Novelty

 

At the beginning of all there is and ever has been was an all-encompassing awareness, a supreme consciousness, the logos, Source, or God, whatever label by which you wish to call it. This awareness was not localized in any sort of materium because the material world had yet to be imagined. It existed as a singularity, preceding any definition of existence. At one point in its unfathomable imagination – perhaps out of what we might think of as supreme boredom of being so all-knowing, omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient – a supreme longing arose within this original awareness for something different, something... anything... that might be uniquely differentiated from itself.

At this moment then, in its imagination, there was an urge to create novelty. If you think about it in a deep way, just imagining that there might be something that supreme consciousness could not know ahead of time is intriguing. It knows everything. Is it possible that there's something it could not know ahead of time?

And so it creates this experiment – our materium – out of its own imagination. It may have created millions of materiums, completely independent and unknown to each other... but who knows, except supreme consciousness. Out of this spark of an idea, this urge for differentiation, the energetic materium of all that is was created in a moment of divine inspiration. And here we are.

Everything is derived from the One, originating from a singular consciousness seeking companionship through something “other”, or seeking surprise to chase away supreme boredom. Each of us is serving a role in the experiment for supreme consciousness seeking novelty.

It makes sense that the creation was not perfect. Why would God create a world that wasn't perfect? Because the nature of the quest was never to create a perfect world, but to discover novelty. And so in order to discover the new, you must allow for unexpected surprises.

Like that force of creation from which we are derived, the central problem of human existence is likely boredom. In order to transcend the triviality of everyday life we must (in the image of our own creator, one must imagine in the same way) personally or collectively create a world around us that offers constant novelty and unexpected surprise. It seems to be the human condition that unless we submit to the continuing necessity of being creative creatures, we will ever be hounded by boredom and find no peace. If one only seeks the novelty created by others, however, the problem of obsessive boredom persists. The novelty must by self-generated.

We like to think we can manage boredom with activity – filling the day with doing things and movement, without personal creativity being involved. We are restless creatures because of boredom. Our roads are full of vehicles - people in too much of a hurry going nowhere for nothing. All places are full of human activity and are full of human beings.

We live in a world where boredom leads to hyperactivity which leads to overconsumption and overproduction, and ultimately stress to both the person and the world around us. We waste our lives managing it at tremendous cost of energy and resources.

We are bored because as a species we are not heading towards anything. We are not personally or collectively creating a stimulating world worth looking forward to living in. We don’t have goals that we as a whole are focused on achieving. Our interpretation of “progress” is not “progressing” towards achieving anything in particular at all. It is moving forwards towards nothing in particular and literally nothing else.

For all our ingenuity, our intelligence, our technology and engineering, we are not actually creating anything. We are not going anywhere. We are not working together towards the “next step” as a species in achieving anything at all.

Mindless and directionless, constant motion in no particular direction or with any particular destination in mind, just is not stimulating or interesting, and the longer you spend on such a path without constant pointless distraction the more exceedingly boring it gets, which is exactly why so many people spend so much time filling their lives up with the endless pursuit of various junk, go out of their way to create needless drama within their own lives, obsess about gossip of what other people who are not them are doing, have an almost psychotic level of passionate investment in the lives of imaginary characters in movies and TV series, and spend so much time in their own heads playing out “what if” scenarios on endless loops.

Because if they ever actually stop and exist within the present moment and look closely at their own actual lives… they get bored (and often quite scared) of the cold hard reality that they actually exist in without those distractions.

Because without being part of a species aiming for something more, all that leaves us with is focusing all our attention on attempting to mitigate the damage that our species generates, modernizing mostly trivialities of technologies, working mostly unfulfilling jobs in an attempt to gain as many “modernized trivialities” as possible for ourselves before we die, other mostly mindless distractions and creating the next generation trapped in the exact same directionless loop.

When we are not doing those things, we fill our time competing with and fighting with other members of our species over minor superficial differences that we try to convince ourselves make us different. To describe this repetitive behavior as simply “boring” is just about the most extreme definition of an understatement one can imagine. Yet this is all humanity ever really does anymore and all it has been doing for decades and multiple generations now. And the hard fact is that without having any goals other than the superficial or trivial in mind, and therefore being forced to do nothing more than obsessively pursue an endless succession of distractions in the attempt to compensate for that lack of purpose, we as a species can’t currently be anything else other than bored.

Christianity, in a historical sense, was a huge step forward for the human race. For the first time in its violent history up to that time, a large portion of humankind believed completely in a dogma that was unconnected with the difficult trappings of its everyday life. Confined to a dull, repetitive, unchallenging, miserable circumstance for centuries, a largely unimaginative humanity was restless and bored beyond description. Although much can be said against the disaster of Christianity, we must recognize it had one virtue that outweighed all its faults. It turned the great mass of humankind into creatures with a certain purpose. While they believed literally in demons, they also believed literally in angels and in a fantastic heaven beyond their daily trivialities.

With the liberal shift away from religious doctrine, contemporary humanity finds itself once again flailing aimlessly without purpose or direction into an unknown future. The unimaginative nature of the majority of humanity is unlikely to change, but as the collective narrative shifts toward a prioritization of the pursuit of greater individual awareness on a path toward spiritual ascension in the new age apparently now dawning, we may once again have a zeitgeist from which to personally and collectively create a novel outlook that sustains us along a greater path of enlightenment.