Change.

The moment my non-theistic grandparents realized that their time on this earth was limited, they began to pray to God. When my grandmother experienced a heart attack, and when the hospital found cancer spreading throughout my grandfather's body, they began to fear death more than anything they had ever feared before. Suddenly, the thought of Heaven was comforting. They would never face suffering again. They would not recede into the black void of non-existence.

When someone suggests that there is an eternal self, a part of us that is everlasting (the soul), the scientist in me begins to laugh. But the spiritual side of me offers a sympathetic explanation.

It is, without a doubt, one of the most prominent goals of human kind; we seek to be remembered, we seek to exist. We are fearful creatures, and the thought of non-existence after death is terrifying. Countless religions, beliefs, and fantasies are mapped around the idea that there is an afterlife, or that we will live on as ghosts, or that we will be reincarnated as other species. I believe there is no other cause for this idea than fear of death. From the time we are born, we know nothing but life, and we fear the unknown. Death is our unknown.

Though we may not have fully come to terms with the permanence of death, we know that an eternal self is merely the hopeful antidote of fear. Many of us have found a way to appreciate the true value of the lives we have.

For, like music, we are always changing. The person you were 2 minutes ago is not the same person you are at the present moment, nor will it ever be. And as music, we begin, we rise, recede, crescendo, lower, taper, and then we end. Music is never the same. It's a beautiful thought, really. The fact that we are forever changing grants us a second chance, and a third, and a fourth, and so on. It is never too late to change ourselves, both physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

In 2012, Oprah visited India to conduct an interview with Deepak Chopra, a renowned spiritual leader who practices similar teachings to Buddhism. When I read the interview, something Deepak said struck me as one of the most profound, yet simple ideas I'd ever understood. While in a monastery in Thailand, Deepak studied under a head monk. When his head monk asked him how it felt walking barefoot, Deepak replied that it hurt. The monk said, "It hurts on the foot that's down, but the one that's up feels really good -- so focus on that one."

Changing our perspective on life--thinking not of the end, but of the time we have now, at this present moment--is a combatant to the fear that drives us to live. It is never too late to change.

So focus on the foot that's up.

Brains.

Think with me for a minute.

I recently stumbled upon a picture of a human brain captioned by a young doctoral student,

(Source: http://medicalschool.tumblr.com/post/20478544652/the-human-brain)

The first time I held a human brain in Anatomy Lab I was completely speechless. I looked at my classmates expecting a similar reaction and they looked back at me confused like…”dude let’s start identifying the structures.” I had to take a step back and let it process…in my hands was someone’s entire life. From start to finish, every memory, every emotion, every bodily control…was right there in my hands.

In all reality, this struck me as truly fascinating and heavily terrifying. These thoughts I am having are essentially the result of this grotesque mass of gray matter encased in my skull. The person I know myself to be is an 8 pound neural organ. Everyone in my life is a brain with individually characterized ridges and crevices.

Then the truth became even more heavy. I began to understand that the standards, rules, and expectations we set for our society are the mere consequence of this wrinkly, pink mound between our ears. When we really boil down the caramel of life, we are all ripe, ceaseless organs built on the same principles as every other sentient being on this planet.

And do you know what that means? The bodies we meticulously measure, preen, and decorate are just evolutionary protein casings meant to carry on the process of life. Why do we set such specifically unrealistic standards for ourselves, when each of us is biologically identical in an anatomical sense?

But yet again, is it not the brain that learns, implants, and accepts these expectations in the first place? It's a complete contradiction with no explanation to be made for it. Our brains are too powerful for their own good! As completely nonsensical as it seems, we have to accept it for it is, and if we can't do that, then we must laugh at it. As my brother's favorite comic character, Hobbes (Calvin & Hobbes), says, "I suppose if we couldn't laugh at things that don’t make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life."

To put this in terms of Buddhism, the world will be as the world will be. Reality is perception, and this is how our brains are programmed to be. There is no practical use for meddling in the affairs of reality.