Thursday, November 8, 2018

Quo Vadis?

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The Old Philosopher Is 78

The life expectancy for a male in the United States of America in the year 2018 is 78.7 years, which means I might have six months left.  I guess it’s time for my whirlwind tour of the Indonesian archipeligo, one last ride on the Sausalito Ferry, a final visit to hallowed Fenway.  I’m not really sure how things escalated to this point so quickly, it seems like just yesterday when I was grousing in the goodie with Rita Peyton in Stillwater, racing around Austin with the Rangeroos, helping to foal mares in nearby Orange Lake.  The bus destination headers used to say “Further,” now they holler “Oblivion.”  Who pushed the aging button to warp speed when I wasn’t looking?

I’ve been trying my darnedest to find the Fountain of Youth these last few years, but I think the thing’s hidden in the lost caves of Gangkhar Puensum Mountain in Bhutan, where they don’t issue climbing permits.  I’ve tried endless supplements, testosterone, weight training, esoteric acupuncture, therapeutic massage, rolfing and Carter’s Little Liver Pills and barely slowed down the Aging Train.  The human body demands to regress, to slow down and shrivel up, to sit on the front porch, drink sarsaparilla and eat tapioca.  It now looks at ten-mile hikes, snickers and snorts, “Surely you jest!”

The ultimate anti-aging weapon, of course, is Human Growth Hormone, which puts the brakes on and sends the train back in the other direction.  Sorta.  HGH increases muscle mass, reduces body fat, helps to maintain, build and repair healthy tissue in the brain and other organs and speeds up healing.  Not bad if you’re the King of Siam and can afford the hefty price tag.  You are also required to be a willing pincushion since HGH must be administered with a prickly needle.  Every.  Single.  Day.  Advocates will tell you okay, but it’s a small needle.  Pesky side effects can include carpal tunnel syndrome, joint pain, fluid retention and increased cholesterol levels, but who’s going to quibble when the cemetery beckons?  There are also expensive alternatives which promise to release vast stores of your own natural HGH, a subject for another day.

There are, of course, contrarians who believe resistance is futile.  They subscribe to the Bob Knight Code: when something is inevitable, why not just lie back and enjoy it?  Death, they tell us, may not be the end of the road but merely a transitional step to another locale.  I’d feel a lot cheerier about this if they had nice pictures.


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Heaven Can Wait.  Not To Mention That Other Place.

When we were kids, the nuns assured us of Eternal Life.  It was where a kid was going to spend it that mattered.  Our catechisms had pretty drawings of souls at birth, pure white they were, untarnished by sin.  Then came the pictures of black dots on the soul, tiny ones, moderate stains and big Rorschach blots called mortal sins.  Enough of them and you couldn’t even see the white part any more, the soul was covered with the ebony filth of sin.  If you had the misfortune of dying in this condition, you would descend to the nether depths and keep The Big Red Guy company in the smarmy playgrounds of Hell, where it was almost as hot as Phoenix.  Sin was, of course, pretty tough to avoid.  Just about anything you liked was sinful, from missing Mass to kissing Mary Ellen McDonald, which actually might be worth going to Hell for.  On the other hand, some of the Protestant kids told us “When you’re dead, you’re dead,” which left further options open with Mary Ellen.  It was a poser, this Eternal Life, and we’d better get a handle on it before we blew all our big opportunities in the current one.  Even if worse came to worse, however, all Catholic kids had one final ace-in-the-hole.  The Church called it Penance.  We called it Confession.


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“Ten ‘Our Fathers,’ Ten ‘Hail Marys.’”

The Catholic Church had a novel plan for saving one’s soul.  It even worked for ax-murderers.  While the police were hot on your trail, guns a-blazin’, just nip into church and duck into Father O’Mallahy’s confession box, make your Act of  Contrition, recite to the good father a litany of your sins, do your penance and receive absolution.  Bingo!  Homeward bound on the Archangel Express.  It always seemed to me that Heaven could be loaded up with miscreants if this policy was strictly adhered to, greatly sullying the aesthetic quality of the old golden land.  Meanwhile, poor old Sally Forth, pure as the driven snow, succumbs to one little tryst with her boyfriend Eddie, is hit by a muckwagon on the way home and goes directly to Hell, does not collect 200 dollars.  I ask you, where’s the fairness here?  What kind of edgy God would permit shenanigans like this to occur?  We’re talking Eternity, bub.  Where do we find the Afterlife Court of Appeals?


