Playing with narratives.

Narratives are powerful, heady stuff. The brain is supposedly wired to think in narratives rather than facts and figures. That’s why we prefer stories to boring lectures. That’s why human drama is much more memorable than a bunch of symbols and charts. (Well– symbols and charts can communicate stories too, but that doesn’t change the underlying point.)

So. If we think in narratives, we remember things in narratives, and we explain things to ourselves in narratives, it makes sense to try and come up with a narrative (or set of narratives) that help us function better. That help us navigate this crazy, absurd thing we call reality. Why are we here? We don’t really know. What are we going to do with our lives? We don’t really know. We inherit narratives from the time we are born, and scripts, and we live out these scripts and narratives– usually imperfectly, often to the best of our abilities. Sometimes things get difficult and painful, and it requires a narrative for us to make sense of all the mess, to cope with it. Blah blah blah.

Good movies, good books, they have an effect on us. They make us feel things. They make us want to do things, or want to see things differently, they move us in some way. Independent of these things, for the most part I feel like I’m not moving anywhere. I’m not going anywhere. The universe is a vibration of information, space and time, color and light and sound. And sometimes I feel like I’m all shut in, a little alien dot in an alien system that I don’t understand as much as I’d like to, this weird imperfect mind trapped in weird, imperfect body that’s trapped in a weird, imperfect world. (Weird, imperfect States, weird, imperfect networks of weird imperfections.) Alright. Then what? So what?

Nothing much, really. Life is a long lazy afternoon by the beach and we get to decide for ourselves how we want to spend it. So how do I want to spend mine? I want to have fun. But there’s the messy business of existence– bills to pay, jobs, responsibilities, health to worry about, relationships to maintain. These are things that have to be taken care of before we can really have fun. And at the same time– we can’t spend our entire existence obsessing about perpetuating existence– what are we living for? What’s the point of sustaining a nearly-perfect automaton if it doesn’t experience bliss and joy? Working for the sake of working for the sake of self-perpetuation feels hollow and void. There has to be something more, even if it’s just the illusion of meaning. There are chemicals that wash over the brain that make us feel good, and we’d like to feel good for some brief instances before we die. But surely life shouldn’t just be a series of momentary pleasures within a vast struggle to stay alive until we’re dead. There should be something a bit more uplifting than that. There should be something that compels us to wake up in the morning that’s more than “I need to eat, pay the bills and go to bed.” I mean, these are normative statements. There’s nothing in the code of the universe that says human beings– bundles of atoms– are entitled to anything more than destruction. Okay.

Then what? We’re still here. Whatever is up, we’re still here. And it’s up to us to provide our own light. I think pleasure comes from pursuit, from learning, from growth. The more we learn, the more we grow, the more we experience and practice compassion, the fuller our hearts are– and in more techical terms these are just a washing of chemicals too, empathy, bonding, yadda yadda.

Back to Power of Now– when we figure out our inner purpose, we can enjoy arbitrary, random external purposes as games that we play because we enjoy playing them. Life should be enjoyed and not taken too seriously, because nobody makes it out alive. The universe itself is not going to make it out alive. So there’s no need to be so serious.

There’s this idea that love is beauty– that we can find ourselves in each other, that we can connect with one another and experience these deep spiritual awakenings, that we can feel less alone. Sometimes I agree with this and feel it strongly. Sometimes it just feels like another joke, another laugh, another staged production in the theater of the absurd. I suppose all of those things are true. I suppose it bothers me in a sense that nobody owes me anything– but the only reason I ever even had the illusion that anybody owed me anything was the fact that I grew up as a child, like everybody else, and children are often born into environments where the world owes them something. Eventually you grow up and realize that that was a convenient little fiction, something people tell you to keep you functioning until you can contribute economically, contribute in some way to the collaborative functioning of the species. Which is itself weird and imperfect.

Then what? What’s the payoff? I suppose in the shedding of illusions there is freedom, although with the shedding of illusions it’s not entirely clear what we ought to use those freedoms to do. I suppose the excercising of the freedom is a pleasure in itself. I’m sitting here typing into a laptop while sitting on my sofa in my home (which I’m paying the mortgage for) in my city-state (that I serve as a citizen-soldier for, and pay taxes for) on my planet– which I don’t actually do very much for. I suppose belonging comes from sacrifice and contribution, and taking risks on the behalf of others. That’s part of why I’m doing this little writing experiment, even if it doesn’t really make a lot of sense as I’m doing it, and even if it won’t make the slightest shred of sense at the end.

The thing is that I need a narrative that keeps me going. Or maybe not. Maybe I just need to silence all the narratives that I’ve been tempted to put on myself. Maybe there’s some sort of deeper wisdom beyond language, beyond communication, and it comes from being still in nature, erasing the boundaries between our selves and skins and experiencing the infinity that is the present moment.