Endless Pointless?
If I disagree, it's because, technically, Mohammed has to wait until Jesus takes a swing at him. Mohammed can only fight as long as Jesus is coming at him, and about the only thing I can think of that would cause
that would be if someone whispered in Jesus' ear that Mohammed was a moneylender.
I'm a real existentialist now!
Honestly, that's one of the dangers of that "logical atheism" that I've spent so many words on. It's why I fled to Sisyphanism; it's one step short of Nihilism, which is not conducive to my vitality.
It's one of the reasons why I believe that humanity does, indeed, have a purpose. The whole living scheme seems otherwise pointless, though I reconciled
that with the comfort that life is not so much a random chance as a specific necessity of the Universe. It is possible for matter to be assembled so that it "lives".
In which case, I'm a fan of the notion that we ought to stick around as a species for as long as we can. It's not so much that the Universe needs
us specifically, but rather something to fill this particular state of matter (life) and this particular state of life (self-consciousness). Given that if we break down the living phenomenon to its utmost core scientifically, it merely means that we have proven scientifically what is self-evident, that a condition called life
is, indeed, possible.
The next time you're in a pleasantly-altered state of mind, even if it's just brought on by pretty lights (I was getting high off sunlight today; pretty wild) think about the electrical currents in your brain in a strictly scientific manner. Go ahead and postulate fictitiously as much as your fancy will. That's part of the point. And, no, drugs or sunshine aren't necessary, but I would be lying if I said I wasn't on drugs the first time I started joyously trying to toy with my brain electricity as a matter of will.
It works. Mildly. I mean, any tripper will tell you that they can (to various degrees, and with varying degrees of honesty in the claims) "control" their hallucinations when on drugs. I generally don't hallucinate, though. My brain fires off like starbirth. So I'm largely left with a delightfully critical game of how-to-tweak-the-psyche. Trippy lights and good music help. In fact, I can actually set off what seems to be that "God center" of the brain, and what should actually be taken from that is that, while I can use
P. pelliculosa, Christmas lights, and comfortable music to create an awareness of the immediate proximity of a female ebullience that bleeds with all the love of a wounded conscience ...
Welcome home, welcome home, children, and you can almost hear it. It's a big, chemically-induced cosmic hug, to be honest. But that's the thing. Having played with that particular portion of my brain to delightful good, I learned much about how humans create gods, and why. It's almost instant anthropomorphization, just add mushrooms and water. But it's why I keep a goddess in my company in the first place, and why she keeps me--that this goddess is a psychological phenomenon only is something that I've even discussed in those topics of "my error"° in which I defended atheism.
In the end, though, it is a critical component motivating my notion that people create gods.
It is also a critical component in my understanding that our living experience is merely an electrical phenomenon.
Which did, in fact, contribute to my descent toward Nihilism, but not so much as one might expect. Trying to examine the moment while living it--now
that inspires Nihilism.
I think that
understanding (not merely
perceiving)° that pointlessness is a necessary component of that magical "enlightenment" that all religions pursue° in one fashion or another.
The point of which is that I encourage you to take yourself seriously when you say,
there's really no point to anything, is there.
Once you are sure you're perceiving it, well, the fun begins.
Some people think I don't have a sense of humor, and I can well understand why this is. But did you ever watch
Mork & Mindy? Do you recall the episode where Mork got up and told bad jokes at an audition, and he asked the bigwig why he wasn't laughing? The bigwig pointed to his chest and said, "It's in here, babe." That's actually where I've bottled my sense of humor. Otherwise, I wouldn't ever stop laughing. It does, eventually, become problematic to not stop laughing.
But ... I offer you this, the 14th Psalm (or Lie) of Perdurabo:
Onion-Peelings
The Universe is the Practical Joke of the General at the Expense of the Particular, quoth FRATER PERDURABO, and laughed.
But those disciples nearest to him wept, seeing the Universal Sorrow.
Those next to them laughed, seeing the Universal Joke.
Below these, certain disciples wept.
Then certain laughed.
Others next wept.
Others next laughed.
Next others wept.
Next others laughed.
Last came those that wept because they could not see the Joke, and those that laughed lest they should be thought not to see the Joke, and thought it safe to act like FRATER PERDURABO.
