Message in a Bottle (The Obviousness of Infinity: An Ontological Inquiry)

Message in a Bottle

The Obviousness of Infinity: An Ontological Inquiry

Published by Elias Rafferton, Copyright 2017. All rights reserved.

Warning: Do not continue past this warning if you are perfectly content with life and the world as you know it. Or, if not perfectly content, exercise extreme caution when proceeding if you consider yourself happy enough and are not otherwise ready for a potential radical overhaul of your worldview, one which may prove existentially devastating to any notion of a fixed identity, and which may cause a very painful process of detachment and disillusionment.

However, in the event you do continue, you may experience complete release into an unprecedented freedom, one that is unimaginable before the radical deconstruction has occurred.

Therefore, be warned.

Contents

Introduction

My Story

Pros and Cons of Enlightenment

Cons

Pros

Thought Experiments

God of Gods

Three Worlds: Ants, A Worried Father, and Tribal Living

Eternal Memory

Entertainment

Pleasure and Pain

Sexuality and Romance

Free Will

Asolute vs. Relative Purpose

Relative Purpose

Absolute Purpose (or The ‘Final’ Relative Purpose)

Integrating Relative and Absolute Purpose

Being and Doing

Final Words: A Rehash

Works Cited, Referenced and/or Recommended

Introduction

"We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way."

-Hunter S. Thompson

A message in a bottle is one that is sent without much (or even any) expectation that it will actually be received. It is cast into the unending ocean while he who cast it watches on with a slight curiosity of the imagination. Envision one at sea, drifting on an endless expanse, perhaps never to return to the good sweet land er’ again, drafting a document with surrendered resignation. The message is encapsulated in a clear glass bottle, topped securely with a bark cork, and then gently lowered to the rolling waves below. Its author peers after as it floats and fades into the unimaginable sunset of forever, the horizon that never ends, while not really expecting any living soul to actually encounter its contents. Nevertheless, all the while he entertains the slightest possibility that maybe, just maybe, somebody will.

And so similarly, I write these words from a place of infinitude, as a drifter with no hope of finding solid ground again. To actually encounter one who finds this message is a vain hope indeed, but nevertheless, messages sent are sometimes found (or so it seems). If only secondary to the writing process itself, these types of documents have benefitted others. Or rather, I should say, documents of this kind have benefitted me. In truth, I can’t say a single thing about what has or has not benefitted anyone, save my very own self.

And that is why I feel compelled to write this. It is to benefit others, if such a thing is actually possible (and I will never know if it actually is possible, though it does seem possible). It is because I have been helped by works that have appeared external to myself, and that without them I might have remained in confusion for who knows how long. Can I say for sure that I haven’t dreamed their content and authors all along? No. Perhaps I’ve dreamt them all. Still though, the dream dreams on, and the roles now change. Me and my writing is now dreamt by you, and may you benefit as I have. May you have the courage to set sail and ne’er look back, for once the dock is gone, it is gone for good. This is a call to the open ocean, an unbounded forever that is both terrifying and unendingly mysterious, both horrific and awesome beyond compare.

So let’s get right to it. In the past I’ve attempted discourses of this type from an impersonal perspective, but it seems to me that such an angle is far less effective for the task at hand. And so instead, I will as briefly as possible show how and why I got here, how and why a landlubber like me could possibly decide to set sail on a sea voyage that lasts forever, never to return again. Then we’ll go on to the good stuff.

My Story

Some of my earliest memories center on the fear of death. I think I was born afraid of death, which seems quite ironic now. Could it be that the very instant life emerges, it considers itself in opposition to what seemingly came ‘before’? (What is this thing we call Death?!) So it seemed to be in my case. I ponder now why babies are often born crying. Sure it’s a huge traumatic event, a highly aggressive occurrence after an otherwise quiescent state of being. But perhaps there is a reason deeper still. Perhaps souls just born recall the horror of something we tend to forget as we grow older and accustomed to our worlds. Perhaps the souls have scrambled violently to return to this place we call life. Perhaps they have just seen the Truth, and maybe they remember for a time that all their past connections have been in an instant swallowed and consumed by it forever.

Anyhow, though I may be exaggerating a bit about fear of death from the very start, since I can’t claim any distinct memories as an infant per se, it is indeed no exaggeration that I remember conscious fear of death from just a few years of age. I remember being terrified of going to sleep at night, terrified of the ‘nothingness’ or ‘non-existence’ of the unconscious state (though at the time I couldn’t put words to this, my fear very vague and unnamable). The morning was the absolute best time, as it was farthest away from bedtime, and throughout the day as the sun went down and the sky darkened, the fear progressively sunk in deeper and deeper, every single night. I felt much more comfortable sleeping with my parents, as though entering the unconscious alongside them quelled my concerns. As they tried to wean me from this behavior, I suffered a great deal, very afraid. Afraid of being alone and in nothingness.

