ITT We answer the question "What is the meaning of life?"

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Cubone: May 26, 2011; Because it never leaves its bedroom, no one has ever seen this poster's real face.

tiger got to hunt
bird got to fly
man got to sit and wonder, "why, why, why?"
tiger got to sleep
bird got to land
man got to tell himself he understand

Cubone posted:

okay, so, what you perceive as "self" and "other" are really just 4th dimensional intersections in higher-dimensional space. sort of like how a hand passing through a 2-dimensional plane would look like 5 circles appearing from nowhere as your fingers pass through, then growing and then joining together as you get to the palm. at any point, from the perspective of the 2-dimensional plane, it's circles, but the reality is that it's a hand. humans are the equivalent of the imaginary "circles"- we haven't realized what we are yet, but if you recognize time as the fourth dimension and travel backwards, the present moment as you perceive it is just the tip of this 4th-dimensional "tendril". it's an extension of who you were an instant ago, which was an extension of who you were an instant before that, which was an extension of who you were an instant before that, all the way back until you were a single zygote in your mother's womb. and your mother, likewise, extends backwards all the way until she was a single zygote in her mother's womb. all the way back, all the way back. the zygotes, too, go further back, until you were a pair of gametes, and even further until those gametes were assembled from proteins, and those proteins came from other biological life, with energy from the sun and the molecules of the atmosphere. and those go back, across the universe, all the way back to the big bang. essentially, viewed fourth dimensionally all matter is actually a complex web of tendrils upon tendrils extending from the same origin point. we're not separate from each other, we're fingers on the same hand, we just don't know it because our perception is limited to the third dimension
he reason people see ufos in old paintings from biblical times and sshit, it's not that they're aliens, that's just the cultural context we're applying to them. back then, a light in the sky, an otherwordly power, that was angels and demons and gods and spirits- everybody "knew" the mysterious lights in the sky were angels, because they didn't have machines that glow and shoot across the sky. we have that, and so that's what we think when we see those lights, but really that's just us applying a meaning to the same phenomenon. what people think are aliens are not actually from outer space any more than they were angels, they're higher dimensional beings. they reason they seem capable of impossible feats, disappearing in the blink of an eye, poo poo like that, is we're not really seeing "them", we're seeing intersections of higher-dimensional beings in terms we're capable of understanding, which is not the whole picture. we're seeing the circles and applying meaning to the circles, we still haven't seen the hand
those high-dimensional beings, they're not just visitors. I don't want to say they put us here, because that's kind of reductive, but the lower dimensional space we exist in is necessary, in their plane of existence, to grow things. almost like how a 2d blueprint is used to build something in 3d, but more involved than that. we're like a larva being grown in a petri dish. and that's the meaning of life. we're like cells in a fetus, part of a greater organism, following the instructions encoded into us in order to build something according to a higher plan more complex than we're capable of understanding. a cell in a fetus' heart doesn't know it's a heart, it's following its encoding biological instructions, hey, make a cell like this. and it's all... it came from a zygote that had those instructions and passed them along, all starting in a single cell. our zygote with the instructions for all this was the big bang

anyway that's the basics but I think you might need to get abducted to really "get" it idk
you mightve heard some poo poo like this before and that's because they keep telling us all the same poo poo, because we're coming to a point where there will be a change in our understanding and we need to recognize what we are in context of the whole. essentially, to go back to the "cells in an organism" metaphor, we're just about done building the cells necessary for the organism to be born, and there's kind of a switch that needs to happen. we're exiting the womb. it's horrifying, to the unborn infant, because this warm, safe place, the only home we've ever known, is ejecting us, because we need to leave, it's time, and from our perspective it's like all of reality is becoming toxic, but it's all part of a greater process, there's a larger reality we can't even imagine waiting for us just outside of the greater cosmic vagina, and these higher-dimensional beings, they're like the old man in jurassic park gleefully encouraging the baby dinosaur to break out of the egg, he knows what we're supposed to do and he's rooting for us, you know?
we're supposed to pass this along. they always tell us the same poo poo, and part of it is to spread the word. like, the dinosaur in the egg, this concept is like the baby really using a muscle for the first time. not even breaking out of the egg, just realizing there's a muscle there, and the first awkward, uncoordinated flailing of the limb. the meme, like the classical sense of the word meme, the idea of recognizing this unity, it's the first synapse, the first electrical signal down the nerve. the infrastructure for understanding it is here, people generally understand what higher-dimensional space is, the smart people have done the math, and it got passed to the rest of us if not in a classroom than in movies and pop culture, everything's in place for the system to start making sense and working as it's intended. it's going to take a long time, like, a really long time, longer than any of us will be around for, but where we are right now is in that moment just before the first muscle moves

"To study the meaning of man and of life � I am making significant progress here. I have faith in myself. Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man."

But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience.

Cubone posted:

the lack of a readily apparent meaning to life and/or existence just means that we're lucky to exist at all and are free to determine for ourselves what we'll make of it

consider the opposite:
if there were some prescribed meaning, known or unknown, why should that somehow be inherently better than meaning that's self-determined? we're free, responsible agents determining our own development through acts of will� what right should the universe have to dictate our own meaning to us? without our consent? against our will? so that if we were to accomplish everything we desire for ourselves, every aspiration fulfilled, every joy, the wisdom and knowledge and self-actualization, a long and incontrovertible trail of righteousness and good will, it wouldn't count, because we've failed in some secret purpose we were "meant" for? ridiculous. disgusting. to have some predetermined "meaning" hanging over every moment, in judgement of our every act would be nothing but an ontological prison.

existence precedes essence� so what? go fly a kite.

"But what's the use of talking! I suspect that all I'm saying now is so like the usual commonplaces that I shall certainly be taken for a lower-form schoolboy sending in his essay on 'sunrise', or they'll say perhaps that I had something to say, but that I did not know how to 'explain' it. But I'll add, that there is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas"

there is not love of life without despair about life ce qui embellit le d�sert, dit le petit prince, c'est qu'il cache un puits quelque part

quote:

Je vois que beaucoup de gens meurent
Parce qu'ils estiment que la vie ne vaut pas la peine d'�tre v�cue
J'en vois d'autres, qui se font paradoxalement tu�s pour des id�es
Pour des illusions, qui leurs donnent une raison de vivre
Ce, qu'on appelle une raison de vivre est en m�me temps une excellente raison de mourir

Throw yourself into the unknown
With pace and a fury defiant
Clothe yourself in beauty untold
And see life as a means to a triumph