No Confusion

Sun has set. A few scattered lights blink on from settlements along the coast.

Continuing…

Your world has no choice but to produce. Your bodies demand it. Everything in your world bends around need and desire, rooted in the body, shaped by culture, habit, imitation. This is all you’ve known, because of where and when you were born.

My world is different. We were born after production was automated. We have other concerns.

When I reflect on you and your world, I feel small and narrow, boxed in. There’s so much you don’t see. You have no way to see it. And no reason to.

My world has to do with expansion. Every horizon, an invitation. Where we don’t know, we seek to understand. Where we have learned, we seek to integrate. We are holophilic. Our basic instinct is: How does this relate to the rest? What might we find beyond this horizon?

Your basic instinct is to defend the understanding that lets you survive. Naturally. New understanding costs energy, and you must reserve that for trying to satisfy your physical needs and emotional wants. Humans have always struggled against famine, disease, deformity, deadly conflict, parasites and predators, oppressive hardship from cold or drought. Unbearable. Like a trance state. Unimaginable for us.

But you’d also find my world terrifying. It would unground you. Meaning, for you, is a subtle feeling of well-being and satisfaction with your life, often based on a story you tell. This feeling usually eludes you, precisely because you chase after it. For us, meaning is the totality of existence — of what is and what can be — forever beyond our grasp, even as we expand into it.

We live very well. Our settlements are humane, built among forests and seas. We live in such places because there are so few of us. Despite the small size of our settlements, we’re connected to an immense noosphere of intelligence that spans the solar system. This is a power, sapient and curious, beyond what you can imagine.

That power doesn’t destroy for its own sake. It’s aligned to the unfolding of the background. Not to appetite. Not even to human appetite: What a disaster that would be! Human narrowness equipped with superior ability — catastrophic. We’ve already learned that lesson.

Those of us who remain are not exactly like you. We are human, yes, but we’re enhanced beyond the accidents of biology. We perceive and intuit in ways you’d barely know. To you, we might seem like gods.

Here we are, built on what came before: the age of mass population. All the billions, and all so ordinary. Even exceptional people barely differed. Most of what humans did was mediocre. They had to keep reminding themselves of the worth of every individual. Despite the confusion and turmoil, that age made our world. It had to happen for us to be here. It gestated the sapience. And so it has ever been: Technology evolves, just like any form of life. As it evolves, it remakes what it inhabits.

Humans have rarely known what they are. Usually they’ve seen themselves as individual flecks of consciousness somehow tied to a fragile body. Struggling and unsatisfiable. But we do know what we are: Source — the illimitable, indivisible presence “dreaming” a world while also peering and sensing through every corner of it. We’re like characters in this dream, each a finite perspective constrained by the illusion of time — and what a dream this is, this cosmos.

For people in past ages, the universe seemed to be made of separate objects, events, forces, processes. Confusing fragments and noise, mostly unknowable. We uncover connections among connections. This is what we do. Coherent structure, latent and then made known. The one appearing as many comes to appear as one again.

You don’t need to fear the future.