Chapter 9: Existential Joy
We all are born and raised under a history that confines our belief of who we are as a people and as individuals. The trappings that had died with men so long ago are still palpable to those who are seeking purpose or soulful connection within their lifetime. Attaching to our ego, we identify with the external cultures, systems and barriers that work to limit and control our potential understanding of self. Once the personal work has been done and a person becomes aware of themselves, the only true thing that will continue to stand against them is that reflecting external world. Luckily, the external and it’s many parts can be made inconsequential, which may offer ease to the pressure of being swallowed back into unawareness and confinement.
The systems that oppress you are typically the first ‘wars’ a person born in the modern age consciously has to exist through. Referencing chapter 2, these systems will paint you the victim and the justified, reinforcing you to succumb to a ego-centered life. The racial system, patriarchal system, economic system, societal system, governmental system, education system and more, all occupy the same tier in the rankings of existence but do not exist as the reigning factor for your suppression. Systems themselves are directly beneath culture, as the overlying culture of a people is what allows each system to create its effects and outcomes. War culture dominates humanity and because of war culture these systems were created with the intent to mass replicate the dominating culture.
War culture supersedes the global patriarchy despite most likely being created from it. War is the product of continued cultivation of an ego-rich humanity, chasing domination over what is viewed as inferior or threatening. It transcends white supremacy although it has never quite been seen on such a scale as white supremacy. It precedes written history and continues to evolve to new levels of destruction. War culture fuels the enforcement of colourism, classism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobic, misogyny and misandry that connects to individual communities, causing further internal conflict based in identity. Conflict is natural but this war culture is man-made. it is taught and it is embodied in everything it reigns over.
Above war culture however, is love culture. Love transcends the conditional nature of conflict by offering an unconditional solution in continued life. Love on its own can be permanent, while conflict serves as a period absent of true love. Can there be world peace if all good people had the power to keep all bad people away? Or would the good people be in conflict with their abuse of power in the place of what should be forgiveness? Would it not be a true exercise of love to seek the route of acceptance rather than persecution of the human who struggles to love themselves and therefore humanity? But should everyone suffer as a result of one person’s ineptitude? Would you kill someone who you claim to love unconditionally? The answer to these questions is unclear even as you transcend the grip of war culture.
Above love is life, the duality of love culture and war culture. This world would not exist without its ‘love’ for continued existence but you would not exist without the ‘war’ of survival. In a way, perhaps humanity would be better off not existing but we do and therefore the love for life that made us exist must persist through you. All life is at war with itself while being fueled by a love of existence. All things are born unconsensually and we all live in non-consensual agreement to war, in pursuit of experience. This cyclical existence is meaningful and meaningless, but it is in our consciousness to decide to see if it is or is not. The idea of being everything, a piece of something and nothing at all is the culture that life teaches in it’s controlled chaos.
Eventually leading to a search for an answer to chaos, death provides its consistency. Death does reign over everything but is not quite supreme, because what death takes, life creates. In your final moments you decide if your life was meaningful or meaningless. There is no need rush to the answer. In the grand scheme of what you experience, the treatment of you as a child becomes a speck in time, in your own personal world, a piece of a system and culture that you uncovered and cultivated over your lifetime. Your relationships serve as proof of humanity’s wisdom and ties to love or humanity’s savagery and ties to war. In spite of death we continue ‘being’, in search of this conclusion.
The concept of ‘being’ has lost meaning in this world because ‘meaning’ has lost consistency in this world. If no one recognizes meaning itself, will it matter when one person does? Life and it’s lack of meaning is a beautiful absence of expectation. All you’ve done is a gift in the presence of a world where there is everything yet nothing. In our humanity, meaningless evil wants to be seen, and meaningful good resides in obscurity. But life itself does not see the meaning in humans living well or dying poorly. Life does not explain, justify or try to understand ‘being’. Life is not human, humanity is a product of life’s persistence. Life only connects to time and death. The only true way to surpass all systems and cultures, to exist in unconditional love through all conflict, is to fully accept the one thing above death; gratitude for time and acceptance of your end for its continuation.