(meme from agent139): What Gets Me Out of Bed in the Morning

[azurelunatic]

I may well wind up adhering to the letter of the question, not the spirit, because I'm not used to looking at this section of the underpinnings of my mind.

I am not a solipsist. Not really. I take comfort in the idea of a material universe, which may or may not (but likely does, because enough people believe it) have a "spiritual" extra gajillion of dimensions to it, a la the "Tree of Life". I take comfort in reincarnation, and the idea that a universe that will eventually all convert to energy (I still need to check KL7AM's science for myself) and be reborn, infinitely over, in infinite combination... if that is true, then the million-monkeys model of reincarnation is sound.

When I was a child, I would torture myself by trying to imagine how it would be like to *not think*. To *not feel*. To have no input of either the outside world or the inside world. For that would be what death was: the complete cessation of sensation and thought.

The idea terrified me.


Sometimes, I don't get out of bed in the morning.


Mostly, though, I get out of bed in the morning because I have stuff to do. I have things to write. I have a house to clean. I have things to read. It is doing, not being, that gets me through the day. "Being" ... I can do that from bed, thanks much. Or I could sleep. I like sleep. I need sleep.

Comments

[tristn.livejournal.com]

I want to comment to agent 139 that I get out of bed in the morning bc I've really got to pee it has nothing to do with carrots or fire. I don't want to be that much of a smart ass right to his face though.

a thought

[agent139.livejournal.com]

you say when the universe will be converted from matter to energy, as if the two were not merely different phases of the same thing, siblings, like ice and water vapor.

the million monkey model of 'reincarnation' is sound enough if you believe that an atom of body will retain a memory of being a part of 'you' long after you have ceased to be a unity. the eternal return- in an infinite universe everything that is happening now will happen again at some future time, an infinite number of times. this is what kundera calls the 'weight' of being, the action and choice you commit now is sculpted into eternity, and you are bound to follow it, again, and again, and again. at the same time- there is no time, space, matter, or energy without our consciousness to make it so. what a naught-y knot that is... weightlessness, the destruction of meaning and with it the annihilation of responsibility to the future, to the past... though not to the present.

as for the complete sessation of thought and sensation, i have to agree with that. however there is a little twist, that the world as you know it, in every detail that you know it, is a construction that you have fabricated of an outside world that is absolutely barred from our experience. you experience it, you own it, and you fictionlize it into your 'story.'

all of our lives are fiction.

i think if you have the attention to detail for it, you can actually see the seams, sometimes, the structuring and ordering mechanism at work, building seem-ing sense and order out of chaos. this is what my book Fallen was about, for me- chasing that deer in the woods, and getting further and furhter into it... until i turned around and saw what i was actually looking at and it scared the fuck out of me. enough to put me in the hospital.

after i was released i started doing a lot of hallucinogens, actively pursuing that snipe, (the "ordering mechanism"), and i forced myself to recognize it with open eyes. then i actually went back and wrote the book that had already been written.

yet in some ways real-izing this entirely has taken the spirit in living away from me. thus the 'what gets you out of bed in the morning.' do i have the guts to recognize it as fiction and ride it to its conclusion, or will i continue to live as a negation? i guess the choice is entirely mine.

[hai-kah-uhk.livejournal.com]

Cool. This whole discussion makes it seem likely that my Perspective isn't so bizarre after all. Perhaps still disturbing, but not so bizarre.

(I mean all the stuff about being a fragment of Passive (or O) and how sentience is a novel new and very temporary thing and I'm looking forward to going back to 'normal' when my sabbatical is over. Hmm.)