TRANSMISSION 42

Create While You Exist

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“Indiscriminately, we are thrust into this existence. And indiscriminately back, we toil through the waves of sunless seas, wading our way through the corrosive entropy of time. The polls are in: nothing cares about us, so we must care about ourselves, a high distinction from caring for ourselves.”

The lives we live are subjective, and so the goals are subjective. We often have a silent, mutual pact with others to survive. But we also need to remember that not everyone’s goals are the same, not even in survival. All we can ask of each other is to create while we exist: continuing the exploration of new opportunities to find meanings for our existences.

As much as possible, I created as part of the indefinite-life groups to afford everyone more time to explore whatever we all wanted to explore. Though, sometimes I would take breaks away from such groups to refresh my mind and discover new interdisciplinary inspiration. Over enough time, the indefinite-life groups became the only ones left alive, simply because our immediate goals more highly prioritized survival; the rest were flushed out of existence through statistical inevitabilities.

We owe our successes not only to ourselves, but also to all the people of the past who gave themselves fully to their craft but didn’t have the ability to live indefinitely (mentally or physically). It would be incorrect to say they failed (in the broad definition of life). While it’s possible they failed to attain their goals, and though they undoubtedly failed the goals of many other people (as we all did), many of them did not give up on their goals, and for that, they were not failures. Unfortunately, many of them physically died without getting to chance their minds against the deepest torments of indefinite existence. And of the people who mentally gave up, they didn’t really hold the goal of indefinite survival in the same way as the ones who survived longer, but that’s okay. Most people who relinquished their lives to become nonliving matter either held goals that conflicted with reality (and at some point realized they couldn’t reach their goals) or they achieved their goals and couldn’t find anything else to live for. Many such people still made great contributions to the living through foundational knowledge (science), inspirational knowledge (art), and applied knowledge (tools). So to call them failures would be a disservice to their efforts. The only sense in which we could suggest that most people were failures was that they lost themselves amid the unsettling darkness, becoming that which they never held intentionality toward.

It’s hard not to lose ourselves when dealing with so much emptiness, so much meaninglessness, so much nothingness. When we battle the nothingness, our thoughts get reflected back at us, and we realize the opponents we battle are ourselves. All our flaws are revealed. All our inadequacies are summoned to the front lines. When we take on these demons, remember that we wield the power to create (and strip) meaning within the emptiness. In fact, more than that, we are the power to create meaning within anything. All our motivations must necessarily stem from this internal domain.

Create your surroundings. Create your dreams. Create your identity. Create your existence. Create real value; don’t settle for being a middle man dealing in the currency of illusory comfort: the comfort of being taken care of, the comfort of shortcuts, the comfort of vehemently-held falsified reality. It’s not bad to look for comfort in the side quests of our visions (i.e. contentment): streamlining our surroundings beneficially focuses us on our main missions. It’s bad when comfort becomes the main quest.

Find any passion and deeply pursue it to greet your unrealized potentials. Create, build, learn, and teach. Bring into reality the passion you hold for any amount of anything. Manifest your creations. Manifest your dreams. Discover your passions through the act of creation. Discover more passions the more you create. Build something. Build anything. Start now. Start all the time. Never start stopping; it’s too easy to land in the comfort spiral of dead-minded consumption. Never stop starting: analyze the fibers of everything you come across to understand how reality works and how you can make it work better.

Don’t just experience art; become art, and then share that. Become the art that lets us see beyond ourselves: the incitement of out-of-body insights, the engulfment of nearly out-of-mind experiences. Sing your art into all the nooks of your reality designs (from conventional art to scientific exploration and engineering). Be economic with your palettes of words to conjure vivid encounters, for good words are the enemy of great words. Bring the experiencer into flow states deep beyond the monotony of second-hand experiences. Cast other people into your internal world with intense passion to unfurl your mindscape dreams beyond the confines of yourself. Create, share, improve, repeat ad infinitum. It’s what we desperately need; it’s all we need.

While I still exist here, my momentary creations are focused into these writings, for they are commensurate with my deepest personal truths. Though, they are not all the truths; don’t romanticize this experience of mine. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that there were no deep struggles along the way or that there were no extended periods of feeling directionless. I have not been flawless. I have not avoided the plight of my own existence. And in that, I don’t fully know why I am the last one alive.

