As The Heavens Wheel in anticlimatic

Instincts are generational coping mechanisms.

Evolution is weaponized scar tissue for the purpose of escaping the trauma that caused it.

How many tree frog ancestors were eaten before one began blending in a little better to the forest and avoided being eaten long enough to produce offspring that would go on to blend in a little better?

Everything down to the shape of our ears and the existence of our fingernails is a tower of time polished survival mechanisms extending down our bloodlines into the infinity of the past.

Things change in life, inherently. The universe churns on itself with a speed relative to our own size of perception. The stars overhead move slow, but the chemical reactions in our hands explode instantly. And we move juuuust right.

If all the stars were bubbles in a Titan’s champagne glass, they would seem to bubble quickly, I’m sure of it. All of the Milky Way’s birth, life, and death in the single span from the bottom of the glass to the top.

Human consciousness was born through the same evolutionary process as other survival coping mechanisms, likely as a result of homo sapiens being the dominant apex predators on the planet for so long that S-Tier upgrades, such as Self Awareness and Self Reflection, were finally made available to the species. I wonder if every other planet that sustains life- if its dominant species didn’t climb to the top of that tech tree as well?

(and for anyone curious how meaning and self awareness can arise from the chaotic meaninglessness of the universe, I strongly recommend GEB by Doug Hofstadter)

Within the system of Self Awareness, within the mind itself which is mostly preoccupied with motor functions, memories, and various other important commands shared across almost all of the animal kingdom, are the complex thoughts of our super-ego. The singular upgrade that separates us, the apex predators of the planet, from the rest.

Our complex ideas- our religions, our political affiliations, our philosophical considerations, all seem quite vast, and large, and larger than life, and larger than ourselves- but it’s an illusion.

What we see trailing off into the fog doesn’t go on forever.
It ends right there, 2 feet from where we can no longer see it.

“To realize that all your life— all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain—
it was all the same thing.
It was all the same dream.
A dream that YOU had inside a locked room.
A dream about being a person.”