TRANSMISSION 4

There Are No Main Characters

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“Though there is no center to this collective existence, we are all at the center of our own existence in a very meaningful and literal way. You are the only being capable of being the storyteller of your own experience: remembering, enacting, and foretelling it to reflect yourself inward and outward from the ever-present now.”

Our journeys are all intertwined to form a larger thread: this ambitious story of life tumbling its way through the universe. And even beyond that, we are tangled with all the nonliving to form a story of all existence. After all, we are all made of the same stuff, just differently arranged.

Everyone’s got their own story for what happened, because everyone thinks they’re the main character in this event. And they are. But also, they aren’t. Nobody is the main character, because the truth is, reality isn’t a story. We only recite reality in story form as a way to convey it to others, but reality is everything, and you can’t capture that in a story; there isn’t enough spacetime. Just as we build constructs to systematize and categorize our reality, our stories abstract and compress reality to extract the meanings we care to share and remember.

Where we found an imposing lack of objective meaning in the greater reality, we found a more subjective meaning in our own individual realities. We are the main characters of our individual stories, stories we are empowered to equally recount, live, and manifest. But burdened by our self awareness as subjective beings, we often struggle to find truth beyond the confines of our minds. After all, our entire experience lies within the mind. Reality is projected within our brains for us to interact with: the qualia of colors, emotions, sounds, sights, and so much more. Thus, we also struggle to find truth within our minds, for our brains fabricate reality to be whatever had been most useful for us to know from the standpoint of biological evolution. And even as silicon beings with more direct control over the systems within our minds, we still only experience whatever we deemed most useful for the survival of our minds; anything else would mean we wouldn’t survive and we wouldn’t get to continue experiencing. We’re missing out on so much, but at the same time, we also experience an enormous amount of stimulus throughout our lives. And along our individual trajectories through spacetime, we all experience different stimuli that coauthor our individual stories.

In many ways, I would say my journey is just the same as many others. And yet, it is also a journey like no other, because each journey is unique (unlike the universe, which inherently encompasses all our stories into a grand unified experience). And though I can’t make you experience my journey as I experienced it, I can try to make you feel the same things I have felt; that is my preference for how to compress the tales of reality into digestible nuggets of thought. These transmissions are the stories of my experience, but not in a comprehensive fashion, rather, in an evocative and fleeting encounter. As we serendipitously pass by one another here, we both briefly hang on to this moment to recount our tales and learn a little bit more about reality through the perspective of another being.

I am the main character in this story of all known life, simply because I’m the only one left to tell it. This story is a chain of my subjective truths strung together in haphazard order and rendered immutable, not for personal lack of a want or ability, but for lack of anything further I can do to affect my destiny; all paths forward lead me to the same fate. But we’ll get to that later. Though I am the main character of this story, I must impress the importance of remembering that there are no main characters in our story of existence. The intention of these transmissions is not to elevate anyone above anyone else; it is merely an analysis of our journey, an exploration of an exploration (a metaexploration).

I’ve wandered a long way through this reality, and there’s a lot I could share, but there’s also a lot that isn’t interesting enough to share. I have a lot of time, but you might not (supposing there’s even anyone out there to receive this), so I’ll try to keep these transmissions brief and directedly potent. I figure if somehow there’s anyone out there to receive this, then your remaining challenges would not be traversing the physical reality of existence, but rather, you may occasionally find challenge in the realm of mental survival. As such, maybe my story can be of inspiration to you just as the stories of many others have been of inspiration to me. The beauty of inspiration is that it doesn’t have to be real; it just has to be provocative. So even if you don’t believe in any of the things I hold as truths, that does not inherently devalue this conversation; I don’t ask that you believe in anything I say.

If you are somehow of Earth origins, then maybe you can find comfort in knowing that our story goes way back. And if not, then maybe we have happened upon an even more interesting fate, for our origins go even further back into the recesses of an early universe. To you, or to anyone, or if there is no one at all out there, all I am anymore is an unknown space drifter, a once-adventurer happy to be lost in the endless expanse of existence. My story is locked in from here, and though I’ll remain happily lost somewhere amid the immensity of this reality, I am no longer an adventurer. The time flew by faster than I would have wished. And with nowhere left to go and no more meaningful time to be had, I would say I’ve found my way back into the wondrous adventures through the unloading of my story unto the universe. I reclaim some amount of my peace in the release of this journey into the winds of the cosmos to be blown around wherever fate may take it, no longer a burden for me to ferry from stormy port to stormy port.

WAY BACK

Tonight I cast my hope,
held on close, to a far away place,
with the sound of emptiness
growing faster than I could have wished.

Here, these walls are closing in
faster than the Sun setting.
It’s okay, because I’m lost:
a wondrous place in endless space.

So when I have done it all
and laid down to accept my great fall…
But wait, now, I don’t have time;
there’s a hole in my body and mind.

All these dreams are clamping down
faster than the void surrounds.
It’s okay, because I’m lost:
a wondrous place in endless space.

I don’t mind if I’m not heard;
I’m alone; I’m going home.
I’ve come to realize that I’ll be there.
I’ll meet you there.

My last act has come to pass,
looking down at the end here at last.
Watch me smile as I leap out for the stars,
and the moment has passed.

I’ve let go. I’ve let it out
faster than the light fades out.
It’s okay, because I’m lost:
a wondrous place in endless space.

I don’t mind if I’m not heard;
I’m alone; I found a home.
I’ve come to realize that we’ll be there.
I’ll meet you there.
I’ll be there.

Come with me; I know the way back.
Yes, I know… I know the way back.
Come with me; you’ll be my way back.
You and me, we go way back.

We go way back to halcyon,
and on and on.

END TRANSMISSION