You can always answer the question: “Where are you?” Even when you are “lost,” you can identify a “where” by its sights, sounds, smells, and textures—all identifying boundaries of an unfamiliar place. Place is a finite entity. It has boundaries: the walls of a room, the property line of a backyard, the forest’s edge, a seashore. Boundaries. All that we know is framed by a known finite, or by an unknown indefinite, surmised, if unknown, boundary, the horizon. Our existence is framed by our being “here” in a place bounded by some horizon. Living entails being and doing in a place: Earth or spaceship, continent or ocean, region or country, neighborhood or wilderness.
Do you perceive the moment of nonliving to be in a place? The great hall known as Valhalla? Heaven? Hell? Some undefined Nirvana? Whatever your image is of “not-being-alive-in-a-place,” it is probably one you imagine in the context of the places you know. Is it an image of “endless” stars in the blackness of space? Does it have a defining light? Or, is it, if you are not religious, a void, a black nothingness?
There’s geometry to your image of death. Even a black nothingness acquires a “shape” in your imagination. You imagine it “from the inside” since you can’t imagine it “from the outside” without making it finite. If you accept an “infinite continuation” of who you are after death, then the geometry of “not-being-alive-in-a-place” falls into plane or solid geometrical shapes: It extends as an unbroken plane of existence without a boundary into infinity; it takes on some spherical form with a boundary past which you cannot go; or it circles into some reincarnation that reunites some altered form of you with finite place.
As a living being, you find your identity in the geometry of place. What you do is also identified by place. “I swim.” Where? “I build houses.” Where? “I handle money.” Where? “I think.” Where? For all these and more activities, you can cite place. Place is so integral, that we have problems with so-called abstractions. We talk about “love,” “spirit,” “soul,” and “thought” as being outside of place and boundaries, but, when asked to “explain,” we put them in the context of boundaries. We see manifestations of love, but not love. We understand the spirit of a team, but we see that spirit only in its manifestation of individuals acting together in a place.
As a living being, you know the geometry of your world. You do not know, regardless of your belief or imagination, the geometry of “not-this-place.” Choose the geometry you know over the geometry you do not know.
Do you perceive the moment of nonliving to be in a place? The great hall known as Valhalla? Heaven? Hell? Some undefined Nirvana? Whatever your image is of “not-being-alive-in-a-place,” it is probably one you imagine in the context of the places you know. Is it an image of “endless” stars in the blackness of space? Does it have a defining light? Or, is it, if you are not religious, a void, a black nothingness?
There’s geometry to your image of death. Even a black nothingness acquires a “shape” in your imagination. You imagine it “from the inside” since you can’t imagine it “from the outside” without making it finite. If you accept an “infinite continuation” of who you are after death, then the geometry of “not-being-alive-in-a-place” falls into plane or solid geometrical shapes: It extends as an unbroken plane of existence without a boundary into infinity; it takes on some spherical form with a boundary past which you cannot go; or it circles into some reincarnation that reunites some altered form of you with finite place.
As a living being, you find your identity in the geometry of place. What you do is also identified by place. “I swim.” Where? “I build houses.” Where? “I handle money.” Where? “I think.” Where? For all these and more activities, you can cite place. Place is so integral, that we have problems with so-called abstractions. We talk about “love,” “spirit,” “soul,” and “thought” as being outside of place and boundaries, but, when asked to “explain,” we put them in the context of boundaries. We see manifestations of love, but not love. We understand the spirit of a team, but we see that spirit only in its manifestation of individuals acting together in a place.
As a living being, you know the geometry of your world. You do not know, regardless of your belief or imagination, the geometry of “not-this-place.” Choose the geometry you know over the geometry you do not know.
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