The following excerpt from my book entitled "The Book That No One Has Seen Because it Hasn't Been Published (Oh Hell Who Am I Kidding, It Isn't Even Written)" was first digitized from my brain to Drive C:/> about one week before I discovered Blogs full force. It is a work in progress, and is denoted as such, parenthetically - Opus 2, Ramblus 1. It has not been editted at all...this is the raw form, so good luck with it, if it makes no sense, or you strongly disagree, I hope you'll at least smile at parts of it.

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I’m not quite sure why I was born, or even how the whole existence thing works. Perhaps I am a single entity, and perhaps I am part of a collection of entities over time, or perhaps there is no real thing such as time with all of existence happening inside of one big “now”. It’s really impossible to detect with any scientific instrumentation, and for me at least, is very difficult to sort out inside a mind cluttered with the everyday struggle that is endured simply so that we can convert one kind of matter into another.

That being the case, I would like to find some higher meaning for existing. The struggle is a tough one from this single point perspective, and it’s a little disenchanting to think that years and years of struggling will go by – wages earned and spent; children born and raised; items bought, used, and sold or discarded; and the day before the physical self ceases to function, the sum value of a person’s life is really how much matter they converted, i.e. how much excrement they produced.

Many would argue this point, of course. Who would want to think that’s all there is? And so we might suppose that, for instance, a person who cures a rare disease, or solves some major problem therefore can claim a higher value to his/her life than their excrement poundage. But if you zoom out on the time scope a good ways, you see that this is not the case. For the sun was born amidst a cloud of swirling gasses in a very common and predictable way, and around it accreted the planets – also in a very predictable way. And although it just seems like the most happenstance chain of events that led to the formation of life on earth, it’s really just one of a large variety of possibilities each of which have an equal likelihood of occurring given the same circumstances when compared to its peers. And from our very anthropocentric system of thought, and our limited perspective of time on any scale other than our own, things that seem like a big deal to us…very simply are not. I’m sorry to those of you that so desperately want them to be. The truth hurts, as they say. It is hardly a big deal that some rare disease is cured, for instance, when you consider things on this larger time scale. Consider the following equally valid chronologies.

1. Wake up
   
2. Get ready for work
   
3. Go to work
   
4. Come home
   
5. Go to sleep
   

1. Beginning
   
2. Solar System accretes
   
3. Sentient Life
   
4. Solar System Dies (Sol Nova/Supernova)
   
5. Who knows
   

How larger than life we wish to be! How we fear that we aren’t magical beings at the center of all creation and that the universe literally turns on our every move. News flash, it hasn’t ever, and it still doesn’t. So what do we do to add value to life? I suppose everyone has to answer (or choose to ignore the question) in their own way. My way is by trying to increase my understanding of absolutely anything that I don’t currently understand. I don’t even really ascribe any value to what it is. For instance, I find it of no more value for me to understand how to do large calculus equations than to make a basket out of palm leaves. I understand neither, and I believe it to add value to my life to understand either, or preferably both.

This of course leaves me with a rather large set of things to choose from, so how do I choose? I don’t believe I have met a person yet that had so little humility as to actually believe they know more than they do not know. One simply has to cast one’s gaze upward at the nighttime sky to see that of all the places from which to gather mere observational data – more are not reachable for observation than those that are.

There is a scale I find hard to describe in words that I would use to choose which new information and experiences I would strive for in order to add value to my life beyond excrement poundage. It is really a narrowing down process. Perhaps the best way to explain it is by example.

If we have a set E that is the set of all potential experiences including all available knowledge both observable and not observable, then we could, to make matters more wieldy, break that down into groups. B is a subset of E that would include all physical or “of the Body” experiences. Going to a place, attaining a certain speed of running a mile, eating a grape are all examples from the subset B. M is another subset of E that encompasses all thoughts and ideas. Any experiences that only require the processing of data from the senses or are considered via imagination and conceptualization are of the Mind, or the subset M. Daydreaming about chocolate cake, theorizing about spiritual matters, or adding two numbers in your head are all examples of the subset M.