But though FRATER PERDURABO laughed openly, He also at the same time wept secretly; and in Himself He neither laughed nor wept.
Nor did he mean what he said.
In the end, it is all rather pointless. Perdurabo's lies, incidentally, form one of the highest expressions of Western theopsychology.° They also form one of the most striking testaments of theopsychological perversity.°
In the meantime, there is a specific advantage to discussing the differences 'twixt people. We're all in this together. It's quite obvious that working together we produce more pleasure amid the pointlessness. I mean, sure, certain pleasures have been around for ages, but I certainly could not, without the modernity achieved by cooperation amid the pointlessness, have managed to hop from one T&A bar to another up and down the I-5 corridor in Oregon, dropping an average of $1000 a month of other people's money in order to maintain the habit long enough to include amid that expense the feeding and entertaining dancers while pausing here in my memory to wonder about the poor schmuck who had to serve me breakfast at 3:30 in the morning for the benefit of pointlessness. That isn't sarcastic, either. The Universe is the Practical Joke of the General at the Expense of the Particular.°
Such are the first things that come to mind about the pointlessness of it all. I've often thought
that should be the book I write, but it's painfully obvious that so many people have tried before me, and I'm quite sure that when I transcend that cacophony of Nihilist-fearing psychobabble, nobody will give even two-hundred pages of it any consideration beyond the effort to gun me down in the streets.°
Christ ... (If I might be forgiven ... that is, if I might be forgiven using a
theological term as a declaration. Oh, hell.)
Fuck ... it would seem my footnotes are getting nearly as long as the post itself. On that note, I'll be along, now ....
Notes
° My error: So some say. Oh, well.
° Understanding/Perceiving: I make this distinction because, well, heck, I don't understand the sense of pointlessness that I perceive. If I ever do, be assured I'll let everybody know.
° Enlightenment: Strangely, religions tend to create a sense of purpose, act as a bulwark against the very perception of pointlessness that must take place before one can even know that there is a pointlessness to understand .... Um, yeah. But--they're religions. What, short of living paradox, can we expect? Does it inherently work against the necessary components of its attainment? Sure, call it a religion. Or a "free society". Interesting juxtaposition. Hmmm ....
° Theopsychology: Yes, I'm inventing a word,and no, it does not describe an alleged discipline. "Sociopolitical", for instance, and theopsychological as I've invented it ....
° Theopsychological perversity: One could make the joke, What do you call a Christian Sufi who tries way too hard? Perdurabo. It is a fair conclusion that Perdurabo, as hard as he chased enlightenment, could never manage to exscind certain accretions, and the result is, when we look at the various personas of Aleister Crowley, outright frightening.
° Universe/Joke ... um ...: No, I don't mean it any more than, well I have no idea what Perdurabo meant with any of it. See the pattern repeating here? But who isn't sympathetic to the idea of life being a sick joke? Or, at least, who in Western culture at least isn't aware of the notion of life being a sick joke? If there's one thing about Perdurabo that I can appreciate, it's that he understood the idea that things can get so ridiculous that you'll never stop laughing.
° Gun me down in the streets: It's possible, I suppose. On the one hand, look at how pissed off people can get at me here. To the other, there's nothing about that that is unusual to me. To yet another, we'll do an experiment sometime. I'll PM you a bunch of words and definitions, and then spring them on a newbie. I do, in fact, use words in a specific way that tends to piss people off, but I'm also convinced that they're pissed because they choose to recognize a specific definition of the word, and that definition always pertains directly to them. For instance, watch how flexibly I use the word integrity when I'm absolutely blazing across the boards. Every time I use it, I'm using it correctly according to a dictionary and the fact that I know damn well how to do this with words, as well as the fact that ... well, that gets even longer, but there are times when those words that people choose to take sharply are the most appropriate words. Really, if I turned two- or four- or ten-hundred pages of post-Existential, post-Christian, anti-Nihilistic, Camusite Sisyphanism on people in all my lexical glory, do you really think the readers are going to stand for it? Maybe 8% of the people who bother to buy the book in the first place will finish reading it without the craven need to kill me.
thanx,
Tiassa
