here’s some fun science for the day #

Your brain is telling you who you are as a person. What you like and don’t like, how you respond to situations, which then dictates how you feel about things. When you have a brain injury, your brain might change in ways that tell you different things now. You might have different interests, different temperaments, different reactions to outside stimulus.

You, and what you perceive during your roughly 85 years of life, are an imagination by a piece of meat in a helmet.

Once you die, that imagination will stop. You will no longer exist because the thing that’s directing the imaginations will no longer be running, because it’s not plugged in anymore.

there’s hope and freedom #

The real neat part is that you, as you perceive yourself, doesn’t actually exist. The you as a meat bag does exist, though. The effect of your choices exist. But the essence of what you and what other people see as you, are only stories living in temporary memory storage. Or if you’re lucky, written down somewhere. Even our collective written down history is all still just temporary in the grand story of the cosmos. We don’t matter to the cosmos.

Some people may never come to terms with that. Everyone, at some level, needs the lies they tell themselves. Some people need the lie of the afterlife to deal with their fear of death.

For some, imagining an entity that will make things right someday, imagining that there’s a place without suffering, gives them the power to continue everyday. Some people need that. For me (and literally everyone else, whether they admit it or not) the place without suffering does actually exist. Oblivion.

It’s incredibly freeing not to maintain that particular lie anymore.

are you feeling the need to defend your beliefs? #

When your identify is rooted so deeply in your beliefs, you fight against anything that threatens to shake it. You fight against the thought of being wrong because what would you have left if you were?

It’s not about me or my beliefs, it’s because you can’t swallow the thought of your faith being wrong, of you losing the identity you hold so dearly.

By centering your identity on religion you ended up building your house on the sand when you thought it was the rock.