Life is like "The After Hours." It's a 1963 "Twilight Zone" episode. I saw it for the first time around 15 years ago or so. In a depressed state, but still: When I watched this, I felt a sense of epiphany: This is exactly how life is: We're part of the ether, then briefly, in cycles, get a chance at acting out in physical form. (The woman in the story was chastised for not wanting to go back.)
As for "black holes": Each black hole is kind of like an hour-glass in the universe. They draw stuff in, and then spit stuff out. The stuff they draw in: Where does it go? As with an hour-glass, to be sifted out/recycled into another universe.
Oh, and what is the "Dark Energy" that astrophysicists cannot explain?
Says AI: "Dark energy and dark matter are two mysterious components of the
universe. Dark matter makes up about 27% of the universe and exerts
gravitational pull, while dark energy accounts for 68% and drives the
accelerated expansion of the universe."
Souls? According to "Science": "Energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another."
I once knew a woman who thought she was the reincarnation of the Black Dahlia. Pretty much the saddest thing I've ever heard. When I think of my own reincarnation, I think of the real-life story of the horse being transported in a trailer whose leg was stuck outside a window of the trailer. The humans didn't have time to unload the trailer and re-adjust the horses within, so someone just sawed off the horse's leg that was sticking out of the window.
As EVERY religion in the world teaches you: Don't rely on the physical life for happiness. Now---if only one or another of dozens of cultures taught this, I might think it was just a shallow, cultural thing. But, going back thousands of years: The root of EVERY SINGLE CULTURE has taught to focus on the SOUL and the afterlife. Why is that? Was each and every one of these civilizations just stupid? Was it ALL a hoax concocted by those in power to subjugate the masses, as the Marxists later claimed?
The early Christians, for example, initially had ZERO power. They were complete low-lifes and outcasts, yet somehow later convinced major potentates like Justinian, for example, to accept their views. Why is that? What happened? Why are millions around the world following these beliefs today if there were not something to it?
Back in the mid-1990s, I travelled from Texas to California, and was stunned/awed by the barrenness of the landscape. "It looks like the bottom of the sea," I thought. As it turned out, that's exactly what this landscape had once been.
Mars is known to have once had water. What if Earthlings are refugees from Mars as it ran out of resources? (Would that explain the dichotomy between advanced people and aborigines?) Or what if we were criminal outcasts from some other planetary society, given the Old Testament as a guide-post to our past history and how we should construct the new one?
It's all very mysterious. So thinks Not-Jack-Handey.
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Addendum: I'm a "Portlandia" fan and was doing a search on Reddit, coming across a 12-year-old open forum from Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, I think upon the release of their latest season of the show. Armisen asked the Reddit audience (paraphrased): "Which do you think is more accurate? What people of the time say, or what historians come up with centuries later?" If I remember right, he was referring specifically to the Egyptian pyramids. (And what a great question, though why ask it on Reddit, of all low-info places?) I was way-too-late to respond, but if I'd been there on Reddit:
People at the time. Because someone's dad or cousin or friend-of-a-friend would have been working on the pyramids and would have been able to tell you exactly how they hauled all of those rocks and what they ate for lunch. Centuries-later, only academics guessing.
