The meaning of life, as I see it

“Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice,” wrote Robert Frost.

It was not until I was finalising this story that a connection occurred to me -- the poet’s own name adds an intriguing echo of connotation to this particular one-stanza marvel, does it not?

#SimulationTheory… but I digress.

△△△

There have been a quite a few instances now when I was absolutely certain I’d experienced something for which I can later find no corroborative evidence in the Newtonian World.* This typically takes the form of a memory that I’ve read something that sparked my interest, then wishing to revisit the original for the purpose of attribution or the like, and subsequently finding no trace of what I’d read.

“Was it a dream?” sang Jared Leto.

This in itself represents another connotation that trembles the threads of my spiderweb-intermind, considering the release date of Dune, and the role Chani plays in my own take on determinism. (Nota bene for the uninitiated: a key character is named Leto.)

Dear Jared, mon compatriote inconscient, I have not even a photograph of which to avail myself as evidence.

Only my living memories.

When these conflict with the present/[perfect], one cannot help but sympathise with all the ‘loonies’ that society locks up. Very recently (relative to the time of writing), I was one of them myself. I already had a rather negative view of psychiatry, but that was before my own experience of how remarkably shite Sydney’s ‘acute care’ of ‘high-dependency’ mental patients is.

There is a point I am building to, and fuck knows it’s the end of all things for a person, psychiatry being merely one of them.

I beg your understanding and forgiveness, dear reader, if what follows is not true of your universe; in mine, I promise there was once an ancient Egypt, and in that bygone aeon, a god named Anubis arbitrated the process of death.

△△△

I read somewhere [or maybe I dreamed?] that millennia ago in that desert nation, it was said that one’s admission to the afterlife was decided on the basis of how one could answer two questions.

The first was: did you bring joy?

The second: did you find joy?

△△△

To be sure, this proposition carries with it dangerous complications. What if a person is so damaged that they can only truly feel joy when hurting another? What if one sacrifices one’s own joy to care for a broken loved one?

At my worst, I routinely focus on something I heard from Marilyn Manson:

“When I’m God, everyone dies.”

If I was actually Anubis, however, my approach would be to consider first the intentions of the deceased. Surely no self-respecting deity would get hung up on debating minutiae. To me, there are obvious instances when people ‘forget the message and worship the creed’; it is imperative, then, to stipulate that these are artefacts of people.

Not of gods.

△△△

And so we return, patient reader, to that most urgent unspoken question.

If you were to die right now, how would you fare in this crucible?

I, for one, am proud to say that for years, decades, there were regrets; plenty of reasons why, facing a jackal-face, I would cringe at my failure, and be gripped by the terror of what eternity might await me.

But today, the love of those about whom I care most deeply, profoundly, demonstrates that I am not nothing. Mister Spock himself might say, “That is simply illogical.”

△△△

I have succeeded in bringing joy.

This might make me a bit like Mother Teresa (if foul-mouthed and packing a chain gun), because being aware of bringing joy does also fill me with joy.

In my opinion, the universe is infinitely more complex than the hubris of humans dictates. So why can’t it be that I, a mere worm in the grand scheme of things, cannot embody the qualities, while alive, that might grant me a blissful afterlife?

△

△

△

*Explanatory note: I use specific terms to differentiate between the four layers of awareness or consciousness or reality or whatever else you might call these planes of experience which I frequent. Here is the current list.

Newtonian World -- macro-scale physical reality. You know, ordinary waking life.

Virtual World -- cyberspace. Simply the reality of online interaction.

Land of Dreams -- whatever that universe is to which we travel while dreaming in sleep.

Invisible World -- the foundational information matrix that underlies the Newtonian World, and all the other realities, while also arising from them. While there are similarities, it is ultimately different to the ‘Upside-down’ of Stranger Things.

I conceptualise it a lot more like the Grid of Tron and its sequel; although I don’t see it, per se, it feels to me like a geometric universe of pure math. @Max Tegmark, I wept with joy and identification while reading your extraordinarily powerful book about math being the fundamental nature of all things. You make Stephen Hawking look like a fifth-grader, as the analogy goes.