Sometimes, to scream seems like the only hope i have for eternal life; to scream and have the vibrations reverberate throughout the universe until it vanishes. How terrible it is that this hope is so callously dashed in the next sentence. How terrible that the universe will end. Will humans be there in the end? I suppose not. It seem we’re not very likely to make it past another generation or so. Oh well-- it wouldn’t really matter, then, if my scream did reverberate forever and the universe never ended; there wouldn’t be any humans to recognize it, analyze it and understand what it is that I was saying. To be honest, I wouldn’t even be able to explain if someone were to hear me the second I was screaming-- they probably would’t ask me either. I’ve only screamed a few times in my life. The ones i can remember were late at night on the side of desolate roads where i wouldn’t be asked to give an explanation; which was haunting. I almost wished the moon would pivot in space, reveal a mouth, two eyes and ears then ask me “now what’s all this about?” In either instance, my answer would have been alternating uncertainty about my future and loneliness. I might have even expressed discontent in my life condition. The moon might have responded “you control your own conditions,” but that’s only becase the moon represents society and the generalized other. I’m glad the moon just stayed the moon; a lifeless, crater-riddled celestial body incapable of empathy. I was jealous of it.
But here i sit now, tense and distraught. I’m not taking initiative in my life; what makes this worse is that if i were to set any goals for myself they would be social constructions of what other people value. My entire being is dependent on these others and what I think they want from me; without them, I couldn’t conceptualize myself. But, as it is, I see myself as a lonely, scared, miserable wretch. This is because I am not living up to their expectations-- or at least I assume not. My father tells me that all he expects from me is to “be happy” and “be the best you can at whatever you are,” whatever that means. I think I’d rather be expected to become a convicted felon than a “happy” person; at least felony is a definable and achievable condition. The only word more vague and meaningless than “happiness” is “love”.
So, I’m not happy-- I’m roughly the opposite, although that is a contradiction of terms. I don’t try to be happy, because I know it’s impossible. The people looking for happiness have just transposed the term onto the concept of God and made a religion of hedonism. They give offerings to their God in the form of unrealized self-disdain and misunderstood feelings of guilt, and most of them lack so much in introspection that they still attribute this to original sin, i.e. being human. They don’t even feel foolish when they worship the old gods. They don’t realize that human existence is that of God-in-Becoming; even though they relate to themselves as such.
It is this becoming God that troubles me and makes me want to scream. It is the desire to Be and to Know. Because we are conscious we cannot escape it, but we are liable to hide ourselves from this truth. Our individual-self (the Ego) only insofar as it is experienced by others. It is their reaction to this experience which enables us to make hypotheses as to our actual existence, and our behavior is the way we test these hypotheses. We are desperate to understand how others experience us because it is the closest we can come to experiencing ourselves. The only way, however, to run a successful psychological experiment is to maintain a control group, and in our private experiment, the Other (society) is seen, contrary to nature, as such. We treat it as a static monolith from which we read our name and Being. It tells us what we are and can become, but we look to individuals in our life to refute what the Other is telling us about ourselves. This is our second misstep in our search for the the true Self (Being), because we alter the random sample, deliberately or otherwise, to demonstrate not the truth, instead merely the opposite of what the Other has said. We do this out of necessity, in order to create meaning for ourselves and the only way to create meaning is by transcending the contingencies of Being and Consciousness. We use our consciousness of the Other to create our own Being and since this Self is unconscious and mute, we ask individual others to view it. Our Being thus becomes a shrine to the Becoming-God our Consciousness wants but can never realize. It is an empty shrine, where we wander until we forget the Being’s relation to the Self.
In essence, I am at the shrine of my Becoming-God tonight. And instead of lighting candles or screaming, I am wondering why I have come because I fail to recognize my Self at its alter to destroyed contingency. In the past I’ve laid down decisions I have made, actions I have taken, as so many animal sacrifices and lit them on fire. I’ve consulted my Being as to what to do and what to think about my life. Tonight I am unconcerned with this. My notion is to burn down the temple; vanquish my Being through overwhelming Consciousness. I want to deny my Self and its inevitable destruction in an unfeeling universe by destroying it through contemplation. Why should I slowly creep toward death, when it seems the only moment in life which is coherent and understandable? Why extend life? What is worth experiencing? What drives me on? The answer, again, is the illusion that I will once and for all deduce the Self from my interactions with others and recognize in it a transcendence of Being and Consciousness. I want to profess my Godhood, and in so doing enable myself to postpone death, until the final end of the Universe. I see my death as oneness and God, the gentle ebbing of all energy in the Universe into nothing, which is the ultimate meaning of life. All meaning is destroyed in the burning out of the Universe, and in my becoming-God I witness the destruction of all meaning, the only true meaning. Until that moment, the end of my human life is simply the snuffing out of a candle, or Consciousness. Forever after, my body is a waiting room to annihilation.
To destroy the shrine is to delineate nature and its synthesis with the human mind. This is not a cognitive parlor trick, but an active acknowledgment of reality using the body. I stand beside the charred ruins of what I built in my mind and am unaware of this fact as it simultaneously ceases to exist. This forgetting is impossible in death, because death is without Consciousness and there is no sense of loss. Therefore, I can only appreciate the fact that I have destroyed my Self in becoming something new while I live; a different, untested Self. I have thus oscillated to the opposite of Consciousness and become Being. I can no longer view myself and depend on others reactions to establish my new Ego. At the same time, my Consciousness is outside my Being, gathering stones for a new temple. My Being will take on the sheath of Consciousness at the entrance and commune once more in the act of becoming-God.