Journal: New Game Plus

Irritations with the modern materialistic worldview and religion

I am continually frustrated by the future. The future as such; as a concept. An abstraction, if you will. I was revisiting an essay I had first read a few years ago, The Instant and Eternity, and it summarized this much better than I have the ability to now. This post is more to collect my specific frustrations, perhaps in a therapeutic way.

The most pressing example I have right now is the idea of heaven from a Christian perspective: a destination for the good people. A New Game Plus of the phenomenal world, different only in that the good people inhabit it, and that whatever one believes ought to be - is. I attend a church and hear things like "Perhaps when you get to heaven you'll see one of those people you saved." Or something relating to "saving" someone as meaning they say the right pass phrase - Jesus is Lord. Fully God and fully man, and He died for my sins- and after a dip in a some water they'll get to go to the good place. It's like these people are simultaneously taking these things too seriously and not seriously enough.

What happens when you die? The same thing as before you were alive.

As this relates to the future: there is no future. There never was. There is only the present. The Ever Present - The Eternal Eye of God, as the essay states. In simpler material terms, we are all just atoms bumping around and vibrating at different frequencies. That you exist is to say that you, or your consciousness, has marked out a somewhat group of atoms to call yourself. This is still adrift in an ocean of atoms, constantly swirling and changing, but that reality is beyond your senses. Here, I argue, you exist by faith. The faith with which you exist, that you animate your body, that you mark out other "things" as existing, is what is meant by "faith." New events only take place by this same faith applied. If a party is planned, it's potential attendants invited, and nobody, including the organizer arrives at the specified "time," was there ever an event at all? I say no.

We imagine a future state and work to bring it about presently. Until it exists, that is to say, it is brought about through faith, it is nothing. The true meaning of the phrase "time is an illusion."

Whether there are realms or heavens or hells - other planes of existing - is beyond my knowledge and the scope of this post. That one could have knowledge of those things is also pretty sus. If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. At the very least: that one might take on a similar form and see other's in those same forms they recognize now, is absolutely and completely false.

This is what I believe.