Kensho

(My blog has moved to: http://rationalharmonics.blogspot.com/)

Afraid of dying? Don’t be! It’s never going to happen to you. At least not the way you think it will.

Albert Einstein once commented that the most fundamental question we can ever ask ourselves is whether or not the universe we live in is friendly or hostile. He hypothesized that your answer to that question would determine your destiny.

Surely, death is the greatest threat that we all face. For many people it gives the universe a decidedly hostile bent. They believe that we can never win this race, that we are born to lose.

I do not agree. In fact, I believe that the nature of the universe is such that we can never lose. I believe that death is an illusion.

To put it simply: I do not believe in death.

That is not to say that I think we are immortal, far from it. I believe that we are in fact exempt from the unpleasant matter all together.

This article is an attempt to prove my hypothesis.

(Note: For the purposes of this article, the terms mind, soul, spirit and consciousness are used interchangeably.)

Remember when you first saw The Matrix? For many people of my generation, this was the first time we had experienced the philosophy of consciousness and perception explored through the medium of pop culture. This film was a great demonstration of the old philosophical statement that “I think, therefore I am.” and it reminds us that this may be the only true statement that we can make. After all, how can we be sure that anything we see is truly real? What we are perceiving may be a sensory fantasy fed to our brains by some outside force… (some would say that it is in fact our own brain that is feeding us this fantasy, but I’m getting ahead of myself)

With all this in mind, I have formulated an earnestly objective, utterly subjective and hopefully truthful explanation for -

LIFE, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING

(with apologies to Douglas Adams)

It’s All In Your Mind

“Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one”

- Einstein

As we enter this new era of technological, scientific and philosophical awakening, I believe that there are a certain number of facts that we can agree on:

The first, and surely most important is that “I think, therefore I am”.

To put it another way: “I think, and that is all that I’m 100% certain of”

God forbid that we ever wake up in an embryonic cell plugged into some vast neural network built by evil robots… it sounds absurd. But, you have to admit, it is actually possible. If you really, really think about it… it could be true. How would we know otherwise? All the information we have is coming from our eyes, ears and other senses.

We’re already implanting Cochlear hearing aids into children with no ear drums at all. The implant is sending signals directly into their brains. Low quality signals, yes, but in a decade or so… Who knows?

You see my point.

Therefore, reality is all in our minds. We do not actually experience the real world, only the images and sensations fed to us by our senses and interpreted by our brains.

Yes, it’s true that this fantasy is directly influenced by the physical world, but no-one can ever know what the world really looks like (indeed research has suggested that we all perceive the world in very different ways.)

Your past exists as a holographic dream imprinted in your mind – your ‘memories’. These memories, and therefore your existence right up to this very moment, are as real and valid as the dream you had last night.

In fact, as far as the universe is concerned, your ‘mind’ doesn’t exist at all. It sees only atoms and movement within your skull.

So, does what we perceive truly exist?

My answer is that it all exists, every thought that we have is as real as the next. You see, as far as we’re concerned, the physical dimension is the one that does not exist, since we are utterly unable to conceive of it .

So is ‘reality’ a dream? I believe that it’s more like a memory of what our senses perceived a nanosecond ago. A story told to us by our mind to represent the physical dimension that surrounds us.

Death is Impossible

When we die our brain stops working and our consciousness ceases to exist. We cannot experience an absence of experience, therefore, technically, we cannot participate in this idea of ‘death’.

Death is an illusion, and something you will never have to experience because it is simply impossible for you to do so.

‘Death’ describes a nothingness. We cannot experience ‘nothing’. If you are experiencing nothing, then you are not experiencing anything at all.

You cannot fear nothing, it does not exist. If something does not exist, then why should you fear it?

Dream On

I assert that all human experience exists in the dimension of pure thought. It is therefore impossible to truly conceive of anything in the physical universe. All we have is the experiences created in our own minds from the sensory input of our own bodies.

Your experience of daily life is as real as your dreams, since both exist totally within your own mind. It is for this reason that our experience of life could be compared to a dream-state. When you wake up, does the person you were in the dream die? Of course not, who you were was only an illusion created in your own mind. But, then again, the same can be said for when you are awake. The truth is, who you are right now is an illusion. Your illusion.

