Thorns of Immortality
by Patryk Rebisz

Part II - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
1. Accidental Midway
"A baby born on the day of their departure was already dead. If they were to go back - to spend another 90 years in sleep, they would be flying back to a place that's two generations detached from their lives."

"The journey was their ticket into eternity - the immortality they will never reach. Their existence wiped from any possible glory, they were nobodies destined for the fringes of history."

"A self-materialising probe that out-ran them on the way to the distant Planet didn't need sensors to experience or chips to process the stimuli. It was as a pure thought - a being that didn't need to exist to be."

2. Dream Rather Than Reality
"Touching God's finger was part of their intentions when embarking on the journey to this distant Planet, now they were to go back - to return Home without even entering the chambers where He resides. They've devoted lives to reach immortality and were rendered obsolete in the process."

"He was an explorer of his fantasy, uninterested in the reality of travel. That detachment from reality was always a necessity for an explorer - without that disengagement one wouldn't begin. Feeling incomplete to just dream, one couldn't simply go. That's why every journey has a destination, a practical goal that, besides fulfilling the technicality of pointing the ship in a specific direction, also gives the journey a purpose."

"The goal is a fact: a prerequisite of reality that exists in the heads and hearts of many that stayed behind. The journey, on the other hand, is more abstract, more personal. One gives into hope to discover something profound at the end of it, risking finding out less than anticipated. The goal is satisfied by its utilitarian role. The journey, on the other hand, unless precisely shaped by facts, is of no interest to anybody other than the self as it's about dreams. For the explorer, the journey's value is in a selfish perception that his experience and his life matters."

"In their greed to see the Planet, they didn't consider that the senses will communicate all there is to say, never bothering waking up the soul."

"He imagined that he would be one of those who keep on staring boldly in the face of death and challenge it to a duel. Today, he realised that death wouldn't care. It would walk away from the confrontation waiting for the spirit inside the fighter, inside him, to diminish so that it could cross the river Styx unmolested."

"He could only hope that some spark still glowed inside and with time a new fire for life will rekindle. He wanted to escape from this void, this emotional vacuum that makes both outcomes equal. He needed to know that to be is more important than not to."

3. Yes or No?
"Even death follows a path of desire."

"He couldn't see himself as a non-being, he couldn't face death and yet the joy of living wasn't with him anymore. He was in between worlds - living or dying didn't matter much to him - he simply was too indifferent to both. To be aware of the distance between mind and the physical body that sustains it, is to be in between the worlds making this empty space home."

"He volunteered for the mission to become part of something bigger than his own singularity and yet he didn't want to disassociate himself from the body that defines him. Did he want to give up something of himself for the dream of a greater humanity?"

"Deepest dreams are rarely formed by the self - they are a grouping of forces that come from outside of the individual. At the edge of existence one is terrified, stripped of those forces imagining the worst: being compelled to create a new dream that belongs to noone else."

"To truly face oneself is a monumental task that's terrifying as it reveals a void within the very body one values so much - its thin shell only to define the soul's end."

"Lived through the body, one might be much more significant than any pretense to the soul's omnipotence. The journey was to prove the otherwise: that the soul, giving people perception of their immortality, reigns supreme."

"To be is to split oneself from the incursion of time. Although being necessarily hints at the beginning and the end, it also separates itself from the constraint of time passing. To do is to be in motion, constantly transforming from one state to another. This motion necessarily involves time."

4. Man as His Own Master
"Even those philosophical leapses that attempt to transcend the human experience were always rooted in human scale and reality."

"The abstract bodies of the ones who, as they imagined, will welcome them in the future gave a reason to dream about the glory - the history of tomorrow where their names could be forged in stone."

"Without knowing it, the dust of the stone is all they really desired. If they could perceive the process of ageing rock, slowly eroded by weather, would they strive to have their memory ingrained into its molecules that one day will blow across the universe? How many gave up their lives in hopes of reaching eternity only to be forgotten by the dust of history?"

"Anchored in current time and space, if they saw the extremes to which their bodies dictate their thoughts, would they desire to be remembered? If they had a choice, would they risk their life again for that temporality?"

