AFTERLIFE, MY LAST DAY IN VIRAMPUR
Something has been happening to me internally that seems to me to explain why so many people believe in an afterlife, a joyous time in heaven if you are a Christian, rebirth if you are a Hindu, with numerous other examples around the world.
This is just my personal apprehension based on my experience. Where you are headed to after you die probably depends upon your convictions and experience.
On Tuesday it was sinking in that I was about to leave Virampur and that changed my attitude toward everything. Until Monday I was very much here, taking as many village photographs and making as many spatial videos as I could. But on Tuesday I felt a deep sadness. I was about to leave all of this intensity behind and return to my little house in Swannanoa. I was half gone already. I didn‘t feel like taking more photographs or panoramas of spatial videos. I stayed in my room all day and did very little except explore the web and eat and sleep.
This is not a surprise. I have experienced the same transition many times before in my life, often on a return from India but also from other places. And I am quite aware of what is going on. Something in me senses the transition to come and as part of that transition I have to let go of where I am and being making my way into what comes next. Often in the middle of trips I would have a dream that somehow I had returned home without willing it. I was back in Swannanoa. Always I felt a terrible disappointment and an intense desire to be back in India, which, when I woke up, I was. But at the very end of a trip when I was forced to make sure the tickets were in order and I was well packed up something inside me had made a transition, I had already let go and moved into the future. If on my last day I had discovered that I had to wait another two days before leaving I would have been irritated with whatever caused the delay and would have not enjoyed the last two days, as I waited impatiently.
My interpretation of this is that while I can live intensely in the present, there is something inside me, a kind of antenna, that is looking forward and preparing for the future. I don‘t want to be blindsided by anything, I want to be aware of what is coming next. Something inside of me is always anticipating the future, probably as a form of protection. Something inside me wants to make the transition into the future.
In my way of thinking, that is why when we approach death that part of ourselves which is always anticipating and preparing for the future shifts us to both anticipating what comes after death and is pushing us to let go of the present as we prepare for the future. Because I am living in the future and preparing for the future I cannot accept that there will be no personal future. I know that for eons I didn‘t exist, but I can‘t imagine that for eons I won‘t exist, that there is nothing to prepare for, it is over. So this explains why the afterlife is so attractive and and why when people are dying they are almost impatient to let go of the present and to enter the future. In my mind this is anticipation of the future is built into us.
And as I think about what I perceive to be the human need to anticipate and live partially in the future, I think of my various paranoias. I am intuitively always on the lookout for threats, for years the words “academic integrity” or “academic rigor” were red flags. Because they represented a form of teaching, the authoritarian teacher fitting students into academic conventions that were not how I learned through experience or how I taught. Whenever I heard the phrases, even when not directed at all at me, I turned paranoid and anxious. It only took a hint to put me on guard, made me suddenly very alert to threats.
And now I’m realizing that the same low grade paranoia, sensing threats in the most mild of statements, can lead me or others into conspiracy theories. It only takes a hint to put me on guard and to begin imagining ways in which I can be threatened, therefore leading me to believe any possible imagined threats, even those for which I don’t yet see evidence. It is enough that they could be threats even when the threats are to this point only imagined.
MAGA people feel threatened by all kinds of threats, and are open to imagining new threats. This is the way MAGA people naturally function, the way I naturally function. Both of us are just being human. What can be imagined, delighting us or threatening us, what could be, draws us along.
So it seems to me that conspiracy theories are completely natural, belief in life after death is completely natural, explaining the otherwise inexplicable good or bad things that happen in our lives as being the work of the supernatural is completely natural. And so is my letting go of India and imagining myself in Swannanoa. All completely natural.
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