34. Reflections on Life, Beliefs, Religion, and the Illusion of Eternity: A Personal Philosophical Essay

I do not understand life. In reality no one does. We all make up whatever makes us feel comfortable. We believe, follow, take on – find converts to our vision – without converts we are fucked; if we could not find anyone to believe what we believe then perhaps what we believe is not the thing to believe in. Religious groups thrive on this – we can even be killed if someone sees we don’t believe what they wish was true. Lifestyles, beliefs, gender, age – we are at a time where nationality is taking a back seat to beliefs. It no longer really matters whether you are Russian, British, Egyptian, Mexican or some other shit… if you have converted to my belief, I will let you into my circle or I will join you so you do not kill me or ignore me. If we are different nationalities and we are heterosexual, then we will unite in bashing those who are not. If we are Christians, Muslims, Jews or some other mythical creature believer – we will kill others who are not what we are even though they are a different nationality. Due to an incredible flaw in humans that is based on a manic delusion of self-righteousness we go through incredible shit to be right. Instead of accepting that we can die at any moment, and no one really lives much past one hundred, we create and then believe in something that will live on after we are long dead. We say we will go to Heaven, or have a group of virgins (surely one would have to go to another solar system to find this) wait on us and fuck us all the time – seven seems to be the accepted number and of course it is female virgins for males – wow that is some twisted thinking.. It is right up there with going to Heaven, purgatory, coming back as an animal, another human or evolving to be a planet then a star then a solar system then a galaxy then a universe which someday will collapse (the big crunch – ouch) and just as it does we will have a flashback of billions of years earlier when we were sucky little human-turds on the shit of a planet we currently call earth (which of course by this time would have been destroyed hundreds of millions of years earlier) and remember when we were a celebrity or won the lottery or became “saved” or had a good blow job or some other such meaningless thing and think SHIT was it worth it?

All these billions of years of struggle and evolution only to become nothing in preparation for the next big bang when of course everything that ever was will have no record of ever being.

The past we hang onto because no one else will. For example, we leave letters, books, movies, blogs, webpages, etchings on walls, graffiti, photos, monuments and bridges, highways and buildings with our names attached in some desperate wild hope that someone will remember. But after the last one to know us in person dies, we then truly no longer exist. A street named Jones, or a Chrysler Building, state of Victoria, or any named place or thing has little emotion attached to it to the person who it is to be attached to. My adopted mother, dying a couple of decades ago has so few to remember her – I barely do myself. I have recently read (mid-2015) dozens of her letters written in 1965 – 1966 written to my brother Robert. They are filled with how I have gone off the track and I need to be in school or in the Army and get my life together. I have little memory of her except her constant singing of hymns and praying – usually for me. A lot of good that did.

A few years ago, when we were clearing out my father’s home and packing him off to a nursing home I collected some writings of my brother’s. The papers and diaries have sat in various boxes in closets for the past three or four years until tonight when I thought I would sort out papers and downsize some of my boxes of things I rarely look at but manage to drag from place to place. My father kept diaries too, since the 1920s but they only mention the weather. Everyone. 

Tonight (Sunday, December 03, 2006) I opened up one of my brother Robert’s folders. He wrote it in 1959 when he was sixteen and titled it “My Autobiography is dedicated in love to… my real parents who are far from me.” Robert and I never discussed much of anything before our adoption – not that we would have remembered it and we rarely discussed – make that we never discussed, anything as emotional or personal as our feelings about anything. I was too busy beating him and slicing his paintings with steak knives when I was a child to care about what he would have thought about anything else.

On the first page he had a drawing of some Manhattan buildings with a notation beneath, “Manhattan being only 12 ½ miles long and 2 ½ miles wide has quite a few buildings.” I think he was born near by – somewhere in Long Island, and he spent most of his adult life in Manhattan and died of AIDS there too. Though his autobiography is only some fifteen pages long plus several pages of love letters from various females there is a lot I had no idea about. His mother had put him up for adoption because his father had left. He was living with a second family in Manhattan until three then for whatever reason, it is not clear in his writing, he was adopted by the same people who adopted me and that was the end of his growing up in New York City. He writes about his grandfather being hit by a car one night as he was crossing the road in front of their house on Route Nine and how sad he was. I, coming along four years later, never knew this grandfather but I knew he was hit crossing the road. Robert writes that they were going to a magic show in the evening and the grandfather was going to meet them there but never made it. Robert was always fascinated by magic and was quite good at it himself so maybe that explains something or the other.

