So let’s assume that the dominant force in the universe is the desire to do good and that everything under its jurisdiction had the altruism to do the right thing every single time. Would existence be nearly as interesting as it stands today, the way the universe ultimately panned out, and since the universe did turn out this way, was there any other possible way for it to have turned out? Of course there is always that possibility to ponder, but is there really any reason to? It gets the brain going, sure, but is there a fundamental reason to stimulate your mind if all the thoughts will just end up polluting your head because they come up with impossible situations which you then convince yourself are possible, simply because you’ve gone through the act of thinking about them? That all sounds like a mental disorder, but we all do the same shit to ourselves, and the way we mess ourselves up becomes apparent as we deal with the other people in our surroundings, because we begin to project our insecurities and ignorance to everybody with whom we speak, and those people then have the choice of either dismissing it as bullshit, considering it carefully and making an informed decision, or jumping on board with it at the tip of a hat. There are many people from all three groups, and I think it’s terrifying that there are so many millions of people in that third group, because you never know what kind of whackjob will come up out of the sewer and spin a few phrases to get a strong following of fairly unintelligent people, which turns into a large mob of almost not unintelligible people that defends their creator’s ideas like they have rabies, and there’s nothing any sane person can do about it except point and laugh. When we speak, we always have an audience, be it ourself or even just the fact that when we talk we emit sound waves that bounce off of things and physically affect them (especially if they’re particularly concentrated and loud sound waves). When we speak, our field of existence shifts just enough to accommodate those words, a modification that may lead to infinite other possibilities for change–most likely none of those possibilities will come to mind, because we can’t actually see what our speech does to our surroundings; we can only see what happens after we let loose, and we often think of any connection between the speech and what comes directly after as completely circumstantial (which it is, because of the circumstance of our changing our plane of existence with some words), and then, therefore, everything is random because we cannot see the direct cause and effect of over 99% of everything (the >1% being those strange coincidental stories you’ve heard your friends tell dozens of times over the years). Can we alter our perception and see things more clearly? Well, shamans have been tripping on shrooms, peyote and salvia for thousands of years, so there’s a basis for that school of thought, but every civilization manages to find a different meaning for what happens when you enter that state. Is it a spiritual realm? Is it a merging of adjacent dimensions into a psychedelic blending and patterning of our surroundings? Nobody has been able to reach a firm consensus, though neuroscientists have been able to pinpoint the stimulated parts of the tripping brain (from which they can probably deduce why we feel the way we do when we enter these spaces, but not what the spaces are). I think that since we still consume these psychedelic mind-enhancers, there must be a lingering sense of magic from those ancient times when many things were inexplicable (and most of those things were then called magical, for lack of a better reality), and no matter what kind of technology we may develop, there will always be a strong pull towards the organic experience of ecstasy and colorful visions, because when you boil it down to the history of human interaction with Earth, the things we use in our modern technology has been relatively inaccessible for the majority of our existence, made of things like aluminum and plastic, while hallucinogenic drugs have always been organic, edible and available to us, affecting the human lifestyle for an extended period of time. Since we have the capacity to grow such a fondness for a kind of plant, perhaps we will develop an affinity for technological materials, and our bodies will slowly integrate more metals into them and perhaps run more efficiently than the older models. Whether or not we’ll have had any say in these changes is irrelevant, because I really don’t care about some postulation of the future that I know has a chance of happening, but it’s so inaccessible to me and the rest of this generation that I’ve pushed the thought out of my head altogether.
WHARVED 