Well…

Watching the world as I knew it disintegrate.

COVID-19 is bigger than anyone will admit. America will be changed by this as much as Europe was changed by the world wars.

You’d think I would suddenly “see the light” and come running back to my past life claims, wouldn’t you?

I’m too jaded now. Nothing matters. The world order since 1945 is coming undone and we have no clue what the dice will roll on this one. Anything like god or religion or reincarnation or the I Ching just feels like a childish distraction from the stark fact of the matter, that it was only a matter of time. I knew it since I was old enough to understand that cultures just vanish sometimes, and it’s usually not any one thing that did it but a series of bad turns. Bad leaders, bad decisions, bad habits, bad planning, bad actors, and bad conditions. That’s all a pandemic is, it’s bad conditions. It’s not a sign from God or some excuse to fall back into the fantasy of reincarnation.

I guess there are atheists in foxholes after all.

Freedom

Disabusing myself of the notion of reincarnation has proved to be every bit as liberating as I had hoped.

I think, for most of my adult life, I preferred to believe that there was nothing after death. I’ve said as much. The notion of reincarnation was always inconvenient to me and I don’t know how I so thoroughly convinced myself of something I never wanted to believe.

But I’m free of that delusion now. Free of ghosts and spirits and the curse of Samsara. When I die (and I hope it comes sooner rather than later) I will greet death as the supreme rest, the dreamless sleep that tired wanderers like me spend all our lives craving.

And how tired I am! The world bores me. People exhaust me. Eating food is like shitting in reverse, and every breath is a tiresome gasp of foul polluted air.

To hell with childish fantasies of the soul and gods and spirits. I am free now. Free to sleep without fear of being reborn into this cursed world, if I so choose.