TRANSMISSION 1

The Significance of Existence

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“We are collaborative authors in the story of life, a perpetual journey with only one real end and beginning; the rest in the middle is just a continuation of the story. We all take our turns stepping up to sound our voices, most of the time in parallel, but occasionally in sequence. And where we encounter our individual ends sooner than we had hoped, the beauty in our lives has been that we got to forge and pursue our own meanings, reverberating our visions into the universe through the actions we took, impressing our soulprints into the destinies of all existence, participating in the universal experiment of time and causality.”

I will not be going out with a bang. I know the romantics of the past might have hoped for this to be a more seductive tale of man versus nature, but that is not this story. No, my end is a dissolution among the rest of decaying existence. Nature is dying with me; there is no fight to be had. And though I am at the end of my personal journey (and equally, life’s collective journey), this is not so much a story about the end as it is everything between the ends.

Reaching this somehow arbitrary yet inevitable end of mine has made me reflect on all the meanings we held through the time we did exist. In the face of impending nothingness, our struggles to find meaning and to find ourselves have been what mattered to me. But even the struggles are going extinct now. I’m not completely sure what matters to me anymore, but we’ll do our best to explore that here while I still have time. This search for struggle is my only genuine remaining struggle (the metastruggle), so I will hold onto it until I die or until I find another struggle to subsist upon.

In the sense that there is no more nature to conquer, this brief moment of my story ending shifts to man versus self. In fact, our struggles against nature were only ever the reflections of our imperfectly unassuming aspirations back toward ourselves (our perceptions of reality and its meanings nothing more than mental constructs). The final frontier was only ever the self. Yet, what even has the self been? What can it become? How did it arise? What does existence mean to us? What do we mean to existence? What does it mean to exist? How far can we probe into the horizons of existence to glean the truths we seek? Was there ever anything real out there for us to find? I don’t have all the answers; I don’t think I even have any answers. But in my limited life, I explored some of the questions. Those explorations are what I care to share here.

To us self-aware surveyors of reality, life was opportunities. Opportunities manifested dreams. And dreams were the value proposition of life. Self-referential, life had twisted upon itself to become what we were. Such tautological existence reminded us that we were what we made of ourselves. We probed the opportunities awaiting our unwritten futures to join the brigade of indefinite possibilities. We set forth our minds to unwind from that which we’d become blind. We desperately ached to unearth the value of life. At least, such was true for the ones of us who tended to be alive longer.

But was it the act of holding those values that had kept us alive? Or was it that the survivors were simply alive to perpetuate those values, with such values simply being a comorbidity to another feature that ailed our decay? Statistically, I’m inclined to say that our philosophies were solely to blame for the extent of our aliveness, but it’s also hard to say where survivorship bias may have landed us. Toward the end, the shores of our marooned minds hadn’t seen any external struggles toward survival in a long time, so it’s debatable where our minds may have wandered in the meantime.

Had we grown destitute? Or did we unfold into the lair of masterminds? I cannot say for sure anymore. I don’t know if I could ever conclude either way given the context of all existence. Because deep down, it’s all subjective, and we made of the journey what we wanted, so I’m happy for that.

We cannot take the words of others as anything more than personal stories, as should be treated my story. We only integrated such conveyances into our understandings of reality if their ideas meshed with the fibers of our personal existences. Setting out into the universe with presaturated minds, we quickly found these truths weren’t absolutes; any mental constructs we built to represent reality were inherently incomplete, but that never stop us from trying. We only ever sought to construct our ride toward personal freedoms of thought beyond the constructs we once took for reality. And when such opportunities presented themselves, we took them without a moment’s hesitation.

Once Earthlings, that is exactly how this journey began for many of us as individuals: aiming to reach beyond our origins, bound to the creed of the unknown intoxication. And when our calls into the unknown went unanswered, deep into the empty we plunged: to find a new day’s hero in ourselves, to uncover the questions we didn’t even know yet how to ask. Ever eager and none the wiser, we embarked ambitiously for the stars and emerged as vehement victors of our own hearts. We couldn’t and wouldn’t have asked for any more or any less.

BETTER OFF IN UNKNOWN

I am desperate to know what is real.
I am beginning to see we’re alone.
I am falling too far, but I feel
I am better off in unknown.

I am restless, intent on this dream.
I am nothing more than I need.
I am forgiving my fear of defeat.
I am the emptiness growing complete.

I am fighting for futures unclear.
I am leaving to find what I fear.
I am severed in half, but I know
I am ready this time to grow whole.

I am desperate to see what is real.
I am beginning to know we’re alone.
I am fading too fast, but I feel
I am better off unknown.

I am willing to move on from this;
I’m not sorry to say I was wrong.
I am destined to fall, but I missed;
I am not sorry I’ll be gone.

END TRANSMISSION