I saw an Instagram post a few days ago that summed up the entirety of my ~awakening~ experience with frustrating simplicity using cat gifs. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, especially as I dip my toe into stage 6 of this process. I’m going to share it here, just in case anyone is curious.
- Blissful unawareness of our own mortality and cosmic insignificance
- Questioning all epistemic assumptions that assigned meaning to your life & place in the universe
- Realizing that there is no inherent or obvious meaning of life to be found
- Turning to pessimistic nihilism (w/o recognizing the irony that you’re using nihilism as a reactionary & surrogate source of meaning)
- Recognizing that you must no longer abstract away this opportunity to build a life that feels meaningful to you; meaning is brought to life by you
- Taking responsibility for your life by anchoring yourself back to basic values like courage, love, and discipline
- Regaining a sense of the transcendent beauty of life, affirming it in all its joys & sorrows, and living authentically
This couples well with something I heard from someone somewhere. I think it was Jordan Peterson, who I like because he tells incels that women don’t like them not because women are mean but because their lives are a mess. Anyways, the thing was about honesty. Everything has consequences. You can reject your intuition and make decisions that contribute to your anger, delusion, lust, greed, jealousy, etc., but there will be consequences. You can deny the consequences and be like “it doesn’t actually matter if I smoke weed every day” or “it doesn’t actually matter if I look at porn” but in some very real sense, it does matter. It disrupts your peace of mind and causes unhappiness, isolation, and shame. Your perception of the world is completely subjective, so everything you perceive is affected by these decisions and their impact on your inner well-being. It’s up to you to set boundaries and follow them, not because the world will crash and burn if you don’t, but because they will make your life more enjoyable and bring you peace & purpose.
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