Nietzsche’s Question

You probably won’t believe this but there are more than 4200 religions in the world and that’s not even counting Jim Jones’ ex-cult and the bygone Branch Davidians.  Every single one of them has its own notion of the Hereafter.  Ideas regarding The Great Beyond are not limited to mere religions, of course, every old philosopher worth his salt has one.  Maybe the Afterlife will arrive as Friedrich Nietzsche describes in Aphorism 341, “The Greatest Weight:”

“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more: and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence---even this spider and this moonlight between the tree, and even this moment and I myself.  The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust.’”

“Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?  Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’  If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you.  The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight.  Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than the ultimate eternal confirmation and seal.”

Well, that’s an easy one for me.  I’d go for it if I could just have Saturdays be a little different. 


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One Toke Over The Line

The traditional afterlives of the major religions are not as much fun as those of the outlier faiths.  Take Zoroastrianism, for instance, where the urvan (the disembodied spirit), lingers on Earth for three days before departing to the Kingdom of the Dead, ruled by somebody named Zima, not to be mistaken for the zesty cold drink.  For the three days that it rests on Earth, righteous souls sit at the head of their body chanting the ever-popular Ustavaiti Gathas joyfully while a wicked person (available for a modest rental at Wicked Persons “R” Us) sits at the feet of the corpse, wails and recites the Yasna (First line: “Yasna, we have no bananas.”)  Zoroastrianism, surprisingly not originated by Zorro, himself, states that for the righteous souls a beautiful maiden, which is the personification of the soul’s good thoughts, words and deeds, appears.   For an evil person, a very old, ugly naked hag appears.  If one is not available, they call Phyllis Diller.  After three nights, the soul of the wicked is taken by the demon Vizaresa (English translation: Vinny) and carried to the Chinvat Bridge, where it is ceremoniously carted off by Waste Management.

In Babylonian mythology, Irkalla was the world where the dead existed.  They were allowed to keep their bodies but they continued to decompose, so big whoop.  To get to their final destination, the dead had to travel through seven gates.  Guards were posted at each to make sure the correct path was followed, and as each gate was passed, the guards took an article of clothing from the dead (think Babylonian afterlife stripper bar with lepers).  Once inside the final gate, everyone is left inside a massive dark expanse, naked and forced to eat dust.  It sounds like a weekend at the Mauritanian Club Med.

Jahannam is the Qur’an equivalent of Hell on Methamphetamine.  One punishment is to have the skin burned off the body, regenerated and burned off again.  And you thought the Catholics were bad.  The dead are also dragged through fire or forced to wear clothes made of flame.  The person punished the least will have his brain boil as a result of standing on hot coals, so maybe you’ll get lucky.


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Biocentrism To The Rescue

Biocentrism is a wacky counterintuitive theory about the universe that skirts the periphery of acceptable mainstream science.  Exactly the type of thing The Flying Pie delights in.  Pioneered by Professor Robert Lanza, the theory relies on the famous double-slit experiment which suggests that all possibilities in the universe happen simultaneously.  It’s only when an observer chooses to look that all these possibilities collapse into a single one---the one which happened in our particular universe.  According to Lanza, we can take this premise and blow it up to encompass everything.

If we do, then time, space, matter and everything else should only exist because of our perception of them.  If that’s true, then it means things like death cease being solid facts and become merely a part of the perception.  In effect, although we may appear to die in this universe, Lanza’s theory states that our life should then become “a perennial flower that returns to bloom in the multiverse.”  If this turns out to be true, it would mean the multiverse doesn’t just allow us to return after death, it demands it.

Yeah.  Me neither.


That’s all, folks….

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