Ornoth

This is a continuation of this post, where I brought your attention to the fact that when we focus on the moving things that automatically attract our eyes, we lose sight of the richness of the things around us that aren’t moving.

It’s also true that the same could be said for our sense of hearing. Our ears are attracted by whatever is loudest around us, rather than the things which are quiet. But unlike our vision, which only required us to look at something else, listening may require us to do two different things.

We often intentionally fill our ears with sound in an effort to keep ourselves from hearing anything unpleasant, or just to keep our ears from getting bored. It should be obvious that if you want to hear the breath of the world, the first thing you need to do it turn off the television, hang up the phone, switch off the radio, and put down the iPoo. You need to stop intentionally blocking your ears with aural fluff.

The other thing we need to do is what we did with our vision: stop following your body’s natural impulse to pay attention to what’s loudest. Hear the ventilation equipment and the key-clicks in your office, not the voices around you. Hear the birds and the wind in the trees, rather than passing automobile engines. Hear your cat’s footfalls as he comes to greet you at the door.

If you stop and listen to the silence behind all the noise of our daily lives, you may find those sounds much richer and more satisfying than you’d ever considered before.

Of course, this practice can also be extended to the other senses. What would you find if you really paid attention to the subtler scents your nose comes across each day, rather than simply ignoring your nose all day?

On the other hand, we’re pretty well attuned to subtlety of taste and touch. We have our favorite foods and have created a very complex set of meanings for all kinds of human touch. But that’s not to say that there isn’t more depth to experience by focusing on those sensations and taking the time to explore them more fully.

In Buddhist philosophy, thought represents a sixth sense. Thoughts are things that come and go, and we sense their passage. In fact, much of Buddhism and meditation centers around the idea of taking the time to stop and look at the thoughts that arise in our minds, and whether they’re actually beneficial or not. Do you allow your mind to be continually distracted by whatever exerts a momentary attraction, the way you allow you eyes to flicker from thing to thing, without ever staying on one subject long enough to fully experience and appreciate it? Or do you observe your thoughts and consciously direct them in more productive directions?

We spend so much of our lives unconsciously, not seeing deeply, not hearing anything and completely out of touch with one another and the miraculous world around us. Even our thoughts, the thing we most associate with our “self”, usually operate in a purely reactive way. We wander around this world, seeing little, hearing little, tasting little, mostly unconscious except for an overriding sense that we’re not happy.

The Buddha was right about the secret of happiness being found in deeply experiencing the present moment. By activating all our physical senses, as well as thought, we transform the world around us into something wondrous and vivid that we’d never see otherwise.

Now—and everything it encompasses—is truly a holy thing, to be honored and cherished above all else. I invite you to open your eyes to it. Your world will never be the same.

Bonus points if you get that reference!

I have to say this for Pope John Paul II: the little bugger's a better visual comedian than Jim Carrey! Last year I came across a photo of him posing with a gaggle of schoolchildren. Completely inappropriate for the situation, the old guy was making a face like he'd just been poked in the eye while eating a communion host that had gone bad. The photo was so funny that I had to feature it in a series of collages I was doing for art school, even though it completely violated the series' theme...

At the time, I thought it was a one-time fluke, but recently I was proved wrong. Our Man JP's recent trip to the Americas provided a couple particularly wonderful images of ecclesiastical humor. In one image (here), JP is being escorted from the PopeJet by a young priest, but his body language and expression say "Let go of me ya damned cardinal! I'm outta here I tellya!" That was followed up by another photo (here), where an attractive adolescent girl in colorful garb is presenting herself to the pontiff. His beanie is knocked askew, and he's holding his head as if to say "Oy, and I took a vow of celibacy?"

But the point of this post isn't to make fun of the chosen representative of God on Earth. No, really! After all, anyone who can type "http://images.google.com" can do that!

But this was the topic of conversation between my friend Rhonda and I when we went down a particularly interesting line of inquiry. We got onto the subject of her "version" of Heaven differing from the standard interpretation, and she described to me a recent Robin Williams movie entitled "What Dreams May Come".

Now, before I get into it, let me tell you that the movie is bad. I'm about to describe its only redeeming feature, so there's no need for you to go out and see it. Fair warning.