What I was surprised about was that I did not get a mention in his “autobiography”.  Even though I had been around him for more than a decade and surely had made my presence known – I was slighted. Robert was very important in my mind and I was proud of his achievements in music and the arts when I was older. I had a bit of a downturn in my thoughts when I discovered he was gay but that was just a temporary setback. Our adopted father was 88 years old when he would go to The City to see Robert dying in his bed in 1993. Sacha and Leigh and I saw him in 1992 when he was very sick from AIDS.
Life is a tragedy – we try to leave a glimpse of ourselves for others, our sufferings, but no one will ever know how bad we feel. We do not even know how bad we feel until we get a slight letup from our pain and we look back and think how bad we felt then soon after we forget we felt good enough to be aware how bad we felt previously and, on the cycles, go.

I have constant recurrences of disappointments but not always tragedies. My disappointment yesterday was going to the doctor to learn that I have to continue my interferon therapy for another five months. The fact that I have cleared the Hepatitis C virus I thought would be enough. However, there was something about not being a responder to the duel therapy of interferon and ribavirin thirteen years ago so instead of ending my injections next week after the first six-months I have to continue. We had been told even on the day that my treatment was over then they found this note in my records that I had not responded a dozen years ago so the good doctor said keep on it. The fact that I have felt awful for six months; and as Narda said to the doctor – ‘this will kill him’, then she cried, but doc said keep going mate. Just when you think something is going right it always doesn’t.

So Robert and I did share much in common – we managed to get ourselves onto the same planet in the same longitude and latitude within a few years of one another then we got ourselves adopted and threatened and moulded into excellent God-damn-fucking good Christians. Then like all God-damn-fucking good Christians we spent the rest of our lives breaking out of the Christian mould so that we could become loving, honest, caring and giving human beings.  If religion was left out and we worked together life would be so much better. Every religion is based on what cannot be proven and false hope that when we die it will be better as long as we suffered for whatever particular religion we were sucked into and have given them our money, time, resources, children, lovers... My primary anger in life is centred on the lies of religion and the false hope that there is something more. Something better. That there is some force outside of us that can give us assistance. Anyone that looks at the news or deals with reality will see that there is no outward directing and benevolent force. I still had some of this lingering crap in my consciousness up to just a few years ago, until August 16th, 2003, when I woke up and realized that there is nothing else but what there is in front of us in this moment. At some point in time creatures crawled out of the sea and after much to do about nothing and a few minor changes (ice ages, life destructive meteorites and whatever else – plagues, starvation, bad sex and etc.) humans developed (invented) consciousness and then after thousands, perhaps millions of years of evolving life on this planet we developed religion and in the twinkle of a cosmic second all of life is threatened in the name of God.

Currently there is a madman in the White House (Bush the small) and a madman in Iran wanting nukes and they are both out to destroy us all in the name of God.

My brother’s writings will now go back into their box and eventually they will be sent to the trash and if in New York City they will end their life where the person who wrote them began and ended their life and the cycle from being born to dying to the last fragments of written memories will all be composted forever more.
Maybe it is our beliefs that are fucked. Not long ago most humans believed in something greater than them now we only believe in technology, and it is going through such rapid replacement cycles that we have thrown our momentarily future structures away in recycled nothingness. I read yesterday that the world’s population will hit nine billion soon – well by 2050, and every one of those people will feel recycled too. Back when I was born and there were only about two and a half billion folks running around, I felt significant. Then again it could have been life in Clifton Park, New York.

My father died a few weeks ago, 27th January 2007, totally unexpected at 101 and nine months - well maybe not totally unexpected. We had spent Christmas of 2006 with him, well close to it. We were with him on 23 December then flew off the next day to Australia for Christmas. When we came back after the first week of January 2007, he seemed a bit tired. Of course, he was one hundred and one and eight months at the time. We thought surely he would plough forward to at least 102 or 103. In all my social sites like Facebook and Youtube and Twitter and all the rest I put my birth year as 1905 in memory or is it celebration? of my father’s birth year. For this week when I should be turning 68 it says I am turning 110. Which is true? I have taken on my father’s karma for being on this planet as long as he was. Of course, I won’t make it to 70 years old with all that is wrong with me and that is fine. This planet sucks and why anyone would want to stay on it is beyond me.