"There was nothing that held them back to history and nothing that connected them to the current reality - it all seemed equally meaningless. Something was brewing under their skins that made them uncomfortable about living."

"The freedom they've found with their spiritual death was uplifting proclaiming: 'As dead - we'll live.' They were 'dead' just like Adam before his finger met that of God's."

"Standing at the abyss of possibilities - man feels frightened at the very idea that now he is his own master. Free to do anything - devoid of any obligation or responsibility - this unbearable lightness to think whatever one wants terrified them."

"The irresponsibility of infinity detached them from the burden of reality."

"Humans are not meant to live like divinities, they rather want to be bogged down by daily responsibility escaping life's troubles into fantasies of what could have happened if only they could reach perfect freedom."

"Devoid of any barriers, they've lost any sense of direction. The fog of uncertainty overtook their minds."

"Looking at the small dots of distant stars - like little pin holes in a black paper dome letting in the outside light - the Poet kept imagining what the outside world looked like. Was God a puppeteer making his next puppet all hollow inside? He wondered if the stars were just holes in the puppet's head waiting for some plebeian hair transplant."

"The Poet desired to flip his mind inside out and in the process envelop the whole world. Like a huge wave from Hokusai's woodcut swallowing up a whole mountain, the Poet wanted to shroud God, in the process destroying Him."

"Reimagined in one's head as a god swallowing up his God - within that one atom a whole new universe could live. Face against the windows, scheming his revenge against the Creator, the Poet could feel the cold emptiness of space."

"What if it's the man giving the gift of life to God? The free will infused into human bodies, almost by accident gave a new meaning to God's existence."

"God was the only source of proof of His existence thus there was always a chance that He could be wrong, that He didn't exist at all, that the Universe was His delusion."

"By giving humans their free will, God cemented His ability to be, for even if people reject Him, in the choice of that renunciation, there is a godliness that defines the Creator."

"It takes a certain amount of determination to look in the mirror and see the true contours of one's face, to rid the self of the disguise, unadorned by superficial needs of the ego. They avoided this mirror terrified that only the illusion of who they are kept them from falling ever deeper into the abyss of despair."

"One lives during their lifetime - not before and only ephemerally after. The end is hazily marked on the timeline of existence but so is one's beginning. One's birth wasn't a surprise - one was meant to exist."

"The question of meaning, the Poet discovered, is incorrect because the answer is within the inquiry. The mere fact of existence gives the answer: one's life is meaningful because one is. Existence spells out meaning."

"The real question is how one should live so that at the end, upon one's death, the soul will transform enough to mark the universe. Search for meaning is not that of existential possibility but rather that of effort and time committed to this inquiry."

5. Begining with Death / Climbing Mt Fuji
"Nature, just like people, is afraid of reality terrified of seeing its own ugliness. What is God's imperfection?"

"The artist had no control over the process of this intellectual annihilation of stripping his art from ideas beyond excitement of decoration. The picture [of waves overtaking Mt Fuji] started its existence as a way to prod the possibility of spiritual enlightenment, beloved by millions ending up meaningless."

"The power of this image was not in reality of the endeavour but in the potential for this endeavor to take place."

"With time, the desire for meaning turned into something else: this realization that one is part of something bigger, giving everyone hope that death isn't the end. Concept of a Being beyond the physicality of structures entered their mind. God was born."

"Technology always tempts to get to the point as if the journey didn't matter. Even understanding the indispensability of time spent on the journey, one often chooses the option requiring less commitment, forgetting that rushing to the goal could destroy the possibility to understand."

"Without the distance specified by two points - that of their origin and their destination, and the immense time it takes to transfer from one to the other, they wouldn't be explorers on the edge of profound, searching for answers to the yet undefined questions. It was the distance that made the journey, thus their lives, meaningful."

"Human aspiration always desired to go to the edge of possibilities, the moment the action of reaching became too familiar - it disappeared from people's lexicon of dreams killing something important inside."