I also became quite worrisome in general, but all worries were essentially rooted in the fear of death. For instance, from a young age I was sent to Texas on an airplane every summer to stay with relatives, and for the first couple rounds of this I was quite concerned about the possibility of dying in a plane crash. Hours and hours I’d spend obsessing over this possibility, trying to solve the problem by thinking about it more and more and more. It was madness, and surely it was not something I chose to experience. Or in other words, I really had no control over my mental processes. Certainly I drove my father nuts with my anxieties.

All kinds of strange little fears tormented me, almost incessantly. The concept of childhood I’ve seen portrayed as a time of carefree fun and enjoyment, a worry-free innocence of the spirit, was very often not my experience. I don’t mean to say it was all bad or horrible. I grew up in beautiful places and never went hungry or cold. I had friends and very rarely suffered rejection or unkindness among peers. But having all the kindness and friends and material goods in the world couldn’t have brought peace to my mind, which was ridden with fear.

Fear of what, exactly? Well, death, as I said, but what exactly about death was it that I feared? All my fears, manifesting as many different mini-fears, in many different ways, all stemmed from the one and only true fear: fear of no-self. Fear of the Abyss, of the Void, of Nothingness. Of non-existence. Of annihilation. Fear of death is the fear of non-existence.

I have to give credit where credit is due, and though I was going to try to keep references out of this for as long as possible, I have to mention briefly the work of another: Jed McKenna. I must mention him now because it was after reading his book (Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing), that I became entirely clear about this point. After reading dozens and possibly over a hundred books on matters of ‘life and death’, I never found it stated so directly and effectively until I read that book: All fears come from the one and only fear, which is fear of no-self.

Now, hang with me here. I know our bullpoop (to be referred to from here on as ‘bp’) meters might start flaring up a bit when a claim like this is made. What about fear of pain, fear of the death of ‘others’, fear of taxes? Aren’t these legitimate fears that aren’t necessarily connected back to fear of no-self? Well, hold these objections if possible and let me not lose you at least until I finish telling the narrative. I can’t claim to know anyone else’s experience concerning anything, or even if ‘others’ exist at all, so all I’m really saying here is that all of my fears stem from the one, poppa daddy of all fears: fear of no-self. To continue then...

My hypochondria got worse. I remember one time I went to basketball camp in Colorado Springs. It was a week-long overnight camp for participants of various sports and activities. Somehow I found myself with a kind of dull ache in my testicles (try to resist the infantile urge to giggle now) and for the life of me, I thought I had cancer. Kid-you-not, I was rather convinced I had testicular cancer at the age of 12 years old. Furthermore, I was an extremely non-imposing child, so I would never actually reveal my concerns to anyone else (except maybe my dad), lest the terrible embarrassment that would certainly result! So I spent the next week in camp and probably several weeks after debating over and over and over in my head why it was that I did or did not have testicular cancer and was or was not going to die from it.

At this point it really won’t serve much additional purpose to belabor my state of perpetual concern with more examples of neurotic thinking as a young person. But suffice then to say, there were plenty of them. Fortunately, once I got to about 11 or 12 years of age, the hypochondria and general underlying fear of this or that thing going wrong did subside some. That sort of urgent, life or death type concern which can be highly draining waned. But in its stead was a fear of insufficiency and insecurity, particularly in matters of romance, as I got older. A different tone of fear, but fear nonetheless.

Now on a hamster wheel of perceived obligation to become something, I fretted over outstanding performance academically as well. I was rather successful in this regard, but still couldn’t escape the background hum of anxiety that was the fire under my caboose. Though surrounded by friends, I often felt lonely and incomplete without an intimate relationship (i.e. girlfriend) but was quite uncomfortable with the whole matter and it wouldn’t be until my later twenties that I actually overcame my hang ups and established a relationship of intimacy. This topic will need some revisiting later but I’ll say for now that, astonishingly enough, what I thought was fear of rejection was actually the opposite. In large part, it was the very success after which I allegedly sought that I resisted so much. In the final analysis, this is because intimate/sexual relationships, perhaps more than any other, can reveal directly the truth of no-self. They won’t necessarily by default, but as it seems to me they certainly can if they need to.

But I’ve gone a bit too far now and need to go back a bit. Those last two paragraphs were really just to drive home the point that essentially the first twenty-five years or so of my life were lived in a state of waxing and waning dis-ease. On top of the stresses of young adulthood from the social and academic standpoints, at age twenty or so I developed a strong sense of religious fear, to say the least, which further complicated the romantic (i.e. sexual) fears and otherwise. Leave it to me to find something else to worry about.

By appearances, my mother must have also suffered a kind of mental neurosis. Especially, recalls my father, after