It all started with a thought. What it all was, he couldn’t really figure out. He knew that he felt something, though, or rather, that he was thinking of something, something that he thought to himself that he must’ve been avoiding for all this time. It was about life and what it all was, what it all implied and what it should mean for him, the creature that was thinking it.
“It must’ve all been a dream,” he thought to himself, “an illusion that clouded the reality of our existence.” A part of him then led him to thinking about what that reality really is. He thought to himself that he must be asking himself a question that millions, nay billions, of people have asked themselves throughout the years, to limited avail. He felt a part of his brain asking him if it was important to question life to begin with. After all, he had realised by now that questioning the reality is the same as questioning life. He couldn’t help himself. The thoughts kept on swirling in his mind. Somehow, someway, there must be a way to uncover the essence of life, that special something that not only makes up our existence, but alters it, too. That’s what his mind had often told him that life was: a series of endless loops tied together by what most people dub “the soul.”
But is it now? Does it have to be? Will he ever know? He couldn’t quite figure it out, and yet, he still felt that the more he thought of it, the more he would be able to somehow help himself. “Knowledge is power, if nothing else. That’s the one key to humanity. It must be,” his mind subconsciously nodded as he continued to wonder. “Well, even if it was, does it all matter in the end? What does the end even mean? Do we know that it exists? Is death the end of it, or is it just an extension of us or another entity not overlapping with other realities anymore?”
The answers, while realistically impossible to find, were a dream that he felt he had to chase. He couldn’t figure out how to chase it because he didn’t know where to even start. “There are no starting and ending points,” he thought, “to anything.” That’s one thing that he was comfortable deducing. It made sense the more he thought of it. Infinity and immortality were things that a brain could comprehend at the end of the day.
His mind drifted to thinking about the opposite of it all, what is often termed “nothing” by most people. To him, the concept of nothing was the exact opposite of what that of infinity was. And the more he thought about it to himself, the more he understood that his mind was telling him that he was right. The concept of nothing simply can’t exist if everything is real. The two were such polar opposites in his mind that they could in fact be synonyms. “But no,” he thought to himself, “that can’t be. Everything is not nothing and nothing is not everything.” He slowly felt a part of him pulling him away from it at all, maybe, he realised, because it didn’t want him figuring out what lied ahead.
The more he thought, the more he became comfortable with his own reality, or so he thought. He began thinking about the implications of subjectivity, and became enamoured with setting his mind at ease through loosely accepting that the power of perception is the only real thing that could be measured. In other words, the power of subjectivity was as real as reality itself in his mind, or so he thought at that moment in time at least.
His mind boxed itself out of the loop, and he carried on with the thing that he called life, knowing that it was all a reality within his mind, and that that was all he had.
