Ride THIS Rambling Train Of Thought

For the past 2 and a half weeks I have been going through my boxes of sentimental treasures and picking out my favourite pictures and memories (and I have alot...I've been collecting for years lol) This is all for the purpose of my current project: scrapbooking the last almost 30 years of my life. It's a cathartic consolidation process, in which the act of me looking at it seems to put meaning in my life. Perhaps you could say that I am merely walking through the memories of those times in my life that were full of meaning in certain particular moments.

It seems that the perception of anything has a reciprocal relationship with whatever is being perceived in reality. The external reality (the outside world) provides information to our perception, while the internal world (the "I" in this equation) responds by attributing meaning to our perceptions. This is the spiral of existence. When the internal and external are in synch and working together they create an upward spiral of energy (still oscillating between the two extremes. When the two are not balanced, (like when too many pieces of information are being processed and received by the brain and yet they all lack apparent or any perceived inherent meaning, for example) existence begins travelling the downward spiral. Both of these extremes, however, belong to the same spiral...they are merely two sides of the same thing. When your perceptions and your experience of reality are the same, or at least similar, then they are in harmony and the world is seen as if everything were covered in brighter colours. Life, however, seems to be an oscillation down the spiral, then up and then down again, seemingly gathering an obscure sort of energy as it moves back and forth between the extremes. The accumulation of energy, (and perhaps the 'colours' of the experiences, or types of energy) when perceived as a whole, is what we may call a person's 'life'.

I have been spending alot of time furthering my contemplations of the meaning and purpose of this life as of late. I had the thought that the simple act of inquiring about that sickening feeling of nothing that lies underneath the essence of our existence (for those of us who can SEE it) implies that we are attempting to describe it or give the nothing a shape. The shape we then attribute to the nothingness ('shape' referring to any of the adjectives, like empty, dark, or any words that attempt to describe or define it) is the result of the mind processing the new information and then merging it with the images and perceptions gained from past experience. Just by the simple fact of our inquiry into the nothing, we make that nothing 'something'. This has all confirmed to me that it is completely up to one's self to give meaning to things; there is no meaning in anything that is in and of itself.

Great! Now I feel empowered with the realization that I am responsible for the meaning in my life; that the meaning of life is in my hands. However, just beyond the horizon of this insight is the blackness that is attached to it. At what point can I stop denying this feeling of nausea that comes when I see that nothing can have any meaning without me (if I am indeed the source of that meaning). If it is only from myself from which I can derive meaning, then when I die, all of the meaning which I had attributed to my life will evaporate into the nothing that so disturbed me in the first place. At what point will I be able to stop the feeling that I am simply fooling myself? I can try to force meaning down the throat of life, but if something doesn't have any meaning other than that which I have given to it, the meaning seems somehow less real and less value, and it still really makes no difference at all if I choose to never attribute meaning to anything again. This also means that if I can find no meaning in life, it is both a grand failure on my part to give it some, as well as being due to the fact that perhaps I have run out of meaning to distribute/attribute.

If I am in charge of my own perceptions and the attributions of meaning to people and events in my life, then how come every time I open my eyes everything is still the same: empty and enveloped in darkness? Perhaps my recent apathetic tendencies are due to the realization that none of it really matters anyway, unless you want it to, and even then it is pure maya, or illusion.

My perception is what decides what colour everything is shaded with, and yet still nothing seems to be any more real or concrete. The most disturbing thing for me is that this seems to imply that it doesn't matter what is real and what isn't, because the only thing that matters is my perception of it.

So what the hell matters anyway?

I'm not sure if any of this makes any sense, but I need to publish this post so I don't keep rewriting it.