One Hundred and Fifty Three

Cogito, ergo sum and sum, ergo cogito.  If I must be a while longer, I must think a while longer.

Scientists now say the question is why there’s something rather than nothing.  It’s an unanswerable question because the distinction is a false one.

What they (we?) call nothing is not an empty void.  It only appears empty to us, just as light appears without color to us until we shine it through a prism.  An apt metaphor because light, with or without color, appears only to us.  Without eyes to see them and ears to hear them, what we call things are only waves moving on the surface of the void, which contains all things just as white light contains all colors.

We imagine the void is empty because it seems so different from us.  But we came from the void, and will return to it.  We are no more than episodes in its history.  For the void does have a history.  It exists in time, just as we do.  It exists because we do, and vice versa.

Once we make a distinction between something and nothing, it’s easy to make a distinction between living and nonliving things.  One error leads to another until finally we create civilisation.

Our earliest philosophers said we are spirits caged in matter.  Death frees us. It would be closer to the truth to say spirit (or life) is a disease of matter.  Once infected, matter begins to decay.

We are parasites, feeding on a world we pretend is lifeless matter in order to avoid judging and condemning ourselves for what we do to it.  We invented gods to forgive us what we do because we can't forgive ourselves.

There is indeed a god-shaped hole in our lives, and nothing can fill it.  Nothing has filled it.

God was a name for what we didn't understand.  The void is a name for what we refuse to understand.

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Life like ours is probably rare, a mutation unique to this planet.  Here it proliferates like a cancer because misery loves company.

Life seems to me tragic, but the lives of other animals most of all because they don’t invent the illusion we call civilisation to avoid seeing what they do.  Other animals do terrible things, but not as terrible as the things we do because they don’t pretend they do them in the service of some greater good, as we do.