Mère

Chapter 22

The next day, after I woke up and ate breakfast, my mum called me into her room. She said that the doctor called her and told her that she could go into surgery in a month or so. My mum had to take a new medication, that was meant to make the surgery easier. The medication made her drowsy and she slept a lot more often because of it. I had to do the housework and grocery shopping…but I was already used to that. School was getting a lot more difficult, and I had to work harder at staying on top of things. It was hard because of the stress of my mum’s surgery and Vanessa leaving me. The school didn’t feel the same without her. I couldn’t look at her from my desk anymore…I couldn’t see how the sunlight laid on her face…and worst of all, I couldn’t hold her. I didn’t hear from her since the letter she gave me…she didn’t call…and wouldn’t pick up when I called. I was surprised that she didn’t block me. Even though I had a lot of work to do, Abel, Daniel, and I always tried to make time for one another. On one particular day, during the weekend, we were at Daniels house.
“Gentlemen, I have a proposition.”, said Daniel
“Do speak, good sir.”, I said
“How about we have a night?”, he said. Abel and I were stupefied.
“Are you crazy? After everything you’ve been through?”, asked Abel
“Woah, relax. I didn’t mean it like that. I meant like, just us…hanging out.”, said Daniel
“Oh…”, said Abel
“When?”, I asked
“How about tonight?”, asked Daniel
“I guess I could ask my parents…”, said Abel
“Me too.”, I said
I went home to ask my mum if I could spend the night at Daniels house. She was lying down, but she was awake.
“Mum?”
“Yes, darling.”, she said, with her head still on her pillow
“Are you okay?”
“I’m okay.”
“Okay…do you need anything?”
“No, I’m fine, my darling.”
“Okay…is it okay if I spend the night at Daniels house?”
“Okay…but can you please go to the store before it gets too late. We don’t have anything to eat…and I can’t make anything right now.”
“Okay, mum.”
I went to the local store to buy something. My mum liked pastries…so I bought custard puffs and jam tarts. While I was looking around, I glanced outside the store window and saw Vanessa. The store clerk was busy packaging the pastries, while I ran out of the store. The girl turned around and looked at me like I was crazy…it turned out not to be Vanesa. I apologized to her and went back into the store. “I’m going crazy.”, I thought. I went home and gave my mum the pastries, then made my way to Daniels house. Abel also got permission from his parents and was already there.
“So, what do you have planned for tonight?”, I asked Daniel
“Well…bought snacks, and we have video games. What more could we need?”, he smiled
“Wow…it’s like we aged backwards.”, said Abel
We played video games all night. There was a point that I actually forgot I wasn’t a kid anymore. It’s amazing what hanging around the right people can do to you. I was so caught up in the world…sometimes I forgot to live. It was nice to have a break from it all…even though it was just for a moment. After a while, we went outside and sat on Daniels porch.
“So…I tried reading some of that Hegel guy’s work. I didn’t understand a thing.”, said Daniel
“He’s hard to understand. I had to research what he meant.”, said Abel
“I remembered what you were saying about the dialectic…I wanted you two to talk about that some more.”, said Daniel
“Well…I did think about something else recently, regarding that.”, I said
“What?”, asked Abel
“I was reading some psychology and it was specifically talking about the left and right hemispheres of the brain. So…the right hemisphere is more exploratory whereas the left hemisphere is more for grasping. The right hemisphere wants to open up to possibility, whereas the left hemisphere wants to close down to certainty. Chaos and order. Yin and Yang. In darkness, light is given dimension. So, then the question is, should life just be order? That’s as deep a question as you could ask. There’s also a central theological issue there…because in the garden of Eden there seems to be a representation of the same idea. A garden is a good example of harmony because nature is prolific and somewhat unpredictable and when you tend to that, as you nurture plants and pull out weeds, you have a garden where chaos and order are balanced. In Genesis, the garden is presented as the ideal place for Adam and Eve. This means that the garden is an ideal place for humanity. In the garden there are walls to keep the outside out, however, walls are permeable, so eventually something is going to get inside, like a snake. So, what should you do? Should you build the walls higher or should the individuals within the garden learn to contend with the possibility of snakes? Do you make people safe or strong? Isn’t the crux of human existence to contend? We have suffering in the world, and we have happiness. Does one exist without the other? I think that one doesn’t have shape unless the other exists. Maybe that’s why God allows suffering…right, Abel? And also…one could say that life was already sufficiently dangerous because of the looming of death…but it seems that the existential problem is only wrapped up in a bow of death. Everything inside is still in question. So, we have limitations as human beings…and that’s what the existential problem is, essentially.”, I said
