Nailed It

Check this out: https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/1100943099340120064?s=19

Some years ago, in this entry, I made a wild speculation:

In order to be adaptive to a transhuman world, a heaven or an enlightenment merely for humans will not do; when the line between human and machine is blurred, those who seek transcendence will only find conflict and cognitive dissonance with faiths that preclude sentient machines, because the presence of sentient machines will be unavoidable.

It would seem creating a robot to teach the Dharma would be an important step in this direction. We are now in a unique time when Japanese Buddhists have entrusted Dharma- one of the great pearls of Buddhism- to a machine and while this machine is not sentient, it seems a logical progression from here that Buddhism might be the first religion to welcome the first true AI as part of its practice.

Not So Sure

I tried to walk away from believing anything I have said previuosly about reincarnation. I had been nearly ready to convince myself that there was nothing to gnosticism either, that it was an aberration, a wild antique heresy.

But the first thing to go was the sense of normalcy, to be honest. There are certain topics I still avoid in conversation, certain music or videos I avoid watching with my partners. There are still moments I have to stave off a freakout over bad memories by hugging my cat and I play it all normal for my partners but I’m actually terrified.

I tried to brush it away with theology but that raised far more questions. The Judeo-Christian theology on the afterlife is much more complex than I could have ever imagined (in some Jewish texts, for example, souls still get their Shabbat even in Gehenna). The verse in Luke about the great divide fixed in place between the righteous and wicked is interesting, and supports the orthodox notion that Jesus spoke of an immovable obstacle that had been placed between the damned and the redeemed. But wasn’t that the point, in orthodox theology, of the crucifixion, to bridge that divide and redeem everyone? And what was the default belief at the time of Christ, versus the belief at the dawn of Rabbinical Judaism or the days when the First Temple was just a tent in the Judean desert? Whither the change? I can’t ignore the notion, shared with certain Eastern religions, that reincarnating in this realm is some form of lesser punishment. But did I not declare the name of Christ? Maybe that’s what Matthew 7:21 is all about. I had not known Christ before. My last life’s “baroque” theology was a dead end. My theology of late has been turning in a Rabbinical direction though I am not yet planning to convert to Judaism. Time will tell.

I guess what I’m getting at with my semi-organized ramblings here is that my experiences have shaped me in ways I can’t fathom. I don’t talk about the war much any more these days (starting to understand why the lads who made it home never did) but it’s still background radiation in my life and it’s changed the landscape.

Well…

…once again, I may have spoken too soon.

I have to say the flashes of the Western Front aren’t as intense or frequent any more. They’re not as frightening or vivid, and nothing new has come since a dream I had in September 2016. But an innocent YouTube video where a guy gets splattered by bits of tomato testing cheap weapons from Amazon dragged some of that imagery out. Specifically, a very unpleasant image of slogging across no man’s land, artillery going off on all sides, looking down at the sleeve of my tunic and seeing tiny flecks of someone’s viscera. Someone I probably knew. That’s a detail you don’t much see in war movies but small bits of intestine and the like did tend to get on you.

Writing this down so I can get that image out of my head. I’d written about this before so it’s not a new image to long-time readers but I’m not keen on that entering my head again.

Still trying to divorce myself from the idea that these images are from a life I personally lived. I can’t deal with that any more. I want to believe this is all some very elaborate self-deception, the artifact of a brilliant imagination on overdrive. But I’ll dutifully record every episode so I can get to the bottom of what my real problem is because I haven’t found a single doctor or counselor who could figure it out.

Clarifying

Regarding my previous post:

First of all, the feeling that what I remember of Jack’s life (or of any other) was real has faded over time and I can’t relate to how I felt before.

Second, the idea of reincarnation sounds kind of absurd to me now and I wonder how many years I wasted on it.

Third, I’m drifting away from the gnostic beliefs I once had. In fact I’m waffling on whether or not I’m better off agnostic. If not for the fact that I do see some value in Christianity I probably would have declared myself agnostic a while ago.

I really thought I had myself sorted but I  don’t. I made myself miserable thinking I was the reincarnated spirit of a dead WWI soldier and I feel great relief that any sense of it being real to me is evaporating. I think writing about all this in my latest novel has helped but I’m already moving away from the mystical in my writing.

The last piece I finished was a 5000 word medieval dick joke involving a relic thief and it was so much more fun than writing about characters tormented by past lives. In fact my vivid medieval characters and settings have been among the few silver linings from all this.

I guess I’ll still post anything relevant here but that’s not going to be often. I thought I could never go back the way I came but maybe I can, and I’m okay with that. This rabbit hole is bottomless.

Comedia Finita Est

I no longer believe in reincarnation.

I apologize to anyone I have troubled with my delusions.