Slapdash profundity #2: Conflict bouquet

(This entry precedes a writing hiatus.)

I think it is safe to assume we will never understand the origin of “something” when that is all there is; will never be able to understand the meaning or possibility of “cause.” This “no answers” plight enables two approaches: We believe in only this something, or we suspect an underlying pre-reality. I am an irresolute atheist. I don’t believe in any creator with primary agency. But like the second approach named, I can’t just be comfortable with the basic mystery of what, where, when and why. On my deathbed, I suspect that my mind will go to a single-sentence fantasy, spoken or unspoken: “There is something else,” and I will believe I will go there. Shouldn’t we assume that all atheists (including the famous ones with a reputation to uphold), in that moment, allow themselves this indulgence? I wonder if it is a human biological necessity. After all, it is a gift that consciousness forces us to ask unanswerable questions about existence. Perhaps it also can’t imagine itself not being. That frightened conceit caused me to create the notion that in a timeless universe, all past and present configurations will eventually reassemble so that trillions or quadrillions of years in the future, each of us will be remade, maybe with early memory embedded – as if we’d merely had a long doze.

Whatever the case, as I get older, my two psychological, diametrical truths press for a fight: the pull to return to my home, to my disastrous inner child, to be my core reality in the world; the pull to, having lived acceptably, be serene and reconciled. One has me nodding to the universe in appreciation, the other is petulant, angry, tragic and f-word speaking. These two will be battling each other, I know, at the exact deathbed moment I believe (hoping against hope) I am going to that unknown something. This hardly predicts peace.