A Different Kind of Death (154 hits)
Category: UberMadness! EntryLabels: practice
Rating: 2 on 1 review (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by scourge (View user info) at 2006-09-26 11:54:58 EDT
This post was an official UberMadness! entry. Click here to view the original matchup.
The ancient Egyptians believed the human soul resided in the heart...thought and emotion; they originated from this smallish organ located in the chest cavity. An individual's ideas, a cultures beliefs and traditions could all be traced back to a simple organic system of contracting bands of muscle and fluttering valves, if one was to believe the conventional thoughts of that time and place.
Of course, our common sense, coupled with the benefit of 'knowledge' to the contrary, belies this notion.
Our senses, the external organs of them anyway, those pieces of us that allow us to perceive the reality that surrounds us, are clustered around this lump of grey that sits in our head. This proximity could ONLY indicate the foremost importance of the human brain.
Not so modern scientists have the ability to show us how electricity pops and sparkles across this ugly mass when we observe different things with our senses. When we see the Christmas lights go up, when we smell the perfume our mother used to wear, when we taste the cookies our grandmother used to bake, when we hear the crack as that high, fast traveling ball meets the wooden face of a bat at 90 plus miles per hour...it's like a blackout in reverse. The external stimuli opening up pathways, synapses snapping open and shut. Our perceptions momentarily clouded by recollection, we're drawn so deeply into reverie that we can lose track of the here and now.
That closer look seems to confirm our suspicions. How could this kind of activity, this fireworks display, not be the location of our soul?
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But then, there is the heaviness of breath, the weight inside our chest when our beliefs are challenged.
We pull our shoulders in, hunched over our own chests, as if to protect our physical self when what we want to believe is shown to have flaws. When our ideas, our beliefs, our identity as a part of existence is challenged, we feel it in our chest, in our throat.
Similarly, we physically protect ourselves when those evocative stimulations of the soul are taken from us, the smell of our mother, our grandmothers cooking...when we find that we'll never again be exposed to those things, our brain initially rejects the notion. But our chest grows heavy. Breathing becomes painful and our hearts miss a beat.
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The Egyptians treated most of the organs of their exalted leaders with the utmost delicacy. Gently handled, bathed and prepared in exquisite oils and herbs. Then carefully wrapped, to be interred with their owners, in the finest linens.
The brain, however, they unceremoniously hooked out through the nose, completely disregarding it and destroying it in the undignified removal process. Perhaps the dogs of ancient Nile delta embalmers occasionally dined on what had once been the warehouse of dreams for a living god?
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When a kid finds his parents wrapping his Christmas presents under the tree and his dad eating the cookies he left for Santa, his brain reconciles the newfound information fairly quickly.
There is no Santa Claus.
Simple.
When the music starts playing and the ground is covered in snow, everything bathed in the glow of a million multicolored lights...those Christmas lights, running in pathways so similar to the flickering electricity in the brain, they never incite that same wonder again. The heart doesn't quicken its pulse in an eager anticipation of the magic that these things once heralded.
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The brain is surely the seat of the soul, the governor of our 'self'. But the heart is surely the timekeeper, the music maker.
Maybe the Egyptians just had different priorities then we do.
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Every flight of fancy done away with, every dream shattered, every belief disproved, every truth resigned to...
The mind teeters back and forth from one end to the other, now a womb ...and now a grave.
Each resignation, reconciliation to a new way of thinking, is a rebirth as a new person.
And each resignation is the death of the human you were, the society you belonged to, the time you lived in, and history as a whole.
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Submitted by kaos-king (user info) at 2007-06-04 22:51:15 EDT (#)
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