Men’s Search for Meaning
There are many tools for self-exploration. Psychotherapy. Meditation. Sometimes my tool of choice is LSD. It is immediate, impactful and certainly brings results. Last night I decided to go on an acid trip to try and solve an inner feeling on emptiness that I’ve been having for a while.
The trip started out OK. I let go of some of my defenses. To be honest, as with most trips, something has been repressed within my mind and I went to seek it out. Turns out I was looking for meaning.
The following writings are a description of what I’ve experienced. It is my personal thoughts, and I feel the need to make this disclaimer because what I’m about to write is presumptuous and pseudo-scientific.
The Construct of Existence
LSD has a way of showing you things. To your perception, the nature of time and space itself distorts, allowing you a different vantage point on life than you are used to. And this, sometimes, brings you to certain conclusions. That is what I’ve experienced.
As a human being, I felt the construct of existence unveil itself to me. I am not a mathematician or physicist, but here is what I saw.
The universe is a construct that ranges from negative infinity to positive infinity. When you are born, you come out of negative infinity and travel a path towards the positive. You, the observer, are the focal point, the convergence. Every moment you live gets committed to the infinite flow behind you. Every moment that is yet to happen is part of the infinite flow ahead.
Yet when you pass through, to either side, you end up in the same place. In your imagination, if you go to the end of the positive, you find yourself in the negative, and vice versa. If you theoretically travel forward, you will find yourself back. The construct is cyclical. Like a buffer overflow (coders will get it).
If you die, you will travel to the same source from which you came, infinity.
I know this is pseudoscience at best, but this is what I saw.
Finding Meaning
I was standing in my shower booth and taking in all of the sounds around me. Feeling the water rushing on top of me, bathing me. LSD has a way of bypassing the natural input filter of your mind, allowing you to take in more of your surroundings — which creates a beautiful separation of sound — you can hear every individual water drop as it falls on your body, on the floor and the walls. It’s like a symphony of drops, all falling a bit differently, creating a symphony.
I then turned my head towards the shower-head and opened my mouth. I stood like that for a moment, and then I realized that I am trying to breathe in the water. I did not intend to do that, but my brain perceived it as an attempt to kill myself. That is not what I was trying to do, but it is what I thought I was doing.
At that moment, I saw the logical conclusion of the decision to breathe in water. At that moment, I saw my death.
I could spend countless lifetimes to describe that moment. The merging between life and death. The brink. To contract a single moment into the single most meaningful, most lasting infinity. To merge the past with the future by removing the focal point in the middle. How elegant.
A moment later I was scared shitless. It’s like the whole world turned into a nightmare. It took me a few seconds to regain my composure.
I found out that I did not want to die.
Life = define !death
I found meaning in the question “How do you define life?”. To me, that seems to be the best way to phrase the existential question.
There’s a more precise way for me to describe it:
Life = define !death
Death is permanent, uniform, while life is full of possibilities. Life is defined by not being dead. If death is 0, life is 1. But that’s just the basic state: Within that “1” there is an infinite array of possibilities, just like there’s the full spectrum of colors within the single color of white.
I feel like life is a dare to all of us who are alive.
It says: “Show me, show me all the ways in which you can live”. It drives us to create. To be explorers. To be risk takers. To be proactive. To love and to live, and to do the best damn job we can.
Humans find pleasure in living “well”. We like to take randomness, entropy, and sort it out. We like patterns and arranging things. We hate disorder and strive to create order in an endlessly chaotic universe. A pleasure of a job well done, that’s art. A thought, an emotion, crystallized and preserved for eternity. That’s art.
But what is art? Art is describing the indescribable. It’s looking into infinity and trying to describe what you see. And then, when you share it, you hope that someone would understand.
I suddenly understand what Hinduism is saying, about praising the divine mother. Glimpsing infinity was the most beautiful experience of my life, and I can spend a countless lifetime describing it. Was that what they were all talking about?
Life is a perpetual motion machine. Feed it, water it, and it will grow, rearranging everything it comes in contact with until there is complete order within the chaos. How beautiful of a purpose is that?
We are all painting on the canvas of reality. Each moment you live is an opportunity to add something to this construct we’ve been building. This civilization of humans.
So go ahead and celebrate life. Show life how you define “not dying”. Show it how you define living.
“Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying” — Bob Dylan
Do you understand? Clap or comment.