I’ll Be There In Spirit

As you might have heard before, all of the atoms in your body are in constant transition. In your brain they are replaced about every twelve months. Therefore, how can you say you are the same person that you were one year ago? You can, of course, because your mind is not a physical entity. It exists instead on a separate plane, in another dimension to the physical world.

Our ’spirit’, ’soul’ or ‘mind’ is who we are, and since that exists in the dimension of pure thought it means that we are already living in a spiritual plain. indeed, we are having a ’spiritual experience’ every moment of our lives.

To quote Dr. Wayne Dyer:

“We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a physical experience.”

Chemistry Between Us

Scientists claim that they can map a human thought by watching the electrical and chemical activity in the brain, yet what they are mapping is simply matter and energy moving through space, it is not an actual thought.

If you take the chemicals that create the emotion of love and combine them on a petri dish then have you created love? Of course not, all you have is a puddle of electrically-charged chemicals. But when this reaction occurs within a human brain a thought is said to have occurred. But what’s the difference? I don’t believe that there is any.

Changing context does not change the physical event, and therefore if you believe that thoughts occur within the physical realm then you must also accept that random thoughts are occurring throughout the universe whenever the right electrically charged chemical reactions take place. Therefore the universe must be filled with an omnipresent intelligence. A ‘God Conciousness’ if you like. The only difference with us humans is that our brains create linear cohesion and a home for these thoughts to cascade and evolve.

But when your physical body ‘dies’ your consciousness does not disappear, it merely becomes disorganised, less constrained by the linear concepts of time and space. You will have rejoined the ‘God Conciousness’.

“Artificial” Intelligence

In fact, if the right chemical reaction was somehow created in a test tube exactly mimicking the thought process of a person sitting in a New York cafe eating a raspberry tart, then who is to say that this thought hasn’t actually occurred? Just because it has not taken place in the cohesive unit of a brain does not mean that it is any less real. In fact the ‘person’ would not even realise that they existed in a test tube and not in a New York Cafe since they can only be aware of what they perceive through their thoughts.

You are only aware of what you perceive through your thoughts; and physical death does not necessarily mean that these will cease.

Some people might argue that a thought which occurs outside of your own brain cannot be identified as yours, yet this argument is fundamentally flawed since our brain cannot be defined as a physical constant. The universe is expanding, the earth is moving around the sun so your fixed position in space is constantly changing. In addition, most of the atoms in your brain have changed places with new ones. So what’s the difference? There is none.

A-Wake

If you cut open a brain you can’t see the thoughts, so where are they? The best way to look at it is to imagine that the physical evidence (the electrical charges and chemical reactions) are like a wake left in the ocean behind a boat that we can never see. The wake is evidence of the boat, but it is not the boat itself. It shows that the boat is moving, yet if you stood below deck and closed your eyes you would not feel as if you were moving at all. In the same way, our consciousness exists on an ever-changing ocean of atoms within our brains. Similarly, we do not feel that our consciousness is ‘moving’ through space since we experience it as a linear constant, separate from the physical realm.

The existence of our mind is proven by the ‘wake’ left in our brains (the predictable movement of atoms and electrical energy) but only we experience consciousness.

Hold That Thought

A thought does not exist within any one moment in time. If that were so, then you could cryogenically freeze someone’s brain, stopping the electrons and chemicals in that moment, and the person would be stuck forever thinking the same thought. Yet we know that this isn’t the case.

A thought does not exist at a fixed point in time, rather it exists in the space between points. It’s like music. A piece of music is not the notes on the page, rather it is the journey from one note to another that creates the song. So are our thoughts created in the path between moments frozen in time.

The universe is a one-song. A single (uni) verse that we all sing with our thoughts.

Pause or Eject?

If our consciousness is a chain of connected thoughts, like a string of musical notes, then the concept of ‘death’ fundamentally describes a chain of thought that is no longer extending. No pain can be felt, no disappointment, nothing. Nothing is nothing, so it cannot exist, and so therefore neither can ‘death’.

