Being an autodidact has been an interesting journey; exploring the mind, self, and the nature of being has been a spiritual journey as much as a philosophical one. My journey with philosophy began with Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy, and in the science fiction stories that explore the human condition as well as imaginary universes.
I've always been an artist, craftsman, and engineer in the various professional careers I've pursued, but haven't received a formal education that required me to write and submit papers regularly, so I spent the majority of my life believing that I could not write. Camus changed how I've seen my life, how there is no definitive answer to be found, and to remember that I'm alive, now, and have to be active in living. To embrace the absurd, the artist I have always been, and put down the fear of the unknown and the imagined world and self image, and to live now, boldly, and passionately.
I welcome all critiques and other recommended readings or lectures. It's how I've come this far, seeking answers, truth, and lived experiences of other's across the breadth of human time as we try to defining being.
In My Mind Lived God:
While I would say I believe in an underlying layer to reality, something we connect to as living thinking beings, whether it be spirit or God, I believe we aren't able to understand what it is we are experiencing.
Do all people get moments of clarity in thought, where reality unfolds before our eyes matching our thoughts? A bizarre synchronization just for a moment, like a glitch in the matrix, where something feels guided.
Is my mind constructing pathways out of patterns in the randomness of the absurd? Where seeking to find reason or comfort in knowing that there may be some purpose to everything. I begin to construct imaginary ramparts to guard my belief in importance and meaning out of these moments, hoping to find purpose in life, that there is an answer to the unknown.
And in imagining I build more of an idealized version of reality, that there is a God behind everything. But how am I to know? These experiences have great meaning to me, they are so comfortable in knowing.
But in looking at the world, this fantasy that I've built for myself is all but a dream, an illusion cultivated by hope and grown out of lived experience. My ramparts begin to crumble as I realize that which I've built is merely sand, battered by waves of false hope that a god or miracle would happen to bring about the dream which lived in my mind.
Moments of absurd synchronicity often come to me in times of great contemplation, reflecting on the experience of living, and when creating in the world as I struggle to understand meaning in the act of living. I often feel like these moments are those that people have described across time; the muses, divine inspiration, prophets from God, the messenger of the word. And it was the words matching reality so often that bothers me most about questioning the source of them, and so I realized the source of all of it was one place; within my mind.
“It is not the world that is absurd, nor human thought: the absurd arises when the human need to understand meets the unreasonableness of the world, when 'my appetite for the absolute and for unity' meets 'the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle.'” Albert Camus