Saturday 23rd January
It's raining again, I love it. I've thrown open all my windows just so I can hear the sound and smell the rain. It's such a relief from the smothering heat from earlier in the week that I am reveling in it. I'm listening to The Tea Party - Edges of Twilight, it's a really fantastic album which I bought earlier in the week. The first song "Fire in the Head" is so raw and powerful and has such unbridled energy. Earlier in the week when it was hot and I first got the album, the music quite literally took over me… I stripped off my clothes turned out the lights and threw myself around the room. I not embarrassed by that, rather I'm glad that there is music which could cause one to do that.
I suppose I've been feeling a bit depressed since Tuesday, ever since Shane told me my job would probably be defunct. I wrote a "reasonably" strongly worded letter to Shane since he did ask for my input. I spent half an hour agonising over one word, which changed the entire tone of the last sentence or two. The word was "only", where I said I could "only" continue to contribute to the college as a permanent Academic Tutor. I didn't want it to sound like a threat, but Shane can often miss subtlety, and I wanted to make my position clear. Whether this will help my cause I do not know. Since Shane will be gone in about 6 months, I have to make every attempt to get appointed early, since after he goes it is unlikely I will be either up or down graded.
I'm hoping that the rowers will go away soon, they've made a number of prank phone calls, which is really stupid because they've only gotten the answering machine and it would be solid evidence that they had. Anyway, I'm not expecting school-boy idiots to display too much common sense, that would be asking a bit much.
The posters are coming along well, provided I don't get too badly side-tracked, they should hopefully be ready for laminating by Monday.
It must have been last Sunday night I think, I was in quite a probing cogitative mood, and I was wondering if the death of the body is also the death of the mind. Unfortunately I had to come to the conclusion that it was. It seemed that all aware and self-aware organisms eventually die, it is somewhat upsetting. It's not like Lovecraft where the malicious Universe is out to get humanity, but somehow worse. The Universe doesn't even care. Like a blind machine which goes on ticking even when it has no purpose. Budda I think had it half right when he said that the ego was an illusion, I think the ego exists, but in the great chain of life the individual is so small a part that it is almost negligible. Of course the important piece to read there is "almost" negligible. I conceive of life as a long rope composed of an enormous multitude of tiny strands. None of these strands are very long in comparison to the whole rope, but they all have a start and an end and some distance in between.
So I suppose that ultimately the question of what meaning does life have if any springs up. The Meaning of life? To find meaning in life. A tautology, a paradox, a chicken and egg problem. I'm quite attached to my personality, and I would be quite upset to lose it. However lose it I shall. I can really only reach my conclusions based on my knowledge of life, mind, biology, psychology and the rest, but I somehow wish that there was a great benefactor in the sky who will sweep me off to paradise at my death where I would live eternally. Do I think this is what will happen? No, I don't.
I've often wondered how we fall asleep, because I believe this switching off of our consciousness is the closest think we'll ever get to feeling how it is to dying and return to report.
From the information at hand, and from what seems logical, at the point of death what happens? Do we lose our senses? Do we continue to see? I don't think so. I'm inclined to go with writers who suggest that "we are swallowed up by the blackness". There is of course the stories of Near-Death-Experiences of long tunnels with bright lights at the end. Another theory I have heard is that as the body dies the time experienced by the mind slows down, so that the consciousness is "preserved at the moment of death". I don't know about this one either. I do think that there is a separation between the organic brain and the mind, and since nothing measurable escapes the body at death, bodily death equals mental death. However, since time is created by the mind, I suppose that as the mind approached it's own extinction, that it might curl in upon itself.
I suppose I shouldn't worry, because I won't know I'm dead when I'm dead. The worst bit must be those last few minutes or hours when you're kicking yourself over all the things you could or should have done and never got around to doing.
Obviously what I'm missing here is that the human mind only exists in the four dimension that we can currently perceive. If it somehow pokes into another set of dimensions, perhaps after the death of this body, it might be free to move in another space which we cannot currently observe.
Descartes states all knowledge of external things is in the mind which is fair enough, I have a problem with his mind-body dualism though. Enough metaphysics, time for bed (4:00 am - still raining.).