There is only now

It’s very interesting experience when some realization comes to you just ‘out of the blue’. You walk around, minding your own business, and suddenly “Ding!”, you understand something more about this world. It is just one, very simple and clear thought. This thought might not mean anything to other people, it might make no sense to them at all, but to you it’s like you’ve got rid of sunglasses you didn’t know you were wearing, and now can see the world more like it really is (or, might be), or you’ll see that there are more ways to think about the world and how it works.

I know these ideas might make no sense to other people at all, but I still like share them. I’ve got these ‘light bulb moments’ twice, first time was around 5 years ago and last one was about a week ago.

1. ‘There is only me‘. I think this one can be described as an understanding the ideas behind ‘brain in a jar‘ and ‘subjective reality‘ philosophies. Basically this ‘brain in a jar’ theory asks: “What if you are only brain in a jar?”. You have no physical body, all you are is a brain, which sits in one jar and is connected to computer, which creates your world. All you ever experienced, saw, touched and felt was computer generated. And the thing is, there is no way you can prove otherwise. You can’t prove that your physical body does actually exist. Actually everything you see, hear, touch, feel and smell is computer generated on the fly. So actually when you don’t see something it doesn’t exist, when I turn my head towards something it is created, just for me to see and make me believe that this world actually does exist. Same thing goes to all people – they are just computer generated bots, nothing more.

While this thought wasn’t much use to me, it was still fun to ponder about it. Also, through this I understood that there is so much that I can’t prove. Even the most basic things, like does my body actually exist, or is it just generated data fed into me.

2. ‘There is only now‘. This idea might prove even useful in everyday life, I can’t say this about first idea. I came to this thought when I wanted to define for myself what is happiness. Maybe not even define what it really is, but to understand why so many people are not happy with their lives (this goes for me too). I think most people have seen this depressed grey mass of people that goes to work every morning and comes to home every evening. Sometimes, if I didn’t know the context of all of it, I would think they all are going to their execution; people are just seem so depressed and stressed out all the time.  You know it – stuffed morning buses with not-quite-waken-up people with their dark brown coats, black jackets and dodgy attitudes struggling to get into to the bus, racing madly to get seating places and then struggling to get out of the bus.

But the thing is – there is only this moment, the now, that we have, and I think we should try to enjoy it. Not to live in the past and think what good has been, though this is very useful in itself and creates thankfulness, not to live in the future and think that soon there’ll be Friday night and I’ll party like there’s no tomorrow (interestingly, this attitude sometimes does create ‘gaps’; Carpe Cerevisi – seize the beer), but live in the now and enjoy it.

Ditch your materialialism, things will never make you happy or content, leave grudge against people and try to take fresh look at the world as it is now. When you look at world as a bystander, not as a victim in the system, you’ll actually see how funny all this is. There is no need to have expensive car, big house, 42″ plasma TV, cool cadgets. Most importantly, this might come as a shock to many, there is no need to be better than you neighbour, by having more ’stuff’, and usually more loans to pay off. Really. I mean it. All this expensive stuff that we gather will just create more worries than they solve. When I have my ’sober’ moments, I do realize that actually all this is quite meaningless (Ecclesiastes), all that media ads force upon us is just plain stupid (all they offer is to cure your symptoms, not to deal with problems), but it still is constant struggle to keep myself above it, because majority of people still believe, that winner is who dies the richest. When Bible said that ‘godliness with content is a great gain‘, I think that just ‘content is a great gain‘ is.

All in all, step away from this ratrace for a minute, look at the world and have a good laugh.