I've always thought I'd like to live forever. Immortality, I was informed in a textbook years ago, is one of the irrational desires of being human. Recently, however, my mother told me of a short story wherein a guy was truly immortal. He lived past the implosion of the Universe and continued existing (in thought or spirit) in a vacuum of nothingness. He hated his life.
Initially I thought: "Well that's not very Buddhist of him," using my mother's practices as a filter to her story. However, it made me think.
What would I feel if I lived through the violent gravitational fluctuations of a collapsing universe?
What would I think if I were the only thing in known existence? Without any physical means of verification?
Would my very consciousness or spirit be able to create my own Universe in thought, thus introducing a new reality from fantasy and creating a Big Bang.
Could we not be doing this very thing now, given enough thought, focus, and belief? And then we wouldn't be alone, ever; even after the end of known existence. Which brings me to my writing. Logic dictates (ha!) that my imagination is not reality and therefore does not exist in the Universe beyond the impulses in my brain and the words written on paper. I accept that the laws of this Universe are finite given the expectations of existence within the sphere of acceptable standards; but I believe my characters are real whether in my head or the imagination of my readers, or in an alternate Universe spawned simply because I thought it.
This is my first step toward enlightenment, which the character in the aforementioned short story couldn't see: vacuums are defined only by our universe. He couldn't know about everything, lest he be God, and should not doubt his future. Change is a constant. A change would undoubtedly appear for him, and he'll be all the wiser for it.
As for immortality, I now have conditions:
~If I could choose to die at anytime,
~And if I could stay beautiful and fit!
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