Existential Musing

To exist is to question ones existence. Do we exist, or do we not? In the overall scope of things, we’re merely just dust on the wind; here for a moment to leave our mark on the ages through acts that are like unto ripples in the ocean. Is life worth living? What is the meaning of life? Is there a God? What if there isn’t a God? Who am I? Why do people do the things that they do?

To understand these things, one must look at the entirety of human existence and look at the entirety of the existence of the Earth in comparison to that and then to look at the entire existence of the Universe in comparison to that and then whatever is beyond in comparison to that and so on and so forth. You will see that from that scale, life is not worth living, since it is over so quickly while death and silence and destruction are continual and ever-lasting. There is no meaning to life, for what meaning could it have on such larger scales, when it’s over and gone so quickly? How can there be a God when so much horror and tragedy goes on? If there isn’t a God, then there’s just nothingness and none of this is for a reason and it doesn’t make sense and we have to make sense of it and… How can I know who I am if others don’t tell me, when I’m so small and my actions mean so little? Since people act like that, that means I can, too; and if nothing else matters, then it’s just this moment and myself.

But that is only one perspective amongst many and may not even be the perspective of those attending. You must also go down into our world as far as you went out into the all-encompassing space and time beyond our own species existence, down into the insect world and the plant world and down into micro-organisms, bacteria and viruses and further down into the molecules and atoms that make up everything, and then you find that splitting certain atoms presents certain powerful results that affect far more than what you would have thought they would upon appearance. Same with all of the other smallest organisms such as bacteria and viruses. When you think about it, God or not, life stemmed from a primordial soup of sorts that held the building blocks for life; and that soup is still in existence to this day in our oceans current systems, being transferred around and through our very world like a life-stream, carrying nutrients and the very basis of life on our planet around the world. All life began as single-celled organisms and expanded from there, splitting to become the symmetrical designs that they’ve become, intricate in their design and unique to each other at the same time as having comparisons.

You see that life is worth living, for every day is like a miracle, but you take it for granted because you forget all of the little things that had to go into each step of each step, you focus on the horrible seeming events, adopting a single perspective instead of working to focus on the positive and make it stand out, because it’s there, every day, in small and simple ways just waiting to be recognized and enjoyed. You realize that the meaning of life is simple ‘to live’ and experience the raw variety of flavors that come with, for better or worse, because each one is different and has something different to offer, different to learn and grow from and then to turn and offer to others for them to learn and grow from. There has to be a God of some sort, because of all the love and deep-connection that you feel to and from and with all things when you clear your mind of negativity, such as in meditation and relaxation. Even if there isn’t a God, it doesn’t matter because this life is so vibrant and rich that it’s worth just living once and having nothingness be on the other side, it’s worth whatever might be waiting, worth every ache and pain and struggle when it finally all clicks together and begins to run smoothly.

Even with all of that space out there and all of the time beyond it and even though our existence is like a momentary pebble cast into an ocean as the tide was sweeping in; we’ve changed things to a small degree, for better or worse. We changed the overall picture from what it would have been had we never been in it. Just like the Virus and the bacteria and the micro-organisms and building blocks of life start small and aspire to great things, so do we. Yeah, we could be gone in the blink of an eye, but at least we were here. Who I am is not defined by any other person or insecurity; it’s what my heart tells me I am and what I always feared I wasn’t and not what I feared I was. Fear turned me into something I was not, but by the banishing of fear, I found who I was. Do not fear fear, but learn from it and adapt like you would any other problem in life. What others do does not matter overly much, as I can handle them and deal with them because I know who I am and it is more important to be the change you want to see rather than try to simply force others to be the change.

Things we do may not seem all that important when compared to the larger picture, but compared to the smaller picture, we can see how they are vastly important. Every action and reaction and word and phrase. Every thought that may come to be and every person that exists regardless of social standing or parentage or racial heritage, every plant, insect, life.

