When it comes to this whole meaning of life thing, looking at my life, trying to make a better life, trying to improve my life, what will I do with this life? It seems like it’s very easy to look at it as being like it’s this one thing, like it’s one piece.
“This is my life.” That’s it.
This one thing.
And we have one shot, and we’re trying to improve this one thing.
And of course that makes sense, because we have this one life, and you know, we do have to hold on to it, because we don’t have, as far as I know, another life waiting for us.
There’s one chance.
If we somehow die, that’s the end of this chance.
And I have no idea what happens after death, if there’s another chance at life.
So as far as I know, this is the only chance that I know about.
And so it really looks like life is this one thing.
But I also find it interesting to look at it as imagine that we do have multiple lives.
And not in the sense of there’s something that’s coming after I die, that I have multiple lives to look forward to in that sense.
But imagine that we can break this idea of just looking at life as this one piece, this one thing, and think of each of us has many lives.
As we look through all the things that can happen in one life, there’s so many different things.
And when we try to look at life as being like this one thing, we try to come up with a way of picturing it, a way of explaining it, understanding it, that fits overall, just one way to understand life: “This is my life.” But imagine seeing our life as being many lives together.
Imagine that we have life that we lived before, we have life we’re living now, we have many different stages, different phases of this life.
And maybe we can really look at each of them as being almost effectively a different life.
That we had different rules of operation, different understanding of the universe back then.
As we were in a different stage of our lives our, whole notion of what life is was different.
Our notion of who we are, what we should be doing, what we can do, what we will do, what will happen, what did happen.
All these things were different for that time.
So that we really could look at those earlier stages of our lives, years and decades ago, we could see them as almost being separate lives.
And we have this chance now to live a new life.
So even though, of course, it’s all one life, I like this way of looking at it, because it gives a sense that really we don’t need to be tied down by this kind of thread of continuity where we have to make our entire life fit together as one piece, like we want to make it a coherent story, where we have to fit everything together, so that everything that I do now, I fit in with the way I was in the past.
Even if I’m changing, of course we’re all changing, but we don’t even need to make it fit.
We don’t even need to make a clear thread of connection where we kind of understand and explain how we got from where we were 10 or 20 years ago to where we are now.
We don’t make need to make it all fit in any kind of comprehensible way.
Imagine just seeing the way we are now.
Let it be something entirely new.
Let it be almost like we died in a previous life and came into this life, that this is like we’re starting a new life.
Like the way we were then is done, and now we’re starting a new life.
Even if we can’t find the exact transition points, because of course, there may not be- in some cases, there may be some very powerful event that made a a big shift very quickly, but in some cases, it can be a slow transformation, until we reach the point where we don’t recognize the way we were before.
But however it is, I like the richness of this point of view, that we can really let ourselves have the feeling of living multiple lives, because there’s so much range to have within this life that we might as well see it as we have a range.
So as much as it’s best to focus on the one life when we’re doing something dangerous, the idea that- you know, it’s easy to take this in the wrong direction and imagine we have extra lives, so we can spend a few, no problem.
So of course, we do have this one body connecting- one body we have to take care of throughout everything, as long as we’re in this life.
But how we picture that life: it seems like there’s a lot of room for flexibility, and there’s enough room to have multiple levels and stages of life, so that we can really almost live that feeling of having the nine lives of the cat or even more.
So I’d be curious to hear what you think of this idea, and how many lives do you feel you’ve had? Is this something- can you have a new life every year? Or is this something like a new life every decade? Or are there certain major events that make the shift? What’s it like?
#multiplelives #manylives #lifetime