Nitrous and Nihilism

I sometimes wonder if the complexity of energy patterns doesn’t increase our level of consciousness but merely fragments it. Perhaps an invertebrate is much more acutely aware of being a invertebrate than we are of being human, and the “amount” of consciousness is always the same, so that life never grows towards higher consciousness but merely cycles through one arbitrary form after another until it comes back around again. If existence is just a cycle, a buddha wouldn’t interfere with the cycle anyway because every moment would be identical in value. Perhaps the right half of the six realms is the way back from enlightenment when, in our enlightenment, we see that it doesn’t matter and let our consciousness unify into simplicity again.

The imperative of nature is reproduction, and as everything arises from it, everything else is a form of that motive force. It can’t transcend that one purpose because whatever other purposes arise from it are an extension of it. Because energy has no destination but its own sustainment, it’s the only thing about it that’s constant and everything else is transient. Energy randomly produces new variations that will sustain themselves to varying degrees, but their sustainment is never necessary. It doesn’t matter how easily we could achieve divinity if it were our purpose, because we were not made with that purpose, or any purpose at all. We will fail not because success is out of our reach, but because we will not reach for it, and only be concerned with the sustainment of our identities.

The only way consciousness can become our purpose in and of itself is if it is useful to that purpose, and sometimes this will be the case, but like everything else it will be temporary: it doesn't matter in what form we sustain, more or less evolve. In the modern age, to reproduce we do not need more consciousness, but an average amount of consciousness, so that it’s understandable enough to others to be accepted by them. Our species therefore strives for mediocrity, for normalcy, and the only way that the few of us who randomly transcend the cycle have a chance, is if we break off from our species and evolve on our own. But the chance that even more than one person has randomly broken free from the cycle of samsara is exponentially smaller.