Something can only be said to have ‘ended’ when it will never continue. In regards to our consciousness, ‘death’ is more like a pause.

Thank You, Come Again

There is every chance that this chain of thoughts may be continued again somewhere, sometime, in the infinite possibilities of time and space.

It’s true that the atoms will have changed, but take a look at your own body. In the last year almost every atom has changed within it too. Who you were then no longer exists. They are ‘dead’. You are a copy of that body, gradually constructed bit by bit within the old one using the proteins and enzymes that you have consumed (you are what you eat, as they say.)

Therefore, who is to say that if by pure chance, your thought pattern is reconstructed a trillion years from now in another physical form, that this would not be you?

And would you feel that any time had passed at all?

At One With The Universe

What separates your mind from the outside world? Why is it that your mind exists only within your brain, and not within the liquid that surrounds it? Or in the bone the encases it? Or in the air outside that? Or in the other people near you? If the atoms in your brain are constantly being replaced and passing through this liquid and bone and air… then is not your mind intrinsically linked with the outside world? The truth is that your brain tissue is as much your consciousness as the ground beneath your feet or the stars above. Physically you are a part of it all whilst being separate in the spiritual dimension.

Your mind is your own creation, and no change in the physical world can ever take that away from you. The physical universe sees no difference between life and death, just a rearrangement of the atoms of your body.

Your mind can never ‘die’ since death is a phenomenon restricted to the physical world, and does not exist in the dimension of pure thought.

It is for these reasons that no person should fear death.

Fearing death is absurd – you may as well fear infinity. It’s like a mathematician fearing that one day infinity will come along and consume all the other numbers. It’s impossible because the numbers will always be there; maybe a particular formula would become disorganised and trail off into nothing if infinity is thrown in the mix, but all the numbers would still be around, ready to recreate the formula once again.

Besides, infinity isn’t even a number.

The nothingness that surrounds our consciousness is infinite. Our lives are, indeed, “a parenthesis in eternity” (to quote Dr Dyer)

Time Enough

The universe is not linear – nor does it move at the speed of our experience… this is all our own dream and unique to us (just watch a fly buzzing around some time. Do you think it is experiencing the world at the same speed as us?)

The universe does not exist exclusively in this moment, or any moment at all; rather, it exists in all possible moments of time. This is the great revelation of Quantum mechanics.

You really do have all the time in the world, because there’s no end to speak of, only the natural progression of your own story, which is all in your mind.

How can you rush a thought? A dream? You can only work against it or in harmony with it.

Work in harmony with your dream, your spirit, and you will enjoy happiness in your life.

Since the world that we see and feel is all created within our own minds, then so too is our experience of it. As the Buddhists have taught for thousands of years: You create your happiness; it comes from within.

The Answer?

The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.

- Einstein

The answer is happiness; joy; peace.

Anything that does not ultimately increase your happiness is unnecessary. Discard your fears and worries about death and stop trying to cram as much into your life as possible before you ‘run out of time’.

I believe that if we all act from what makes us truly happy, there should be no deliberate suffering in the world. Any psychologist will tell you that hatred and violence are caused by a person’s insecurities and fears. No truly happy person would ever harm another.

Any thought that does not serve to help you live your life in happiness is irrelevant. The idea of death is disturbing, and yet , as I hope I have shown, is not worth wasting your energy worrying about.

Enjoy this dream of “life”, and never worry about time passing and the end approaching, for this too is an illusion.

The universe is not dark, it is not cold, it is simply free of emotion and subjective experience. It exists in a state of pure enlightenment.

It is made up of energy that occasionally transforms into matter and matter that occasionally forms sentient beings; all of which eventually returns again to rejoin the great river of energy. This energy is the source from which we have all emanated.

Indeed, we have never been apart from this source. We like to draw divisions and imagine that we are somehow separate the rest of the universe, but the truth is that we are all physically and spiritually intertwined with it.

We are truly at one with the universe.

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Thanks everyone for your comments. If you would like to share your thoughts or register your interest in my upcoming book feel free to email me at bardcan@gmail.com.

(My blog has moved to: http://rationalharmonics.blogspot.com/)

- Bard Canning