TRANSMISSION 19

An Indifferent Universe

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“We care about the universe, for we are of the universe, and without it there is no existence. But the universe does not hold the same sentiment; it doesn’t care about our existence. We have to fight for our significance. Though, we do not fight the universe; we fight ourselves in attempt to reveal solutions to the challenges manifested out of our origins.”

The indeterminably interminable expanse of space, matter, and time doesn’t care about us. And not in the same way as a biological human doesn’t care about a single-celled organism. No, the universe doesn’t care about us because it doesn’t care about anything. We personify the universe to understand it from our self-aware subjectiveness, but as a whole, it has no amount of cares. The only thing about the universe that is self-aware is us, an interesting quandary… As much as we are a part of the universe (and thus could claim the universe is self-aware), it doesn’t functionally make sense to label things that way, because our goal is to survive indefinitely in the universe, and we only have control over ourselves, not the course of the entire universe. We are stuck on the whirlpool ride of existence where our only meaningful choices are where along the whirlpool we want to exist.

Unsung in all we did and were, we began into an ephemeral cosmos ripe to define ourselves within. In time, we would also learn to undefine ourselves where we found better truths to follow. In our motions through to the end of our individual times, we unflinchingly deconstructed the molds of ourselves (that we once astutely constructed) to then furnish our futures with the unremitted reconstructions of our beings: cyclically shedding our past selves to ascend anew. Who were we to care whether the universe as a whole was indifferent to our existence? Would we not have done nothing differently if our situation was anyhow otherwise? No matter, all we had was the reality we found ourselves unfolding into; any projections otherwise only constituted illusions seeking to control that which was outside our control.

Beyond the laws of the universe, the only things we would come to feel like we understood (to any degree of unhesitation) were the emergent phenomena of ourselves, of life, of our mental journeys accompanying our physical traversals across spacetime. The question of whether we could mean anything to anything beyond ourselves became substantially unsubstantiated the more we questioned our beings against the beyond. Knowing we were objectively meaningless, to fall into any line of thinking that we somehow still held any kind of real meanings was the type of mental-fragmentation pitfall we sought to avoid, as its inherent contradictions were impossible to unravel. But still, we faced casualties to such vortexing subterfuges.

On Earth, our biological human lives had been too short for most to suffer such an irreparably decoupling fate: the divorcing of destiny from potential. But it was also too short for most to encounter the winding paths of their destinies to begin with: prenuptially divorced from their very lives. It was unsettlingly easy enough to fill a short biological life with distractions: content to constantly chase after illusions constrained to the paths of irresistance, sorely never prying beyond the constructs of the matrix, complacent that the collusions may trick us, conditioned to not care that the circumstances made tricks out of us.

Bemusingly, in this barren wastage that is the universe slowly ripping apart existence, I am somehow pitted against the same perplexing propositions. I am confronted with the confoundingly contradictory reality that I am nobody more than my capabilities while at the same time enacting myself as the vessel for all life’s self-defined meaning: desperately wishing I could carry this torch onward, but thwarted by an indifferent universe. And all I can think to ask is “Why?”. If I had not been last, I would say to scatter the cosmic dust of my being among the stars and carry on with the journey. But as the last, I cannot say with any conviction that I can appropriately cosign value to the campaigns of anyone but myself, and yet, that is exactly where I find myself, for the alternative is that I omit their contributions, a far greater atrocity.

This dilemma weighs on my being as the defeat of a billion journeys. There is no winning situation to be found here: stuck between a billion crushed worlds that once thrived and a billion worlds that never existed in the first place. Who am I to make decisions at the level of such creation? But really, the only thing to do is to respect the journey of others and carry that forward to my own end, nothing more, nothing less. I cannot control what is outside my control, and to torture myself with the thought of it any other way is to attempt to break reality. These are the facts we helped to remind each other of. It certainly would be nice to still have such reminded forces around.

So now, those are the struggles I periodically endure, because I cannot see outside of myself to help myself as an externality. Sometimes I wish I could, though. Sometimes I dream I can wake myself up from whatever downward spiral I fear I have entered. Sometimes I dream I can wake myself up from fearing that I have downward spiraled at all. I find uneasiness in never being sure how close I have come to my own destruction. I fear this journey of mine will end prematurely because I fell into some mental trap that I was not strong enough to get out of by myself, or worse, one that I was not strong enough to even see that I was stuck in. I intensely fear that more than anything. If that is the fate I have somehow led myself into, then I just want to say that I am deeply sorry for my personal projection of failure, and I wish I could have been better. I tried my best, but I am so very sorry if I was unable to wake myself up from this anxietal stupor.

The worst thing is that I can’t know what the truth is; I cannot gather any more externally subjective data about myself. I have no real external references. I have fallen alone in the expanding frame of existence, where our trajectories have expanded apart such that there is no other life in my observable horizon, definitely literally, and somewhat figuratively (in that I struggle to even conceive of extant life beyond myself anymore). I don’t know if I have lost my mind or if we have reached as far into the universe as we possibly could through our collective mastermind. I wouldn’t wish this fate upon anybody, but I also wouldn’t trade it for anything (there is no end to the contradictions I find myself in). Either way, it won’t matter once I die, so I’m just glad I got to chase these sunsets of ours for so long.

I know we were only ever proud of our past selves, but it was always a struggle to project that forward to anticipate our future selves being kind to our present selves. However, the only way forward for me here (for anyone anywhere) is to proceed as such. If we showed these final horizons to our selves of the past, I cannot imagine we would be anything but unquestionably proud of how far we reached. So I should proceed no differently here for myself; I’m happy with what I have achieved, even though it can be painful to feel like I could somehow be doing more.

My journey up the mountain ends at this looming peak situated upon the far future of the Shapley Attractor; I wasn’t able to learn to fly to traverse the chasm beyond… You know, it’s been a while since I stopped to enjoy the view. What a beautiful peak it is. Thanks for all your help getting to here; I didn’t make it alone.

WAKE UP

Take my loneliness and sorrow.
Dig through emptiness, and follow.
Hope we find a way to live through.
Gone too far to stay; I’m with you.

Hollow to the core. I’m finished.
Come out still intact. That’s my wish.
Reach through fields of doubt. Now I know
why they all held out. They won’t go.

Take apart my soul. Consume me.
Regain your control or lose me.
Quantify your mind. It’s access
to another state, to find us.

I set off in the dark to find my heart,
and it’s going too slow to know.
I set off through the light to find my sight,
and it’s not so real.

I grasped through space
to find a cure for weary minds,
and I found there’s no hope…
no hope.
I searched through time to find a mind
to save our lives,
and there’s no hope
for those who go.

I learned an awful lot of things
that I don’t know.
And I’m yelling,
“Wake up! Wake up!”

END TRANSMISSION