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Years ago I got really high on homemade pot brownies and while on the couch barely able to move I had a vision that haunted me for years: I saw a group of humans that traveled on a spaceship to the end of the universe searching for the meaning of life. But all they found was a mad, multi-limbed animal flailing its limbs to create matter, spewing Technicolor noise. It was then that we discovered everything that we called rationality, logic, reason, meaning was built upon this swarming, inchoate pile of nonsense. Everything that we had built, all of our majesty, had been created by an wailing god-infant who didn’t even understand language or emotion or even consciousness itself.

It terrified me. And I think it terrifies a lot of people - this idea that it’s all for nothing.  Because this idea, although colorful and lurid, isn’t really an original one. That everything we’ve worked for is a heaping pile of refuse created out of carbon. That we’re just complex structures of dirt moving dirt around before we become dirt.

About a year ago, I had another epiphany. I was high (yeah, again) and saw the breakdown of my limbs right in front of me. Everything I did became so incredibly complex that it was like I was performing mathematical equations just to move my arm.

And then I realized - I was! It’s just that my body had been designed so extraordinarily well that it performed those mathematical equations subconsciously, without me ever having to think about it.

And after that, for a few minutes I even lost the concept of my own self. I became lost in the huge swarms of data that surrounded me. The idea of objects that were separate from each other had become an abstraction. It was as if my brain was flooded with so much sensory data that they all crossed and I could no longer make sense of existence.

When I was able to form a cogent though, I realized something.

I wanted to scream it. And when I came down, it still clung to me.

CONSCIOUSNESS GIVES CONTEXT TO DATA.

That day I had seen another perspective of “inchoate pile of nonsense creating the universe.” But I’d been wrong the first time. It wasn’t nonsense that I’d seen in that first vision. It was pure, raw data. It was matter without consciousness to give it meaning. And for millions of years that’s what must’ve flowed through (Let’s not even get into that whole “Are we a simulation?” thing) all existence.

That is, until we came along. Life, consciousness, and then intelligence.

As humans we took raw data and through our modes of perception we created our version of the world. As does everything else in existence.

Does that terrify you? That there is no golden scroll waiting for you on a mountaintop to be handed to you by an benevolent world-maker, your name written somewhere on the bottom with your purpose? Does it terrify you that the building blocks of the universe are not only incomprehensible without our minds to comprehend them, but simultaneously weren’t built with us in mind?

Now it makes me want to grab my feet and lean back laughing like a child.

Because that means we’re free.

That wailing nonsense in Technicolor I saw that scared me so much is really the ultimate gift to humanity. To life itself.

CONSCIOUSNESS GIVES CONTEXT TO DATA.

It’s another way to say: We make our own meaning.

We make our own rules. From the beginning we were built to do nothing except make our own rules. We determine the way that we live, not a God with a vengeance streak or a universe having a bad day. Not the government, not the devil, not even our parents.

We do.

And we make the choice of how we want to live and what our purpose is each and every day, even when we want to refuse the responsibility.