On a Mind that is Wholly Indivisible

For personal reasons on which I will not elaborate in this text, I am going through a significant crisis of being-ness right now. While I am able to recognize how meaning must be found (or unfound) in the world we live in, I am being confronted with an overwhelming sense that all that is, the structures and anti-structures, theses and anti-theses, which have guided human progression have not so much been a refinement of our understanding of self, but rather a stark departure. I can’t escape a sense that we are, at the end of the day, wholly indivisible from ourselves. Despite what we see, despite the contrived post-enlightenment theories of understanding we rest upon , we are indivisible from the minds and bodies that are the entirety of our existence.

I first came upon this idea yesterday, while reflecting on some of the ideas of Sartrian existentialism. While momentarily freed by his theory of a contrived reality, I woke this morning with an overwhelming sense that the world is not at all constructed. In fact, the world is interpretational by pure necessity. We see what we see and understand what we understand not as an act of concession, but as a uniquely actualizing thought. The chair is a chair not because we are told it’s a chair — it’s a chair because we tell ourselves that it’s a chair. Decision-making falls on us, on our brains and our bodies, working in tandem to make meaning of the world around us. To reject this is to question the absolute right we have to find meaning in the world of one that is human existence.

And this worried me because it made me question everything that existentialism is as a theory. One on hand it is freeing because it encourages us to have agency in interpreting the world around us, but on the other hand, it is debilitating because it asks us to reject a world that is already, by necessity, interpretational. The world is not contained in the things around us, in the collection of atomic matter which coalesces in random forms under the auspices of order. It is contained within the human skull, within the divine claxon of electrical signals that somehow display the emergent quality of thought. Rejecting that is not to open yourself to meaning — it is to concede to a system which is by nature external, which claims that meaninglessness, and not the individual, is somehow the fundamental core of existence.

But we are free. We are freed by the knowledge that all that we are and all that we have is of our own construction, lived through a life that sits precariously on the edge of an infinity and a mortality that we are constantly forced to reconcile with. Existence is not about scraping for meaning in a world that is, to our dismay, meaningless. Existence is the meaning, it is the purpose. It makes it’s own infinite meaning when neurons fire and compel our bodies to act. It legitimizes understanding when it makes sense of the actions of those around us and emulates what it sees.

This specifically is the problem I have with modernity. With the rationalization of the self, we’ve trapped ourselves in a world where we are constantly striving to give meaning to the world around us. Even those who do not necessarily feel as though they live in a meaningless world feel as though they have agency in trying to shape collective understanding. We post online, we “connect” on Facebook, we try to construct a new form of “influence” so that we can finally do something with this world that — because of the ascension of post-modern capitalism — feels as though it is for the taking. But that should not be where meaning is found. In fact, meaning should derive from the individual reality which must have guided us prior to the creation of civilization. Meaning should be an act of freedom, of the mind in conversation with the brain, of the brain with electricity, of electricity with the universe, of the universe with divinity. Chemicals race through our endocrine system not as an act of deception — but as an act of universal divinity. That is true freedom.