Today I learned my friend is going to die in a matter of weeks.
It was the first text message I read after waking. My dreams were surreal and hyperrealistic, scaling pinnacles in a desert mesa with my mother, scaling down with tactile detail that I rarely encounter in “real life”.
Daniel framed it as a joke — I can’t come to your event because I’m DYING. jk not jk.
It felt like a rug pull — someone who I simply assumed would continue existing soon won’t. It was quietly jarring, how can I even picture any kind of stable future when this kind of uncertainty is the truth? The jarringness indicated the degree to which I cling to story for a false sense of security. This is truer than my stories, at some point every human I love will suddenly and jarringly die. I will too, certainly before many of them do. And it will be exactly like this. I’m not sure how to walk the line between hopes and dreams with uncertainty and loss.
I’m confronted with the reality in a second-hand form, if I were to be Daniel how would I feel about my life?
I wouldn’t feel very good. I don’t feel good. In my story of self, I’ve gone from one trap to another, buoyed by an escapist utopian dream of what my life could be, but I have never lived that life. I left my job believing I had enough material security to pay off my white-collar corposlavery bond and claim my freedom. But the hardest part of claiming freedom has been stripping the internal shackles, copes designed by and for fear, reflexes that assume fundamental isolation and threat, and discover my compass towards aliveness. I am still in that prison, and I tell myself that it takes time and patience for it to fade. In a trap, these loadbearing structures made sense, in space there’s nothing holding it together, other than a lingering imprint of fear. This fear is beneath my compulsion for story.
But what Daniel is facing is beneath that fear. It consumes that fear. It laughs at it. The fear is suspended in a story of threat which has a virtualness to it; what Daniel is facing is undeniable and real. And I face it too. The ultimate trap, and there is no escape from it. I can live this life once, and I have nothing to lose. That is how I want to live, and it goes against all my reflexive behaviors and psychological grooves.
So what is there to live for? What is my quest? What would change my answer?
There is something, and Daniel’s pre-passing forces an answer. It is somehow easier to do it for him, to honor the utter unfairness of his situation by owning my responsibility to live, than it is to live for myself. Living for myself feels hollow right now, for whatever reason. But for him, I can be brave. For him, I can step into my effervescent being. For him I can be more and less, more of my aliveness and less of my fears of not-enoughness, too-muchness, worthwhileness. Those fears are made up. The should are empty threats. We only have the present moment, and living it fully is my creator-given responsibility. And it’s easier to live for Daniel.
There are some dark stories around this; is this a result of orienting around my father and my mother? Is there some vestigial conditioning recurring? It reminds of friends who have come to understand unconditional self-love through their love of others — is this something similar? And a glimmer of sudden hope: and is this my chance to rewrite it? Is this my shot to break it through its own logic?
There is something I want to live for, and for Daniel, I’m going to own it.
I have been trying to piece together a different way of seeing the world and my place in it, and it’s been too vulnerable to admit. To admit it is to potentially be faced with its destruction. But faced with my own inevitable dissolution, I must take that leap of faith. It is one worthwhile aspects of living, and what’s left on this side of the chasm is fear and regret of a half-life.
To live is to occupy the leap, the ephemeral aliveness, one day there will not be ground on the other end, and that’s just a fact. I can cower and deny or I can over it and live. I’m sick of my own wallowing fear, my own meekness. I am sick of my own masturbatory comforts and pathetic desire for safety. It doesn’t exist. I want to own my life and live in the leap.
I live in the leap for you, Daniel.
For much of my life I have been trying to articulate a feeling, to find the language to describe how something isn’t quite right. I want to live outside the Matrix. I want a story to succinctly articulate the Matrix and what’s outside of it.
Here is my attempt.
My god, I’ve been applying my prison mindset to living. I dance because I should. I music because I should. I’ve been doing these things out of a sense that it conforms to a sensible procedure or story for how I should be living fully.
But the very mindset is its own undoing, its the prison perpetuating itself.
Living in the leap is putting that aside. There is no should, just now. There is only listening to my own tender being, that whisper which has been crushed beneath sedimentary layers of “should”. The whisper of Creator speaking through me, that arising something which can only be described as “spirit”. I listen to spirit.
The real story isn’t convenient. I want to smooth it out, massage it, so its more palatable to others. But in doing so, I cheapen the only thing I have to offer: my own distinct interiority.
This is my way of explaining myself, explaining non-linearity as authenticity — this is the path my thoughts have traveled and they all matter somehow, they are all deeply embedded and contingent. It’s all a beautiful mess. I honor the mess in its fullness, in its extravagant uncertainty, in its chaotic realness.
