There is only one truth. . .

. . . And it is nothing.

 

This has been my first post. Thank you very much for reading.

A bit about me?

I’m from New Zealand, I was a really happy positive out going popular child, always aware that I was adopted, always knew my birth mother though I’ve only just seen my birth father and his family including my two half-brothers I never knew I had for 38 years last week at a pre Christmas get-together (totally full on). I was the sort of child who’d invite their entire class of 40 to their 6th birthday causing all sorts of headaches for their parents (this happened).

I can only assume kids became jealous of my positive happy nature as soon after the bullying started, and didn’t end till I left school at 17 a bitter, lonely, shy and resentful teen. Forever changed, damaged by the hateful world.

Strangely enough I don’t really have much to be unhappy for, I have a lot of good things in my life.

I’m a 38 year old male and struggling cartoonist, self taught, it’s my passion though I don’t see much hope in it being anything but a pass time as it holds absolutely no value in the toxic world we live in. I only hope that when the AI singularity happens that creative people like myself find more worth, more value in the world when all the mundane jobs are gone.

Been drawing all my life though dyslexia has made things difficult in terms of actually getting anywhere in study. I feel like an intelligent person trapped in a simpleton’s mind.

Formerly a contact center agent, tech support, nothing quite like being screamed at down the phone for 8 years. Ended up punching myself in the head repeatedly, apparently for a good 5 minutes, really hard after a string of really bad calls.

I Woke up in hospital and have now been fired for stress, anxiety and ‘endangering my co-workers’. How wanting to beat myself to death endangers them is beyond me.

I was then diagnosed with severe depression and PTSD. ffs it was a contact center not a war zone and my mind still collapsed in on itself regardless.

On the plus side I’ve been happily married for 6 years though we’ve been trying for a baby since ‘I do’. Alls working on both teams, we just have ‘unexplained infertility’.

I lost one of my old school friends because his wife became jealous that her daughter found us more fun than her (I mean come on!), My friends wife ended up saying something really hurtful to my wife along the lines of  ‘she’s not your daughter, just because you cant have children of your own’. . . I cant remember the reset, needless to say that friendship is dead. . Really not happy about that as she was a real cool girl and I lost my only friend.

I’m adopted and my wife is training to be an early childhood teacher so when I find stable work we’ll be great candidates to be adoptive parents.

 

Until further notice (trans-humanism anyone?) I know that death is inevitable. I know I don’t want to die and that I just want the pain to die but my mind tells me that in reverse.

I used to kill this pain with alcohol, though I now find myself 6 years sober.

And now I find myself with nothing to kill this pain.

I find it hard to quiet my mind.

Mr Alan Watts helps me with that. He has lots of great philosophical discussions but here are two of my favorites:

 

 

Apologies for the below rant. As you can see I am hilariously void of answers:

For some time now I’ve found myself frustratingly aware of my ‘existence’ and ask myself  ‘is this it? Is what I am some sort of Pharisaical joke or an absurd random occurrence?’

But what is ‘nothing’?, Is it the absence of self? the de-configuration of these cells and atoms that have somehow formed themselves into a being that has formed some clumsy self awareness and is now stumbling about it’s environment wondering wtf is going on?

Is this configuration ‘me’? If I bite my nails and sever them from my finger are those nails still me? they don’t feel like me.

 

And how far does this go? If I cut off a segment of my finger is that segment still me? How about my hand or my arm? What about the rest of my body till all that’s left is my head and I get rid of that too? and my brain is somehow being kept alive in a jar, still ‘aware’. All those dis-guarded body parts still don’t feel like me, all they allowed me to do is retrieve information for my brain to process.

So how about my brain? Surely it goes by the same rules as the rest of my disgarded physical self. And once that’s gone surely I must cease to exist entirely in a mental state? With all the atoms of my body reverted back to their basic state. With my ‘mind’ now gone all that remains is a relative state of eternal nothingness.

And if time and space is truly eternal might ‘I’  become aware again in some way, shape or form? Maybe? and hopefully certainly not with the the thoughts and experiences of this life, and not necessarily in the form of a human life or an awareness that would be even remotely recognizable but awareness anew nonetheless, and to ‘me’ it’s all I know and would become familiar in what ever husk I have grown in to.

 

That is my greatest hope. Because ‘this’? this cant be all there is.

 

 

I remember as a child asking my mother “is being dead like what it was like before I was born?” from there I imagined what that would be like, I imagined nothing being black, cold and silent:

But black is the absence of colour and is a construct of our perception, therefore it is something:

And temperature is a sense our body has to tell us certain things about ourselves in relation to our environment and therefore is something too.

And silence being the absence of sound and sound being another way we perceive our existence in relation to everything else, it too is also something.

 

We as thinking, aware beings simply cannot comprehend what it is not to be thinking and aware so I don’t think this answer will ever be known.

 

So having established that death is the absence of self, thought, consciousness and perception leaving only the base physical elements that allowed that awareness to be.

I’m brought back to the state of mental nothingness that I can only experience by proxy in the way that my childhood imagination could: Where I could only try to  ‘remember’ in a flimsily relative way what it was like to have not existed, what it was like before being born into this mind and what it was like to not have existed in a conscious form for how ever many potentially timeless ages that may have come before.

 

Then there’s the paradox that ‘nothing’ is ever physically gone in this universe, its all been used and re-used in an ‘endless’ cycle till eventually the laws of Thermo dynamics will see the physicality we know eventually crawl into an entropic eternal halt where nothing can ever be aware again. So inevitably entropy wins out, even if the physical universe remains there will be no energy left for consciousness to be.

And without awareness there is no pain so is it really all that bad?

 

I just want to wake up and for it to all have been a dream.

 

Thank you again for reading.

 

May this life and whatever comes next be kind to you.