I was at work when the nursing home telephoned me, The Dwight School, on West 89th Street, just had finished my last class of the day when they rang me and I telephoned Narda. She said we should go right away so we drove up to Ballston Spa. We got there at 8 pm and he was just lying there – not dead, not alive, mouth opened and eyes sort of closed. I talked to him for a while, and it looked as if he tried to respond. He did open his eyes for a few seconds then drifted off to wherever people go in between places of alive and non-alive and a short twinkle of a moment in creation; though no doubt in our miserable lives a long time. One hundred and one years. Was it worth it? Is there anything to show for it? I recall some forty five years earlier when he would get so stressed over a bill or some action that my brother or I had done – but the moment came and went and I am the last one to have any thought of that or any other moment that Kenneth Adsit, formal hard line Christian, out to save the heathen would have had.

Narda and I stayed at a motel a few miles away and at seven am the next morning the nursing home rang to say dad was cactus. Shit! Well we rushed about, my father was good in his day, he left funeral arrangements to such a degree that he even left notes how to set up the church – the area up front – that magical and sacred area of Christian abuse – had to have the chairs and alter and some other crap, exactly as they had been fifty years earlier. By afternoon we were driving back to New York City, a four-hour drive. We had arranged for a Saturday funeral so as not to miss any more than a day’s work, being thoughtful and caring that we are. The funeral people were concerned that the ground would be frozen but somehow, they managed to dig through and on Saturday we had a funeral in the style dad wanted it. So is that it? All those joys and struggles and hopes and wishes and beliefs all buried. My theory that when the last person who knew us immediately dies then we finally die leaves him alive for a bit longer; the youngest to know him would be some kids at the Clifton Park Methodist Church so he could live for another sixty or seventy years, in someone’s memory. My father’s father is well and truly dead because there is no one alive who knew him in person. What a rip-off life is. In the millions of years of evolution the living cell has been developing survival mechanisms. 

If we upload ourselves in the future in a Ray Kurzweil fashion of course the mental part of us will always exist. However, the problem or make it problems with the Ray Kurzweil picture is that will not be us. In the future ‘singularity’ there truly could be multiple copies of us and in different spheres; Physical and Virtual. “Hey, did you get to say hi to me on Pluto when you were virtually there? I was having multiple affairs with four of me, a bit of an experiment with having a five-some, all with me, and then I think I experienced you in Alaska and at the same time on one of those trans-Neptune planets.” Come on Ray I love your work and thinking but our life is also our emotions and our experiences and interactions with other poor slobs like us. If we were all machines in the future or part this and part that and if future machines do not delete all memory of human existence once it has evolved to be able to rationalize that human beliefs were faulty from the get-go the problem is within the experiences. Because I have no cyber parts I have to go through using nasty drugs such as interferon to eliminate my hepatitis C virus but within that are experiences; not good ones for sure, that I could not have if I did not have the C thingy. I would not have had all those experiences that have made me who I am such as all I have said so far and so much more which I will never write. If we were perfect in the future with computer chips in our brain(s), blood cells, bones and we avoided mistakes because computer parts in our being would alert us not to do something because of what has happened statistically to others who had the same experience life would be shit; not that we would know that because we would be perfect. Yes I would have liked to have found a way to be popular, to be acknowledged, to be successful, to have the shit that I want but in a future cyber world of perfection everyone will be downloading and uploading and living in la la land where all is great.

Machine people will not wonder and be in awe of a beautiful sunset, a wonderful love, birth (in the future Ray-World we would be test-tube creatures; with all our implants of perfection inserted). There would never be “what happens if we take this road?” Because the various twists and turns will all be shown to us before jumping in. There will be no jumping into the unknown because everything will be known.