It is the balance that must be found in accepting different perspectives and utilizing both at the same time to remain a blend of humble and confident, noble and not, etc., for every situation is different and must be handled at least slightly differently, because each person is different, at least slightly and each background is different, at least slightly. But, the emotions caused are ultimately all the same and what it all boils down to is ‘choice’ and what perspective a person would rather have; what avenues they will more likely take based on their ability or inability to see beyond singular perspectives, whether they choose to focus on the negative or the positive, or both; or the fact that they may not even be what we think they are in terms of negative and positive.

That seems to me to be an interesting perspective.

What I would add to it might be this:

Whether or not you choose to be born, and to live, you are in fact doing so as you read this. You have been thrown into existence, with all the conditions that come with it : old age, sickness, suffering, and death. These apply not only to you, but to everyone you know, whether you love them or revile them as human beings. But by continuing to exist, by getting out of bed in the morning, you affirm the importance and meaning of life. When asked, why do you go on living? one may answer with various different reasons. But by doing so, one makes these reasons the meaning of one’s life. It is because of this, that the great existentialist novelist Albert Camus said, on the very first line of The Myth of Sisyphus “There is only one true problem in philosophy, and it is the question of suicide.” When you can answer the question of why you have not yet committed suicide, you can answer as to the meaning of your life.

Well put.

Well put, indeed.

Some peoples reasons will make them enemies of your reasons even if you and them never wished to be enemies. People follow their reasons unto death because it is what grounds them; and everything happens for a reason. I can not claim that a murderer is any less a part of all of this than the person with a family and a job to support that family.

Each person should be themselves no matter how many enemies it might make them; because it might also make them some pretty good allies, too. I find that when people try to please everyone, they wind up pleasing no one. I have always gotten far more respect by being honest, straight up and real with people and by telling things how they are whether it made people angry or not. At the end of the day, I find respect to be the longer-lasting and the love born of respect to be longer-lasting still.

But is that to mean that every person should choose to be respected? I don’t think so.

The way the world works, we have that negativity spectrum. It exists. Instead of trying to fully harmonize that into society; we need to be using it to be what we fight against; so we continually have something to fight and we don’t have this confused chaos of a society trying to be something it’s not and failing.

Not everyone can be saved; not everyone can be helped; not everyone wants to be a good person. Not everyone can be a good person even if they do want to be. We’re trying to take the fight out of our selves and we see the results all over the news. Let people be who and what they should be; let things go back to being natural; when men and women were really men and women and they lived; actually lived.

I think it’s vastly important for people to realize at some point that asking ‘why’ is a pointless question. What should be asked most is ‘how do I respond to this?’

Ask both why and how to respond. One will inform the other.

Existence is numerous, inexhaustible tectonic levels of oppositions, symmetries and antitheses. Causes and effects, immanences, orders of change and stasis. ‘Memory’ sews it all together. Consciousness arose by virtue of series of “accidents” creating instinct systems that perpetuate certain patterns of behavior given particular conditions. When these systems began to get complex enough to start responding to their own inner patterns and impulses, self-consciousness or sentience was born. And when this sentience began to externalize itself via language and more subtle social-emotional cues and stable roles, acting as storage and perpetuation vehicles for new kinds of forms and codes, man was born.

God is the hope which is a realization of how great opposing spheres of personality and experience work against each other, crashing into each other creating fractures and Gestalts. Your emotions want to grab reason, your reason wants to grab emotion, and ethics forms in the middle as a result.

Phenomenologically and tectonically speaking it is not impossible that a “soul” exists or that information is not transferred between souls and their “material counterparts”. If one plane or logical type is seen to develop tremendously but with no opposite, attempt a daemonic process of antithesis-synthesis to see what you are missing. Taking your “feelings” out of the equation is only one part of it.

Experience is its own reward. Reason is a vicious circle and must be brought into violent counterbalance with the rest of the self. You are a unique self-valuing, you are an irreducible complex of potentials virtually crafting time in an atemporality, you are a pure deterministic clockwork of evolutionary necessity, you are a congruence of fault lines in a tectonic universality, you are a ghost in the machine, and you are many other things which you do not know and many of which you will never know.