The past is gone. It has already happened, and it will never happen again. It is a place without substance, a land of the imagination. Even though we know it happened, it isn’t real in any way. Any reconstruction we make of the past is entirely a reconstruction. The future is a land of the imagination as well. There will never be a future. I don’t have a future and you don’t have a future. We are witness to the universe right now as it exists. When we disappear, the universe will disappear as well. Yes, the universe will go on just as it did before we were aware of its existence but there will not be anyone to witness it, there will not be an awareness. It will go back to substance without form.
We don’t know that there is any intelligent life anywhere in the universe, at least not in our galaxy. We should stop grasping at straws. We need to create an entirely new understanding of what it means to be human and what it means to exist on this planet. For all of the evil that has ever happened on planet earth, for all the good that has ever been done, every despot that ever massacred its population, for every baby rescued from the Nile, everything that has ever happened in the past, which doesn’t exist has only happened here, being recycled with the raw materials of this limited resource of a planet.
I know it sounds like a broken record, everyone imagines they already know and understand. We believe we have already created all the science and technology to project our identities out into infinity, but we don’t know how to do it. We can’t really see it. We can’t really think our way out of this bizarre planet that we inhabit and this bizarre set of rules that we have constructed for our existence.
I think that one of the hardest challenges of being human is understanding how to project the experience of being human onto the past and onto each other. Frankly I don’t understand how it is possible. There are these hard limits to what people can know and how they can know and the only way around that is to connect with anyone at anywhere in recorded time and space or in real time and space.
The strange thing is that you can literally connect with almost anyone almost anywhere but what are you really connecting with? How do we make that connection and what are we connecting too? I personally think that part of the idiosyncrasies that we carry as a species is that we think we are individuals. I think that this sense that we are individuals is mostly a product of our bizarre brains because it seems clear to me that we aren’t anything like individuals.
What I am trying to unpack with each subsequent paragraph is this, I am trying to get at something about what is true, and each statement has a thousand implications but many of the thoughts we have we can at least begin to grasp at the truth of it. Then there is the consensus which forms a check in the mind and when thoughts move about back and forth in the head that mental check is there. What is that mental check, is it the internalized voice of authority? That internalized voice of fear?
Everyone is trying to get away from that fear and toward some kind of truth. What is that truth people are getting to? What does that truth mean? How can I even possess one thing, even one thought? Nothing is really mine, not these thoughts which are the product of a smothered over colonization of the human soul? I don’t believe there is a soul but there is the raw potential of a human being. What is it that we really are? How can we unpack our colonization, our own internal colonialism?
Language itself has undermined our authentic identity. I am the destroyer of language. I wish to undo language and all its implications of authority. I want to undo recorded history and the implications of western thought. I want to undermine science, I want to undermine technology, I want to overthrow history. Our history is a history of garbage, our technology is the output of a death culture which has followed the models of civilization cultivation since the beginning of Western history. It is a history that is based on subjugation, the use of overwhelming force, the erasure of the past, the subjugation of women and the arbitrary use of violence for social control and reinforcement of authoritarianism.
I am convinced that I am not an individual. My individuality is entirely an illusion. I could be any person in any house, or any refugee. Our individuality is like this piece of clothing we put on and when we take it off, we are completely naked, metaphorically, and this is really where our true state of freedom exists. When we are released from all the implications of the internalized authoritarian identity which forms the substance of western identity, that is the only place where we are truly free.
I sincerely doubt that there has ever been a generation that has experienced true freedom. I doubt that there has ever been an individual who was born free or lived a free life. I can’t imagine how we can even do it. These stumbling blocks that we have put in front of ourselves, these stumbling blocks to freedom were put there by our hunter gatherer ancestors for some reason we can only guess, and they have tripped us up ever since.
My guess is that the collective trauma which is really the legacy of our past, it is honestly the legacy of all animal past lives, that collective trauma which was the result of so much brutality in so many ways, all the brutality human beings are uniquely capable of is the substance which inspired our hunter gatherer ancestors to put these tumbling blocks in our way, which have accreted over time into language, property, religion, gender and ultimately individuality.
