A RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POSSIBILITY AND HOPE
[Written between Saturday, May 27th and Tuesday, July 4th, 2023]
Back in the winter of 2010 a gas station attendant filling the philosopher’s car with gas asked him, “how’s it going bro?” and the philosopher replied: “I wish I was rich and lived on the beach.” And then the gas station attendant said: “it’s like that AC/DC song, bro. ‘It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock and Roll’).” This thirteen year old memory resurfaced as the philosopher once more reflected on how so many of his dreams lately had been coming true — these many desires, fantasies, visions, visualizations, deeply held wishes, hopes, prayers… manifested…these aspects of his life experiences which had evolved from seeming, to him, utterly impossible “pie in the sky” “pipe dreams” to material and perceivable.
All these things he wanted to happen in his life had seemed impossible because he had not yet been sufficiently conscious of these things as possibilities, of possibility… as such, qua a thing, and infinite possibility,…. and the energy…. of every possibility…. as a distinct… thing… in the universe and consciousness… but then he started researching Quantum Physics and contemplating how it might inform his metaphysical thinking…and this became one of the best things ever to happen in his life because it provided mathematical and scientific language and a tangible, very seemingly, apparently credible foundation for what used to be only merely a speculative idea in his mind about the nature of thought, the energy of thought, and the law of attraction.
The first time he seriously contemplated the nature of thought he was 21, stoned, and suffering from one of those marijuana induced panic and paranoia attacks…which often occurred when he smoked marijuana…about three fourths of the time…palpitating heart, hyperventilation, tightening body, inexplicable sense of utter doom and hopelessness which was based on a deeply rooted, utterly ignorant, unvetted, not thoroughly contemplated metaphysical assumption that he absolutely, necessarily possessed no semblance of free will, whatsoever… and thus, consequentially, he played no role in what occurred to him in his life…and thus…bad things could happen to him at any time, he could simply drop dead at any time, the sun could explode or the universe could just…end… and no aspect of his consciousness could stop it! He was pathetic and defenseless. This had created a most awful, depressed, and anxious disposition which smoking marijuana often agitated; he had been a walking, panicking mess without the marijuana, but the marijuana often escalated the feelings from a blander and more tedious sort of dread, resignation, passivity, abandonment of all sense of purposefulness to a sense of literal, impending, imminent, inevitable doom…
Ironic experiences however can sometimes save one’s soul as was the case for him. In those days, he also held a dogmatic, pessimistic, unwittingly postmodern epistemological assumption that there could be no such thing as a fact, as knowledge. But, talk about one single thought which seemed to transpire at the right time and the right place and which forever changed his life: according to his assumption, no knowledge, or facts, or truth could “exist”… how ironically logical then, if he was to be at all consistent in his thinking, and possess any integrity whatsoever, and grant a certain legitimacy to the thought that just as he could not know he actually possessed free will, he could not know he utterly and entirely lacked free will…and just like that, he felt the slightest pulsation of hope…
