• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

and That is That. (4)

True humor is, indeed, laughter at one's Self—at the Divine Comedy, the fabulous deception, whereby one comes. to imagine that a creature in existence is not also of existence, that what man is is not also what everything is. All the time we "know it in our bones" but conscious attention, distracted by details and differences, cannot see the whole for the parts.

The major trick in this deception is, of course, death. Consider death as the permanent end of consciousness, the point at which you and your knowledge of the universe simply cease, and where you become as if you had never existed at all. Consider it also on a much vaster scale—

the death of the universe at the time when all energy runs out, when, according to some cosmologists, the explosion which flung the galaxies into space fades out like a skyrocket. It will be as if it had never happened, which is, of course, the way things were before it did happen.

Likewise, when you are dead, you will be as you were before you were conceived. So—there has been a flash, a flash of consciousness or a flash of galaxies. It happened. Even if there is no one left to remember.

But if, when it has happened and vanished, things are at all as they were before it began (including the possibility that there were no things), it can happen again. Why not? On the other hand, I might suppose that after it has happened things aren't the same as they were before. Energy was present before the explosion, but after the explosion died out, no energy was left. For ever and ever energy was latent. Then it blew up, and that was that. It is, perhaps, possible to imagine that what had always existed got tired of itself, blew up, and stopped. But this is a greater strain on my imagination than the idea that these flashes are periodic and rhythmic. They may go on and on, or round and round: it doesn't make much difference. Furthermore, if latent energy had always existed before the explosion, I find it difficult to think of a single, particular time coming when it had to stop. Can anything be half eternal? That is, can a process which had no beginning come to an end?

I presume, then, that with my own death I shall forget who I was, just as my conscious attention is unable to recall, if it ever knew, how to form the cells of the brain and the pattern of the veins. Conscious memory plays little part in our biological existence. Thus as my sensation of "I-ness," of being alive, once came into being without conscious memory or intent, so it will arise again and again, as the

"central" Self—the IT—appears as the self/other situation in its myriads of pulsating forms—always the same and always new, a here in the midst of a there, a now in the midst of then, and a one in the midst of many. And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light. I return in every baby born.

Actually, we know this already. After people die, babies are born—

and, unless they are automata, every one of them is, just as we ourselves were, the "I" experience coming again into being. The conditions of heredity and environment change, but each of those babies incarnates the same experience of being central to a world that is "other." Each infant dawns into life as I did, without any memory of a past. Thus when I am gone there can be no experience, no living through, of the state of being a perpetual "has-been." Nature "abhors the vacuum" and the I-feeling appears again as it did before, and it matters not whether the interval be ten seconds or billions of years. In unconsciousness all times are the same brief instant.

This is so obvious, but our block against seeing it is the ingrained and compelling myth that the "I" comes into this world, or is thrown out from it, in such a way as to have no essential connection with it. Thus we do not trust the universe to repeat what it has already done—to "I"

itself again and again. We see it as an eternal arena in which the individual is no more