Sometimes, like today, I feel a calmness wash over me. The hum of the computer and the noise of the TV fall into the background and I begin to wonder. What am I doing? I'm watching TV. I'm trying to write a short story. I'm reading a pile of comic books. I'm reading an essay from a favourite author... but it all falls away into irrelevance. Why am I watching TV? Why am I writing a short story? Why am I reading my comic books? Why am I reading an essay?
I scan the objects in my room, my TV, my bed, my cat. The science of it fills my mind. Things scatter into molecules. The molecules scatter into atoms. The atoms scatter into particles. Here energies like light and heat join in the morass. Particles dissolve into quanta. Finally, quanta reveal themselves as wave functions, mathematics. Everything dissipates into nothingness...
Slowly, I realize that none of it has meaning, none of it has relevance. A notion rises in my mind, a notion that I'm simply finding things to occupy my mind until my time comes to die, that I'm simply passing the time until my life ends. I cannot truly be, I can only do, I am an object in motion, for the sake of motion. Aside from the pursuit of the necessities of life, like food, shelter and even sex, does anything we do have meaning beyond the consumption of time? Even the pursuit of those necessities becomes pointless beyond the maintenance of survival, the satiation, the appeasement, of the instinct to continue. One question lies behind it all, one question whose whispers slowly become apparent in the calm, and only, I think, because of the calm. That question is 'what is the meaning of life'.
No punctuation, no capitalization. The question is so implied, so inherent, so quiet that it's undetectable until that calmness comes and sweeps away the minutiae. I try to answer the question. It's useless, of course. The answer to such a question can truly only come from ultimate knowledge, if such a thing even exists. Science tells us that life exists for its own sake. Life feeds on itself to continue using the chaos of genetics and procreation to change and evolve, become better, stronger, faster, smarter... is there an end goal? If the popular theory is correct, is Life racing to some goal, some end point, or is it expressing the eternal dance of Chaos and Order, dancing to the music of Chaos to find the secrets of Order?
However, that's only the lesser answer, if it's even the correct one. Life is a function of existence, a lesser god in the Court of Chaos and Order. So, to return to my thought, the question of 'what is the meaning of life' turns up... empty, unanswerable. I screen through all of the so-called 'occult' knowledge that I've read, studied, researched and I find nothing but theory and dogma. In the end, at the moment of the whisper when the question hovers in the calm solitude of my mind, I find emptiness.
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