TRANSMISSION 41

A Break from Reality

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“Don’t judge us for our weaknesses. Don’t condemn our failures. Our triumphs speak for themselves. Our successes shine beyond the shadows of our doubts. Our influences surpass our personal scopes to find relevance among the horizons of all void wanderers.”

Some of us were lucky for our internal motivations that lodged our minds to stay the course. Some of us were unlucky in the unforeseen circumstances that led to our individual downfalls, whether abrupt or strung out. When someone reached the point where they just couldn’t pull themselves forward anymore, we could instantly feel it. There was nothing that could be done for someone like that. We couldn’t force someone to keep marching forward if everything in their being convinced them that it didn’t make sense to go. We couldn’t propel anyone into the bleakness when everything in their being had convinced them they were no longer pushing for anything meaningful enough. That said, there were a few lucky ones of that designation who desperately mangled their minds to a coincidentally fortuitous state, but they were so few and far between that it didn’t really affect the trajectory of life, not to mention the fact that randomly rewiring the mind is not a reproducible salvage solution.

I should note that there’s a difference between motivated people needing a break and non-motivated people needing a break. The motivated people still hunger for the vision; they just need to step back, take a figurative breath, and reassess their place in the flow of spacetime. The non-motivated people were only ever in the race because they were chasing anybody’s dreams but their own. And if it wasn’t for that, they wouldn’t have even gotten as far as they did. In a sense, if we had perfect knowledge, we would have been able to tell right away who would make it and who wouldn’t. But in reality, it took a long time for cracks to eat at the people who were strong enough to want to become silicon beings and leave Earth. The cracks started small, but without the resilience to repair them, the cracks inevitably grew over time. Yes, we could repair other people’s cracks for them, but we could only repair them fast enough to keep their head above water; we couldn’t repair them fast enough to let them succeed. Once someone reached into panic to discover there was no safety net to cling to, we couldn’t calm them down enough to teach them to grow; they would become stuck with their current abilities and mindset. So sure, we could help them out initially, but as circumstances changed (as they always do), the burden of keeping the sinkers afloat would accelerate to the point where we had to let them go or slowly drown along with them amid the new circumstance’s demands for new mental resilience and new abilities.

Carrying on our metaphors from back on Earth, we could compare our universal expeditions to mountain climbers in Earth’s death zone where there wasn’t enough oxygen to sustain their biological systems indefinitely. The higher we go on the metaphorical mountain, the less we are able to help others if they fall. And as tragic as it is, when the only option is to keep pushing forward, we ultimately can’t do anything for the people who fall. It is abundantly clear at the outset that if we fall, we can only count on ourselves to pick back up and carry on. Despite knowing this, our humanity can’t help but to assist the fallen, for within them, we see glimpses of our own untrodden destinies. So we drag them along with us as long as we can manage. These people who have come so far with us understandably mean a lot to us, even if their hearts are no longer in it. And as we drag them along, we hold the illusion of the person they once projected, hoping desperately that it was their true self and they will reemerge. But the snow has blinded them, the cold has numbed them, the altitude has dazed them, and they have no more fight left. We can try as hard as we want, but eventually the burden becomes too great, and we realize that we will succumb to the mountain alongside them if we don’t mentally and physically let them go to then continue forging ourselves forward. So we let go, watching them drift into the comfort of their relief, the deepest relief of knowing they don’t have to push anymore.

Just as we all need occasional breaks from reality, we often admired our fallen friends for their ability to take a permanent break from reality. It was not the death that we admired, but the moments before their death where they could let go and find the comfort they had once so diligently neglected. Before permanent inexistence set in, they found deep comfort in shrugging off the constructs needed for perpetuating their identity, leaving their lens of reality to only see idealized beauty in everything. I suppose that’s all the dying were ever doing: ignoring truth to indulge in romanticized reality. We never knew whether they were the smarter ones for letting go of our fool’s quest for meaning in indefinite survival or whether we were the fools for believing we could pursue meaning in the first place. All we knew is that we wanted to be aware of our destiny tracts, which could not be done ignorantly.