To make it as far as many of us did, I think we simply had to want to keep learning. When we felt like there wasn’t anything left to do in life, that’s when we would downward spiral. And because the universe is unrelentingly inhospitable and uncaring toward our feelings and existences, once we downward spiral, it becomes very hard to get out.

As much as we could try to hold on to the illusion that we’d be able to escape the pains of our current reality or escape into the dreams of an illusory reality (the incitement of downward spirals), the truth was that we only ever had the option to incrementally improve our moment-to-moment reality. Recognizing that actuality, we could hold our illusory dreams and work toward them so long as we remembered they weren’t necessarily achievable in the ways we might have hoped. We had to remember, firstly, that there could be a lot of pain between us and our goals and, secondly, that our goals were never the centers for pain relief we longingly projected them to be.

Incremental progress is how we nudged our destinies to where we ended up. And because we’ve never been omniscient, we wouldn’t know exactly how everything would end up until we reached our destinations. If we stifled our visions to the confines of our humanly-perceived destinies, we wouldn’t have been open to the paths that unfolded to us along the way. That may have been the biggest factor that kept us alive for so long: simply being curious as to what was out there while enjoying the moments for what they were (rather than erroneously force-fitting our preconceived notions as the bounds of how we hoped reality would unfold so as not to offend our mental scars). Whenever we recognized the choice between opening up to reality (to overcome our traumatic misconceptions) and denying the true reflections of existence (to carry on unfluidly navigating the rapids of our lives), we always chose to let the universe be our judge, and vitally, we chose to look upon that judgment with open eyes to learn and adapt at an ever-compounding rate.

There is no real “start” to any journey. But if we were ever at a perceived start and didn’t know what we want to do, then we simply started creating and interacting with existence to feel the tugs of our authentic beings directing us toward our personal resonance vectors (the directions that mattered most to us) and our personal resonance frequencies (the modes of approach toward our destinations); stagnation casts no ripples into the universe from which we can deduce the echos of ourselves. And only through deliberately placing ourselves along any journey could we begin to triangulate ourselves and our goals. Over time, we found ourselves aligning into our takeoff trajectories: our visions solidified and our beings poised to launch into manifesting our dreams. After even more time, we rocketed our way off into the deepest of newly conceived frontiers, chartering our existences through gentle nudges to the destinies we had no concept of at the “start”.

There is no such thing as overnight success (anyone who say so is selling something). Find unrelenting hope in the depths of your visions for reality and never let go. Chase down the shadows of your existence that haunt you most. Champion forward your dreams until they echo into reality where you can catch the reverberations to get a lay of the land and plot your next course into the infinite expanse. Just remember that the darkness we delve is distinct for each of us, and we must figure out how to conjugate our experiences there with the experiences of the known. That bridge is what knowledge (in all forms) is all about. Art, specifically, is the most expansive and most unconstrained bridger of unknown to known. But with that also comes the most expansive and unconstrained demons. Don’t forget to pull your head out of the art, lest you become a monk to your own art in the nirvana fallacy: lost in the illusion of a perfect solution to an artificially contrived reality.

ON MY OWN

Hungry is the night
that I want to call my own.
Left to live a life
that I barely even know.
Hardened through the fire
that pursues my every breath.
Came out through the dark
where there’s nowhere left to fall.
Conjugate the fall
with the wonder after all.

One step:
I’m getting closer.
I’ve made it all these years
to fall down on my own.

Two steps:
I’ve gone too far now.
I’ve left them all behind
to carry on my own.

Three steps:
I’ve fallen off world
into the famed abyss.
I’m walking on my own.

Four steps:
There’s no returning.
I’ve now outpaced the dark.
Beyond is nothingness.
Head into nothingness.

Tautological,
life has turned upon itself;
meaningless divides
in an infinite abyss.
Grossly underwhelmed
by our merely being here.
Understood ourselves
only long enough to see.
Wonders of this realm
we are learning splendidly.

Last step:
it’s taking me down,
a righteous melody.
There’s no returning now.
There’s no safe turning ’round.

Nothing,
it’s what I’ve passed through,
to overcome my stake
in all these human ways.
This hollow dream pervades.

END TRANSMISSION