Okay, it started, as I mentioned, with me watching What Dreams May Come. The first thought that this movie spawned within me isn't even a part of mega-theory, merely the stepping stone in opening my mind enough to view the rest that followed.
This first thought was as follows: The movie presents that Annie has killed herself and thus has to carry out the rest of existance in her own personal hell. Now the hell she created for herself was to keep living on as if she had never died, never realizing that she had ended her own life.
I'm watching this amidst all my fears about death and dying and I think, "Great! How nice that would be, you die and just wake up the next day as though it never happened and keep right on living."
Although you physically go through the act of dying, your thoughts are more powerful than physical reality, so you completely tune out the fact that you're even dead at all. Meaning--two years ago I could have killed myself when my heart was broken and never realized it--thus explaining why my life had been so steadily miserable after the fact.
It was a nice thought--but I wasn't too sure how well it would hold up in logical terms. So I watched a couple more scenes in the movie and pondered the main concept the movie presents: The thought is the most powerful thing humans are capable of. It overrides every other reality. The body is merely a shell that is part of a stage we go through in our evolution as higher beings.
That's when it all started falling into place. As humans, we are capable of thought and emotion--this is what we call the soul, or personality. The voice in our heads. This is the part that goes on. Because we are here and aware--we know that we are here, we know that we're sitting here staring at a computer screen reading words, we know what the words mean and if the message is strong, we'll remember what those words told us. That's a pretty amazing concept, that we're capable of that much.
It also struck me how as humans we all tend to thrive on one certain thing--learning, expanding, growing. From the moment we are born we want to touch and explore and emote and just learn as much as we can from our planet and from each other.
As humans we also tend to always need some sort of belief system, or structure or theory--anything to ward off the dread that there is in fact NOTHING after we close our eyes that last time.
But what happens when we close our eyes every other time? The one thing all humans and animals have in common regardless of smarts or creativity or status?
We dream. We close our eyes and we still see. We create worlds that no one else can see that are so real we forget we made them up. The entire time we dream, that world is all that's real to us. Sometimes it's even more real than reality itself. We become so lost in it that when we first wake up we think awake is the dream. We lose sight of which one started first for just that one moment.
It's also a fact that blind people still dream. Now really think about that for a second. The man that cannot tell you what a tree looks like because he has never seen one, can dream and see and live in a visual world after he goes to bed at night. Why? Or better yet, HOW??
Could it be that what the movie presented held some truth to it? That we do go on and subconsciously, we know this? Dreams may in fact just be a nightly reminder to ourselves not to forget what our minds are capable of. That we are all creators at heart. Could this be why we so desperately cling to any theory that has our core element--the self--living out an eternity somewhere--be it in the clouds or in thought or through reincarnation or spirit?
