BSG and NDE

So my sister did a piece to "Violence And Variations" from the season 3 episode "Unfinished Business" and my interest, it was piqued. Borrowed season 1 from my BIL, which resulted in Fahnz stacking our Netflix queue head to toe with the entire series plus the specials.

And it's changed my life.

I won't lie, it's damned hard sometimes coming to terms with the fact that I almost died. It's funny how so many people see a white light and angels and family members who went before them--because all I got was an admonishment from my dead father and the bizarre feeling that I'd been thumped in the head instead of falling ever-so-gracefully and feather-light back into my crumpled body. I think I may have drooled a little while I was unconscious.

Yep, it's all so frakking mystical, isn't it? I guess I'm deprived, no one beckoned to me or called my name, and I didn't see Jesus or God or Beelzebub. No rainbows or unicorns, and I didn't return with a sense of purpose or psychic powers, although Dad has appeared to me in dreams quite a few times. He gives delightfully cryptic advice and then poofs away.

So anyway, we've been watching Battlestar Galactica for the past few months, and it's really making me re-examine what happened to me and what I have taken from the experience. Watching a Three commit suicide to see the faces of their makers got to me in a way I did not expect at all. Watching Lee and Starbuck in a boxing ring, fighting their memories and their imperfections and the ways in which they hurt each other, took me to pieces.

Where do you go when you've realized there is only one thing left that keeps you free? For me, it is Fahnz and his love for me that keeps me free from worry and pain and fear. I haven't been able to explain to him what happens when I go into those dark places, but I know it scares him because there isn't a damn thing he can do about it. All he can do is watch me fight against the darkness, and help me find my answers.

What is life and death? What do we see when we cross over?

Part of the downloading process for the Cylons is that they retain every memory--physical, emotional, spiritual--that they experienced in a specific body. Time and resurrection has the effect of accumulated knowledge, and it is the basic nature of every model to interpret that knowledge as best their programming allows. This in a nutshell is human spirituality. All we encounter in the world, in life and death, is filtered through our individual religious/philosophical perceptions. I think this is why I struggle so--I have yet to find the filter that can help me heal.

It's easier to say it than it is to understand it, and yet I have come to accept it. I do not deny what happened to me anymore. I've stopped running from it. Since then, every day I have discovered more reasons why I need to stay, and the stories of the Cylons have taught me more lessons than I ever expected to learn from a television show. I do not long for the Cylon life of self-loathing, for how can you not hate yourself for destroying a world?
Instead, I envy them their surety, their knowledge of what lies beyond. There are moments that I wonder if Three doesn't have a point, this constant need to die and see and return. I just don't want to die again to reach the place of complete understanding.