TRANSMISSION 6

Our Personal Horizons

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“We are all limited in our understanding of and influence on the universe. Imperatively, we must be deliberate to design our realities so we can go full force toward the depths of our known and unknown passions. The dreams we seek do not inherently manifest themselves, nor can the thoughts even begin to form in our minds simply by willing them. We are the propellant for actualizing our dreams; life is an active participation experience. Death is the catastrophe of passive attendance. If we find ourselves not fully living, then we’re just en route to dying.”

I came from Earth. Statistically, most of life as we knew it died on Earth as well, but that won’t be the case for me. I’ll die here on an unnamed moon, orbiting an unnamed planet, orbiting an unnamed star, orbiting through an unnamed super-massive black hole galaxy.

The local galaxies coalesced into a single galactic form not long after the last other living being died. That’s around the time when I stopped giving names to stars and planets, simply because there didn’t seem to be any reason to. And this galaxy is the last one in my visible universe, so to me, it is simply “the galaxy”. Beyond that, I now just exist where I exist, and I go where I need to go. The places and things I care about are cataloged as indexes in the library of my mind with no need for names, because there is no one else around who would necessitate the sharing of knowledge. Although, if I had to name this galaxy, I might call this my personal Oyster Galaxy. It holds the deepest truths I have come to find, but I have only been able to reach this point through tremendous adversity.

I haven’t been studious about keeping time, but from my recollection of events prior, I would estimate it’s been about 15 billion years since the last other person died. That may seem like a lot of time to be alone, but you’ve got to realize that by this point, we’d already been on this journey for a trillion years (meaning 15 billion years only accounts for 1.5% of my life).

For some perspective, life only existed on Earth for an estimated 6 billion years, with the biological humans only existing for roughly 3 million years, though the lines are blurry at both ends. Earth only existed for maybe 12 billion years before it was swallowed by the Sun’s red giant phase (preceding its life forms by 0.5 billion years and outlasting them by 5.5 billion years).

But back to the present… It’s hard to say exactly when the last other person died, because time can only be calculated relative to a reference point, and around the trillion-year mark, expansion occluded any access to the cosmic microwave background (our reference for measuring time all the way back to the big bang). But even if I had perfect data (or if I cared to implement another way to track time), I don’t know if there’s much point in trying to be exact. From my personal frame of reference, I didn’t experience as many years as compared to something that stayed static in relation to the cosmic microwave background, because I spent a nontrivial amount of time traveling at high speeds and in high gravitational fields (affecting the perceived flow of time from different reference points); I’ve “lost” at least a few hundred million years here and there that I could have saved staying static (though, being too static incites death in other ways). So don’t take my crude timeline remembrances as absolute truths (here or in any of my transmissions); they are only to help convey the expanse of our ventures.

The scale of our time in existence was a product of our scaled minds and experiences. As we pushed beyond our perceived physical and mental boundaries, we grew into the shadows of our personal horizons. Beyond the horizon, these personal shadowspheres contained the landscapes of our deepest nightmares, but equally, they contained our deepest dreams. Only those who were brave enough to delve into their personal abyss were also able to delve the torment of the physical abyss, for all that ever existed to find in the physical abyss was the self. Thus, to meaningfully undertake any adventure required a high level of commitment to our personal shadowspheres.

No life seems to have emerged in this galaxy during my stay so far, and no other humans but my group traveled to this area of the universe. We jumped to this sector of space at the time because it seemed to offer more promise than the previous cosmic neighborhood we occupied. It’s funny to think that I’m the only person to have stepped foot in this particular galactic formation. It’s funny because now I get to die very much alone; I came all this way and put in all this effort just to die the same as everyone else, but also differently from everyone else. I guess I don’t really “get” to die, I’m being forced to die by the laws of the universe. “Get” would imply a privilege. But there is nothing inherently beneficial about death; there is only nothingness in death.

Nothingness is not suffering, nor is it peace, nor is it beauty. Back on Earth, humanity often assigned meaning upon (and in place of) such emptiness in attempt to idolize their impermanent existences into permanent reliquaries. While such meanings were only ever futilely contrived artificialities, I completely understand how they came about. But we quickly outgrew them, even when we were still Earthlings yearning to leave. And now, as equally as we once found ourselves distanced from Earth, I find myself completely removed from the dreams and fears once held by pretty much anyone ever.

Though I feel quite alone to be on my own in this galaxy, in reality, I would have likely been alone anywhere, because there is a very realistic probability that no other humans are left. But the humanity within me feels safer when I get to be nostalgic about my experiences (good and bad), because I think that’s just part of having evolved as a human trying to make sense of a universe that doesn’t care if we figure out how it all works or what it all means. We’re designed to find comfort in our unique stories, even if we haven’t earned our place in those stories, even if we were simply born into the middle of someone else’s story, even once we realize there’s no real grand overarching story going on.

