Time Out of Mind

It started out as just a joke.  A clever little "what-not" to sit on my shelf with other items of memorabilia.  It is a bogus prescription bottle I forged for my own amusement. The prescription reads: "If you forget what these pills are for... take all of them at once." The bottle contains ten 500mg capsules of Arsenic trioxide.  I call it my time out of mind cure.
There is only one thing worse than having your mind trapped in a body which can not respond to mind's desires. Much worse, to me, is being trapped in a body when your mind no longer functions to control that body.
My philosophy of existence is totally wrapped around the idea of a universal consciousness that expresses itself individually.  I believe life is the manifestation of this unique and individual concept of identity.  To over simplify: life on Earth is actually a concept of consciousness created to teach us abstract concepts that do not involve the physical senses.  What we think is reality is only a complex dream of symbols that should ideally teach us how eternity is experienced... in the abstract.
Take LOVE for an example.  Love is not a thing we can hold and touch.  It is not a scientific experiment that can be measured. It is just a feeling in our Earthly dream but a law in the cosmic consciousness of spiritual reality.
So how do we understand the law of love, and how do we learn what  that law is and experience it?  The abstract can not be taught with abstract examples.  So, Consciousness creates a dream reality that gives us seemingly solid examples of the abstract. Again to over simplify, if you ever want to have an earthly example of "unconditional love" open your heart and raise a dog.  By experiencing the feeling for a dog which becomes part of your life you can come to understand the abstract concept of "unconditional love".  When we can understand love from the physical there is a better chance for us to "know it" in the abstract. Learning how to exist in the eternity of abstract is the goal of this earthly experience.

Holding to that believe I find a conundrum.  To learn how to exist the conscious moment of the eternal now requires acute awareness of this symbolic dream reality.  How can we lean these abstracts when our mind can not understand the physical parables all around us? What happens when you are facing Alzheimer's disease or just plain dementia? That is the conundrum.  To learn,  you must be able to understand.  How do you graduate into eternity when you have a learning disability?

So, this little bottle of pills sits on my shelf above the computer I am typing on right now. The older I get the less of a joke it becomes.  It is not a perfect plan because it assumes I can understand the directions for taking the pills after having forgotten what they are for.  Perhaps the joke will ultimately be on me.
I have seen the mental decline of close members of my family.  One from Alzheimer's, one from a stroke and another with just age related dementia.  On the other hand I have friends and relatives in their mid 90's who are as sharp and aware as ever they were.  I know which direction I would like to go in my life.  What will I have to learn to keep being able to learn?  Another conundrum.

As you were,
Jay