On a Paradox and Another Planet.

I was sitting by the fire listening to the popping of gas in the burning coal, and found myself asking ‘is that reality?’ I watched the meandering tongues of flame occasionally give way to purposeful plumes of smoke, and wondered whether that was reality. I felt the heat on my face and contrasted it with the chill air in the unheated kitchen. ‘Is that reality?’ And then it occurred to me that the question is a pointless one to ask, since you need to know the answer before you can define the word and know what you’re asking. That seemed to me typical of the unsolvable paradoxes you always come up against when you ask deep and damn fool questions like ‘what is reality?’ Oh well, just carry on regardless then.

(Actually, I still seriously suspect that if you insist on asking the question anyway, you need to be looking for the answer in the abstract not the phenomenal. But what would I know?)

*  *  *

I asked my friend Leila once, when she was in the advanced stages of her medical training: ‘What do you think happens when we die?’ She replied:

‘Our energy escapes and flies off to mingle with the cosmic soup.’

‘Does that include consciousness?’

She didn’t know.

*  *  *

And I felt a growing conviction today that we HSP types are not exclusively descended from early hominids like everybody else, but from something different which came here from another planet. Seriously.