This is a guest post from my cousin Ben.  It was in response to his response to my response in the last post! It was posted on facebook. It was just so well written I had to place it here, I hope he doesn’t mind. Thanks Ben for your insights, since it is late I may have to digest this and come back tomorrow.  For me spiritual enlightenment will require a decent nights sleep, well that and maybe a glass of red wine!!  Here is his wonderful post:

Benjamin Dobler commented on your note “Time”:

“Is not living alone enough reward?  Why does there have to be a point to something?  Why does there always have to be some sort of “improvement” or change in state from beginning to end if there really isn’t a beginning or end?  To think and truly understand our impermanence I really believe is pointless… it’s like trying to think about really where you physically are… we’re not made to comprehend it.  Just think… I’m in Madrid, in Spain, in Europe, in the Western hemisphere, on the Earth, in the solar system in the milky way… on and on and on.  And where IS all of this?  No clue and I can’t even really comprehend it and I never will, so why should I spend time worrying about it.  I think this is one of the biggest mistakes in Christianity which kind of destroys the spirituality… the need to explain everything because we’re terrified of the unknown… putting rules and order and laws on everything, as if our logic is also God’s logic, as if God needs to follow our ways of doing things.  Good people go to heaven, bad people to hell.  Souls are sitting in a bank waiting to enter a body etc.  Sounds a bit far fetched really, as NO one ever in history has ever died and come back to tell us what’s really going on.  One thing for sure, we are connected to our bodies.  We as we see “ourselves” and everything we perceive is a result of a physical body.  I also think an individual is not the soul… the soul is the thing that makes us living, it’s God or God’s power or love or whatever (the water of the wave to go back to the analogy).  But the individual, I truly believe is the body the soul inhabits, which dies in the end.  I don’t think I as a person will survive beyond death.  But my soul (which isn’t me or mine, it’s a piece of God) will.  And are we really any different than when we started?  Dust to dust right?  It all goes back into the cycle.  You are born, you learn, you live, you get old, you forget and you die, very much in the same state as you were born.  Many drooling and wearing diapers.  Is there anything which is truly permanent?  Or is it just an exercise… life in an exercise of some sort… like learning maths in school which you just forget later.  The point was not knowing it, but learning it.