Being in the position of losing my dad in his early fifties whilst I was in my late twenties has had quite a large effect on my life and the way that I view the world. I know that I'm not alone in this situation and there are countless others who have had it worse, but they are not me and they don't have my thought processes and therefore are not writing this blog. But I am.
I've never been a happy sort of chap, firmly believing (and having pointed out to me by my BFF) that happiness is just total bollocks. It's an entirely emotional state which means it's next to impossible to be happy all the time, and those that are, are quite clearly bonkers. The best we should hope for is contentment. I wish I was lucky enough to even feel that once in a while. My life is barely disguised darkness and depths of emptiness, hopelessness and nausea with sporadic and fleeting glimpses of dull light from afar. Then my dad died. And my Granny, one of my Uncles, a Cousin and a few pets all within the space of a couple of months. What a cunt.
Before this string of mildly hilarious (in the sense that if I don't laugh I'll vomit blood and cry myself to death) events, I was a good Catholic boy. Well, certainly Catholic if not good. I believed the lot. I believed all the stuff about Heaven and Hell, God and the Devil and pretty much all the stories from the Bible with the exception of the Creation stories. I had chosen to take communion in my adulthood and attend confessions and live my life according to the word of God, as put forth in the Good Book. But not in a preachy way. Roll on my life falling apart and, try as I might to not do it, I started to question my faith. And watch a lot of programs about the Universe. Well bugger me if all of a sudden, I didn't believe in God anymore. When you have been a believer and then, all of a sudden you are not, life takes on a different slant as you ponder the apparent lack of purpose now slapped across your face and laid in front of you, and my usual jovial pessimism and depression was shot to bits as I spiralled into an entirely new level of living Hell. Apart from grieving for those loved and lost, my default train of thought became one of contemplating my own mortality and that of those closest to me. Because I no longer believed that when you die, your spirit goes to heaven and that not believing that leaves you with a default of an eternity of nothingness, I sort of became... well... 'Not Well' (proper and actual medical term, honest). I started obsessing over it and it dominated my entire life for a long, long time. I didn't want to speak to anyone about it because, as mentioned before, people are cunts. Another reason for me not spreading my insanity was that it was my Hell, not theirs, and I wanted to keep it for myself. It's an oddly personal thing being in an unfit state of mind and despite their best efforts to understand and sympathise, most therapists can not empathise because they are perfectly sane and not depressed (though they are still cunts).
Over the course of the next couple of years I started to try and work out why I should believe in anything, and that if I did, where I should place my beliefs and why. I was sure that making an effort to be a good person with a strong moral grounding, a good work and life ethic and straight cut attitude should at least be a starting point as I had always tried to be that anyway, and it had served me well over the years when I had managed to successfully maintain it. I had a look into many of the pagan belief systems and whilst some of them are very similar to what I now believe, they are not part of my beliefs due to the background reasoning and other such trivialities. I had a look at some of the Buddhist beliefs and bits and bobs from other religions, but I finally came to the decision that non of them were correct because they are founded on other peoples beliefs rather than facts. I eventually managed to thrash out what I believe and whilst it doesn't actually please me in any way thanks to my previous Catholic convictions and knowing what I COULD believe, it does makes sense.
So, on to what I currently believe (mostly based on fact). The universe is coming up to it's 14 billionth birthday shortly (in about 250 million years) and everything in it was there at the start. Everything you can think of is made from Star Dust that was ejected during the Big Bang including the solid matter that your body is made from. Congratulations, you are 13.75 billion years old (though on a cellular level you are only ten years old). It's also fairly common knowledge that energy can not be destroyed (by any conventional means, possibly by black holes) but is merely transformed into another form. The human mind and body are both full of energy, your mind sending electrical impulses to the body then the body moves bits of it's self about by using energy created through burning calories from your food etc. Your food is physically made of the same 14 billion year old stuff that you are and contains energy that your body can burn with the energy also having originated during the big bang. When the current combination of matter and energy that is you eventually starts to fall apart and you die, the matter and energy will be returned to the Earth (and therefore the Universe) and will eventually be transformed into something new. Probably a Mars Bar or a roll of toilet paper. But on a molecular level, we never truly die. Great news eh? Unless of course you were expecting consciousness after death. Further to this, all the energy that transforms can only do so by using other energy to get the process going (photosynthesis for example), most of which comes from the sun and other stuff in the Cosmos. The sun it's self can only function because of energy from the greater Cosmos. The Universe basically feeds its self and then feeds on the by-products created in a never ending cycle and everything in the Universe depends, in turn, on this. Well, fucking hell. Looking at this as a belief system, it turns out that Im a Pantheist. Of course, I do believe in looking after the planet (something that is not really happing to the necessary degree at the minute) and treating people in a humane manner regardless of colour, creed, sexuality, sex, age and all the rest of it.
To sum up then, although consciousness is lost when we cease to live, we do not actually die. We are here forever, which means no heaven, which in turn can only mean that the only purpose in life is to enjoy ourselves as much as possible and to appreciate everything around us and to try and make the world a nicer place for every other bugger. Enjoyment of course, should not be confused with happiness. Taking pleasure in something can make you happy but it is not in and of it's self, happiness. So, once again, the moral of this story is for us all to stop being cunts. That's right, you are a cunt! Now fucking sort it out!
It's still a fucker that we have to croak it though, cos life is certainly entertaining.
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