TRANSMISSION 38

The Discomfort of Being

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“Our once-dampened minds are bound to the fatigueless fight for retained relief against the blightly comforts of counterfeit bliss. We anchor our pursuits in as much of nothing as possible (for any amount of falsely-held something is an invitation to never move the behemoth of illusory undamaged reality). Yet, the discomfort of our existence is that we must hold some illusions to carry ourselves forward. The trick becomes conjuring the motivation to remain in the depths of discomfort that eschew complacency (on the scale of ever). The impervious adversary of the indifferent unknown drives us forward. The impetuous comfort of the impatient familiar tempts our downfall.”

Along life’s journey, many humans were lured into the false safety of comfort. They found their temporary bliss, but in doing so, they forgot that reality doesn’t care about their artificial constructs. They tried to live inside the bubble of a safety corridor propped up from the outside with temporary solutions that evolved into permanent problems. Looking from the outside in (as more objective observers), we could see it for what it was, but looking from the inside out, all you could see was the manicured illusion (destined for utter destruction). Many humans paid others to maintain such illusions for them, a fate much more detached and dangerous than managing one’s own illusions. To manage your own illusions means you’ll likely realize they are illusions, at which point you can hide from them (crumbling from the mental dissonance), accept them as illusion to carry on unchanged (ignoring the threat of your crumbling existence), or dismantle the illusions as much as possible (so reality doesn’t cascade down quite as hard when it inevitably reveals your crumbled soul back to you along your quest for disillusionment).

We’ll never find our answers and questions staying inside our contrived bubbles of safety. All that awaits us there is the slow rotting of our minds and forms from the untruths that neglect our existence. We are condemned to fight relentlessly for that which we want in life; there is no easy way about it. If we are perfectly comfortable and perfectly entertained, there is nothing pushing us to want to learn and build. Stagnation is the ultimate mind killer. In that way, we are fortunate to be thrust into this relentless fight of an existence.

Once we went silicon, significant populations were lost in the bottomless bowels of virtual worlds, where the endeavors of greater reality stopped feeling as real. Many people didn’t recognize their minds could be conditioned to crave the more artificial rewards of virtual worlds. So even though our lower-construct “real world” held more truths and value to find, it was easy to become stuck behind a tinted view that obscured reality. Most would go in to never come back out, rotting their minds to death, unable to maintain the virtual world as an illusion they shouldn’t build their foundations upon (to the point of it becoming their “objective” truth). Some would go in and reemerge, only to find they resurfaced to reality too late, the rest of us having moved onward in physical space to continue our survival, leaving behind their virtual simulation at the star it was built around.

By this time in my story, all the stars gravitationally binding any virtual-bound beings were destined to now be in the phase of white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole, none of which the virtualization hardware was equipped to survive through. So while I can hope that maybe some of them are still alive, there isn’t any realistic way any of them still physically exist. Not to mention that there isn’t much case to hope their minds would have survived, as the virtual realities operated so efficiently that their minds aged far faster than in greater reality, so any amount of mental torment they held would be wrought over a much larger effective time than the time I experienced. While it’s easy to point at the dangers of virtual realities to make ourselves feel better about our endeavors in whatever we might call the greater realities, there is nowhere to go to escape such dangers. The perils of stagnation lurk everywhere; it’s just easier to manage them the closer to discomfort we place ourselves. Unfortunately, our maximum capacity for sustainable discomfort lies just before the line of overwhelmed paralysis. And where we find ourselves substantially overwhelmed, the illusory comforts tempt us that much fiercer.

The adversity is not our enemy; it presents the challenges for us to endeavor against, the challenges that befriend us in a plethora of ways to define our existential meanings. It’s the highly artificial challenges and shortcut journeys that we must avoid, lest we think we could ever attain anything meaningful for free. If we ever found ourselves in comfort, we acted quickly to find adversity to challenge ourselves with. Even if we didn’t know where to take the next step (especially if we didn’t know where to take the next step), we would just start moving and coming up with challenges to tackle, peaks to climb. Because once we climbed up a ways, we would get a better view of the land to scout our next peak, and then our next peak, and so on. It got easier the more we stayed with it, even to the point where returning to the rediscovery process (after noticing we were succumbing to comfort) became a known methodology rather than a grueling aberration to hysterically subdue. We learned to surrender any inclination to tame absurdism (that gristling slog of forceful self exposure with no end in sight).