Living in the leap means honesty is all I have and am. Anything less is a compromise not worth offering. There is nothing to lose except my Truth.
The etymology of “data” in Latin is “something given”. In this, there is something quietly profound and essential about how our collective story of reality is constructed. Implicit in this language is an onus on external reality, that a reality outside of us is giving us something.
In that onus on outside reality, there’s an assumption that it exists and we’re all interfacing with it the same way, there’s some kind of shared experience with it. There is an implicit objectivity. But weirdly and paradoxically, I’m also excluded from it. My experience is outside it. The qualitative and embodied are somehow illegitimate, wrong, dirty. The subjective is somehow excluded from this notion of “outside reality”, we’re special for some reason.
There’s an assumption of default value. Data as “something given” always has some value to offer, in “data is the new oil” there is the assumption of intrinsic functional value. AI seems like the strongest validation of this belief, from data we have birthed superintelligence, it must be so. If reality gave it, it must have something to offer.
There’s an assumption that data is a kind of decontextualized objectivity. Devoid of context and connection, reality “gives itself” to us.
Within this web of assumptions I believe there is a collective falsehood, perhaps The Falsehood, the rootiest root where the other falsehoods originate and depend on.
Instead of “something given” I believe it’s “something taken”. Rather than “data”, I believe in “septa”, which is based on the Latin for “something taken”. Even this doesn’t quite capture what I want, it is something even more subtly co-created, but I don’t have better language yet. “Septa” is a stepping stone.
Why does this distinction matter? It matters because it turns the story upside down.
Where “data” puts the onus on reality, “septa” puts the onus on observer, it puts the onus on consciousness. Reality is not something I passively receive, it is something I actively participate in, I actively take. And its import is completely dependent on my relationship to it, my vantage point to it. Where “data” makes me a passive noun and reality an active verb, “septa” makes me the verb. And in that active process, there is no possibility of objectivity, real or socially constructed.
I can only know my own interiority. And from my own interiority, I have no idea if other people actually exist, the assumption of their existence is fundamentally impossible to substantiate. If I exist, then I presume others exist too, but it’s on faith. It’s a faith that’s practically necessary, but ultimately uncertain, a cosmic mystery.
From this perspective, communication with others is a tiny fragile corridor, a peep hole into a pocket universe of experience, becoming, unfolding, that is You. Whatever understanding we come to is less than 1% of our being. You will never know the full richness of what this means to me, and I will never know the full richness of what this means to you. We communicate across a dark chasm with string cups. That is language. That is all our technologies and attunement.
A story of data and objectivity is existentially comforting, it gives a false sense of companionship and closeness, which I suspect does not exist. However, ironically, beautifully, I believe my reality-story gives a much better shot at closeness than it does.
Why is “data” and Objectivity the rootiest root? The origin that other falsehoods emanate from?
In a reality-story predicated on “data”, I reduce myself to something small, something impotent, something wrong, and in believing it, I make it so. It has a self-fulfilling reality to it. If I can only receive reality from outside myself, then I fundamentally cannot trust my own experience. This story sows the seed of self-doubt, and from that place, there is no way out. I am gaslit, trapped in its reality-story. It’s this self-doubt which is required for the rest of its logic to continue. It’s this domesticated objectivity which is required for all its other systems and institutions and contingent beliefs to continue.
In a reality-story predicated on “septa”, my interiority is literally everything. My experience is the Only Truth. Everything else is story. Everything else is a mental construct. My embodied experience is the only entity I can directly interface with. And giving that up is an attempt to gaslight, coerce, domesticate my spirit. To give that up is to have my mind and spirit colonized.
I do think there’s a mass Gaslighting, a Big Lie of state-sponsored Objectivity, a Big Lie of Data. This is the Matrix.
I want to live outside of the Matrix, I want to figure out what it means to honor my interiority, to live as my spirit. And I want to figure out how to do that in community. I need a system where this is collectively possible. This is my scary, massive, insane mission. I own it.
How does my reality-story lead to closer forms of closeness?
I can only meet You in what I have experienced myself. I only have my own material to relate to. In honoring the depth of my interiority I have more and more material to briefly, ineffably, infinitesimally meet You in your experience. In plumbing the depths of my spirit for all it has to offer, I have more refractory material to know You.
It is only by owning the depth of my own experience that I expand my vocabulary of connection. And in expanding this vocabulary, I come to know myself, I learn how to be as my spirit. And this feels like the only worthwhile way to live in the leap.
I own it, this is what I really want, and I’m searching for other seekers.
Thank you Daniel.