November

I had a sex dream last night, or this morning rather. Arid and analytical. An object of desire never before of interest to me. The amorality of dreams. It's not our true selves. It's not ourselves at all. We are simply observers.

And it must have been Friday that I heard -- not overheard, since I was right there -- a fellow talk about a former girlfriend who wanted him to tie her up with duct tape and take pictures. Oh no, he said, it was such a temptation, but she might later press charges. I can't think how it would be a temptation. I do my best to avoid dominating and degrading people. I think he must get his fantasies from pornography. Imagine letting pornographers direct your desires.

Imagine a universe where there is life, and that life ends. What sort of a universe would that be like? A very strange place. First, life would have to have arisen randomly. An impossibility in itself, but this is some other universe. Randomly I say because a purposeful universe would be directed by intelligence, or God if you will, and God is not capable of creating life that ends. Animals? Their souls must return to that vast subclass of life that loses its identity when it becomes nonphysical.

That's my latest understanding about the soul. The thing that remembers going to the light, but then returns, in near-death experiences? That's not the spirit. That's the soul. Soul is the emotional body, elemental, a sort of ethereal feeling clay that becomes impressed with a shape for a time, which it may retain, but is not a real identity. There may be ghosts, but they're just emotional corpses. The light that they should be liberated into is the non-being of Buddhism. Soul is not who we are. We don't have eternal souls. We have eternal spirits.

So I need not trouble myself over dreams. They may speak of psychology, or memory, or information processing, or metabolic upset, or of the interference or communication of other souls, benign, malicious or just wandering in their sleep. There is randomness, for all that there is purpose. God made a quantum universe, regardless of whether or not he plays dice. For God, randomness shows up as free will.

What are the statistics. About twenty percent of Americans belong to some sort of fitness club. Of those, about 20% are active. I'm pulling different data sources together here, so there are likely to be inaccuracies. But, uh, twenty percent of 20% is, um, 4%. Of Americans are serious about fitness. Sounds about right, actually. Man I'm smart. The point is that everyone wants to be fit, healthy, beautiful. Why aren't they. Free will is not the same as will power.

Take the phrase, dig deep. Under pressure, sorely tried, hard pressed -- time to show your mettle. Dig deep. But only 4% are deep. We don't start with any depth at all. We start on the surface. To get deep, we have to dig. That's a process. A practice. A skill. Character? It is developed, like shaped clay, by what we do habitually.

This is not encouraging. It feels deterministic. When we need to be strong, in the crisis, there is only the strength we have prepared. Sort of a conservation of energy thing. Anything else would be a miracle. And there are no miracles. None at all. God disapproves of them. You know -- things happening for no reason. Other than free will, of course.

You know what the universe looks like to a photon? It looks frozen. And a photon is just a line, from its origin to its terminus, each point on the line existing in a next moment relative to the external universe, but part of a single timeless moment of existence to the photon itself. Light is like life, except it has an end. Light ends, right? Or does some light just go on and on, forever, from the first utterance of God, until -- well, there is no until. What good is it then, if it is never seen?

I got out of October without any serious depression. My foolish mother is being sued by a criminal in November, and she has no lawyer. That will be depressing. I really don't understand the world. There is no justice -- the outcome is effectively random. A prayer, or willpower, or digging deep -- if they make a difference it would be a miracle, or a change of emotion. There are no miracles. There are only people, and emotions.


J