Every so often, we would come across a lifeless soul along the path, not dead, but somehow not really alive: the perfunctory rhythms of their virtualized mindscapes lulling them to death by an octillion atomic dissipations. And though there was nothing we could do for them, we heard there was beauty in the death of all things poised to fall. So we would go to watch them die, not out of morbid curiosity, but out of respect for life: to learn how to live. They had found so much solace in their pain that they could no longer turn back to life. Our worlds are truly what we make of them, and their worlds were falling down. Is it possible to recover from such a downfall? Yes; I’ve seen it. Is it common? No, not at all. And as such, we could never stay for too long to watch, lest we learn everything we sought to learn and then remain further only for the false comfort of stagnation, joining them in their downfall.

Why couldn’t we save them? Well, life cannot be externally motivated, not in any kind of truthful way. To replace one ill-contrived illusion with another would never suffice to ignite the motives for survival. You can’t beat it into them either, just as life has never been about appeasing our critics. We have never owed anything to anyone, no matter how loud their voice. Life has only ever been about building tangible value for ourselves and our biggest supporters: our allies, those who understand our passions and visions, the highest forms of shared truth seeking. To try to appease everyone was to veer from our visions and identities while losing our voice, our biggest supporters, and at the end of the day, our sanity. So to force anyone to be anything would never work; the best we could do was to plant seeds of thought that would hopefully help them navigate the maze of their mind (and principles maps) to get from the place they currently were to the truths they sought. However, such seeding efforts were often much better spent on the minds who professed to want inspiration, not on the minds who rejected reality’s advances. It is only within the constructs of ourselves that we can motivate change.

Our perceptions of our own selves are but momentary constructs we use to propel ourselves through the flow of time. The transitory existence of our identities, journeys, and lives is the discomfort that unsettles us deeply and actuates us toward answers. The temporariness of existence as a whole finds us jumbled somewhere between the search for meaning and the discomfort of knowing we can never have all the answers. With that said, all our pursuit here has ever been and will ever be is that of sequencing our lives into something we can believe in:

• We analyze our beings to find our dreams.
• We arrange our futures to become our dreams.

What do we dream? What should we dream? Well, that’s for us to decide, and we necessarily must decide. That decision can change as frequently as we desire, but we need to be moving somewhere, or we will find ourselves spiraling down the untenable abyss of stimulation deprivation.

To join our journey at the start, all we required was that ask. It didn’t seem like a lot for many, but we knew it to be a lot for the people who grew up on Earth. Surrounded by baseless constructs, they knew not the truth of what we asked. But who were we to gatekeep the journey, so, many came along, many who would end up dying. I wish we could have done better for them, but at the same time, I think our journey provided better for them than any alternative I could imagine. The mountain was established, and we all set off heroically to conquer it in our hearts. It was a beautiful sight to behold, to see such a grand allocation of humanity’s efforts pushing up the hill in unison, excited at all the illusions they were destined to never find. Though, for some of us, knowing the illusions would wear off soon enough for much of humanity, it revealed the whole effort as a certain level of illusion. We held the illusion knowingly, harnessing its energy while it lasted to forge our momentum up the mountain, ready to swap out of the illusion to a more sustainable speed whenever the illusory (yet tantalizingly tangible) momentum was overcome by reality’s dispelling gravitation.

NO CONTEST

The brightest moon is in the night,
but that’s when monsters come to prowl.
Though you’re safe within these walls,
you’ll never find the answers here.
You see, belief holds no ground here;
I’m lost forever to you.

The eager monsters come to play
as you’ve been thrown out of the light.
But you can’t fight your way out now;
there are no sanctions on your life.
You could find the answers here
if you follow them through.

Find me. Save me. I hope we see.
All I wanted was you to believe in me,
but we lost ourselves here.

I feel it’s real. My heart’s not enough.
I’ve been down. I’ve been lost.
I’ve been stuck in my thoughts.
But I won’t quit now that I’m in it.
I know we’re the best.
There’s no contest.

I believe we’re climbing peaks.
We can believe.
And I know we are driving too far.
Without a doubt.
But I’m wondering whether we can win.
Just take it in.
They’ll say we’re the best.
There is no contest,
despite this mess.

Take it in.
We won’t be coming back.
This moment here
is only temporary.
I’m sure you know
that I will never let go.
We’ve fallen far.
Tomorrow is a new start.
So here I go.
I won’t let go.

END TRANSMISSION