November Project: Question #4
This question comes from B.C. through Skype chat:
I was thinking about life and living the other day, and it struck me as strange that we are alive. Not in any morbid sense, but just as a fact. We are living beings on this planet, running around, doing whatever it is that we do. Have you ever thought about how odd it is to actually be alive? How do you feel about this?
[NOTE: I paraphrased this question, as I neglected to write it down at the time. Oops! ~ TM]
Thanks for the question, BC.
I just realized I have never actually thought about this before. It is amazing…
…I have no feeling whatsoever of being alive.
I know, factually, it must be true. If I look up the word in the dictionary, compare it to my state, I am sure I would qualify as life. But I feel nothing. Not that I feel ‘un-life’, or ‘not living’, or anything like that. There is just no feeling of being alive.
Or maybe I should say, there is no separate feeling of being alive. I can feel the heart beating. My senses all seem to be operational. I can talk. I eat. I excrete. This is a living creature, to be sure. But I don’t feel these as separate events, happening to a person. It is all simultaneous.
Fishing In Kamakura
I suppose most people feel this differently. Perhaps it is the separatness of experiences stacked on top of one another than gives the illusion of a person having a unique life? A feeling or an idea of being alive; a feeling of having a life, of living a life, of being a person experiencing a life. But I feel none of that. I can’t really even sense it.
Perhaps it is this…Life does not know it is alive. It just lives.
How does living appear to all of you? I am curious to find out…I’m not sure we’ve ever discussed this before.
{ 13 comments }
An adequate definition:
I guess I do qualify after all!
Well…at least partially.
What is the the most significant or the most major difference you feel between ‘separate feeling of being alive’ and no ‘separate feelingof being alive’? You have known the former before the accident, I guess. Would love to know.
I’ve answered this question in the latest post, A. Thanks!
I tend to see it as Life living us rather than us living life. If that makes any sense
Thanks, Cedric.
Yes, that makes sense. I suppose the main difference is, Life doesn’t know it is living, while we think we do know.
I also think about this quite often and wonder why there is something rather than nothing. It’s also fascinating to ask why experience or existence is the way it is. I look out of ‘my’ supposed eyes and see a certain reality and really know nothing else. I wake up in the morning and feel this energy that I take to be my body but during the day there are times I forget about this. This seems to be the mind automatically theorizing and building a story around experience and the ‘I’ that pops up and takes credit has a lot of fun sometimes contemplating this subject.
Thanks, Brooks.
That is a great way to say it…
The wonder of being alive was first brought home to me by the following illustration.
Imagine a pile of letters – out of this big pile you happen to choose the exact one addressed to you. Imagine the pile as big as you like. As big as the universe if you like. Imagine choosing just that one letter. But however big the pile it pales into insignificance that the pile exists.
Thanks, Evan.
It is a lottery of sorts, isn’t it? Haha
When you are lying down sometime, just watch your stomach rise up and down as you breath.
Lay with your chest bare sometime, and see your skin move on your chest as your heart beats.
Look at the pores in your skin, the tiny little hairs … and my favorite …
~ VEINS ~
Veins are so beautiful. There is life in them. Healthy blood.
If you look at all these things through your “child-like eyes” of amazement and wonder, these things are life!
I like that, BC.
It is lovely…
“How does living appear to all of you? I am curious to find out…I’m not sure we’ve ever discussed this before.”
Hello,Takuin san
I wanted to write you something about me.
My life has not been a sweet but hard and bitter experience to remember. Compared my life to others’ the hardship may not has been harder.
I have started to feel easier to image that we are not flesh existence, originally spiritual species.
Some philosophy says we are sons of god, Creator. I really love it. I can not prove, though.
I read the books “Conversations with God” sincerely. They are quite touching and I cried many times for joy. It taught life is worth to experience.
Though, I am nor realize “Truth” even now.
Say, I am worry about my work tomorrow. I know it is no use worry about tomorrow in my bed late at night. That is, it works as good as I expect as a supervision on construction site.
Now I effort to image that I “ my spirit” want to experience that concern now.
I really want to know the meaning of my present life.
While, I am learning Japanese History by national personality.
I want to write you about me sometimes.
Excuse for my poor English. Saitou osamu 斎藤 修 2011.11.6
Thank you, Osamu.
Life unfolds. I think we can all agree on that. And Life really doesn’t demand so much from us.
Some of us see living to be a problem, and others see it differently. But however one sees it, life unfolds.
Ahead of the unfolding are our conclusions. And the conclusions are easy to see, especially if they are seen as the objects of our frustrations. But instead of seeing the conclusions, have you ever stopped to see the unfolding? Not what you think the unfolding will become…just the unfolding of life, the beauty of living. Have you seen it?
{ 2 trackbacks }
Comments on this entry are closed.