Rather Suspect

Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

Don DeLillo, White Noise

Listen. Yes, we sent you there for a purpose. We placed you on a small blue dot of a planet, wiped your memory, made it so that you had to learn everything from scratch. The first two or three years you had no awareness but then you started to build that part of you: the memory-creating part.

And since then, interestingly, that’s all that you’ve done: created memory after memory. So much so that you had to invent an entire physics so that you could explain these memories to yourself. You made grand leaps, constructed an entire fictional god you called Time, and then rationalized it to yourself using those same memories. You told yourself those who came “before” you (as if that idea alone made any sense) had other, lesser gods, primitive gods. Zeus, Thor, Yahweh — you say now these were ways others constructed explanations for things they couldn’t understand.

You say, Now (another invention, another god), that you have no need for a god, because you’ve found Science. But, tell me, how fulfilling is it? Does it bring you peace when you awake with a start in the middle of the night?

You say, the point of life is to live it. Based upon what, may we ask? How is it that your preoccupation with constructing memories entitles you to claim you know the “point” of anything?

But we share this with you not out of any anger or spite. How could we ask any more of you, given what we’ve done? You will learn. You will stop focusing so intently upon making memories, and when you do your Time will hold less power over you, just as Science did, in fact, help you fear thunder less when it replaced Thor.

Fear drives all this, and we wished there had been a better way. And there will be. But at this stage in your development Fear is the strongest guide, the loudest. So it is often best to turn towards Fear, something you know.

Many of you try to avoid that fact, spending your precious “Time” (how is it you made a god that is also a currency is something we wish you would reflect more upon) on things like looking at photos of what others are doing and inventing devices so you can do more of this. And then, strangely, you elevate this to something you call “living” when you do something that is photo-worthy.

All well and good of course, it’s the path you’ve chosen. Again, yes, we did place you there, and yes, there was a reason. But the mechanism for how you exist there we didn’t plan, and how could we? You aren’t a machine. You could argue that you have no agency, but it isn’t true. You do have it, you just haven’t discovered it yet. Along they way you have found, and will find, false agencies. But these will never satisfy.

Why this message to you? Only because your allegiance to your holy Time has many of us concerned. Not all, mind you — many of us believe it is no more worrying than any other fictions you’ve created. But a few of us have raised objections that are at least somewhat compelling.

So, we shall try to say this in a way you might understand. Let go of your so-called memories and, when you do so, be alert and aware to what may fill the void. You will feel Fear. Listen to what it is telling you.