Of Contrast and Context

With every crest of a wave in a frequency, there is a corresponding trough that allows it to be. To the highest of highs, there will exist the potential for a lowest of lows to balance it and complete the symmetry of zero-sum. Dualities and dynamics such as these, and the gray areas that can be both their medians and their unities, are everywhere. The underlying symmetry of contrasts appears to be an overall tendency of nature.

We will, at times, think things that we, ourselves, later outright reject. Some of our very own thoughts will cause responses of disgust in us. These dark and twisted thoughts are nothing but reactions, and they will beget others more beautiful. They exist to show the beauty of their contrast. True mistakes are impossible if they are learned from. We can only ever decide from what we know, and we can only ever know what we know at any given moment.

We are this way because our universe is this way. We are nothing separate, within, or above -- we are it. We are the Big Bang still happening. The causal chain of our pre-beings stretches back all the way to that first moment of expansion (and beyond). One can even say, since no neuron-firing happens without stimuli and no thought without prompt, that the universe is thinking through the mediums of the brains of which it manifested.

This universe evolves. Natural selection is everywhere. It's in the selection of surviving genes, which allowed for the following selection of thoughts and ways of being -- things that survive, survive -- an intrinsic cosmological tautology that knows no bias and acts upon the previous versions of itself. Often with harmful or fatal mutation, but sometimes with something truly amazing.

Any semblance of the experience of life such as our memories or awareness continuing onward after death is an assumption predicated on the fear of letting go of oneself. We were always part of something greater -- this universe itself -- the parameters of which, on the grandest of cosmic scales, have always allowed for the possibility of our existence, if conditions allow (and they do). Perhaps the frequency of life is as it is so that it can exist at all.

Sure, these conditions take a while to align -- a harmonic struck amidst a clattering of seemingly random string-picking -- but it happens. We are the evidence. It seems reasonable to consider that self-awareness is an eventually-inevitable function of the universe. What's a universe unobserved? Unmirrored by minds? Time that a universe spends unaware of itself is not capable of fretting about it. Self-awareness emerges when it is able.

Birth is the beauty, with death the necessary contrast that allows us to see what it is at all. Impermanence defines emergence. Death defines life as silence defines sound, as negative space defines a message inked on a slate. Each concept is ultimately the frame of reference of, and defined by, its opposite. If logic is taking steps, logical fallacies are steps that don't work, and we only know what steps work by having steps that don't to compare them to. We only know what beauty is by having ugliness to compare it to. Without the impermanence of states of matter and energy -- without the contrast to their emergence -- we would not be able to know them. Energy keeps moving because it has to. Movement is what it's made of. We are not static entities -- we exist only in the context of the movement of the energy that comprises us.

Who among us would truly wish to live forever? To be subject to a self-aware existence for the staggering magnitude that is eternity? Ray Troll once wisely said, "Life is good. Death is not bad." Death is like a collapse into sweet unconscious sleep after a long day of work, but rather, it is the last and greatest sleep after a lifetime of moments. Death itself is nothing to fear. What we really fear is the way out. Painful deaths are like an insomnia. Untimely but instant deaths are like being knocked unconscious. Peaceful deaths are like gently dissolving into a much-needed sleep. We practice dying every time we fall asleep.

Even stars die. Their deaths are the cosmic engines of new possibility.

Our egos are not ours. They belong to the universe from which they emerged. We're the whole, entire universe that has taken the form of a temporary energetic pattern that is aware of itself within an ocean of its own perpetual flux. The essence, the raw materials -- the matter, the energy, the spirit (different names for the same thing, perhaps) -- already existed. They only had to come together in the right way -- the right context -- to be you.

But our actions, while we are alive, are not for us. They can't be, if we won't remember them. We're capable of acting with self-defined purpose in a sea of apparent purposelessness if we see pointlessness as the point -- that anything we choose to do, the universe chooses to do through us. There is no destination. There is only perpetual becoming, and by having existed and acted at all, we unalterably changed the universe forever. We are vessels of experience for the energy that will continue on from us, our causal ripples, including the energy of those that survive us and carry on the process of memory.

Would an omnipotence of actual boundlessness be capable of something like bias? Bias depends on will, and will depends on context. What makes infinity so beautiful is its contextlessness -- it cannot know what it is doing, if knowing what it is doing requires context. There is no risk for any of its elements, conscious or otherwise, to fail to meet a higher purpose. If there is the complete absence of any higher purpose whatsoever, then effectively -- just as moving in no particular direction is the same as moving in every direction at once -- there is every possible higher purpose at once.

After all, what is a search for ultimate meaning but a search for ultimate bias? Only meaning-makers carry bias. Only bias-holders carry meaning. Infinity, in its own context of contextlessness, is neither. Any and all meaning exists only in context, and context implies paying attention to only a particular finity at the temporary exclusion of the background infinity from which it originated.

If the most all-encompassing context is the lack of one entirely, and the most all-encompassing point is the lack of one entirely, then to accept a life of meaning, we must accept a life of bias. And there are an infinite amount of ways to be biased.

What we actually represent is something more unfathomable than any religion could ever hope to come close to revealing. "We are participants in a ritual older than our collective memory," as Saul Williams put it. It depends on us to self-actualize, and to realize each other not simply as brothers and sisters in time, but as the very same universe thinking many different thoughts through many different minds.