IMPLICATIONS OF THE STARS - THE CAMPFIRE DIALOGUES

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Submitted Date 09/18/2021
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"Yet, everything ends, and these special moments would lose their significance should we be able to cling to them endlessly. Eventually reality sets in, and you find yourself back on Earth, subject to its demands and the demands of your human mind and body. And, as humans, we are frail and vulnerable. We are thrust into this absurd existence and have no choice but to make sense of it. The trouble is, there's no sense to be made. The very structure of being is paradoxical; life is just an infinite, fluctuating chain of contradictions, our minds constantly at irresolvable odds with themselves. It seems the more critically you think about life, the more obscure and unreasonable it becomes. The solutions to our deepest desires, those longings for clarity and certainty, are simply not there. Yet we raise our towers of confidence upon them regardless, inevitably to fall."

 

"It almost seems like a cruel game. We are bound to this human condition, a condition inextricable of this yearning for clarity, unity, and purpose, yet we are equally bound to the cold, indifferent, and chaotic universe we call home. Through some entirely arbitrary means, consciousness arose on this planet and a monkey called itself 'I.' And now here we are, a fluke in a vast cosmic soup. We are quite literally jelly zapping itself into hallucinating reality. Our minds and everything within them are just illusions we've tricked ourselves into believing for biological reasons, for protection, for reproduction. Yet this has become a quite sophisticated illusion, and now we long for more than food, sex, and basic protection. We've evolved to the point where we are never satisfied. We've got a taste of what we can be, this fantastic cosmic machine we're a part of, and now we want it all. Yet understanding this universe is a luxury we'll never have. The more we know, the more we know we don't know. Answers are always eluding us, the essence of existence always transcending us, so we engage in this endless game of cat and mouse, which can end with either the cat catching a decoy, because the mouse never even truly existed, or sitting alone in the dark, running its mind around in circles while it tries to grapple with the absurdity of its existence. Then it either kills itself, or continues the chase. In these moments, the stars become less of a chorus and more of a taunt, reminding you of your insignificant place in a meaningless universe; reminding you that just as suddenly as you arrived here, you'll be dead; that eventually the earth will wither away, and the stars will stop shining, and everything you ever lived for, or hoped to live for, will vanish. And then you think, or perhaps more so you feel, 'what's the point?'"

An excerpt from "Implications of the Stars," the debut entry in a new project I'm working on: The Campfire Dialogues.

https://thecampfiredialogues.wixsite.com/campfiredialogues

 

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