We all battled with the same demons; the people and demons who survived longer simply had the motivation to want to battle. To keep ourselves alive was to keep our demons alive, and while some people didn’t like that, many of us felt like we still had something we wanted to figure out in that crusade. When there’s nothing left to figure out, that’s when people give up. And so, as sentient living beings, maybe our imperfect subjective experiences offered something to aim for as a motivation to exist. If a being existed with perfect truth, maybe it wouldn’t care to do anything. Maybe it wouldn’t care to exist if it could find no further adversity to play with. For those of us who remained in existence longer, we harnessed adversity as our endless source of motivation. We understood that the struggles made reality interesting. We understood that the suffering is what kept us figuratively (and thus literally) alive. We understood these things because the universe afforded no meanings; we were not even relegated to a mandated life (forever pushing a specific boulder up a well-defined mountain). No, we were caught somewhere deeply beyond, in the intersection of absurdity, nihilism, and existentialism where we were forced to define our own mountains, our own boulders, and our own selves among the indefinite everything, everywhere, everywhen, and everyhow. Existence is intensely our own creation: our fallible natures playing host to the cascade of our destinies. And therein lie the multitudes of demons (for better or for worse).

I took a lot of breaks from reality. Every time I finished a project, I would dedicate time toward mentally recalibrating myself to the big picture: assessing my surroundings and planning a path forward for the next segment of my life. Deeper into our journey, after moment-to-moment survival became more trivial and our primary focuses were on longer-term survival, our work became a lot more theoretical (mental) than applied (physical). It’s a dangerous place to go (living in our heads so much), but a necessary risk to delve deeper unknowns. Sometimes I would break away to take breaks by myself, and sometimes I would take accompanied breaks. It was often during our breaks that we would encounter the broken souls of others who couldn’t convince themselves to carry on for another slog. Their minds couldn’t find a point to the endless cycles, and so their cracks realized into full fractures.

It was easy to motivate ourselves to the end of a project; that kind of artificial milestone was something we exploited (in bad and good ways) to help push ourselves toward goals. However, when a project was completed (and even along the way), you could instantly see who was relieved and who was celebratory. Celebration for the past and excitement for the future indicated the right mentality toward the journey, even if parts of it were painful. Relief from the past and dread toward the future indicated the incorrect mentality for perpetuating one’s existence. When we noticed that, sometimes it just meant we needed to get that person onto a different team working on different kinds of projects. But more often than not, that person was slowly and inevitably sinking… Aren’t we all, though?

Over time, we all came to more deeply understand this phenomenon of the sinking self (both in others and in ourselves). People would start to slip, realize it, and then remove themselves from the situation to recalibrate. Or if they felt they had slipped too far, they would go off to die alone so they didn’t hold anyone else back (not that we ever asked it of anyone). We always wished we knew how to save them, but we also all understood that we were fully responsible for only ourselves on whatever mountain we chose to measure our beings upon. We understood that life can only exist on a thin edge between overwhelming struggle and understimulation. Fall too far to one side and our minds begin to rot. If we struggle too much, life becomes torturous, and from there it’s a constant fall downhill until our minds break entirely. If we don’t have any struggle at all, there’s no stimulation to engage our minds, and we also find ourselves in a downhill deterioration. Pure torture is death. Pure peace is death. And somewhere in the middle is where we try to balance ourselves so that we may continue to live. For what reason? Well, we hadn’t figured that out quite yet. But there’s nothing else to do, and the infinite darkness will soon be upon us all, so we might as well try.

DARKEST NIGHT

Hi there, darkest night.
I’ve been waiting for you
for a long long time.
Soon I will find my way
past the light,
rooted deep in the darkest night.
Soon you may find me there,
past the light,
rooted deep in the darkest night.

Goodbye, sweet sweet light.
We’ve been bifurcating
for a long long time.
Soon I’ll be gone from view.
Send a card:
let you know that I made it through.
Soon you’ll be gone from view.
Send a card:
let me know that you made it too.

Hi there, everyone.
We’ve been waiting for you
for a long long time.
Soon you will have to fall.
This whole time
you’ve been waiting here after all.
Soon you’ll acquit your mind.
This whole time
you’ve been stuck in a plane-bound mind.

Goodbye, consciousness.
I’ve been bound to this realm
for a short short time.
Built up a holy crown;
disillusion
was all that we hadn’t found.
Tore down a holy crown;
disillusion
defines where I left this realm.

Soon we will be together,
darkness and me forever.
Soon enough we will be together.
Soon enough no more me forever.

Soon I will find my way.

END TRANSMISSION