"The Poet never found scientific arguments completely convincing because besides facts, they lacked that subliminal layer that conveyed a full understanding. As the sciences advanced, the original mysticism diminished robbing people of underlying metaphysics. Surrounded by data that quickly dispels myths, explaining a large portion of the working universe, one lost the ability and more so the desire to imagine the unexplainable. Quick access to answers severed one's ability to wonder, with every explanation taking one further away from the sheer pleasure of living."

"It was a search for the abstraction through facts that made the Poet raise up to go. He started wondering if as the travelers to the distant Planet, they weren't a sort of spiritual leaders in times marked by science's hegemony."

"The savage man didn't have the comfort of desire - he needed to know or death followed. He got his confidence from mastering the forces shaping his immediate surroundings unconcerned about the larger world that could only be attributed to mysticism and magic."

"Embracing certainty in the power of knowledge - this conviction that if one desires, the knowledge is to be gained - people became information processors only capable of computing, starved of underlying spirituality."

"The world has lost its magic because any phenomena is explainable even if temporarily beyond one's grasp. The question is not of possibility to understand but the time it takes to fully ingest the knowledge."

"The dreamer who only believes in the goal, doesn't need a temporary fulfilment - the blind faith is all that motivates because at the moment of greatest uncertainty, facts provide very little inspiration to keep on going."

"Dream requires an unflinching belief in its potential - not just doing what one is told but rather defining a goal (even if roughly) and pursuing it with unyielding belief to its very end. There is a virtue in a job well executed but it doesn't hold the same timeless value as a pure madness of dreaming."

"Bringing his ego to a complete annihilation, he was on the verge of having to construct himself anew. Still sulking in his sadness, a breath of fresh air was infusing the almost-dead fire within with a new sort of energy. He faced an abyss of opportunity but this infinite range of possibilities frightened him."

"The journey let them escape the chains of social constraints - they were free and this new freedom scared them because all they wanted was the illusion of freedom that comes with power bestowed upon them by the mission's success. The need for illusion is as a structural necessity - if one erases the illusion, the reality is lost."

"The artifice of illusions is shaped by the dreamer's need to return to reality. At some point the deception ends and one is confronted by that which is Real. One's excitement at the artifice is proportional to one's roots in the Real."

6. Musician and King
"'I was suddenly overcome by pity, as I considered the brevity of human life, since not one of all these people here will be alive one hundred years from now.' - Persian king Xerxes, recounted by Herodotus. He saw himself as a god and was saddened that this self-deception couldn't extend into the reality - that he was limited in his godliness by his finite body."

"The astronauts have outlived the crowds that sent them on their journey - and the ones who were supposed to give them their divinity if the mission went according to plan, weren't even born yet. They too, the Poet realized, were gods - who died, unfortunately, before being born."

"Immortality is fed by the ego of those on top of Mt Olympus as well as the masses - the mutated concert goers existing as an abstraction hiding in darkness beyond the brightness of the stage. One body merging into another, until they meant nothing as individuals. Their presence at this concert was a form of spiritual cleansing - a willful disjointment from their individualism, in the communal prayer with the performer as their priest."

"What propels someone to willingly give up their uniqueness? What motivates the desire to exchange the singularity of the self for the chance to be part of something bigger - a mosaic of colors worshiping an idol?"

"God gave humans free will and then tamed it by one's desire to exist among others."

7. Reality From A Though / Birth of God
"Dissatisfied with a thought of the universe, God let that thought turn into a concrete reality. From nothing, something was born."

"A thought represents an idea only when it becomes part of reality and that can manifest only via action. Thus the fundamental question is not that of thought but how to convert the metaphysical energy of an idea into that action."

"The Poet preferred the dreams of the mountain climb over the climb itself. He favored thinking up the ideas that resonate in the climber's head while struggling against the monolith of the mountain rather than climb and experience it first hand. The truth becomes an obstacle to the pleasures of imagination."

"A definition taken to an extreme encompasses such a vast amalgamation of elements that anything can be anything else. It's the human physical limitations that impose constraints on concepts."

"The crew would have to find a new agent of reality discovering a new 'body' to concretely affect the world - to forget all that they knew so once again they could live in a blissful ignorance detached from the knowledge of knowing."