Rhonda brought it up because the movie's basic premise is that the afterlife we'll experience is a reflection of our expectations of it. If you believe that the afterlife is what el papa says, then that's what you'll experience; if you believe the afterlife is going to be one big orgy, then for you it will be; if you think you'll be punished for your transgressions in this life, you surely will be; and if you don't believe in life after death... Well, the movie doesn't really address that question, but I'm sure you can imagine. The basic plot of the movie is that Robin Williams dies and finds himself in the world he and his wife had always dreamed about; his wife, a needy, self-absorbed neurotic, commits suicide shortly after, and resigns herself to an eternity in her own personal hell. The basic conflict is Robin Williams' quest to be reunited with his wife and show her there's another way.

The idea that everyone could be a god ruling a world created by their own imaginings was the basis of the first story I ever got paid for, "In Our Infinite Wisdom", published more than 20 years ago. The premise was a late-night wargaming session, where the players began theorizing that if there were an infinite number of worlds, there'd be a world just like Earth, only we'd all live in castles, that one could get to simply by thinking about it. Shazam! There it is. The characters wind up continuing this line of thought, essentially incrementally thinking their way into their own individually-tailored Heaven. To give away the ending, the twist comes as they all gradually realize that there'd also be an equivalent Hell that one would be transported to simply by thinking of it, and their brief but vain struggle to not think about it.

So all this talk got me thinking about my own idea of Heaven, and how it might look. Not what I believe is after death, because I think I made than abundantly clear in my 2/24/2002 LJ article "Philosophy for Dummies" (here), when I wrote "When we die, like any animal, we die. There is no essense or spirit which survives when our brain activity ceases", but what I would like: what world I'd design if I were given free reign to create a Heaven of my own devising.

Interestingly, despite having written a story that dealt with the topic, I really have never thought about what my Heaven would be like. I decided that'd be an interesting line of inquiry. At the same time, I'm also curious about the kinds of worlds other people would create. Would they just give the universal answers of "flying angels, no disease, no hunger, no conflict", and so forth? I think you could learn a lot about someone by the unique things they'd do to create their own world and how it'd be different from everyone else's. In "What Dreams May Come", Williams' world is full of saturated colors and things made from wet paint, since his hobby is painting. I think it'd be an interesting question to ask people over beers. I also think it'd make a cool assignment -- create a ten-minute videograph of your idea of the perfect afterlife -- although in some of our cases getting willing and appropriately-endowed actors and actresses might be a bit of an issue...

So let's consider this question. Let's get the base assumptions out of the way: we're all going to prohibit things like disease, pain, conflict, hatred, inequality, injustice, and fear, right? Let's not restate the painfully obvious here. But in what less straightforward ways would your world differ from Earth? Here are some of mine...

• I would have the time to do everything I want to do
• "Do what thou wilt, and it hurt none" would not just be the whole of the law, but would also actually be practical and meet everyone's needs
• Travelling from place to place would be both free and instantaneous, allowing you to go anywhere anytime you wanted
• There would be the ability to travel to different destinations in time; you could easily visit the 1970s or the 14th century or ancient Rome if you so desired
• Seasons would be more discrete; summer would be more summerlike, autumn more autumnal, and you'd know when you passed from one to the next
• Similarly, urban areas would be more urban, and rural areas more rural; the two would mix less
• There would be no economy, in the sense of no currency and no need to work just to maintain one's standard of living
• Creating things would be quicker and less error-prone; things like baking, programming, and art would be much less labor-intensive
• Things would be less pre-fabricated, and everything would be more "designed"; all housing, in particular, would demonstrate more architectural and artistic appeal
• There would be very, very few smells; most odors we know wouldn't exist, and there'd be a cap on the strength of all odors
• There would be no children, noisy, smelly, hateful little things that they are
• Everyone would appear to be the age at which I knew them, e.g. my high school friends would be circa 1982, my college friends circa 1986, my co-workers circa 1998, and so forth
• No one would have any body hair, save normal hair on the top of their head
• One would have the ability to experience life as a member of the opposite gender if desired
• People would be free to express their affection to one another, without fear of any kind
• Sex of widely diverse flavors would be much more common; inhibiting factors such as social acceptance, rape, STDs, performance issues, and unwanted pregnancies would be alleviated
• People would be able to intuit and accept (and, of course, act on) one another's turn-ons
• True non-consentuality would not exist

I don't think there's any real need for me to comment any further on these. The point isn't to justify them to you, but just to noodle around some vision of what life might be like in my perfect world. And I'd hardly advertise this as an immutable list, just some brainstorming.

Now, unlike my previous postings, I'm going to open this one up for public response. However, I want to emphasize that I'm not interested in your comments about my Heaven, or the thinking that got me to this point. What I'm interested in is your description of the Heaven that you would create. I'd appreciate it if you limited your comments to that topic.

It's one part imagination, and one part character; so show me what you got!