Even though all of the themes are all related, I'm most interested in the themes of Myth and Dream, Life as Fiction and the 20 Minute Lifetime. The recurring element to all of these is time and reality. I'd like to discuss that side of scientific time with philosophic time and how that all ties our themes together. I want to talk about death, reincarnation and life. I think a huge resource for all of this will be this paper Terry L. Fairchild wrote entitled, "Time, Eternity and Immortality." I don't know if Terry's a guy or a girl, so I'm going to call it it. It incorporates the scientific view of time and transcendental meditation with the Four Quartets. If you'd like to take a look, you could check out http://www.mum.edu/msvs/9199terry.html. I think it's a fascinating read on Eliot.
Time is all relative to the individual. I kept trying to think of how to verbalize this, but then I gave up, went to YouTube and found a video from the old version of the Time Machine. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVlr24zD_KQ&playnext_from=TL&videos=2MHb7a0rIkk Time for the person "at rest" will be different than the person "in motion." It depends on perspective and consciousness. Patrick Stewart in the Inner Light fainted and found himself in a world where he was supposedly sick and feverish for four days. When we travel from this time zone to others, it's kind of like time traveling, because when we go east or west, we are either going backward or forward in time. "Time cannot be said to exist until someone witnesses it or feels its effects."- Fairchild.
Sorry this is so jumbled. . .I'm just trying to wrap my head around this. I think myth and dream come into the picture with time and consciousness, because we've created time to give ourselves a solid foundation for reality. At this time, this happened. . or in a few days, this will happen. It gives us a way to chronologically organize our lives. I think that's why we get so panicky and worried when we lose track of it all. Sick in bed, head injury. . .the Hangover. But dreams seem to be a more realistic way to look at life in terms of time. So many things can get accomplished in dreams. I've been wondering lately if dreams are just the other lives we have when we're not in this one. Herman wakes up to another kind of life. "My dreams have always borne a disturbing resemblance to life, as if even in my sleep I could not come up with something new, but now it was the other way around, now at last my life resembled a dream."
Back to Fairchild, it brought up E= mc² as "an image of immortality." And it was like a lightbulb turned on in my head, which is funny because the equation is about the speed of light. Ha ha. Anyway, something I remembered from high school science- energy cannot be destroyed or created. It can only be transferred, or metamorphosed. People have energy, in body and mind. When the body goes out, it returns to the earth, dust and ashes and all that. Does the mind do the same thing? Or does that energy transfer to something or somebody else? The Amber Spyglass talks about that. The spirits of those characters, their energies, returned to the land of the living, becoming the grass, the trees and the sky. When we dream, our conscious mind takes us somewhere, transferring our thoughts to a new world. The many worlds thing, by the by, could be possible if you take up String Theory and Quantum Mechanics as truth. So when we die, which I've often heard as "going to sleep," maybe it's just our mind traveling off to find a new home to occupy. I met a lady at the retirement home in town. She told me that reincarnation was real, because she could remember all of her past lives. She said that they were wonderful lives, but she was so tired. She told me that the next time she goes to sleep, she just wants to wake up in Heaven, and live the rest of her life(lives) up there. In Scrubs season 2, I think, they have an episode about death. A patient sees it as a big Broadway musical coming to an end. "As, in a theatre, The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed/ With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of dark-/ ness on darkness." It doesn't sound too scary to have a scene change, a change in worlds, but I think people fear it anyway. I think it's far worse to be left with "only the growing terror of nothing to think about;/ Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing--"
This is pretty much what I've been thinking. I have a lot of organization to do with it, but I think it's really fascinating.
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