Joyride

I always used to say that people who deceive themselves with the illusion of immortality are fools, crazy people or unrealistic. But, after reading a book, Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes”, I realize WHY people have that intrisec need to go beyond a 70 year life expectancy.

The world and the universe are such wonders that there is not enough for a lifetime to conceive it all. Even you might be a genius like this scientist or any other, ONE life is merely enough to get a glimpse of what might be done if you were immortal. And now I understand people’s fear of death, beyond the simple things like a sunsets or being with the one you love. It is this ancestral curiosity of “what lies next ?“, “will I be around to see that ?” what other answers do they find and, most important, what questions do they ask, in order to evolve besides the limits of our consciousness.

On the side, a researcher in the field of the New Rhetoric, G. Bachelard stated that “in order to have a guarantee of the authenticity of a common opinion, you first have to have been in contradiction with that opinion. […] The truth is born out of negotiation, not from sympathy”.

Anyway, Hawking gave me a feeling of unworthiness, just because I live here, in my simple world, with my simple concerns, like what to eat tomorrow (simple Maslow’s pyramid needs). Yes, I do agree that we are limited by our body to purely physical states, but how many of us let go of that and ever wonder “does time always run forward?”. We definetly are not all equipped with the mental intelligence needed to make research to answer any of those questions, so even if at one point we do ask that, we are just left with a big blank.

So, as I stated, we can’t all be mathematicians or study pure physics. What happens when we raise some questions and have no answers ?

First, we can get them from other sources that have already dealt and researched on that theme. We can have that drive to know more, even we are not the ones making it all happen.

Second, and this is actually what will happen first in our brain, we can experience cognitive dissonance. This is a state of conflict between our thoughts, between psychologically named different “cognitions”, where “cognition” is a part of our knowledge : emotions, beliefs, attitudes or behavior. Any person who experiences this state is trying to reduce as much as he/she can of the conflict by giving themselves reasons to follow one of the 2 contradicting ways.

So, if we come up with or run into these kind of problems, that transcend our everyday routine, we get into a conflict : our beliefs change, maybe our emotions towards some problems that we use to consider important become not so obviously big of a deal. Then, we start reducing cognitive dissonance by adopting an argumentation :

• I should go find more about this because :

- I consider myself an open-minded person and not pursuing this will alter that belief over my personality.

- I consider myself the kind of person who is not shallow and stuck into immediate reality, the kind of person who sees beyond today, so pursuing this information will confirm my attitudes.

• I should not go out and get more information because :

- I believe in God and so, this information I consider to be heretic, in fact, this information will contradict my beliefs and enter into another dissonance

- I find this information too hard to digest and I am not such a complex thinker, I care more about immediate things and things that affect my reality now. In fact, I avoid this information because it will get into a conflict with my beliefs that all that matters is now.

So each and every one of us gives reasons in order to keep our mind straight and reach a consensus. Some want more, some remain with what they came with in the first place. I am not advocating for any of them. It is a matter of personal choice and personal comfort.

I, in fact, only wanted to say that I understand different religions, appealing to their followers for the after life. Why ? I used to ask. Why would anybody find that idea attractive ? Give up all your earthly possessions, so you will lead to a joyful life afterwards. I still think that they are all scams, but now I understand those who do want to live forever. I doesn’t mean that I’m going to join some religious cult, as I do not believe that there is something more than a hole in the ground, but the idea of finding out what other mysteries will be uncovered in 2, 3 or 100 thousands of years, is now indeed appealing to me too. I consider myself lucky to be living in this century, where all information is one click away, in the century where we don’t believe that the Earth is round, nor that is it the centre of the universe.

I was amazed and excited to read – didn’t even finish it, so I will enjoyably keep reading – that the universe is, in fact, in a constant move, expanding, that time runs slower closer to the earth and faster at high altitudes and that in general relativity, all objects have straight trajectories in fourth-dimensional space-time, even we perceive them as being curved in our tri-dimensional space.

What can I say at the end ? I can only recommend you the book that I’m talking about or … just live every second as you consider best, because I don’t think there anything invented yet remotely competing with happiness.