That feeling of needing to be the main character of our own story led us to tribalism on Earth, where we were blinded to each other’s stories and often wholly unwilling to work with one another in favor of greedily chasing status (too many people yearning to be the biggest character on the biggest stage that would recognize the status they purported). We fought a lot. That’s why some of us eventually left. We left behind the ones who wanted to fight over that stupid rock hanging in space, that place we called Earth. And though it was just a stupid rock, it was also a special rock, for it birthed the only life I’ve known to ever exist in the universe; it’s the origin of our story. But beyond that, it was just a rock. There were many more just like it.

Before we left Earth, we grew increasingly frustrated by the petty power grabs and short-term thinking plaguing widespread humanity. So many people convinced themselves (and others) that their meaning in life was to hoard imaginary wealth and get into the global spotlight; they egged each other on to create artificial power dynamics, and they spent entirely too much time chasing the things someone else said was cool to chase. But even if they were remembered 100 years beyond their deaths, even if they amassed all the wealth in the world, they failed to see that their empires would eventually turn to dust. They failed to grasp at anything more meaningful than manipulating the zeitgeist. Their disenfranchised hopes were the products of their own artificial games with artificial rules and artificial prizes, utterly unfulfilling and exploitedly addictive. They hacked their environments and even their own minds into operant conditioning chambers to forever chase empty and impermanent chemical joy. The emptiness of it all made them crave it even more, and it soon became all they knew, so they shoveled it into their minds at faster and faster rates to try to abate the numbness they felt.

As you can guess, it didn’t turn out that well for a lot of people who couldn’t figure out how to escape the detrimental amplification cycle (the negative positive-feedback loop): the claustrophobia of their unchecked, devolving personal horizons causing their reality to further inflict them with the suffering they had grown unable to see. These artificial constructs exploited everyone equally, from the most vulnerable to the institutionally educated. And so the solution would have been real education toward critical thinking and first-principles problem solving, but the ruling class was equally uneducated in this way. Compounded with the shortsighted cash grabbing of short-lived lives, they perpetuated these controlling games upon one another.

The populations went uneducated to truer realities, so they could only elect representatives and consume content that accurately represented their own intellects (as much as the populations would profess innocence to contributing to the problems). The scales became more and more tipped away from representatives who could better their collective situations. Like emperors throwing their own populations to the gladiator arena, the world loved to watch itself burn if it meant they could find a way to feel good about it for the moment. And some of us had had enough of that. So we left. Simple as that. It wasn’t simple to leave, but we simply sought freedom from the mass hysteria we tried but failed to denormalize. We escaped and explored the universe for deeper truths, leaving behind the infighting to advance our adversary to the unknown and to entropy (the force describing both the enactment and fragmentation of our existence).

Eons later, I find myself staring up at a night sky void of other galaxies. The sky does not show me the Milky Way, home to Earth. I cannot see my origin story; I can only tell of it: a place of many memories (both my own and others’) and of significantly more lost memories (both my own and others’). The universe has expanded so much now that the light from other galaxies has redshifted into oblivion, the chasm too great for light itself to even traverse. I know those galaxies are surely out there, but I can never send a message to them, let alone reach them with my body. To me, those galaxies effectively no longer exist.

If I cared to escape this moon, planet, star, and black hole, there wouldn’t be anywhere else to go. This physical horizon has enclosed upon my personal horizons as there becomes nothing more to do. If I escaped this galaxy, I would float through emptiness until we disappeared from each other forever.

If I wanted to create another being to accompany me (which would be an entirely self-interested endeavor at this point), I could never convince them that other galaxies existed, because there is no evidence anymore. Such a being’s personal horizon would forever be obscured by this physical horizon. But more importantly, I couldn’t allow myself to bring someone into existence to share my burden; this is mine to carry to the ends of the universe; I wouldn’t will it upon anyone else. I have unwittingly made that mistake in the past, and I will not make it again.

There is nowhere to go with this burden, and so even though I pushed so hard to reach the escape velocity of death, I’ve realized it’s a quest not too dissimilar to traveling faster than light. No matter how much energy we dump into the endeavor, we can’t outrun it; we can’t even match it. We almost can, and that’s what makes it so tantalizing; we can get so very very close. But really, we could never reach it.

I am utterly alone. And I’m okay with that.

INTO THE ABYSS

Echoed in the darkest bliss,
binded through a heartless kiss.
Kinder words I must have wished.
Raging world upon my banished list.

While fallen eyes ignore this maze,
these problems can’t avert our gaze.
And I find I can’t escape this haze
in a world of endless mainstream ways
for all our days.

Such a beautiful downfall.
Such a beautiful escape.
Such beautiful memories
of such a desolate place.

I couldn’t fight the itch today,
I’m breaking in this skin.
I’m falling in.
I didn’t stay along for this,
this medley here of souls.
I’m falling out, without a doubt.

Would you fall to me?
Would you follow me?
Would we find the deep?
Would we find our weakness?

Growing separate ways in this life,
drifting slowly out of this time we had;
you don’t even know me.

Echoed in the dark abyss,
blinding night you cannot miss.
Kinder thoughts I must have missed
to rage upon a place so much like this.

END TRANSMISSION