A Simple Model of Life

  I'm not a religious guy.  The fire and brimstone stuff is kind of a turnoff, I enjoy sleeping in on Sundays, and the idea of God as some old man in the sky doesn't really sit well with me.  I also find it very difficult to believe the almighty creator of the universe decided on a whim to come to a microscopic speck of dust such as Earth and walk among us in human form 2,000 years ago.  It doesn't jibe.
  But going back to that microscopic speck of dust thing, it does occur to me that we are tiny little insignificant things floating about in a massive fantastically large, for all intents and purposes infinitely gigantic universe of which we effectively know next to nothing about.  I think it's pretty safe to say that there's something out there greater than ourselves.
  Throughout history humans have liked to walk around thinking we're a pretty big deal.  I think the really miraculous thing about life though isn't the existence of humans, per se.  It's the fact that anything exists at all and that we're able to perceive it.  I've come to think of humans as little radio receivers whose brains are tuned in to the true essential reality and this is what we have come to know as consciousness.
  So I've come up with this little model of life.  It's a gross oversimplification of some pretty complex stuff, but here it is.  There is a great and vast ocean.  This ocean is filled with an infinite number of droplets of water and these water droplets represent everything that is, everything that ever was, everything that ever will be, and everything that ever could be.  Now humans are tiny little vessels not unlike water balloons.  We are suspended upside down from a platform over this great vast ocean, only we are used to being suspended upside down so we perceive ourselves as being upright.  We possess sensory organs such as sight, hearing, smell, etc.  Although maybe not consciously aware of it, we all also have a connection not unlike a hose that feeds directly into the ocean.  We can't detect the connection with our other senses, but it could perhaps be described as our sense of consciousness.  This isn't really so strange because if you think about it you can't detect hearing with your eyes or seeing with your ears.
  So anyway this hose allows us access to droplets of water from the ocean.  Our perception of time is really our perception of being filled with more and more of these droplets.  Each of us gets our own droplets which contain different aspects of the fundamental reality.  Nobody has the same combination of droplets and that's what makes us unique.  Moreover some of us get droplets that make us sensitive to music or sports or physics or math or whatever.  It's what makes us good at things.  As you move through life you get filled up with more and more of these droplets of water and like a water balloon you begin to fill up and grow.  Also like a water balloon you eventually pop.  Since we're suspended upside down over the ocean all of the water droplets that were collected inside of you fall back into it.  They don't go away they just re-join the vast ocean.  Part of what was inside you may eventually end up inside someone else, but the exact combination of droplets that made you YOU will never again be collected in precisely the same way in a single vessel.
  Imagine if you were in a raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and you dipped a glass over the side and filled it with water.  Then you dumped the glass back into the ocean and dipped it in again and refilled it.  What are the odds you would have the exact same drops of water in the glass you had the first time?  Astronomically small, I would suppose.  And the great cosmic ocean from which we draw the essence of ourselves is infinitely larger than the Pacific Ocean.
  So death is really the end of the vessel, but not the end of what was inside it.  That is the fundamental stuff of existence.  It never dies, it just recombines in different ways.  So you can think of the ocean as God, if you want.  I'm willing to buy that.  Maybe it's what the universe itself is.  I don't know.  But if the ocean is God and we are all made of the ocean, then we are all God.  Cool, huh?

  Hey what was in that brownie I just ate anyway?  Just kidding.  I've just been thinking about this sort of stuff, like, for reals.
 

Another Year Down the Tubes

Jeez, is it just me or do these years keep going by faster and faster?  It's kind of not cool.  2013 was all right, but saw it's share of disappointments, irritations, and frustrations.  But it had its ups, too.  Same as pretty much any other year I suppose.  I had a pretty good run at updating this here blog regularly, but then I got kind of bad about it.  Oh well.  It's not as if anybody reads this anyway.  I could say some pretty outrageous things like M.C. Hammer is a pink rooster-wolf and nobody would be the wiser.  Hope 2014 kicks some ass for a change.  

Impressive Homeless People

I just saw a one handed guy on a street corner juggling and it was pretty impressive.  Now mind you I don't mean the guy was juggling one handed.  He only had one hand and yet he was juggling.  He did do some one handed juggling, but even more impressively and freakishly fascinating he sometimes used his handless stump. I have to say bravo to that.  This guy can do things with one hand that I'm not very good at with two.  Now that's the kind of homeless guy that deserves a little of your spare change.  He earned that money, damn it.

Wealthy Lunatics

It's not too much of a stretch to think that most people would like to be richer than they are, if not downright super duper rich.  I certainly used to dream of having billions of dollars and whatnot.  But as I've gotten older I've come to realize that there's only a finite amount of money and resources out there and that people who horde excessive amounts of money are kind of being dicks.

If someone were to hand me say... ten million dollars, I could probably make that last me for the rest of my life and be living pretty well the whole time.  And that's relatively small potatoes compared to what some of these rich freaks have.  At some point you just don't really NEED any more money.

That said, if people are going to have mass amounts of money, I kind of like it when they're a little bit crazy and do cool, weird stuff with their cash.  A perfect example of this is Sarah Winchester who built the Winchester mystery house.  Apparently she was under the impression that ghosts were going to kill her if construction ever stopped on this house so she kept building more and more for like 36 years.  It got to the point that servants needed a map to navigate the house and there are stairs that lead nowhere and doors that open up on walls and crazy stuff like that.  Now is this a better usage of money than feeding hungry children?  No, but it's better than just keeping the money in your bank account and doing nothing with it.  So if you're going to be filthy rich, please have the decency to be a little nuts as well.

Santa: Total Badass?

I, like many other people, saw the Lord of the Rings movies.  In them we learn that elves are noble ethereal creatures with incredible powers.  They are also fierce warriors with total mastery of weapons such as bows and arrows.

And yet Santa Claus was able to not just conquer them but enslave them.  He forces them to make toys at the North Pole, which I'm pretty sure is not the elves' natural habitat.  It's a far cry from Rivendell, that's for sure.  From what I hear kids in Chinese sweat shops make better wages and have better working conditions.  How did this happen?

There's only one solution I see.  Santa Claus is a total badass who singlehandedly whupped the entire Elvish army.  Don't piss him off, man, or you might have more to worry about than coal in your stocking.

Positive Attitudes

They say you should approach life with a positive attitude and that positive thinking causes good things to happen.  That may be true, but doesn't it then stand to reason that if you're going to have a negative attitude you should just be doubly negative?  After all two negatives make a positive.  Don't just be negative.  Be negative twice over!  Life will reward you.