From now to Eternity

This might be a long blog. I have spent a lot of time thinking about god and what reality is truly. There is a lot of long, sleepless nights where I would wake up violently trying to comprehend that I would one day die. I would begin to feel the darkening fear set over me, and I would simply try to calm myself by telling myself that it would be a long time for now until I would die. It was an empty promise, but it would bring Morpheous back into my room, to lay the dust upon my eyes. It's this epic attempt to answer what happens when I die, because it's not only the unknown that scares me, but it's the fear that I will go on for eternity, either I know it or not. I would day dream about counting sand for eternity, I would wake from these lulls scared and confused. I would be disoriented, unable to differentiate the real from the surreal. I began to think about god, I thought about Christianity. Eternal salvation seems good on the outside of thought, but I began to think about Heaven. The idea of eternity still haunted me, I don't want to be in Heaven forever, the boredom that would set over me. I began to realize if Heaven was real, I would need to lose time perception to enjoy it. Being able to perceive time inherently makes us human. Therefor, I began to realize to like eternally I would need to be different than a human, and I'm not sure if I want that. I began to drift away from Christianity. Heaven seems more like a fool's dream than an Ultimate Reality.

See I don't care about the moralities that religions give. I understand that it's a society pushing morality upon me. I feel like I live I a moral life. I know what it means to be hurt by the immoral. It's a driven, internal concept that engrained in me the moment I realized about my bastard upbringing, and the pain my mother endured. Religion will not force my moral choices. I feel right and wrong, it is inherent. The point of religion is trying to understand the true reality. I took philosophy classes in high school and I thought logically about god, and creation. I would think about the big bang and potentiality of intelligent creation. Moot was reached. I came to the idea that creation is illogical. Human mind cannot fathom creation. For everything must come from something, but at a certain point in creation we cannot account for the formation of god, or what caused the big bang. It simply is formed from the nothing. The only thing that I could logically discern is that god is more of a potentially than the big bang. God is an illogical organism, therefor he can be created in an illogical way. I solidly became agnostic. I had friends that were atheists, it just didn't make sense to me.

The question haunted me though. God is called to be loving in monotheism, but what about vengeful or uncaring gods? The Ultimate Reality still eluded my logical perfection. In my philosophy class we began to study Taoism, and I found it appealing. My life was hectic and structured. I longed to be the water that flowed, it didn't dam itself, it just flowed. The philosophy was perfection. Just simply let go, and life will take you away. However, it's like socialism: perfect on paper. I found it hard to practice and ultimately embody. I gained an air of apathy though. Little things didn't matter to me. Life is too short to worry about the guy that cut you off in the freeway. That's the point there: life is too short. Taoism fit with that.

"Knowledge is power, guard it well" it's a phrase I live by. There hasn't been a day where I haven't strategically used my mind. It's as if I am honing my mind through this tedious mental gymnastics. I've run circles around my own arguments. Then it hit me, I am forming mental perfection. I began to not worry about what is going to be; I focus on what is. I developed Taoism into something tangible. Not worrying about things I cannot control and lived my life by my own mental perfection. The Ultimately Reality still would wake me up from night to night. 8 years after the night tremors started, they still continued. I took a religion class this year, mostly to argue with ignorant Christians, but there was one day I was hit with a TGV train. We learned about Buddhism in my philosophy classes. The Four Noble Truths. Desire causes suffering. It seemed like a sorcerer's religion; maybe if I studied it long enough I could pull a sword out of a stone and become king of all England. The destruction of desire seemed hokey, if not impossible. My religion teacher opened my eyes to enlightenment though. He told me that the original writing was translated wrong. It was not desire that caused all suffering, but more of the idea of grasping the fleeting. The concept that if we try to have we cannot grasp is what causes sorrow and suffering. If the human being does not covet what is impossible to have, we will reach calm and finally enter Nirvana. I began to realize this is what I had been thinking. Do not worry about the maybe, worry about the is, and understand it. Do not force yourself on the is, simply understand it. It is passive living, but it was mental perfection. It's what I believe in, but I never answered my original terror: What is the Ultimate Reality? I came to terms with me dying and there being no afterlife. I have come to terms with living for eternity. It is not my control, I simply must forge myself into perfection and what happens will happen regardless of what I do to stop it. It is fleeting, I cannot grasp it.