“Well, I came across this idea about the classic attributes of God, which are omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence. What does a being of those attributes lack? Limitations. The unlimited lacks the limited, and human beings live with limits, as that is the fundamental part of being a human. It’s even the fundamental justification of being. So…what does that mean? If God is unlimited and we are the limited, then perhaps our interaction with him is a sort of dialectical process…in the sense that we negate the finite and move toward the infinite. Is the infinite our potential? Does our interactions with the anomaly cause us to materialize infinite potential and our potential for infinity?”, asked Abel
“I guess…if you think about the brain again, and if you think about an anomaly, there are generally two approaches your mind takes to an anomaly. One is to disprove that it’s an anomaly, which is typically the left hemisphere at work, because the left hemisphere doesn’t want anything to shift, and reasonably so, since it’s difficult and you might be wrong. So, it’s correct to be wary, but not to be so wary that it shuts out anomalies altogether, and there’s a lot of evidence that suggests that the left hemisphere blots out what doesn’t fit with its understanding. The right hemisphere tries to explore, because, if there are enough anomalies, it needs to be able to shift. Imagine that the right hemisphere starts to recognize anomalies, so much so, that it starts seeing patterns. The left inhibits the right, as is its job, because otherwise you’d be overcome with fear, but now, because of the patterns in the anomalies, the right can create an antithesis to the thesis of the left hemisphere, and if that new antithesis can formulate into an actual hypothesis, by being able to map out the anomalies plus the already mapped territory, then what ensues is a rapid personality change, observed by Jung. And…it seems to me that it echoes the Hegelian idea of a thing that’s opposed by something else, but when there’s a synthesis it’s not that one of them is annihilated, because they’re both transformed and taken up into the new whole, which embraces what before looked like an opposition. And…I guess the point that I’m trying to make, if there is any, is that…let’s say you have a theory and some anomalies happen, so you have to wipe out the theory and then incorporate the anomalies so that you have a new theory. That’s sort of a metaphorical descent into chaos. So, you reconfigure the theory with the chaos and you come up with a better theory. Why is it better? Because it accounts for everything that the previous theory accounted for, plus the anomalies, so there’s progress and being is the process of becoming. I don’t think that you just shift between paradigms. We know that the universe is expanding, but what is it expanding in? Nothing? Well, that’s impossible to conceptualize. Maybe the universe is a drop in a cosmic bowl. Well, then what surrounds the bowl? Nothing? Well, that’s impossible to conceptualize too. At some point, you start to see the limits of the human mind…as you reach an infinite regress. So…maybe there’s a sense of…things don’t have to be definitively proven to be true…maybe some truths are truer than other truths. Everyone has truths…which we use to discriminate against what’s coming into our brains…and I guess that’s why I’m not an Atheist or a Theist…I’m comfortable in a position of discomfort, that is, uncertainty. I’m in a sort of…unstable position where I’m on the border of order and chaos.”, I said
“I understand what you’re saying, but I think that you’re on the fence because you don’t believe, or aren’t sure, that intuition is a valid indicator for belief, because if you had surety then you’d either be an Atheist or a Theist.”, said Abel
