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When we are born, we are unaware of the concept of god. We are unaware of life, or of its opposite, death. We cannot remember without becoming fanciful or inventive what our first months of life on earth were like. Although we mark the day we were born every year, we are not recollectively conscious of ourselves until much later than the day we arrived on Earth as a living being.
Try to recall your earliest memory - is it vague and dream-like? Is it less about how you were feeling and more about the actual event, similar to recalling watching something on television? It is tempting to wonder if our consciousness does not 'kick in' until we reach a certain age of cognitive development, which seems to occur sometime between the ages of two and five, depending on each individual. So, where are we until our awakening? Do we simply exist? Or are we actually conscious of ourselves but unable to retain any of that information? These questions haunt me, because I have recently begun pondering the possibility that while we are infants we may carry with us a concept of the place we came from, beyond the womb; the possibility we could be aware of what lies on the other side of the here and now, but that knowing is consumed by the 'awakening' of our consciousness into this place we call reality. Materialist scientists believe we are nothing more than the workings of our brains, and our consciousness nothing more than the complicated electrical firings of neurons. When our brain dies, we die, our consciousness dies, and then there is nothing. For many this is comforting, it is uncomplicated, sterile, nullifying all potentialities (both horrifying and fantastical) created by religious thinkers.
But the truth is, no one knows. Since I last posted in Paradigm's Bend, I lost two beloved pets over the course of eleven days. On April 24, [2012] which was a beautiful sunny day, we said goodbye to our little two-year-old dog. When he was three months of age he had his first seizure. Over the course of his short life he had numerous blood tests and continual medical treatment. I researched constantly about his condition to understand what was happening to him and how to take care of him in the best way. I learned the processes used to create the pellets in commercial dog food could trigger seizures in epileptic dogs. Our vet told us raw dog food wouldn't make a difference to his illness, but we needed to try. It took some investigation to source a supplier, and then a two hour return trip to pick up the box of frozen meat, but we would have driven across the country if necessary. For awhile it looked like our vet might have been wrong and we had done the right thing. For a while. But in the end nothing we did helped. Our little dog relentlessly progressed into his illness, his behaviour changed. He had to be retrained to do his business outside. He slept a lot. He was like a little old man. He got tired walking.
In Feb 2012 when his condition worsened substantially we took him to a hospital six hours away where he had an MRI on his brain, lumbar puncture, ultrasound, and blood tests. By March, the vets were certain he had primary epilepsy and treated him accordingly. In April, he continued to get worse and did not respond to the highest doses of medicine his liver could safely process. During his last days he showed symptoms of his brain necrotising, having multiple localised spasms daily that made him cry out in agony. The last seizure he had, he was conscious during the first half of his episode and although nothing was blocking his airway, he was suffocating - horrified, I realised that his ability to breathe had stopped. I talked to him reassuringly, and held his neck straight in an attempt to open his airway, although I knew I wasn't really helping much. His eyes were bulging and he was panicking with the effort to breathe while at the same time he had to endure severe cramps from head to tail. I thought he would die but after what seemed like an eternity, he finally began to gasp for air, wheezing and gulping before he lost awareness and descended into a seizure of such violence that if I had been a passing observer and did not know he had epilepsy I would have sworn he was being electrocuted. When he came out of it and I had cleaned him up and reassured him, I called his neurologist at the vet hospital. She told me we had done everything we could and it would be wrong for her to continue to treat him. According to her, he would likely die very soon from the illness since it had progressed to this stage. She wanted to euthanise him immediately in case he seized again and died from it, she made it clear he would experience the full horror of it, and since I had seen it for myself, I believed her. With no alternative, we agreed to book the time and take him in.
