Page 3 (kind of--and still under construction)

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?