What Do You Mean?

“People get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words… As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.”

- Alan Watts

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

- Joseph Campbell

Q: “I used to live a life where angels were cheering me on. I was creating worlds and verses with my good deeds and I would destroy things with my bad ones. Every ounce of pain I felt would make me call out to god and created a powerful relationship.

My life had meaning. How can anything live up to the life I once led?” *

A: I used to hear the angels. I used to fear the demons. I know how you feel. And I swear to you, I am so much more alive today than I ever was back when I thought my actions had infinite consequences. I now live in a world where massive nuclear explosions in the sky birth galaxies that smell like raspberries and planets that rain diamonds and sometimes, or maybe just one time, ones that grow monkeys with meat in their skulls more dense and more complex than any biological matter we know of. These stars are not decorations in God’s Pretty Terrarium, they are our ancestors. Often, they are so far away that by the time their light reaches us they have already twinkled out of existence. You live in a universe not under the watchful eye of a jealous god, but rather, as the eye of the universe itself- as cognisant matter, you are the big bang, observing the beautiful mess that it made.

You were raised with one story. I’m here to tell you there are better stories. Stories about people who faced the fact of their meaningless, painful, horrifying lives, and made art out of it. They used the holes life stabbed in their heart as openings to truly connect to the people around them, and figured out ways to make the next go of it just a little better.

I know it feels like your story is the only story that will work for you. It is not. Do you know how you got to be in this fucked up situation? Every single one of your ancestors managed to survive in a world that was constantly trying to kill it. They also managed to have sex and pass those incredibly resilient genes on to you. You have no idea how adaptable you are. How resilient, flexible, and nimble your mind is. Trust me, you can adjust. You can more than adjust. You have successfully shed the boundaries of an extremely limiting reality tunnel. Let some light pour in the vacuum before you go lamenting how good a story once made you feel. Instead, write and live new stories- better stories.

Yes. The life you once lead was mostly a castle in the sky. There are no angels. There are no demons. Instead, there is your mind; an unfathomable mystery of a thing that goes on forever and ever inside itself. We have yet to understand why anything feels like anything at all- why and how matter can be self-cognisant. You are a mystery far deeper and more mystical than any story you heard of growing up. There are billions of other mystery consciousnesses/people/monkeys and many more that have lived before and struggled with the same shit you have, and written their struggles and solutions down.

You can now, as a person in a meaningless world with no angels and no demons and no god to tell you what to and not to read, explore the entire history of ideas. You can talk to people. You can fuck anybody who gives you consent. You can love literally anybody, consent or not. You can explore absurd, fascinating, exciting, and shocking, cultures, places, websites, and dreams. You can eat plants that allow you to see things no one has ever seen or will ever see again. You can get paid to do all sorts of things you weren’t allowed to do when you were religious that are worth doing.

You do not have to play this game. But for fuck’s sake (not for god’s sake), give it a minute first. Consider how much bigger your world, no, your universe is now. There is so much you can’t possibly know about it yet. It is simply too early to know for certain there isn’t a better game to play, a better story to write, a better life to live.

So live.

* Question asked by an anonymous member of an online group for people who have left orthodox religion