Toys and Things

I saw a bumper sticker recently that read “He who dies with the most toys wins” and it reminded me of the experience of cleaning out my parent’s house after they both died.

My father was a tinkerer and had built a nice wooden work bench in the basement where he had numerous hand tools, all neatly displayed and organized. Most were related to his hobby of rock hounding and jewelery making. They were an important part of his life and packing up the ones that neither my brother nor I wanted was a surrealistic experience. One day they were important and valuable and the next day…they were just stuff.

The very things that we find so important and necessary in our lives suddenly lose their meaning when the owner dies. It isn’t the object, the toy, that has value. It’s the experience of using it that has value.

Time is the great deception

…and yet I believe that time itself doesn’t exist. It is the parade of events that we use to mark our place in the great play in which we participate.

How can it be that time doesn’t exist? Clearly we see the hands on the clock move around and the leaves of the calendar turn. Surely that is the passage of a linear something that we call time? But no. Think of a movie film reel wound into its’ can. The whole story exists at once tucked into the can. The illusion of a linear something is produced one frame at a time but all frames exist at once. It is only our viewpoint that changes. We who are embedded in the strip cannot see it from the outside and so have no realization of the whole. Nor can we rewind. Once a frame is gone it is gone forever to us and we can never return to it again.

The moving hand writes

And, having writ, moves on.

Not all thy piety nor all thy wit can lure it back to cancel half a line,

Nor all the tears wash out a word of it.

(From the Rubiyat of Omar Kayam)

Beauty surrounds us

There is beauty in the most common and mundane items. Open your eyes, take time to look. Life goes by day by day, one after the other until our allotment is used up and then it is too late. Do you want to meet your maker and have to tell him/her/it that you weren’t interested enough in creation to stop and look? That you were too busy “rocking out” and being cool to bother to look? To busy making a living? Too busy achieving social standing?

Reality. Is it real?

Nothing is real. Not me, not you, not the Earth we walk on or any of its’ components. At the atomic level all is empty space and energy. It’s all a construct for lesson learning, a vehicle for the spirit. Time and again we return, each time to learn a new lesson, interact with different personifications of our soul group. It’s all a play. At the end of the play the spirit, the true actors, withdraw, take lessons from the reviews and regroup to assume new roles, to enact another play.

Sleep, the little death

Why it is that we fear death and seek out sleep? Someone, can’t recall who, once described sleep as the “little death” and when you think about it that is a pretty apt description. So we routinely lose consciousness and find it pleasant but resist mightily the idea or fact of death.

As we age many of us find death far less intimidating than we did while young though. I went through a period of a couple of years when five members of my immediate family died from one cause or another. The whole thing left me reeling (and the oldest member of my family save one) but, in the end, it was a period of growth and realization and certain experiences after those deaths convinced me that death is indeed a gateway and not an end. Someday I may write about those experiences if they turn out to be of interest to anyone but me.