...Now. If the bright sun outside is any indication. We're either in the calm before the storm. Or the forecast was quite literally as hilariously wrong as a forecast could possibly be. Both are options, so I suppose we'll just have to see what turns out later tonight.
Still, it's a thing. School stuff continues to be worth writing about. I'm not helping out as much as my teacher would prefer me to be, but then again, nobody has yet to ask for my help. I am largely ahead in terms of what assignments are to be done, so I should be good until Monday--I'm sure I'll be fullblown panic mode come Monday until I talk to the teacher, but until then I'm definitely good. This week's assignments I know are all turned in on time or even early. It's next week's I'd have to worry about.
I did have time to finally work on my personal CAD project: a plastic cup. Or, at least it was a plastic cup. Now it's glass (in spite of the original being plastic) because I couldn't find a seethrough plastic. Ah well. I also have rather inadequate tools for the job: a ruler. That's it. To find all the necessary measurements. I have a ruler. An 18-inch ruler.
In spite of that, I actually got a fair number of good measurements! I was able to calculate the height of the bottom, the height of the whole cup, the height of the cup's top to the middle two-thirds (where the cup has a notable change in patterning and whatnot), the bottom diameter, the bottom rim diameter, the top inner and outer diameters, and then some miscellaneous extras.
Including angles! Well, it ended up not looking right with the given angle I came out with, butstill. I actually busted out some trigonometry to figure out the angles I needed! Was quite proud of myself. (Even though I needed to look up the Pythagorean Theorem...and SOHCAHTOA...and how to enter an inverse tangent on a computer calculator...god my math sucks.)
What's that in the parenthesis? Nope, nothing to see there, carry on! I did good, I am good, I achieved much, totally without assistance. (I can dream, right?)
Of course, I couldn't get the part to work the way I want to. I'm pretty sure I need to start over from scratch and use a different technique altogether. A technique I was considering using in the first place but somehow talked myself out of using it. (I think out of fear of me not knowing the angles, but me definitely knowing how to create some geometry.)
Well that'll be sad but I think it'll be better in the long-run. And it's not like the process was a total waste. I learned and taught myself a bunch of tricks which will help me make the revised part. So there.
Anyway...I have round dancing tonight, but not for another four hours. That leaves me plenty of time to deliver a promised ramble about aspects of religion. Basically, back on Sunday, I wanted to write about religious topics again--I tend not to share my beliefs too much because for me, belief should be a personal thing, not a preachy thing, and I don't want to let my blog become a mouthpiece for that sort of thing.
Still, I figure that every grand once and a while, it's okay to ramble on the subject. In this case, the subject of the day? Life after death.
Now, my belief there has evolved over time. I started out with no belief either way--death was a foreign concept to me. (Still largely is, just not as much.) I saw it in fiction, and in things like insects, and mentioned about people I didn't really know, but death itself just wasn't something which was tangible to me: it...didn't feel "real", so to speak, because I had no experience, no reference point, nothing, in regards to death.
And for belief or lack thereof in life after death, you first as a requirement absolutely need to have a grasp on the concept OF death. Which, admittedly, I'm still shaky on even after 23 years' worth of life experience.
Death just...isn't something which really concerns me when it comes to most people--I fear for many of my online friends, and I am deathly afraid of the possibility of ending my own life, but when it comes to most people, people I know in real life and family members, death just...is something that I don't see as a big deal?
I don't know exactly why I feel that way--but I do. Death feels to me like it's just a natural part of life. So I don't really mourn for those who die. I don't really fear the possibility of most people dieing. (Except for many of my online friends, for some strange reason.) It simply feels like...it's something which happens, and for me that makes me feel like maybe my experience with death is largely detached, largely outside of the norm.
...Still. All the same. My understanding of death does exist now (whereas before it did not), so I did develop the concept necessary to hold a stance on life after death: "I don't know what's there--heaven, reincarnation, ghosts, nothingness, something else, whatever. But should there be nothing...that makes our time alive all the more special, to be cherished. Do good for the sake of good, yet still live life to the fullest." (Essentially a philosophy similar, but not quite identical, to the Anti-Nihilist.)
That stance...never fully went away. I still only have the slightest of inclinations as to what I feel lies beyond the mortal coil. All the same. My stance since then has evolved. It's gone from a reasonably simple stance to horrendously complex, as dealing with the concept of souls and whatnot transcends space and time and therefore gets really, really complicated really, really quickly.
But basically: I do believe there's an afterlife now. My understanding of it is that it is a realm similar to the thoughtrealm, dreamrealm, and ethereal, and may be something transcending all three, tying them together. It is a place beyond space time. It's a realm where ideas, where thoughts, where concepts, where aspirations, where desires, emotions, and feelings all blend together: everything a person ever was, and ever could have been.
They have essentially the ultimate version of the internet, where anything we wish to communicate would be communicated in absolute perfection. The image as it is meant to be, rather than as flawed human hands have managed to produce. All that they have experienced, both real and fictional, tied together to others.
This would be a place where there would be no need for desire, but not because all wishes would instantly be fulfilled or because there would be no wishes. Rather. It'd more be a place where we'd exist in a state where desires would be obsolete. It'd be a level of existence closely tied to the multiverse.
