October 17, 2008
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Are we real?
My son, at 7 years old, asked me the other day whether he was real. Cause sometimes he feels like he isn’t real. I think this is extremely advanced thinking, the kind that we beat out of kids early. The kind of thinking that great philosophers contemplate – what is the essence of life? The kind of thinking that great spiritual minds contemplate, what is the nature of spirit, life, afterlife. The kinds that filmmakers contemplate, that maybe we are all just stuck in a matrix. I don’t want to discourage this kind of question, but I don’t know the answer. I don’t know, son, whether we are real.
Comments (11)
That's cool. My 7 year old daughter always talks matter-of-factly about how souls are recycled and we come back as someone else. She wonders aloud about how many lives she had before this one. I certainly don't believe in any such thing, and the ideas have not been taught to her by anyone else. She's just a natural reincarnationist, for whatever reason. We were also walking in the hills once, with the sunset making the grass and trees all beautiful and she said, "I don't want to die... it's so beautiful here." She was six then.They say the darnedest things, don't they?
Nice!!!
Maybe your son is questioning his own reality because at age 7, he finds that he is often overlooked and marginalized, that as a child he should be seen and not heard, and not even seen most of the time. I think that would make me wonder if I were real as well. Our perceptions of ourselves are extremely dependent on the feedback we get from others. There will come a day when my mother doesn't know me, and I will question my own reality, I'm sure.
@runaheadofme - I read a book once in which a reporter investigated kids who supposedly remember living before. He had to go to countries in which the religious beliefs are consistent with that because in the US, and other western Judeo-Christian countries, we do discourage that kind of thinking, and kids learn not to share it and to discount it early as fantasy. I think that your child says things like that from out of nowhere does seem to suggest something, whether you believe it or not.
@elgan - Ironically, if my child is questioning his reality because children should be "seen and not heard" he's probably remembering that phrase from a prior life, because these days, we don't use it too much. But I know what you mean. Kids are marginalized, though I'm not sure I make the connection between being marginalized and not feeling real. I do remember after our daughter had waited what seemed like forever for a dog, and then the dog died after a week, she said that it seemed unreal to her and that she couldn't believe this was happening, but that was a particularly tramatic event in her young life - and the fact that this kind of thinking comes out at times like those doesn't negate it's potential for truth. For example, if we do live forever, that knowledge would help us put death, and tragedy in perspective. Perhaps we know what we need to know when we need to know it, or for the skeptic, perhaps we fantasize what we need to fantasize in order to cope. Like I said to my son, I don't know.
My sons are 32 months and 8 months.....and the former is learning to talk and his vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds; I am certain that one day soon, like your 7 year old, he will start to discover his self, his consciousness, his relation to the world, and yes, inevitably he will learn about good and evil, life and death. I enjoyed your thought. I look forward to reading your post on the election, that is your prediction of Obama's margin of victory and what happens to the farce that is Sarah Palin after she faces the reality of a electoral drubbing. MB
@mbiberg - I'm not counting any non verifiable votes before they're hatched. I've got friends who want to have an election night party, because they are just completely convinced Obama is winning (and they are also perhaps a little bit over hopeful of the salvation that represents), but when I tell them I'm worried about the election being stolen they have no idea there were any allegations of theft in the last two electinos. Aside from the fact that we won't necessarily know who the victor is before the party is over, I don't want to be at a party if Obama doesn't win (or rather if he does win and they steal it).
Did you read about Sarah Palin ridiculing spending money on fruit fly research, "I kid you not" she said. This was at some sort of symposium for autism - a direct beneficiary of some of the advances attributable to fruit fly research.
I can't write what I'm thinking about her right now. Did she actually get elected in Alaska, or did the GOP steal it there too?
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No, dad, we were never real - and the xangadream is about to end.
Take care my friend. You were a great source of inspiration.
@notforprophet - how do you explain then, that we are still here?@theorist - Hello theorist. I wish now that I had kept it up. Will have to start over somewhere else I guess. Thanks for the compliment. Take care. Find me anywhere. or here: andyglasser.wordpress.com
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