mu boyan, fat series
I'm hearing this more and more from people, "Mike, it's like my life is LOCKED in some sort of holding pattern."
Now, this term 'holding pattern' comes from the commercial aviation industry and describes the way an aeroplane will circle and airfield waiting to land.
Spoke to my mom on the phone last night and had a very interesting 'religious' converstion: for example, I didn't realize my mom practises a sort of Catholic Buddhism and says her prayers, every night. She's being doing this for the last nine years apparently. And that's totally fine.
She believes that we're here on this earth to "live good, wholesome lives," and if we don't, God reprimands us and sends us back to 'retake the exam' (my paraphrase). At some point the topic of conversation meandered onto my chosen atheism.
For me, Atheism is merely a way to get PERSONALITY and INTENT out of the God equation. I've never been a really big fan of 'like some ghost or bloke dictating how man should comport himself' while 'down here on earth'. I just can't have some (benevolent or tyrannical) dictator in space launching arbitrary dictats at the Human Race. I just can't allow that to be true, and therefore I atheise my universe.
We can't allow one 'fallible' soul to rule all.
Now, back to my spirituality, or lack of it. And I conceded, I might have a 'view of spirituality' that will allow 'afterlife' or 'soul' but it's like nothing you're taught in schools. See that image above, Mu Boyan's fat series sculpture of a big round fat man undergoing some sort of Cupping Therapy: he's had the air evacuated from a glass cupping jar with a flame and this 'vaccuum' has been placed on to an area of his skin to pull the skin into the cupping jar and cure some illness or imbalance. This image above, and my 'theory of the spirit' if you will, is all about balance. Equilibrium. Doing right by.
Now, in my atheist view of existence, and I've seen this happen to dying people, it's like they're dragged back into the void at the moment of their demise. Imagine this big fat man in the image. Now take away his personality because that's got nothing to do with this equation. Now take away all his physical human features, because we should be viewing this simulation as a sphere. I'm not sure whether it's a moving sphere or a vibrating sphere or a sphere that straddles multiple dimensions or time.
I don't know.
But this is my idea of what happens, when the brain starts to form in a human embryo, this fatness starts to pour into the proto-human. As this child grows up, more and more of this fatness pours into him until, at about the age of five years old, the brain has all of the fatness in it, it needs.
This gives me a dilemma. I don't think this process of vaccuuming the random area of a big round blob of 'spirit' into the brain (or the carbon atoms of biochemistry) is unique to humans: if anything it's connected to neurones. There seems to be something about brain cells that makes them 'create worlds' or universes. I'm always tempted to say every atom has some vaccuum of this spirit-blob in it, but I'm not totally convinced by that.
If anything spiritual exists at all, it's that the neuronic brain animals have somehow acts as a multidimensional connector between OUR PHYSICALITY (our personality being a reflection (or refraction) of our environment) and THAT LUMP OF SOMETHING out there somewhere across the dimensions.
But this still doesn't help, I'm still an atheist; for me, there's still no God, no Lord, no Law-giver. I know the difference between right and wrong, and so do you. I have to live this life like it's my only life, and so should you. Yes, life seems like it's 'locked in some kind of holding pattern', live with that. I have to try to Do Right By Free Planet, it's all I can do. It's all YOU CAN DO.
Soon, our landing slot will arrive.