"The end of something - the membrane that defines a thing as one but not another - always fascinated the Poet. He put his hand up observing, seeking the boundary of self. Where does 'he' end and the 'world' begins? The edges defining physical objects are apparent, but where one's conceptual definition of self wins over another is a choice."

"Objects and concepts do not exist in perfect tangibility but are rather shaped by probabilities of perception."

"The body tries to provide more exact definitions to the world, but the mind, shaped by the body's senses and biology of the brain, tries to dilute those demarcations by questioning the body. It doesn't want to accept that for its existence, it needs the body. It strives to outgrow the hegemony of the physical boundaries and imagines the infinites - the places where body's authority ceases due to impossible expanse."

"For God to exist, the mind must conceptualize It first. Likewise, the body must create the universe out of infinites of possibilities by giving it its definitions. The circle complete: perception birthed by the possibilities of the world."

"What's outside of God-Universe? Can this question exist outside of the Supreme Being? Is the symbiosis between the possibility of this thought and physical boundaries of the universe similar to that of mind interacting with its body? Can one rebel against God's omnipotence just as the mind does again the body's constraints?"

"One is constrained by the body but also accepts that it's through the body that one connects to the real world affecting change. The body is both the enabler of change and the limiting factor: it will die before this world reaches its perfection."

"Despite its inherent frailty, the body anchors the presence carving out an existence out of infinity of times and places rooting one in this time and in this reality."

"Why not first create a human floating aimlessly through the dark waters of eternal abyss slowly building the world around? The amniotic sack sustains the baby for nine months spent in the mother's womb - the child exists before being born. The universe doesn't exist before the child is born into it, rather the world is created for the baby the moment of birth - the process of birth fuses one's life with the abstraction of this world making it concrete."

"On the way to death, man seeks meaning, finding it only due to a curious handicap to experience time in its one-dimensionality - the arrow of time moving always forward - and imagining the self outside of this time. At the foundation of meaning is the human ability to think abstractly about time and space while being confined by those two dimensions."

"The answer to the question of meaning is not in a tangibility but in ability to 'stretch' the conceptual understanding of time reaching to its beginning and the end while facing mortality; the ability to reach the boundaries of the universe with thoughts while confined by the imperfect body."

"The soul wouldn't be needed as a concept if not for the body's finity, existing only thanks to the body's short burst of existence. Due to its inevitable death, the body creates the soul as a way to stay immortal. God played a cruel joke giving humans the ability to comprehend the concept of the soul but only through the unrefined physical being of the body."

"Imagining his body after death, the Poet wondered if he too would be content turning into 'immortal' dust. To fulfill one's destiny is to infuse atoms with enough meaning that the memory could carry on even if recomposed as a part of another creation."

8. Beyond
"Life is a struggle on a very prosaic level - the basics of survival, but also on a complex one: to wake up everyday and be inspired finding significance in the day ahead. God gave humanity a double-edged sword with which they can seek meaning or succumb to everyday banality."

"Without a finity there is no meaning - it's death that gives life its purpose. The Poet imagined the eternal God experiencing daily melancholy because He chose not to incorporate finity into His being, making himself perpetual - without a beginning or an end. Meaningless."

"How often does God wonder what it means to die watching stars be born only to collapse millions of years later?"

"With two trillion galaxies, a star could be given to every human being ever born… Why this generosity, why did the universe have to be so vast? There is always a need for a climb like this one up the mountain - to discover some certainty in the irrational overabundance of cosmos."

"If the wrong / right doesn't mean much, why search for any kind of answer in the first place?"

"When God forbade the original parents to consume fruit from the tree of knowledge, He was probing Adam and Eve to see if they indeed possess the ability to shape their own destiny."

"God gave people building blocks for thinking up something outside of Him. Incapable of producing that thought, He needed people's mind as a medium for that thought to occur."

"The Evil is a negation of the discovery that for the thought to be, one needs to exist. Evil is not a negation of God or tangible existence of the universe but rather the possibility of reaching outside of self. To stay complacent is to be Evil."