Archive for the ‘Random meditations’ Category

Afterlife or Null

January 17, 2008

When I’ve got not much to do, I like to meditate about things. How does this world come to the shape it is now; could animals also be religious; why the form of worldwide anarchy wouldn’t work; when will the weather get warmer so that I could go out and play basketball again etcetera.

I slept over the alarm this morning till 9:36. No haste, boss wouldn’t herein bite. That’s what I like about the company, flexible timing and free lunch. The first thing I received when I opened my computer, as always, was the greeting from Katie Showalter who is a good friend of mine I’ve been talking to for years through IM, for which I appreciate very much because she is the only one who greets me whenever I go online and I actually love talking to her.

As the talk went, we were into the discussion of afterlife. She’s a nonbeliever of afterlife, nor am I, I guess. Thing is, as I have also asked her, that why would people still fear when they walk in a cemetery or graveyard? Feeling alone and uneasy at least for that matter. If you are a solid nonbeliever of life after death, why the heck would you still act like you do somewhat believe in it? It appears so to me when people show their anxiety of being ambushed by some sort of souls or ghosts lurking around the tombs especially when the corpses weren’t cremated but buried directly six feet under. Katie came up with the answer that because people watched too many horror movies where bad and weird things always take place in cemeteries. So does that mean people become flip-flopped in their belief before and after the movie? Which, again, means that perhaps they are not quite sure about it?

I myself am very aware that I dare go to the cemetery in the day with a bunch of people around and sunshine if possible. However, I will never go there alone, in the darkness, with no breath of liveness. Any kind of breeze of movement would scare the shit out of me under that situation, even it is the sound of my own. Yet, I still claim myself a disbeliever, an atheist. Why? I dunno.

Maybe I misclassified myself into the atheistic category. Maybe I’m an agnostic. Probably many others are as well. The existence of supernatural phenomena, such as souls and life after death, is unverifiable and therefore unknowable. This also leads to one of my above meditations, the animals, do they have afterlife, too? Are they held responsible for their actions?

Some people form their views based on observation, some formulate theirs based on faith. The notion of afterlife is absurd at first sight, but with more thought into it, particularly if you have some sort of special experience of near death or out-of-body, then you might challenge your own certainty . I haven’t experienced any of it, certainly I hope I never will, I still ridicule the concept of afterlife yet I have doubts nonetheless. Am I making myself paradoxical?

So what’s your take on this?

GuideToTheAfterlife-CustodianForGoddessAmun-AltesMuseum-Berlin

Starting my blog

January 14, 2008

Everyone does it, and now I’m finally doing it … again! The first time I started to write on a blog was back in 2004 when UEFA European Championship was going on. I remember it was an exciting summer because I knew Greek’s going to do something big in the tournament. Boy, they surely knew how to satisfy me — winning the glorious trophy!

I digressed …

Anyway, the effort of writing on a blog has winded off into a distant memory and I guess I’ve got two reasons why I failed doing it. The first is that I didn’t know what to write about. And the second is that I wasn’t content with my narrative skills.

Having said that, I think I’ve gotta overcome that two little shortcomings if I want this blog to be survived. I’m going to write about my endeavors on my personal development, an area I’ve dabbled with since time immemorial! Or since I was a teenager anyway.

The second part that I’m not satisfied with YET, I reckon, is the key to the survival of this blog. My Chinese friends might already have this question that why I don’t write it in Chinese. Well honestly, that’s mainly because Karen ( a very nice mormon lady who’s currently living in Colorado) told me that my English is understandable, and that’s just it! I know how I could understand a foreigner who speaks Chinese with sporadic words in a sentence and I could guess the whole idea most of the time that he/she is trying to express. So I take what Karen told me as she had the same feeling as I did of those crappy Chinese speakers. Frustratingly yet ambitiously, I decide to improve it systematically. How? Well, that’s another question. *chuckle*. In addition, I guess as I go along with writing my blog, I will know how to write things that are interesting to read. Hopefully.

Humm, I guess, basically, that’s it. Now begins a new era of my life! Cheers!