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My life started out predictably.  Kind of like a sit com of sorts.  My earliest memories were all based on that television object that I later rejected.  I remember this for example:  

Introduction: Live from our Burbank Studios we present America's favorite game show where knowledge is King, Lady Luck is a jester, and everyone tries to be Woody Allen, yes, its time for "Whose Got Woody."

(applause)

Introduction continued: And your host, Gilbreto Filberstein.

Gilbreto Filberstein (GF): Thank you Don. Our first contestant tonight is a Reform Rabbi from Brooklyn where he is with the Temple Shalom Paki, everyone please welcome our returning champion Isaac Snagglepuss. (more applause).

GF:  And our challenger tonight is a lawyer from Edwardsville, Illinois, a big hand of applause for  Sri Pseudo Pumpkin (marked less applause).

GF:  Now, contestants, I'm sure you know the rules.   We will give each of you a hypothetical situation, and your job is to react to it just like Woody Allen would do.  Each member of our studio audience will then electronically rate your performance on a scale of one to ten.   As the returning champion, the first question goes to you Mr. Snagglepuss:

(GF reads his card):   "You are at a dinner party and are asked what you think of the psychiatry of Freud:"

Mr. Snagglepuss:   Thats an easy one.  I tell them I worked with Freud in Vienna. We broke over the concept of penis envy. Freud felt that it should be limited only to women.  (laughter)

GF:  Lets see, our audience survey says, you earned a 9.24.  Very good Mr. Snagglepuss.  And now a question for our challenger:

(GF reads his card):  You are at an art opening and the attractive artist asks you what you think of the controlled brush strokes of her paintings and how they symbolically represent the control she has in her life.   You respond?

Mr. Psuedopumkin:  I tell her that this ontological structure is similar to kind of structure in Heidegger's "Being in Time".   Specifically, the control represents what Heidegger wants to get at--he wants, in the Dasein Analytic, to uncover the fundamental structures of Human existence.    (silence)

GF: Survey says 0.2.   I'm sorry, Mr. Pseudopumpkin, because your score is less than 2, it gives Mr. Snagglepuss a chance to steal the question.   What do you say Snagglepuss?  What does the control mean to you?

Mr. Snagglepuss:  I tell her that you can’t control life. It doesn’t wind up perfectly. Only art you can control. Art and masturbation. Two areas in which I am an absolute expert.  (roaring laughter)

GF:  And the audience survey says 8.78.  We'll it looks like our champion has successfully won round 1.  We'll be back for an exciting round 2 right after a word from our sponsor,

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People throughout history have spent a lot of time trying to get enlightened or achieve transcendence, whatever those words mean.  But I think the experience of enlightenment is the realization that we do not exist.  At least not in the way we think we do.  And when we are on our deathbed, experiencing our "final" moments of life, we maybe get a glimmer that the transition to death may not be that much of a transition at all.  Kind of a buzz kill actually.  And all our life our belief that we were alive was a delusion.

Imagine that--human's making things up.  I would have never believed that was possible.  Humans for example, can make believe they are dead.  That is called Contard's delusion. There is a documented case where a patient suffering from Contard's delusion believed he was dead so strongly that he actually starved. 

But what I'm getting at is the tendency toward a reverse form of Contard's delusion that we all share:  the belief not that we are dead, but that we are living.   This is a very practical and convenient idea.   Hard to do much of anything without it:-).   There are a mulitude of different perspectives on what constitutes life.   The biologists might say that we really are mostly a vast colony of bacteria in a host organism.  Though the belief that we are living has tremendous practical advantages,  it is still a belief-- perhaps no different than a belief that we are dead.

Like Cotard's, the belief that we are alive may be just as delusional or compulsive.  For in our belief that we are alive,  isn't there an internal narrative which we cling, a story we construct minute-by-minute to assure ourselves that we understand what is happening?  Sufferers of conditions like Cotard’s delusion may invent weird, nonsensical explanations for their reality because they are experiencing weird, nonsensical input. The only difference between these patients’ explanations and our own explanations is the degree to which they are obviously, verifiably false. Whatever explanations we manufacture at any given moment to explain our state of mind and body could be similarly muddled.   Whether or not your brain is damaged, your mind is always trying to explain itself to itself, and the degree of accuracy varies moment to moment.

Don't believe everything you think.  Even that you are just a big container of mostly bacteria:-).  

Still at the end of the day, I can't help wondering if this is what got her in trouble with the wardens in the land of Nod.  Maybe it wasn't that she summoned me.  Maybe it was that she possessed the forbidden knowledge of death?