From Dust to Dust

Being raised in a Christian household, I worry that I may never overcome the fear that I will one day face the ultimate judgement. I now consider myself an atheist but religion is like an incurable virus that infects your mind. The only way I’ve found to overcome these fears is to try and rationalize them as much as I can. . .

Hell is expressed as a place of eternal torment and damnation, but I believe this was conceptualized as an archaic understanding of the human mind. Before we evolved to the point that our prefrontal cortex is as developed as it is now, our limbic system, or “lizard brain”, had much more control over how we understood our world. The limbic system is always analyzing our environment and processing for things that we can eat, fornicate with, or need to fight or run from. This part of our brain is largely subconscious and these thoughts rarely bubble up into the higher level processing area. Sometimes they do though and to my knowledge, this is what we understand as intrusive thoughts. “Neurotypical” people don’t usually give these thoughts the time of day, because they’re often nonsensical or jarring. Such as, “should I stab my significant other in the face with this knife I picked up to cut the tomatoes on the counter,” or, “do I want to have sex with that puppy.” Sometimes these thoughts are so repulsive that we begin to think about why we would ever think of such a thing. At this point, the thought is given some form of meaning and your prefrontal cortex now begins to comprehensively process it and the thought is filed away in your hippocampus. Now there’s an anchor point for similar thoughts to build off of when your neurons are pinging around your dendrites looking for ways to form connections that produce cohesive thoughts. The more you think about it, the more it builds and at some point you may start to respond to these repulsive thoughts by avoiding knives or puppies altogether, which only exacerbates the problem more. These intrusive thoughts are sometimes so grotesque in nature that a person without an understanding of the complexes at work may believe that an evil force must have put them there. It’s hard to reckon with the idea that we could cook up such a thing ourselves.

I imagine that we all have corners of our mind that we try to avoid, but unless we deal with and try to understand why then it will always be there, looming in the darkness; ready to snatch us up when we’re alone. There all sorts of other complexes: morbid curiosities, dark fantasies/fixations, extreme ideologies, etc. . . that I love to explore because they exist in all of us, and yet, are considered taboo to talk about. This creates a feeling of wrongness and isolation that causes you to internalize these things and suppress them. Maybe this is why seemingly “normal” people can sometimes snap unexpectedly and commit heinous acts of violence and abuse. I think we created the concept of Hell as a way to try to separate and purge ourselves of these thoughts and desires. At some point in our civilization we stopped talking about these things and pushed it all to the fringe in our never-ending quest toward perfection and order. What else is Hell but the embodiment of chaos and the realization of your worst horrors multiplied by 10. We conceptualize Heaven as being a place of contentment, bliss, and order. All things that we rarely see and are fleeting while felt or experienced. The way we currently understand the mechanisms of our universe through science is that it mostly consists of randomness and chaos, right? Order is felt through the fundamental laws of physics and seen through the lens of nature as in the Fibonacci Sequence, but even still, it all fits together in entirely unexpected ways.

It seems to reason that we should come to terms with chaos because we are all subject to it forever. There is beauty in the unknown, but it’s also terrifying. So much so that we’ve developed the evolutionary mechanism of fear in response to it. A psychological state that induces a physiological response so strong that one can do things in a split second that we didn’t even have time to think about. Fear allows us to be controlled and easily manipulated. Anyone that has had a bad trip on psychedelics is familiar with the feeling of eternal madness and confusion. Though, when you finally stop resisting and let go, watching as the disorder of the universe rushes over, under, and through you, you experience a beauty of immeasurable quality.

When I die, I will dissolve back into entropy and never again be what I was, but perhaps become something more. My body’s biologic constituents will be repurposed for life on earth to continue thriving, and my energy will echo back out into the universe for eternity.

Here is a quote from one of my favorite inspirational speakers: “You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.” – Alan Watts

And a song that uses sound bytes from one of my favorite speeches by him: Something by AZEDIA