Which, incidentally, is closely tied to what I believe God to be. That'd be a different ramble, but the cliffnotes version would be God is a combination of Destiny--which Fate we will choose, which things will happen rather than can possible happen--and also of the multiverse laced with a healthy dosage of being life itself, with every one of us having a bit of God inside of us. Essentially, God would both be a being, yet not be a being, because God would be something beyond our understanding of 'actively thinks': actively exists and functions, with a guiding hand loosely helping (and also with a level of care and love beyond what we normally think), which we'd interpret as being conscious thought, more or less.
But back to the afterlife. This would more or less be how we'd interact directly with God--by in a sense, becoming more directly linked with and becoming God. I more or less believe that humans even when alive have some influence on the fabric of reality: quite literally, our minds make things real if we believe in them enough. Now, this isn't as powerful as people who're both true believers and skeptics would say. It's not like thinking "I can fly!" will make me able to fly. It's more subtle than that.
I lack the words to properly explain that connection right now. But what I can say is that my basic belief is that after we die, that connection grows stronger. We get to exist outside the boundaries of space and time, we get to see the many universes of possibilities actively rather than subconsciously. (Because there's an infinite number of multiverses created every second, we always have the ability to see many universes. We just do it without being aware we're doing it. After death, this would become more deliberate, essentially.)
If this is even remotely close to true. (And I like it for being true.) Then that's not exactly a place which would be something to fear going to. All the same. This is speculation on my part--I don't actually know that to be what the afterlife is like, so it's not exactly something to actively go after. And even if that afterlife is real. I still have reason to delay going there.
For a start, because that level of existence transcends time...there's no rush to get there. When I get there, I'd have literally all of existence in there. What's a few dozen years like for literally something transcending eternity? I might as well live out my life and have as many good experiences as I can in this realm.
I also believe that there may be some things, some good, which can be done alive yet not dead. Just because our awareness of the multiverse may expand after death doesn't mean our influence will--not at the level life itself exists on, anyway. Maybe after our death, we can influence things in a different way. In fact I think that's the case, that after death there is things we can do which have an impact on reality.
But I also feel that there are things which effect reality that we can only do while alive--being alive is a gift. Not a curse. The state after life? That might be the default state, where much can be done. Yet the state of life itself is a realm where we can do different things, where we experience things differently. Where we can feel, where we can do, in a way that simply doesn't exist elsewhere.
As a result...my philosophy didn't change at all. Because we're still supposed to live our lives to the fullest with as much happiness as we can. And we're also supposed to do as much good, make as many positive changes, to the world as we can, both consciously and subconsciously. It's just that instead of this being for fear of there being nothing after death, it's out of belief in how things work after death.
Now, this doesn't mean we can exactly live, so to speak, a life full of sin--I actually still believe there's a type of hell. I should preface that with the caveat I don't believe in "eternal damnation". Hell would be a temporary state of being, just like life itself is temporary. I see Hell as more of a...jail, so to speak. And I don't mean jail as they are in real life, as much as I mean jail as jails are supposed to be, that being, a place someone who has done wrong goes, in order to learn what they did was wrong, and how to do things right, essentially.
How hell interacts with the world and the afterlife, I'm not precisely sure of the details. I mean, this is largely speculation and conjecture anyway. But I've more or less developed the theory that hell is essentially where someone who rejects their life goes: it's where someone who doesn't acknowledge their actions, what they have done, would go. Because souls exist outside the boundaries of time and space, they can see all of the consequences of their actions.
For instance, if someone, saaaaaay, was a mass-murderer...they would see not only all of the memories/experiences/feelings of those that they had killed...but also see all of those things for those people after they were killed, as the "things you prevented them from doing". And maybe even, extrapolating from that, all the lives they prevented from existing if the people they had killed would have had children.
Essentially, Hell would be a state where people reject the consequences of their actions, rather than accepting them. If someone can well and truly accept what they've done, then they would no longer be in hell--whatever happens to them, not sure. Maybe if they've well and truly atoned, they'd go to the afterlife, or maybe there's reincarnation, I don't know. I do believe Hell would work in that way though, where it's self-inflicted more or less by not accepting all they are responsible for.
I mean. That certainly sounds better than arbitrary rules set forth by systems of morality. One thing consistent about morality is that there is nothing consistent across cultures about morality. (I mean, that's kind-of the whole point of the game Socrates Jones: the game more or less posited that finding an objective measure for morality is literally impossible, essentially.)
It also makes a lot of sense to me. Some people might never leave Hell if they well and truly cannot, essentially, forgive themselves, cannot accept themselves, cannot comprehend what their reality was. Maybe only a few people go to Hell, or maybe almost (or literally) everyone goes to Hell for a brief period of time.
Heck, it's even possible that the expression "Living hell" is quite literally true--and that some people's time in Hell coincides with their time alive. But I think that this Hell is not something which would be a place where anyone would go to stay. Especially not since I feel like perspective of Hell might be "crime to fit the punishment".
And in an environment like that...hell's not exactly going to be pleasant. We'd want to get out. So we'd want to come to peace with the world. Which is what I feel the afterlife is about: peace. The afterlife is where we can finally get peace. So hell would be a place for those who can't find it--and I'd like to believe we all can find peace.
I feel like I'm not quite getting to my concept as clearly as I'd like to. I feel like there's a lot left unsaid. But I can't think of more content for here, so for now I suppose this concludes my current ramble.