Bodyworlds

 bodyworlds, recommendations, Self  3 Responses »
Feb 222011
 

Gunther von Hagens’s Bodyworlds is truly something to behold.  How many formerly living human bodies have you been in the same room with at the same time?  Personally, thanks to having experienced the Bodyworlds exhibit on two separate occasions, I’ve lost count.  This is an exceptionally fascinating project, though I’m slightly conflicted on the situation of the participants, post life, which I’ll get to in a few moments.

Fundamentally, Bodyworlds is an art exhibit that showcases human bodies in ways that most living humans have never seen.  Deceased individuals are preserved via a process called “plastination” that basically prevents decomposition and allows the body to be manipulated/posed/displayed in virtually any fashion.   I use the term “fashion” literally and figuratively… in that a body can be separated into it’s individual parts and displayed in an amazing way, or it can be posed as if playing poker, or riding atop a plastinated de-skinned horse.  It may sound morbid, but it truly isn’t… at least not for any reasonable individual.  In my humble opinion, even children should see this exhibit, I would certainly take my own children, aged 5 and 7, should this exhibit return to my city for a third run.

At any rate, the DVD shown in the picture in the previous post was purchased at the exhibit itself, but is available on the official website:

http://www.bodyworlds.com

Go have a look, be amazed.

As for my concern for the participants, or plastinates as they are known, Thinking & Destiny addresses a period following death in relation to the existing physical body.  I’m epically paraphrasing here, but basically the sooner that the physical body is destroyed, the sooner the former inhabitant can disassociate its thought processes to the physical Earth and proceed through the after-death states.  All of this will absolutely be discussed in future posts, I’m definitely getting ahead of myself here, but essentially the best way to dispose of a body is cremation.  It return the body to element and frees the former inhabitant from it fully, they can “move on,” as the saying goes.  Any other method of postmortem body-handling will inevitable hinder the individual from rapidly traversing certain after-death states.  Again, we’re way ahead of ourselves, but I can’t help but wonder the effect on the Self of having one’s former body plastinated upon death.

At any rate, what’s done is done and godspeed to all former inhabitants of plastinated bodies and those presently alive who shall become future plastinates.  Long live Bodyworlds!

***

Two posts in two days?  I decided to quickly hammer this one out so as to have a post on 2/22 as a nod the the birth of this blog on 1/11.

 Posted by valant at 5:31 am

Some Fundamentals, pt. 2

 karma, reincarnation, Self  12 Responses »
Jan 222011
 

Let’s throw some more terms out there such that we can begin actually discussing some things more in depth.

We need to agree that we are not the bodies that we inhabit… at least not any more so than we are the clothes that we wear.  Fundamentally, a body is to the conscious something inhabiting said body as clothes are to the body wearing said clothes.  We need a term to specifically indicate this “conscious something.”  For our purposes here, we shall use the term Little Self.  Your Little Self then is by and large what and whom you consider yourself to be… should there be a time such that you consider yourself, that is.  Anytime to you refer to yourself as “I,” as in “I am…” or “I think…” or “I want…”  you are referring to your Little Self.  As such, by and large, you most likely consider this Little Self to be a big deal.  It’s isn’t, though.  T&D explains that this Little Self is actually no more than 1/12 of 1/3 of that which we’ll term the Big Self.

For the record, T&D calls our Little Self an embodied doer portion.  So yes, you take one Big Self, split it into three equal portions, take one of those portions and divide it by twelve, one of those twelve portions would be embodied presently and would in fact, be what you consider to be, well, you.  We may be getting ahead of ourselves here.  Just for fun, let’s throw this out there:  That which you recognize as God, in whatever form you recognize a deity or creator as, is none other than that part of yourself which is not embodied.  Neat, huh?  God = your very own Big Self.  Riddle me this:  How else could “God” hear each & every prayer spoken by each and every believer?  Because of magic!?  Like Santa!

In the future, we may alter these terms as we proceed in our thinking here, but presently Little Self and Big Self are what we’re defaulting to.  One of the nice things about thinking on abstract ideas is that it’s not actually necessary to term the individual pieces, because you already know what you mean.  When abstractions needs to manifest in the physical though, it becomes necessary to clothe the abstraction within a label.  So, there we are.

We can now state the following and have a basic understanding of the terminologies therein: I, as an individual conscious being, am fundamentally a Little Self which is but a portion of a Big Self that is presently embodied to exist in this physical world for a time in order to work out my own karma, which I manifest as my destiny.

Oh.

We didn’t yet cover the idea of “destiny” being simply the manifestation of karma, did we?  Next time…

 Posted by valant at 7:35 am
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