You Are Ten Years Old

It is said that your body, with which you identify so closely, is at any time no more than ten years old. That means your skin, your eyes, your bones, your internal organs, and your penis and/or vagina are all made up of different cells than they were ten years ago. They regenerate continuously. The body you had ten years ago has been completely replaced.

But here you are, alive, reading this, thinking, and it still feels like you’re the same person.

What’s the only constant throughout your life? Your consciousness.

Despite all of the huge scientific breakthroughs and advances over the years, despite our ability to travel to the moon, our ability to genetically modify living beings, we still basically have no idea what houses our consciousness.

Of course we can say it springs forth from our brain matter, the neurons and whatever else is in there. Actually, all current evidence supports (but hasn’t proven) the theory that neurons are never replaced. That may be the one part of the human body that doesn’t regenerate, which would lend credence to the idea that our consciousness springs forth from our neurons. Or something like that. I’m not a scientist.

The idea that consciousness comes to exist from something physical seems a bit ridiculous to me. It seems more appropriate to posit that the brain is simply a filter and a processor for this physical reality with our eternal consciousness interpreting the world through the human brain.

You may not believe that psychics are legit, that some people are able to meditate out of their bodies to verify real-world facts they never could have known, or that people who have had near-death experiences have been conscious while their bodies were dead, only to return to them and recount their super-conscious experiences after magically coming back to life, defying all known science. (I wrote about one such experience here.) If you held those beliefs I wouldn’t need to convince you that our consciousnesses exist independently of our bodies because you’d already believe/know it.

Unfortunately for the doubter, I can’t prove to you that your consciousness, your personality will persist when your physical body perishes. You can only prove it to yourself. The way to prove it to yourself is to keep an open mind and at least consider that it may be true. I will be posting much more on this topic in the future, how to meditate, have lucid dreams, and astral project. To be clear, I’m no expert or anything but I do know quite a bit about it.

When you become lucid in a dream, meaning you realize you’re dreaming but you don’t wake up, and you look down into your own bed and see your body (in my case a distorted version of my body), you reach down and shake its legs and you feel it in your own legs, then wake up in your body with sleep paralysis (when your mind is awake but your body is asleep and you’re unable to move no matter how hard you try), then find yourself whizzing away from your body at the speed of light through colorful, wormhole-like tunnels and it feels like you’re in the middle of a category 5 tornado only to arrive in a place unlike any you’ve ever seen, more beautiful than anything you’ve ever experienced on Earth, and your emotional response to the beauty of the place is more intense than any emotion you’ve felt in waking life, and every sense is heightened and amplified more than anything you’ve ever experienced, all the while being completely aware of your physical body back in bed on Earth, well, an experience like that will prove to you that this physical world is but a dense, dull physical manifestation that pales in comparison to what we experienced before we willingly put on the blinders and incarnated in this world, what we will experience when our physical body dies.

That has to be the longest sentence you’ve ever seen, and it’s not even a run-on. God damn I impress myself sometimes.

The point is that you are ten years old at most, where “you” refers to your physical body. Your consciousness has always existed and it will always exist.

Have a nice weekend.