“I guess the difference between us is that I’m willing to embrace uncertainty. I think that people with ‘certainty’ are boring. Like…I know there’s this idea that says the universe is just God’s will unfolding as we speak, but that’s quite static, because that means we are just going along with the ride. We’re passengers. Wouldn’t it make more sense if God isn’t omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent? What if God, in the process of being, is becoming? Maybe everything is just a process and there aren’t any things at all. I mean…everything decays, even plastic. We negate a previous state of being every moment of every day, therefore, there are no things, only things that are becoming, and is becoming. It’s all, ‘the becoming’. It’s like music…and how it flows. Each note on its own, means nothing. Each silence between the notes, on its own, means nothing too. Only when the notes are put together, along with the silences, do you have a work of art, which could present the nature of the cosmos. Even in the universe itself, we have us, which are the notes, and empty spaces, which are the silences. Perhaps that echoes the necessity of opposites? Death itself might just be a necessary note in the symphony, like a final dramatic stand against an ever-expanding wave of possibility and stars. We are made from the death of stars. Perhaps death is just us becoming stars once more? Maybe that’s what heaven is? Because I noticed that religious fundamentalists keep trying to make heaven and hell sound like…things…or places that you could travel to…but is that really all it is?”, I asked
“I don’t know what heaven or hell really are, and no one does. I heard a pastor say that heaven is a place where you have eternal peace and bliss…but I don’t know if you can have both of those things…right? I mean, on earth, we can only have bliss because of our consciousness, since we are aware of the circumstance causing the bliss, but, according to some pastors, in heaven, your memories are wiped and the only thing that exists is your soul. So…is the soul consciousness? Wouldn’t it have to be to experience bliss?”, asked Abel
“What do you think, Daniel?”, I asked, as Daniel sat quietly.
“Oh…uhm…I don’t know. What if death itself is heaven? Like…what if when you die…the fact that you don’t have to suffer on earth anymore is what heaven is?”
“Well, what about everything that brought you joy on earth? That would be ending too.”, said Abel
“Do you think that…there’s like a Jungian necessity of opposites that could be going on there? Where, heaven is the end of the suffering and hell is the end of joy? I mean…we spoke about Hegel, and how when a thing is opposed by something else, when a synthesis occurs, the two are subsumed under the same paradigm, instead of shifting between paradigms. Maybe heaven and hell are meant to exist with one another?”, I asked
“But heaven is described as eternal bliss, and hell is described as eternal suffering, so how can you have the absolutes of both extremes of the spectrum at the same time? They’re mutually exclusive.”, said Abel
“Well…that’s the thing with absolutes…are there any? We don’t have absolute certainty about anything… possibly even in science. We only know what we think we know. Things that are actually ‘absolute’ might just be far away from us, as things we could never reach, like Kant’s things-in-themselves.”, I said
“Don’t we behave as if we have absolutes?”, asked Daniel
“What do you mean?”, asked Abel
“Well, like in terms of morality, for example. We behave as if morality is objective, but it isn’t. We only behave according to what we, as a society, believe is correct.”, said Daniel
“Which is another reason why I believe in God.”, said Abel
“How so?”, I asked
“Well…if God isn’t real, then morality and its implications are subjective, but if He’s real, then it isn’t.”, said Abel
“But wouldn’t it still be subjective, because God wants things to be done a certain way, according to His will?”, asked Daniel
“Well, if you remember my speech, I said that if God is the creator of the universe and all the laws, physical and moral, that govern it, then whatever He deems to be good IS good. Therefore, if He exists, and His will exists, then good exists.”, said Abel
“So, you think that a world without God would fall into chaos?”, asked Daniel
“Essentially, yes.”, said Abel
“Well, the world is becoming more secular, so why hasn’t that happened already?”, asked Daniel
“Well, like you said, we behave as if the moral law is objective, but soon, if religion is eradicated from the world, we will see something different. People will only govern themselves civilly because they would enter into a social contract with the state, instead of believing that the things we consider good are intrinsically good. People will abstain from doing bad things because of the possibility of being caught, instead of not doing bad things because they are intrinsically bad. Without the metaphysical, we are left with the earthly, and we don’t listen to the earthly. People always seek something that transcends themselves.”, said Abel
“This is all just a big ‘what if’, that we’re doing here. Morality is objective if God exists…so and so is so, if God exists. There could be no God…then what? Do we base everything on ‘what if’?”, I asked
“Everything is a ‘what if’, bro.”, said Abel
After our conversation we were tired, so we went home. I slept that night wondering if I would ever know what the true nature of existence was…or if anyone would.