread within that pattern, a part to play, a lesson to learn or teach. True, by this definition and belief system, we might one day get to the end of that raw material after all, the chaos of the formless void stretched thin into tightly woven lines of light and shadow, a masterpiece in grayscale. It would take millennia upon millennia, however, and beyond that, the earliest ends of the Tapestry are not tied off. They can be unraveled, unmade. Entropy constantly tugs at those loose strands, seeking to return all to the cold dark of nothingness, no form, no substance, no knowledge, but even then, at thread pulled out will find its way back to the whole, and become part of the process again.
There is no life and there is no death, merely changed states of awareness. This is not to say that we should always go quietly into that good night, no, that we should not rage at the loss of life and love and loved. We are, in these human seemings, so much more than the material from whence our soul was spun. In these forms, we shape worlds, universes exist within in our tears, we call forth hell and heaven with one bright red drop of blood. We are the keepers of life and death, our breath, our words, balm to a wound or poison to a heart. Given this life, this existence, we do not wish to let it go, to lose the spark that makes us utterly and completely our own, unique. We will seek to cheat Time, offer bargains of flesh and mind to Death to stay his/her hand, all in hopes of having just one day more of existence, no matter how base or lavish that existence may be.
I do not fear death. I fear being forgotten, that this existence, though yes, I have learned much, fulfilled my function, is so utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of All that it would matter not that I had lived in the first place. This is why, to me, stagnation, willful ignorance, refusal to adapt and learn are the basest of blasphemies. We have infinite lives and yet there is only this one that is uniquely and wholly our own. This is the world; there is no other. Make of it something that matters.
We're born, we live a little while, we die, leaving marks upon the World both great and small, remembered and forgotten in equal measure. Such is the way of the weft and the weave, each soul a strand of the greater pattern, a pattern which evolves and changes with each addition, each subtraction, each choice. Each soul is spun from the same mass of soulstuff, at once both limitless and finite. Limitless, in that it can never be used up completely; energy can be neither created nor destroyed, merely recycled, and once the mortal shells have fallen, the majority of that soulstuff returns to the whole, leaving only the barest trace of what it was- its Thread- to mark its place in the ordered pattern. Finite, in that there is still only so much soulstuff, so much raw material, so that it becomes near impossible to spin a new thread that does not incorporate a portion of the recycled material, to greater or lesser degree. As such, the knowledge of what was can be passed to what is, and to what will be, genetic memory, of a sort, new eyes to look at the same problems and create new solutions.
We are spun and cut for the express purpose of learning, to learn all that can and might be possible in this great and varied universe. The Tapestry, which has been simplified to be called that of the Fates, of past, present, and future, is so much more. It is a catalog of the experiment of creation, of free will, and all that is, from the brightest star in the heavens to the smallest microbe deep in the Earth's crust has a thread within that pattern, a part to play, a lesson to learn or teach. True, by this definition and belief system, we might one day get to the end of that raw material after all, the chaos of the formless void stretched thin into tightly woven lines of light and shadow, a masterpiece in grayscale. It would take millennia upon millennia, however, and beyond that, the earliest ends of the Tapestry are not tied off. They can be unraveled, unmade. Entropy constantly tugs at those loose strands, seeking to return all to the cold dark of nothingness, no form, no substance, no knowledge, but even then, at thread pulled out will find its way back to the whole, and become part of the process again.
There is no life and there is no death, merely changed states of awareness. This is not to say that we should always go quietly into that good night, no, that we should not rage at the loss of life and love and loved. We are, in these human seemings, so much more than the material from whence our soul was spun. In these forms, we shape worlds, universes exist within in our tears, we call forth hell and heaven with one bright red drop of blood. We are the keepers of life and death, our breath, our words, balm to a wound or poison to a heart. Given this life, this existence, we do not wish to let it go, to lose the spark that makes us utterly and completely our own, unique. We will seek to cheat Time, offer bargains of flesh and mind to Death to stay his/her hand, all in hopes of having just one day more of existence, no matter how base or lavish that existence may be.
I do not fear death. I fear being forgotten, that this existence, though yes, I have learned much, fulfilled my function, is so utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of All that it would matter not that I had lived in the first place. This is why, to me, stagnation, willful ignorance, refusal to adapt and learn are the basest of blasphemies. We have infinite lives and yet there is only this one that is uniquely and wholly our own. This is the world; there is no other. Make of it something that matters.
