Two Roads to One Horizon

So I had an epiphany. One of those simple notions that alleviate some of the mental frustration that seems impossibly inexorable, but in a second, when the weight shifts, the light shines through, and the cacophony of voices recede away into a quiet whisper. I would like to highlight the fact that this epiphany, this mental alleviation, occurred on the tail end of a dialectic. Two boy-men engaged in an abstraction, and at the tail end, one boy-man struck the treasure right between the X. A simple duality; nothing more but a two-forked road where both roads lead to an answer found in the endless horizon ahead of us.

The last few weeks I’ve been facing the ill viewed, supposed worthless, approach to life found in nihilism. Basically, existence is futile, and that life is useless. Mostly Sartre being birthed by Kierkegaard, and understood by yours truly. It was completely fathomable, and more so, it just clicked. It made sense and was completely real. Many a person had come through and tried to jostle this landscape of understanding out my mind’s grasp. People shook me with arguments. Many did. But Johnnie boy came through for me, he made the abstract tangible, and I was able to come up with a solution; even if it’s just mine oh mine. A personal solution.

So check it: in regards to existence, to exist is completely meaningless. (The words I’ll continue like meaningless and so on, I’m using just as the word minus pretense and value. Think of a place where the environment was just the word. I know it’s difficult, but negate yourself from this world and all words, and that’s where I’m directing such defining terms.) A senseless void. However, in regards to life, life my friends is completely meaningful and full of value. Right, I know, nothing to jump through hoops over to understand, but for me it’s completely mind-blowing.

Existence, meaning in my own wiki definition, means everything outside personal perception. The universe and its ramparts are completely meaningless. Motions and tangible extensions and processes ever changing of nothing; a vacuous nothing of shifting energy and changing parallels. It’s completely arbitrary. No matter how many rotations occur, no matter how many walls are built, no matter how many lives arise, it means nothing. Traces of substances in a valueless void.

However, whenever existence is brought down to a single person’s perception, let’s call it a life, all these things of prior mention mean everything. The words, the definitions, the theories, the systems, the conventions, every damn piece of supposed meaning, the large bowl of understanding is what it means to live. And death being the sole defining factor of life, life then has complete total impassioned meaning. You see that is where quality is found. That’s where we gauge perception. Then take and mingle the perception of one man’s with that of another’s and that is where compromises are formed in order to create order/understanding for groups of people and there perception in order to create order. Abstractions are fought over, values in forms of substance are created, physical peripheries are created to help perpetuate further life on this earth.

I’ll misquote Pirsig when he says that whether Newton postulated and then theorized over gravity didn’t diminish or desecrate the actual motions that went along to later be defined as gravity. It’s just a state “of” with no intrinsic value. The other day I was lucky to be surrounded in the grasps of a natural world where I was watching a genteel stream rush by my eyes and I was able to smile at the thought that though the river, the water, through it’s power changes the world encompassing it, and the way the water moves and changes takes on a diadem of processes, and all the other attributes of that creek does not dissipate or change whether my mind encounters such thoughts. The water just is. The creek just is, without the words or the abstractions or the thoughts. It just is.

Now, the only way value is discerned is through understanding, the death-life ratio value, and introspective perception. If we were beasts of the field with the only ability is to lay prostate to our instincts, the scope of the universe would be as meaningless to us as the stars in the sky or the color blue. We would just be playing a role in a world without any need for understanding or any real roles. However, we do have perception and the ability to analyze cost-benefit ratios, so we gauge the world the way we see best fit. And the ironic factor is, we are nothing but beasts of the field with thinking capacities, which have slightly evolved over time and allowed us a great breadth of understanding; and yet we still play by the rules and processes of the natural world surrounding us. Inescapable, while we just try to give names to the bars and analyze the locks of the natural world imprisoning us. Whether we put a word or create an equation to the process our agency does not diminish the affect and overall uselessness to the progression of existence. It’s so damn beautiful.

It’s not a matter of one or another nor is it a war between the two. Both just coincide beautifully. A horrible paradox of complete uselessness and total value meeting in the middle to form the mind of human existence in the universe that is present in our existence.