Emerging from the gloom of humanity’s consciousness, or perhaps stepping out from the interstice between the mundane and the supernatural, a creature uncoils itself. Tall as the Burj Kalifa, inky and fluid as molten tar. Its shape, vaguely human, betrays a substance of a different nature; it is as though darkness itself has been given form and consistency, a texture that is at once smooth, yet impossibly sticky, akin to black honey dripping slowly from a spoon.
A pond of dark nectar forms under its every step. The ponds, exuding an alien beauty, as if wrought from black glass now liquified, spread and merge, their slow, languid ripples captivating the mind, as though a darkly pleasant dream seeping into the fabric of reality. It threatens to cover the whole earth, a shallow ocean of syrupy substance without substance. It is made of pure apathy.
The opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Or so goes the meme. If you’ve heard it a hundred times you may feel the pull of it right now, the pull of indifference, of apathy.
Allow me to purport that apathy is not merely the opposite of love but also the purest antithesis of all that we should hold dear. Apathy’s disinterested, snot-nosed sibling is boredom, and boredom is merely the absence of attention. At least, this is what many blissed out, perhaps boring but definitely-not-bored meditators will claim. And based on my own experience with non-ordinary states, I believe them. Attention is all we need.
Yet the black ocean continues to rise. We can feel its dankness lapping at our ankles even now. Well, fear not. Its emergence is, actually, a fantastic development.
In a time of relative peace you have probably found yourself bored. One of many paths out of apathy is fighting in the trenches of the ongoing culture war, named such for the life-or-death stakes its soldiers have been convinced it possesses. Many of those who have managed to remain civilians have turned to a morphine drip of endless content.
Might I suggest that both soldiers and civilians are wanting the wrong things. They are merely confused. And, unfortunately, they are us.
When we spend undue attention discussing The Current Thing or what television shows we’re watching, we have become stuck once again in a sociocultural local minima. Apathy causes people to make up things to care about and thus care of the wrong things. We are in a war against apathy. Defeat apathy and people start shifting their attention to what really matters. What really matters? Well, silly, obviously it’s positive-sum infinite games of creation and love and protecting consciousness and making awareness feel awesome for all living beings!
Anyway, here’s the good news: war is exciting!
Once you see the real war you can join the fight. And it’s not like other wars, where you risk life and limb for a cause that you were born into and, probably, as you lay dying in the center of a Rorschach blot of your own blood, realize it was never your cause, anyway. This war, however, is a war not only of the minds but for the minds. This is the funnest war ever.
In my last post I wrote,
“All we are is our consciousness and its contents. In general nearly everything we do, every action we take, is in service of trying to feel better. Given this, it’s quite clear to me that understanding how to improve consciousness directly is so far upstream in this game that it might well be the mouth of the goddamn river.”
I didn’t say ‘goddamn’ last time but hey, I’m energized. We’re at war for god’s sake. The higher the stakes the higher the excitement, and what stakes could be higher than what it fucking feels like to be alive.
We want you to help move the frontlines from zero-sum to positive-sum and we can’t do it without you. The light of consciousness needs you. Please, god, or simulation creators, or fellow hypothetical fragments of a five-dimensional space mind that shattered itself into a bazillion shards of consciousness so it wouldn’t be alone anymore, make something metta.
Make things that help people love people. Make things that help people feel awesome. Make things designed to help other people these things.
Look there, across the surface of that viscous black ocean, you see dozens of boats. They are crafted from the amorphous writings of Tasshin and Andrés, of Romeo and Nick, and further toward the horizon you spot a veritable battleship, built by thousands of people doing a hundred things each. And yes, there at the bow is Visa himself! He’s shouting something. You can just make it out,
“Get in bitch, we’re fighting apathy!”