In my own personal imagination individuality is the aggregate of these collective stumbling blocks of trauma from multiple generations. How can it be anything else? What else can it be? If we as a species are only capable of forming maybe 150 authentic connections to other human beings among this vast macrocosm of species then how are we ever going to maneuver, we must have asked ourselves, in a world where it is necessary to live in cities that are safe for the few thousand at the beginning of civilization, where we are suddenly forced to become individuals, this shore where our legacy of ancestral wandering for two million years has been subverted for the reasons of safety and convenience?
How did we so foolishly blind ourselves into imagining that there was a personal god, an internalized authoritarian that we then lied to our children and said was connected to everything in the universe, in fact was the essence of the universe itself. Can’t we see, even through the illusion of our own false individuality, that this is a collective set of instructions. It is the dim echo of the ancestral past, the gathering of the tribes over millennia who decided whether to go forth or stay home. This is home, this is identity.
Then, according to the philosophers, there is pure reason, but how can we even begin to approach true reason, pure reason? Is there even such a thing? Writing is an experiment in the outpouring of consciousness. It is an exercise in complexity. Here is how to imagine life, at least I have a theory. Of course, my theory is totally bogus as I don’t have any evidence for my theory, and it doesn’t have any foundation, so it is just a stupid idea but here is my idea:
There is no such thing as time. Time is an illusion that we imagine. The entire universe is all happening at once, in one moment and we are barely aware of it. There is a limit to what we can understand about the universe because we experience it through the limited framework of our brains and what our brain is capable of filtering. I also have a theory that our brains were primarily designed as visual operating machines which is why we have such a bias toward vision and what we see.
Sometimes when I write my writing is absurd, especially my poetry, I am trying to get at the fundamental absurdity of life. Life doesn’t really make any sense, it doesn’t have a purpose. Things just happen and there isn’t a reason that they happen, this is the beginning of meaning. But even with this truth we still have to somehow make sense of what has happened to us. At the minimum we must survive, we must eat food, shelter ourselves and take care of our travel mates whom we may be related to or not.
Then there is place meaning, the meaning that a hill has or a mountain or perhaps a tree. This place meaning which we give a higher value to, things which become closer and closer to resembling our own identity. So for instance we feel a deeper connection with a plant than a rock and we feel closer to a cat than to a turtle. Then of course there is the other. That fetish we call a person which we have given rights and put on clothes and given an identity.
We have called that object the body and that is where we are right now. This emergent free floating desire that we call consciousness, that is the foundation of the assumptions that language attempts to replicate, this vast chasm between these useless symbols that our ancient scribes first scribbled out of pictographs, that place where we rest internalized authoritarianism and where we imagine that personal god lives, the one who is all over the Christian, Muslim and sometimes Jewish tradition, that personal God, the internalized authoritarian, the void of language, that vast chasm between the random firings of thought and the implication of the body, that is where we are right now.
The body walking down the street that doesn’t have a name. That is the truth of the world. That nameless body travelling by which you will never engage in, and all the implications of that nameless body. You have been told what that nameless body is, they are the stranger, and that is the entirety of the known world. All of those bodies in the magical world of your imagined universe. Those nameless bodies, the clones, the bringers of violence and authority. The mob which will over run the individual and trample the individual leaving them on the ground in a crumpled heap of flesh and blood.
That is the truth of the world. There are no aliens that are going to save us, we are the aliens on this planet. We are the outer space creature we are looking for from another planet and we don’t even know what we are capable of. We are multitudinous and we are capable of transforming the world into heaven on earth, we are really capable of utopia. We are capable of it because we can imagine it, and we are not individuals and because we have already had utopia and then we forgot how to access it and now we are slowly remembering. Our ancestral memories are awakening, that fantastic legacy of our wanderings, our utopia, the luxury of the infinite moment, the luxury and pure indulgence of consciousness and awareness, our treasure of connectedness.