Whose information will be created into the future machine-person? There are some crazy believing folks in the world; whole countries of them. What if one group decides to eliminate another group? As one who may need a liver transplant soon I am in favour of finding an alternative to a human liver, so I do not have to wait on some stupide transplant list. I was born in the year of the pig so give me a pig’s liver. I am sure there will be cyber transplants for livers and cures for diabetes which I have (currently in 2015 it is possible there will be a cure in the next five years) and so many diseases. Finding ways to increase food production, energy use, saving the planet and all that good crap are the future. But replacing and adapting our brains so that we cannot make mistakes, feel anything or experience success (what the hell does that feel like?) and failures which I have known plenty of. No one will write gripping novels based on human experiences because computers will toss out perfect scripts that we can download to our mind and read/experience instantly. Sounds awful. I am glad I am at the end of my life cycle. Yes, it has been shit but at least I have experienced stuff no one in the perfect future will. Actually, what will be the purpose of machine people? A bunch of robots without any original or new thinking because of the ‘singularity’ with everything just so perfect will just be going throughout the universe with no individuality.

Maybe just plain old fashion evolution if the best. From the old brain stem. where the human began to develop paranoia survival instincts; oh here comes a hungry horny reptile that is going to fuck then eat me, and we stayed away from the creature and developed fire and lust for a neighbouring cave person’s partner and built structures and put value into possessions and communication and developed reasons of existence and created avatars, heroes, villains, gods, messiahs and Hollywood celebrities to finding methods to live longer. The living longer part no doubt has been a long cyclic thing where humans, tens of thousands of years ago, did live for hundreds of years because the climate of the earth was conducive to longevity (before fast-food pain-chains and pollution; back when a moist sensual orgasmic mist favourable for new life forms covered the earth). Several thousand years ago folks started searching for ways to prolong their life for when they were dead. Some developed concepts of an afterlife, other more realistic types, looked for ways to keep memories of their sojourns alive. This was done by paintings such as cave paintings from some fifty thousand years ago and building burial places like pyramids and then writing and storytelling developed.

It was only a second ago in time when creation stories with gods and sons of gods as messiah and virgins having saviours began to be put into saved story manuscripts and passed on as ‘the word of god’. My father use to speak about this Jesus-cat-dude-homeboy, as if he was still available for story time. What would Jesus do? Became a bit of a way to live. Then of course we have the memories of the Moses dude and God himself (sic) as well as the sexist self-indulgent, egomaniac Jew boy Paul. These are written memories as fancied by someone else. They are not really indicative of the actual person who was used for the gains of others, i.e. the Catholic Church and later the crazy Protest-ants. In our current cycle people are trying to live longer via moving and still images, and of course we can make any image do anything we want. Perhaps in the future, when most of the world’s population is destroyed through war, famine, disease, asteroids, alien invaders or whatever and a new group begin the evolutionary communication process all over and some superman comics are discovered a new myth and religion will develop about a man who could fly and so on and so forth and that will be believed as the way it was or as it is.

Back to my dead father, so he stays alive in the memory of a few people then when the memories of those who knew him in person die then he is dead. Yes, I can write about him, show video clips of him on the Internet and have his photo on my desk but that is not really him – just an interpretable moment of his life. He is well and truly dead, not in heaven with God as he fancied, he would be but just come and gone like all of us. Just another blip on the evolutionary march to wherever and whatever. Memory saving is the current step in evolution where we try to stay alive longer than we are programmed to life.

This is one of the overriding problems with Ray Kurzweil. His father died; having his first heart attack when Raymond was about 15. Ray talks plenty about his father and how he misses him. Ray sees death as a tragedy and he hopes to upload everything he has about his father; diaries, musical scores, video, photos probably DNA if he has some. So Ray wants to live forever. Hey dude we are the same age; we are cactus we ain’t got much longer to live, get over it.

In 1980 I first met Lesia in January – her birthday on February 17th was on one solar eclipse and there happened to be a second solar eclipse that year, on August 10th – my birthday. We got married on the eleventh of that August – with the solar eclipse still in full force (in Hawaii, where we were, it was exact, the eclipse path went over our the alter we stood in front of and where we agreed to hate one another until death do us part, then after death we would give it a rest, unless of course, Ray Kurzweil uploads us so we can fight one another throughout the cosmos for eternity; in the seventh house (marriage) of our marriage chart. Eclipses are about disasters, one of the few things that have been provable over thousands of years or at least associated with something or the other. I love our marriage chart it is the story of a cosmic disaster that we were chosen to act out on the stage of life in the twentieth century. It is one of those things that make me feel so chosen.

Solar Eclipse Marriage Chart

35. Minimalist life: LA Dodgers sign Leigh