Witchy Wednesday - What Makes Myself Me

"When I die, my body stops functioning. Five minutes later, my brain cells start dying. But in the meantime, in between, maybe my brain releases a flood of DMT – the psychedelic drug released when we dream – so I dream. I dream bigger than I have ever dreamed before because it’s all of it. Just the last dump of DMT all at once, and my neurons are firing and I’m seeing this firework display of memories and imagination. My mind’s rifling through the memories, long and short term, and the dreams mix with the memories. And it’s a curtain call. One last great dream as my mind empties the fuckin’ missile silos, and then I stop. My brain activity ceases and there is nothing left of me. No pain, no memory, no awareness that I ever was. That I ever hurt someone. That I ever killed someone. Everything is as it was before me. All of the other little things that make me up – the microbes and bacterium and the billion other little things that live on my eyelashes and in my hair and in my mouth and on my skin and in my gut and everywhere else, they just keep on living and eating. And I’m serving a purpose. I’m feeding life and I’m broken apart and all the littlest pieces of me are just recycled and I’m billions of other places. And my atoms are in plants and bugs and animals, and I am like the stars that are in the sky. There one moment and then just scattered across the goddamn cosmos.”

"Myself. My self. That’s the problem. That’s the whole problem with the whole thing. That word, “self.” Thats not the word. That’s not right, that isn’t…How did I forget that? When did I forget that? The body stops a cell at a time, but the brain keeps firing those neurons. Little lightning bolts, like fireworks inside and I thought I’d despair or feel afraid, but I don’t feel any of that. None of it. Because I’m too busy. I’m too busy in the moment. Remembering. Of course. I remember that every atom in my body was forged in a star. This matter, this body is mostly empty space after all, and solid matter? It’s just energy vibrating very slowly why there is no me. There never was. The electrons of my body mingle and dance with the electrons of the ground below me and the air I’m no longer breathing. And I remember there is no point where any of that ends and I begin. I remember I am energy. Not memory. Not self. My name, my personality, my choices, all came after me. I was before them and I will be after, and everything else is pictures, picked up along the way. Fleeting little dreamlets printed on the tissue of my dying brain. And I am the lightning that jumps between. I am the energy firing the neurons, and I’m returning. Just by remembering, I’m returning home. And it’s like a drop of water falling back into the ocean, of which it’s always been a part. All things… a part. You, me and my little girl, and my mother and my father, everyone’s who’s ever been, every plant, every animal, every atom, every star, every galaxy, all of it. More galaxies in the universe than grains of sand on the beach. And that’s what we’re talking about when we say “God.” The cosmos and its infinite dreams. We are the cosmos dreaming of itself. It’s simply a dream that I think is my life, every time. But I’ll forget this. I always do. I always forget my dreams. But now, in this split-second, in the moment I remember, the instant I remember, I comprehend everything at once. There is no time. There is no death. Life is a dream. It’s a wish. Made again and again and again and again and again and again and on into eternity. And I am all of it. I am everything. I am all. I am that I am."

Both of these quotes are from the television show Midnight Mass, found streaming on Netflix. I was so impressed and taken back by the beauty and simplicity of what's expressed in them. It's very different than what the majority of people I know think when they talk about what comes after this life. They aren't full of pearly gates and singing angels and tearful reunions with loved ones who have passed on before. It made me really think about what I believe about the afterlife. 

I have to believe that some part of us remains after the outer shell of our bodies die. I don't think this life is all there is. That thought is too depressing for me. 

I'm not sure I am fully sold on the idea of reincarnation, nor am I sure I would want that. We struggle and fight our way through life cherishing the few moments of happiness and fulfillment we are able to experience, and then when we die, we get sent back to go through it all again ... in the hopes of what? Learning one more speck of knowledge of about the world or oneself or whatever. The pain outweighs that speck, and I would hate to think whatever higher power set the world into motion would be that much of a sadist. 

Do I buy the idea of a Heaven and Hell .... or Elysian Fields and Tartarus ... or whatever you call your Paradise versus Everlasting Suffering? Maybe, but maybe not. I don't believe in the church's version necessarily. Dante's vision of it is interesting intellectually, but it's too mired in dogma. I think if we buy into the idea that we go to one place or the other that each is made up from our own conceptions of them. Hell is of our own making, and so is Heaven. I think it would be different for everyone. I have resonated with the evolving personal Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory presented by the movie What Dreams May Come. If that's the sort of Afterlife we all get, and I have been kind enough to go to the Good Place in the end, I hope I get to exist in my happiest moments.  A cabin by the river in the mountains that I love. Visits from all of my loved ones. A meadow to run with the dogs I loved as much as I did the people. A crowded table full of delicious foods with a chair for everyone who has made my existence a little richer, a little happier, a little more full.

While that thought is nice, it's not the one that brings me the most peace and contentment. In the end, I hope I know what it was all for ... the why, the who, the why not ... just KNOW. And then knowing that Knowing wasn't as important as I had thought because there is so much more to being than simply knowing. The body and both its pleasures and pains are gone, but "I" remain. Not the I that I thought I was maybe or that I had always been because it was so entwined with the physical body and the limited scope of the human mind. I would be the "I" I could have always been if I had not been so confined. Light, effervescent, large and small, solid and vapor. Aware of myself but so much more than I had ever "been" before. I could be the little gust of wind that lifts a leaf off the ground and dances it round and round through the air. I could be the current that rushes water through the rocks of the stream. I could be the sunlight that helps the Spring flowers break the surface of the snow. To be an unfettered and eternal part of everything, tied to the Universe and to its Creator in ways that I never could be in my mortal form. And then as time goes on (if time exists outside of mortality at all), we grow less and less "I" and then just "Are." We exist to be what needs to be at any given moment. Raw energy to be formed and used and reformed but always there.