“Life is a stretch of sensory experience bookended by oblivion.” So I declaimed recently.
Did I say it willy-nilly? No I did not.
Let me pick up where that one liner left off.
Life is a hoverboard of reality, hovering over nothing.
It is not nothing, really, is it?
It’s mystery.
What we cannot see, hear, smell, taste or feel we call ‘nothing’.
What we cannot sense even with extrasensory perception we call ‘void’.
We stand on that hoverboard of reality and look down. We see nothing. If we dropped a coin down there, we would never hear a clink; if we shouted into the abyss, we would never hear an echo.
And that is unnerving.
But relax. A well-stocked spiritual store comes to the rescue. Shopping there is not unlike your everyday shopping: you check the brand while referencing what you know about its founder, its heritage and lineage, what is promised in its advertisements, earlier adopters’ testimonials, etc.; you check the label and find out if it contains the ingredients you think you need; you evaluate its compatibility with your palate and constitution; and you take on board the advice of your family and friends - people you trust - if such advice is available. There’s no need to check the price, by the way, because utter devotion is all you need to pay for most of the products.
Then you make your purchase decision. If you are the gullible type or are too kind to say no, you may end up with a product that is imposed on you. Don’t worry. In time you will be convinced that it’s the best product in the world. And that’s okay.
Then you start filling the nothingness or void with concepts - learned concepts.
Now look down again. What do you see? Nothing... plus something. What’s that something? A reflection of your mental projections.
Close your physical eyes and look with your mind’s eye. What do you ‘see’ now? That erstwhile void is now teeming with realities.
And there is an order that rules those realities. That order is at the heart of a framework that furnishes the answer to every question that the human mind can conjure up, from the origin of the universe, that of life, to the nitty-gritty of everyday conundrums, from where you came from to where you are headed - yes, everything.
You are no longer standing on a hoverboard measured in decades, but walking on an interminable path that stretches towards eternity. You now own a faith.
Or, shall we say, you are now owned by a faith?
“Who do you think you are, dissing all faiths, especially my infallible faith?”
Not so fast, my friend. I might have come across as an arrogant, condescending, nihilistic and soulless arsehole of a cynic - and I may very well be one - but I wasn’t being nasty.
Because I also have faith.
True to form as a believer, I have internalised what used to be just a hypothesis as a verity: that we are characters in a cosmic computer simulation.
Rings a bell? You bet it does, because Elon Musk said it.
And I agree with him. For it chimes in perfectly with my long-held belief: a brand of creationist evolutionism stripped of the former's anthropomorphic personification of ultimate reality and of the latter's mechanical randomness.
This ‘faith’ - if I may call it such without desecrating the word - doesn’t make me happier or sadder. Faith is supposed to make one happy or happier, is it not? Well, this one doesn’t. But I don’t mind. It gives me clarity. And clarity gives me peace. And peace is all I want. Because I don't know what I can do with (greater) happiness.
So, you see, I have been talking about my faith all along. Not yours.
No offence meant and none taken, I hope.
But why all that waffling and padding in the run-up to this punchline?
Because I was answering a friend’s question about spirituality:
“What exactly is 头外头?”
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