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The Immortal Self
I can’t tell you where I was when I first encountered that idea. This has a history, I don’t intend to expound on that. I am not a historian. I am not a particularly good writer. From a personal history, I can report that the idea didn’t sit well with me. Hubris doesn’t even begin to sort my reaction, my fear of punishment. From just an intellectual endeavor, Einstein might call it a thought experiment, there is no judgement or crime to examining a thought. We hold worse forms of judgements against others, not knowing vectors or tangents or histories- a snapshot on facebook never results in questioning, ‘is that person really happy?’ Life advice from Alan Watts might result in paradigm changing experiences as powerful as hallucinogens.
Alan describes the threshold to a room that’s easy to explore this concept. The room is dream time. It’s a room we enter nightly. There are probably a million ways to unpack real dreams and dreams as metaphors. Within the dreamscape, you are essentially god. The producer, the director, the actor… You are everyone and everything. You might say you have no control over your dream content. Isn’t that idea alone an existential nightmare? If you’re not in control of your dreams, who is?
I have been a fan of dreaming since I was little. Even before the Bible story of…
