Dust to Dust

One of the great parts about blogging is the fact that while many of us often deal with the same pressing issues and difficult questions, we're still able to take our own style and approach to the subjects and frame them in our own unique ways.  Some bloggers openly declare their intention to hurt their reader's brains. Some bloggers tear at the scabs of people's complacent sensibilities.  My friend Vincent just likes to take walks.  His blog A Wayfarer's Notes has a premise which is beguilingly simple, while it's execution is prolific in its complexity.  It doesn't hurt that he's a damn good writer either.  He goes where his feet take him, and he lets his mind wander in a similar fashion, and on his blog he shares with us the results of these physical and mental ramblings.  His reveries aren't always confined to his walks.  Sometimes he's in bed half asleep; sometimes he's hanging the wash out to dry.  But one of the charms of his blog is that he often organically incorporates the physical details of his surroundings with the abstract musings of his ideas.  This has the sublime effect of placing thoughts in the context of life.

His latest post is a fine example of this.  He not only tells us of an epiphany that he had, an intuition of immortality, but he also describes exactly where he had it and even provides a picture of the spot.  Of immortality he says, "Normally, when we speak of being immortal, we refer to the notion of the 'I' not dying when the body dies. But I saw, in that moment, that the 'I' is nothing more than the body’s mechanism for looking out for itself. It dies and unravels, but consciousness is all-pervasive, in all beings, in all matter. Call it awareness, call it an indwelling intelligence in everything, if you like."  As usual with Vincent's post, this gave me a lot to think about.

It seems to me, if he wanted to pursue this idea (assuming even that he's interested in treating it as an idea.  He might be content to take it as a moment of awe and wonder, and leave it at that without further questioning.  He and I are of somewhat different temperaments.) ...but suppose he wanted to look deeper into this notion of consciousness being something larger than the finite existence of the ego and the individual.  Then, I would suggest that to find a clue to how it all ends, one needs to look at how it all begins.  If "our" consciousness, his and mine and yours and whoever's, returns to some universal mind upon death, then it seems to follow that they arose up out of that universal mind at birth.  If consciousness transcends the individual, mustn't it do so in both directions in time, mustn't it precede life as well as succeed it?

For instance, under that post I left a comment speculating about immortality on the basis of the Law of Conservation, the question of "Where does it all go?  Where does a lifetime of knowledge and my knowing of that knowledge...how can it all just vanish without a trace?"  This is, of course, an entirely different point from the one Vincent was making, and yet it proceeds from the same principle that consciousness is part of something larger than the individual life, in this case, part of the general substance of the universe, a transubstantiation of matter and energy and thought that somehow endures in some form.  To insist that it must return to something, is to insist likewise that it must have come from this something.  Arguing from Conservation requires a persistent continuum from which the individual rises and falls.

I'm reminded of Adam from the Bible, and I'm struck once again by the metaphorical insight of those ancient writers.  Adam was formed from the dust of the ground to which he would someday return, life rising up out of the very substance to which death would eventually return it.  Or as Mark Twain once put it, "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."

But yet, we can't simply return consciousness to the shelf where we found it.  It's a used item, changed and worn and broken in by passing through a lifetime of our experiences.  It began for me as a crack of awareness in the world as I first opened my eyes.  I knew nothing beyond the most natural of bodily functions, breathing, sleeping, crying and so on.  As time went on, that crack of awareness has grown.  It has become a repository of information and experience.  It has gathered the dust of my life to complement the dust of the Earth.  When the one returns to the ground, what becomes of the other?  It has blossomed, grown in complexity and substance.  Isn't it made of something?  Where do it go?  Is it disseminated through-out this universal mind like fertilizer, enhancing its general growth and vitality?  Does that flash of memory in my mind, my foot making cracks in the ice...will that someday be part of a stream flowing over a rock?  Will the algebraic equations I learned somehow fall from the sky with the rain?  Will my laughter grow from the ground?  Where does it all go?

We're not done with this subject.  Not by a long shot.  It's one of the most important, most enduring questions of the human race.  It's also probably the most difficult to answer.  What happens to us when we die?  Only the dead know for sure, and they're not giving up any of their secrets.  So it's up to us.  I'll chip in.  I'll do my part, and I'll do my best to give you a headache in the process.  That, for what it's worth and while it lasts, is my "individual" perspective and contribution to the whole cosmic mess.