I've increasingly headed into a deeper absurdist way of thought. For any who might not know, absurdism is the philosophy that there is no inherent meaning in the universe, but that humans inherently seek meaning, and there is not necessarily need for conflict for these two things to exist. I've advanced to the way of thinking that absolutely no one has true free will, that all actions, reactions, consequences, all events and incidences, absolutely all in time and space at any given time in any given space was fated, inevitable, and unavoidable. It's not so much a matter of 'no matter what we do,' as it is 'there's only one thing we ever could've done.' Strangely, when I was younger and, honestly, more religious, I thought more in this way. I believed in fate, in predestination, in heaven and hell. I believed in the word of the bible, and this is what I was taught.
By my teens, I had a crisis of faith. Further and further contemplation placed my conscience against and my religion. The way I'd seen God depicted, He would, in my mind, be a violent sociopath unworthy of praise. Heaven and Hell were unnecessarily cruel and despicable acts of God, and that any God would allow, let alone intend, such cruelty was impossible to follow. The devil further gained my sympathy in the bible's narrative. A rebel anarchist who would not follow anyone's absolute rule, even a deity's. A tester of man who was more a gate keeper to Heaven than any other figure in the book. It felt more and more a simple narrative of humanity than a religious doctrine. The writings made more and more sense as I removed all concepts of morality. This triggered a further evolution in my way of thinking.
I arrived to the conclusion, only the third year into my twenties, that fate was real. I may have questioned everything - and I mean absolutely everything - that I had believed, but not everything changed as a result. In the turmoil and turbulence, some things still stood. In fact, I went from believing without understanding to believing because I understood. Doctrine all but entirely blew away in the storm of belief and conscience. Belief essentially vanished, and I accepted the idea that nothing can be believed so much as guessed. George Christopher on Board to Death, played by Ted Danson, actually captured it quite well when he said that we're each starring in our own movies, just guessing about others'.
My therapist pointed out that this is certainly very, "pot thinking." Yes, some of these conclusions were drawn during use of cannabis, even blossomed into what they are in part because of it, but she also pointed out that it was very 'me' thinking to begin with, pot or no pot. It wasn't actually a tremendous leap from where I was already going. I would say that I went from religious, to spiritual, to... something else entirely. I believe in mysteriousness, and my inevitable ignorance of the world, as all else have, only confirms its existence. God has become a concept to embody all this chaos, these perfect and inevitable trajectories in a predetermined film. God becomes a synonym for the universe around us, and all which we could not possibly know. God is what we can see and cannot. God was no longer religious, but a word which could conceptualise an entirety beyond our comprehension. The world around us, too big to understand, too complex to see all of the trajectories, however inevitable, to know what will happen and what must happen. All that will not, is not. All that would is. All that was must have been, and all that was not could not have been.
There is a tremendous amount of freedom that comes from this evolution of thought. A weight of conscience, self-consciousness, and fear of the unknown began to dissipate. I have actually become more productive, more active, and been able to actually take care of myself in at least the minimum amount (I have had trouble taking care of myself on a day-to-day level for a decade, at least.) The culmination of relieving pointless guilt from fundamental beliefs and treating my myriad conditions with cannabis has effectively put me at a peak of functioning. Am I anywhere near being a standard, functional adult? I highly doubt it. But even terminal patients are given the possibility of living comfortably until the end. Some would say it's worth compensating more for a shorter life-span, but even a shorter life-span can't warrant such special treatment in such cases without considerable discomfort in need of relief. It is the discomforts, the struggles, the burdens which are being compensated for. I believe (or should I say 'strongly guess,' now?) everyone has the right to do what they think they need in order to tolerate life and all that comes with it. I'm not such a delusional optimist as to possibly think all will or could possibly get that comfort. I do think, however, that every person and thing in the universe does what it 'thinks' it must to be in the most comfortable, moderate state. I think quantum physics, thermodynamics, and chaos theory all support my stance and are applicable.
My belief system became synonymous with the most fundamental aspects of science: most notably, making best educated guesses given the information we are aware and, thus, exposed to, and using these 'best guesses' as our new, and forever metamorphosing, foundation. We intuitively try to make our foundations as solid as possible and forget that nothing is completely unchanging, let alone permanent. A balance is struck, to the best of our capabilities, between open-mindedness and scepticism, questioning absolutely everything while maintaining our stance until new evidence comes to light which says otherwise. We rely whole heartedly on the facts, real or perceived, at hand, but benefit most from the acceptance that the conclusions we draw can change as more of such facts come to light. We try our bests, no matter what, given what realities we form out of what information we can scrounge up. Every reality, for each individual, becomes equally real, and all capable of change when new information capable of swaying and mutating our beliefs becomes accepted. We cannot always accept, however, and some things can actually harden our resistance to acceptance of all sorts and forms, making us maintain our realities, often even in the face of new information. Absolute belief, or even extremely strong beliefs, can become fundamentally resistant to certain forms of acceptance when new information is presented, which sometimes has more destructive, rather than constructive, consequence.
This has been my journey into absurdist thought, and reconciling my consciousness, thus far.
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