In my latest blog post I asked questions about the world around us or to be much more general – the world around me.  What is real?  Is what I see the same thing that you see?  How would we ever know if that is true until it is completely over?

Those questions resonate at the heart of a lot of fear.  For someone who likes to know the answers I struggle with the unknown. Who was D.B. Cooper?  Is there a Yeti?  What was that object I saw over Roanoke in the fall of 1997?  Yeah, yeah go ahead and tell me there are no aliens but I know what I saw that afternoon was not of this world,

As a person who demands resolution, life proves to be a bane of my existence.  Can someone please tell me what our goal is?  Furthering society?  Making ourselves better?  Proving that we can destroy the planet?  Hell we don’t even know what happens when we die.  No one has ever been able to come back and supply us with a conclusion – well maybe that’s not the best word?  Do we truly want a conclusion to life?

There are many people who wish to spend hundreds if not thousands of years on this planet alive.  At the time that their bodies cease to give their brains oxygen, a service comes in to freeze and preserve those cells until such time that we can recreate that “life” in another form.  From what I understand baseball legend and hitter extraordinaire Ted Williams had his grey matter put into a vat until such time that it could be placed into a suitable life container.

What is Williams’ life state?  Is he currently experiencing a dream state?  Based upon what I know of our bodies I would think there is no brain waves in that organ so isn’t he technically dead?  Aren’t we trying to create an Igor without understanding how the mind works?

If I’m not mistaken our bodies are full of electric currents or parts that conduct that form of energy.  When we tell our feet to move as we are walking we are sending that signal in the form of a charge to the muscles to make them move.  When we dream and our body moves, our brain is still active and sending that wave to the part in question.  If you take a battery and put it the freezer you are just storing that energy until it can be used because it is not connected to a circuit or device asking for that signal.

So Williams’ brain is frozen and in a neutral state, somewhere that none of us know what it is going through or what will happen when it comes out of.  With that in mind there’s no way to know what the brain will “see” if it ever does get connected to a body or what it will even “remember.”  After all , these things are all a matter of perception.  What I perceive to be real, you most certainly may find to be fake.  Again it comes back to the state of reality.  How you describe the world around you verses how I describe it.  Is green the same shade of a color to you as me?  It can’t be – otherwise we would not have “color blind” people.

What does it all mean?  Are there any answers?  As far as I can tell it’s the same thing that smarter men and women before me have been asking for years and years.  What I have come to realize is that for every question and every answer the most important thing is to realize that we are human.

For every good thing we do we tend to screw up something else.  We can’t take ourselves too seriously.  We can get mad at something but we have to keep from taking it out on someone else.  We have to realize that the same material that makes up the stars makes up us.   One day the star that we call the “Sun” is going to burn out – that is a day we will never see but it will happen.  When that happens the world that we know, the real to us, will cease to exist.  Everything from America to Europe to Asia will suffer if it still exists.

We are simply who we are.  We have the ability to make choices, or even the curse of making choices.  We are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.  But choose we must.  We struggle to understand that this choice is ours and not something that has been granted to us our even pre-determined.  We would like to think that some higher power pushed us to a resolution or a conclusion just so we don’t wrestle with the problem of being in control of our lives.  But we are confined to this determinism.  It’s the reason that we turn to our friends and family and ask what we should choose, we sub-consciously struggle with making decisions.

One of the greatest minds of the 20th century, Jean-Paul Sartre, who ironically I didn’t understand when I took philosophy as a 19-year-old, said the following:

“Man is condemned to be; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.  It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.”

Once we start to realize that we have the curse and the blessing to make the choices that control our lives, the same lives that are short, we are the only ones who are in control of the short time that is our reality.  Or better yet, your reality, not mine.