All right, two questions.

Great questions from the fine readers at X, FDRERL.com slash X.

If you don't subscribe, you're missing out on some really, really great stuff.

Now, the first question, where was my consciousness before my birth?

I mean, there's two answers to that.

One is, all of the atoms that compose your consciousness were always there for as long as the universe has existed from a sort of functional

physics standpoint, given that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted to energy and back,

the atoms that make up your consciousness are immortal. I mean, which is a way of saying that

they are eternal. Of course, they're not immortal because atoms don't live or die. So you and I are

composed of the bowels of exploding stars that have crossed

across the universe to aggregate on planet Earth and become our consciousness as a whole. So it's a

beautiful thing. We were forged in the furnace of a dying star.

And that's a beautiful thing.

We have brought a dead star back to life

through the blinding luminosity of thought.

So the atoms that make up your consciousness

have been around forever and ever, amen.

And we'll be around forever and ever amen

when we die. We will go into the ground, we will go into the bellies of worms, and

the worms will excrete, we will be used as food for plants, that plant may be eaten by another human being, and then we merge into another

life, though of course we, as an entity, are long gone. But our atoms, we're just borrowing

them. You're just borrowing them. You know, you ever find a really old penny, or 1913, or

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