Thank you. This makes me think of religion ddifferently.
Cool. Good to know all this junk in my head has some use to someone else.
I doubt anyone will talk about me after I'm dead. It's sad to realize that one day, nobody will know who you are. I guess the same could be said of religious figures, given time.
If you stop to think about it, if you think about someone like Jesus, no one really knows he was either, at least not in reality. What they know are their ideas about him, their hopes and dreams and beliefs layered on top of the person. But that's not who the person was, but the image of who that person is in their own minds.
In fact, if you stop to think about it, who really knows who we are anyway? If if someone knows me personally, it is still their idea about me that they know. I am much more than that idea, but that's all we really do in knowing another person. We only think we know them, but we are knowing is our mental image of them which contains a whole lot of ourselves in that image. It may seem sad know one will know who you are when you're dead, but it seems sadder than no one knows who we are even when they talk directly with you!
To take that thought and go one step further, do we even know who we are? Aren't we creating mental images, ideas about who we think we are? But is that really who we are, the person we think we are? I can tell you that it's not. The person who we think we are is based on how we size ourselves up against standards created by others, and even our own selves, measures and scales of value, and so forth. There is a saying I think really captures this. "We are not who we think we are. We are not even who others think we are. But we are who we think others think we are". In other words, we don't even know ourselves, and we live in this sack of skin we call ourselves. How can we hope anyone else knows us, let alone remembers whom they don't know in the first place?
Happy thoughts.
