Have you ever transcended space and time?

"Yes. No. Uh, time, not space. No, I don't know what you're talking about....."--Jason Schwartzman, I Heart Huckabees.

Cruelty, manipulation, and meaninglessness. Caterine Vauban presents these three concepts as the constants of the universe in her seminal work If Not Now... True to her school of existential nihilism, Vauban's "method" (Vauban's method of existential therapy as opposed to the Jaffes' method) teaches us to deconstruct our minds to the blackness, accept the reality as it is--a manifestation of pure evil and human toil. Armed with such a powerful weapon, one is therefore able to dismantle the fundamental glue of experience, shredding apart the so-called "blanket of reality" that represents all the matter and energy in the universe. Essentially, there's dust and particles over there, us over here, and good and bad luck in between. That's chaos. That's our being.

Aside from such light metaphysical quandry introduced to us in I Heart Huckabees, there's probably a greater lesson in such a blunt jab at modern existentialism. Truly, there is nothing to demonstrate a higher purpose or any higher meaning. Bernard and Vivian Jaffe argue that there is an interconnectedness that binds all things together, thus creating a meaning in the experience of existence. Caterine Vauban, on the other hand, teaches that such existential quandries are the result of human drama and once the human being realizes that there is nothing beyond the manure, the return to drama begins. