MEDITATION 1

(~2015)

Before we hit the ground, I wanted to ask you a question. What do you think we see before we die?

If you’ll allow me, let me tell you two stories. One is true, and one is false. You will decide for yourself which is which.

Here is the first story. In the last moments before we die, we see the light. We understand our place in the world, and finally we see its beauty. We see our insignificance, yes, our tiny puny humanness; but we see that as small as we were we were part of something greater. That we were all woven together into a braid, a pattern, that connected each of us to all others, and that will in some small way connect us still even after we are gone. We see that although each of us dies, there is something that lives forever. That life is not something we could ever have possessed; it was something that possessed us. That our time in this world and the paths we took in it were never about us, they were never for us, they were for the world. That we each had our small, critical, and even in some way eternal, part to play.

That, in short, our lives had meaning after all.

If you have seen this vision then you will know: nothing will ever feel truer to you than this vision did. It is impossible to exaggerate this vision’s transcendent clarity, its absolute certainty. What we see in this final vision, in all its glory and beauty and mercy, is something I have a name for.

Here is the second story. Some long time after you have seen this vision, when it has faded almost entirely and you can no longer remember how it felt, you will realize: this vision was false. Merely a chemical trick in your skull. Some gland buried back in the lizard brain, one of the very first parts of the nervous system to evolve, sensing incredible danger and releasing its payload to kick you into action - to fight, to struggle, to persist; trying to spur you back to life. Because such a gland (if not a physical gland, then, such a reflex) led to greater evolutionary success. And this is the way the world actually works. Our selfish genes - cruel genes - lie to us, in the end hurt us, because they are using us, and care not for us except insofar as they can force us to propagate them. And if that braid, that pattern, as we saw in our vision, is real - then this is its true blank-faced, loveless, nature.

If you have come to this understanding then you will know:... no, this understanding does not feel anywhere near as good. But its logic is compelling. What we take from this understanding, in all its chill darkness, is something I have a name for.

So those are my stories. Tell me: which story would you prefer to believe?

If you’ve chosen your answer, I will tell you mine.

I lied. There are not two stories. What I know is that both these stories are the same.

They are the two halves, the two sides, of a single story, of a single thing. The thing which cannot be named, which cannot be mastered, which cannot be undone -

Which is beyond the horizon, beyond comprehension, beyond infinity; which is the dawn and the eclipse, the lover and the enemy, the word and the void, the world and the end; which lives while it dies and speaks truth when it lies and is what it is not; which is the only thing that truly exists and though it cannot be named if you will indulge me now we might call it -