I'm in
a nothingy kind of place where I'm weighing up if this might be
it...and I think it might be. I'm wondering how, if, I can come to
terms with it. Perhaps I have already. Accepted it as already passed.
This disconnectedness set to last, measured by the time I have left which for all I know could be eternity if science continues its leaps and pushes. Is this how it is to be some sort of New Age astronaut with my brain permanently encased in a bubble?
There is nothing here. I feel nothing here.
There is no meaning, no emotion. Just a vast, blank emptiness where nothing is related. No pinpricks of planets or stars to illuminate the blackness. No space dust to examine as it floats by, and even if there was I'm not sure it would arouse my once human curiosity.
Humanness is no longer an existence I have any conception of, although the brain still thinks as if it were always separate from and outside the body. There's nothing to quantify its being so it survives independently, freed from its shackles but persisting in its thinking as 'I'. That attachment has not been severed, yet.
Give it time and I, whatever this I describes: who I was or who I am now, might join the cosmos. Merge with the dark pool and cease individualised thinking, possibly cease thinking altogether. Maybe consciousness too will lose its current importance, but right now this need for an independent identity is all I have left. In mind alone.
The body, or the vehicle as I shall refer to it from this moment forwards, was abandoned relatively recently when it became apparent it did not serve. It functioned but was unfit for purpose for I (and I was then what is generally comprehended as an I) had surpassed it. The inclination to possess a physical property had grown less and less with frequent civil wars that couldn't be contained or pacified. The threats of unrest were never empty. Naturally, I became disenchanted presiding over this warring state and so escaped into the world of the mind. And once there, I was enthralled.
My experience of the mind is that it operates much like a hotel: reception is always frantically busy with arrivals, departures and requests from staying guests, whereas the lounge is an oasis of calm. The floor assigned to VIPs is huge with plenty of rooms to choose from, all of which are designed to ponder and pontificate in. It doesn't matter if you only hear your own response, so grateful are you for the space to hear what you alone have to think and say.
However, retreats if retired to too often have a habit of descending into permanency. The benefits on each occasion multiplying, the desire to stay too great to discard.
The vehicle for a time does fine without you. Its voluntary and involuntary functions continue as before when you were more present, and so your attention is diverted to a greater extent, drawn ever inward, until you reach a point where you consider it surplus to requirements. You have no need of it yet it does not desist from needing you, and takes up energy that could be better spent on intellectual matters. The perfunctory glances, which you felt it deserved, are disregarded completely, as are observations of events – those events outside yourself which make little or no impact. The I subconsciously stating it no longer wishes to be troubled by these worldly affairs.
The mind is the controller now and the brain its subordinate, though to be honest with the vehicle deserted that role is largely defunct; still, it occasionally flickers, lights up its circuits like a pinball machine just in case or for old time's sake which the mind on one of its daily rambles barely registers.
The I that once used to present, in company, an exterior personality yet live in its head on the quiet has now chosen instead to reside in a state of nothing.
Picture credit: Hubble Space Telescope, NASA
