.:i hope buddhism is right:.
so the latest news is that i’ve gotten badly sick again. badly sick as in stomach ills. don’t think that the irony of the situation has eluded me, what with my giant post about treating colitis and such. i honestly thought i had it all figured out. you can imagine the massive smack-down to the pride i am feeling right now in addition to the fact that my stomach feels like it’s going to explode. hopefully next week i will end up on some different medication and i’ll be back on the road to remission again. that’d be nice, because it’s really hard to live with this thing when it’s in full flare…
but what does this have to do with buddhism?
a long time ago, a friend of mine told me about a short story written by neil gaimon. i don’t remember what the name of it was, but i do remember that it had to do with scientists coming up with a way to ‘reboot’ your body through a pill. you’d basically take this pill and everything that was ailing you basically got knocked out. you would be able to start all over again. the side effect was that you’d turn into a member of the opposite sex each time you did it. and you could take the pill again to turn you back into what you were previously, but you lost more and more of your distinctly male and distinctly female characteristics as you went back and forth, resulting in turning into some kind of odd androgynous being. and…of course…the pill was addictive.
that said, sometimes i wish a pill like that was available. wouldn’t it be awesome if you could just pop a pill and all of a sudden have all of your sicknesses go away? cancer…HIV…all of those terrible diseases…gone. i mean, i could do without the turning into a member of the opposite sex and all, as i do quite enjoy being a dude, but i would really love to get rid of this thing i have.
and what does THIS have to do with buddhism?
the idea of reincarnation. the idea of starting over. the idea of going back to the beginning and reliving a life. my overly imaginitive, somewhat macabre mind starts thinking things like, ‘wouldn’t it be great if you could just hurl yourself off of a building, die, and then all of a sudden you’re back to square one…childhood…teens…college.’ is that how it works?
and then thinking things like that results in a flood of other questions…
- would you start in a new body…a new ‘vessel’…or would you simply restart your own life?
- would you be conscious of the things you learned in your ‘previous life’?
- is the reason why you can’t remember any of your ‘previous lives’ because this is actually your first life?
- because i’m human now, does that mean that i’ll always come back as a human?
- if i come back as a human, and i come back as a different ‘vessel’, will i be born in another country? into another social class?
- what are the rules that determine where you’re placed? is everything i do here a factor in what i become after i die and come back?
the more i think about my life, the more i observe and think about how things work here, the more inclined i am to believe that there isn’t any kind of ‘afterlife’ for us. it makes much more sense to think that we’ll just come back. it makes sense to me based on the scientific principle that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
when you take a step back and look at yourself, you come to realize that ‘you’ isn’t really necessarily your body; rather, it’s all of your experience and knowledge and feelings and memories all bundled into one neat little set of chemicals and electrical impulses that reside in your brain. and all of that is energy, right? so if energy can’t be created or destroyed, then what happens to all of those when we die? i’m sure some of it gets soaked up into other forms of energy, such as heat, electricity, etc. but there are still those pieces of energy that contain ‘you’ imprinted within them. therefore, it makes sense that at some point or another that this energy is perhaps imprinted into another being, and lo and behold, you’re reborn again.
furthering this, remember that it takes energy for an egg and a sperm cell to unite. where does that energy come from if energy can’t be created? it has to already exist…
sometimes i take comfort in these thoughts when i start thinking that my body is trying to destroy itself. other times i think i’m a little bit crazy. i think it’s my brain’s desperate attempt at reassuring me that someday, i won’t have to worry about this pain.
oh well…
so i hope that next week when i start this new stuff it’ll help me out so that i can go out and enjoy this life as much as possible. despite the fact that i wish i could reboot, restart with another body, that would mean sacrificing what i already have, and i really kinda’ like that…