We might suggest then that E = B + M (at which point the humorist readers will immediately point out “Yes! Existence = Bowel Movement just as he suggests!”), but since it cannot be proven that all there is to experience can be categorized by these two subsets, we must then add a third subset U which would cover the balance of all things that can be neither perceived, imagined, dreamt, or experienced in any way by the human mind and body. No examples are given, obviously, for any thing I came up with would immediately have to graduate to one of the other two sets. I will let it slip however, that I do in fact intend for U to represent “Unknown”.

Now to continue with my decision making process of how I will add value to my excrement producing life, I have to take into account my own personal makeup. I am thin, and have always been more of a thinker than a doer, and so I will immediately eliminate any desire to, for instance, break the record of the 100-yard dash. Furthermore, being a thinker, I see life from the perspective of one, and therefore to me, anyone that chooses to add value to his or her life by breaking a land speed record must first think about doing so. In my mind it is therefore redundant to think an experience and then to have it as well for the purposes of increasing experience. I make this distinction because I don’t want it to be perceived that what I mean is you’re an idiot to think about running the 100-yard dash and then to actually do so, not at all. I am just saying that in our set E, it is redundant.

So having narrowed this down somewhat, I have choices regarding mind experiences. Just to grab a name out of a hat, Albert Einstein was a man who had some very clever thoughts. And it would be a new experience for me to understand them as well as Einstein did. But in terms of all mankind, I would be experiencing a different kind of redundancy. If person A has proven that 2 + 2 = 4, I do not feel a need to prove it as well. I prefer to simply take it on faith that it is so and use the information they have so kindly provided in thought processes of my own. And now we’re down to it.

I do not feel it adds value to my life to experience something from E that has already been done by someone else (for reasons I shall explain momentarily.) Whether it be from subset B or subset M, if someone else has already walked down the physical and mental roads to arrive at that destination and gather their observational data, I am just as satisfied to read about what they have found. I do not need to go witness it for myself. Here is why.

Go back a long long ways in our time scope. And for arguments sake, let us say that human life is the only sentient life in the universe (an appalling suggestion if there ever was one). At some point this life began to think outside of a “programmed manner”. And let me briefly explain what I mean by that. Check out a dog or a cat sometime. They’re great! Fun, loving, and have unique personalities most of the time, and…they are a static program. If you think about the actual brain operation of a cat or dog, the number of routines and subroutines is fairly small. The same seems true in varying degrees for most of the animal kingdom. Animals, for the most part, have brains that seem to contain static behavioral programming of varying levels of complexity. Some are just one line of code better than a rock, and others are a bit more complex. I digress…

At some point, whether it was from being plopped down into the universe by the deity of your choice or whether it occurred through evolution or whatever way you wish to imagine it, the human race rose above the static programming I mention above. If you can imagine this, then you can further imagine that the origination of some thoughts could be traced back to one particular human being. For instance, it took one human being to invent writing a name in the snow with one’s urine. The rest of the instances of that experience are just copies of that one entry into the set E. Perhaps you can see where I’m going now. As ridiculous as idea it is to think that Grog’s life had an exactly equal value to Throk’s in excrement poundage BUT he also had the urine name in the snow creation going for him, it is nevertheless the case that Grog’s life had more value. Why? Because Grog brought something into the universe that prior to his very existence did not exist at all. And it is a meaningless statement to say that “someone” would have eventually thought of it, because whoever those someone’s were…they didn’t have to think of it thanks to the tireless efforts of the imagination of Grog, esquire.

So where does that leave me? Do you wonder where it leaves you? You might. So many years have gone by…all the obvious mental territory has been claimed. Finding something no one has thought of is like trying to find one molecule of type A in a sea of molecules of type B. Yet that is what I strive to do, and all based on the simple idea that even though much has been experienced, both in the subset B and the subset M, the subset U must still be full of experiences waiting to graduate into one of the other two groups. To uncover one such thing is no less than an act of creation, and even a simple creation like writing one’s name in the snow with urine elevates one above the position of having lived and died as no more than a crapping machine.