Is this it?

This morning, I had breakfast at the Tollygunge Club with one old friend I see often and another I hadn't met for 26 years. The first lives and works here in Calcutta and the other teaches at MIT now but years ago, all three of us studied French at Alliance Francaise and read for our undergraduate degrees at St. Xavier's.

As they sometimes do, the years in between just seemed to vanish in the first few moments of our meeting and almost instantly, we were doing the typical Bangali philosophical adda thing even as we tried to catch up with each other's lives.

At one point we started talking about things of Universal significance (again a typical Bangali adda thing) and what if "this was it" and if, when we went, we were just gone--like "blips."

Would we be disappointed if we came to know there wasn't anything more?
No "rebirth" in another time; no reincarnation as another genus or species; no "passing on" to another plane of existence; no journey upwards or downwards; no rewards and no consequences; no being recycled again and again, here on this earth, until our souls couldn't be used anymore...

No reason to anticipate enduring the "going hence" as we endured our coming hither. Therefore, no "ripeness" no "before his time" no grief or mourning for what could've, would've, might've...

Would I be disappointed if "this was it? "
I guess I would be. I guess I'd feel a bit betrayed, as if the Universe promised more than it delivered.

From the gyres of dense black hole pin points growing to ever-expanding galaxies condensing to dense black hole pin points and the poetry of quantum strings endings are not really ends and beginnings aren't really beginnings and the vibrations never end.

Things collapse and regenerate endlessly.

Alia destroys and devastates and kills hundreds of thousands of land creatures but at the same time she churns the ocean and sea life prospers and has a boom year.

Is this it?
Maybe for this consciousness it is.
Maybe for this soul it is.
Maybe for this matter, this essence; this element; this form of energy; this dimension of existence; this universe...

But I'm reasonably sure there is a process and that we're some part of that process and will be until the process is done.
Only to begin again.


Ultimately,
Do I care if I regain this consciousness?
Do I care if there is a collective consciousness?
Do I care if consious life continues hereafter?


It would be nice, I guess, to merge into a paramatman and continue as a conciousness that holds on to the aggregate of all awareness and have the onion peels of the universe unfurl.

It would be wonderful to have the Universe validate this life and begin another becoming into something else.

For the traveller within me, it would be exciting to have the journey continue.

But I'm not going to sweat it. If this is it, so be it.

I'll blip.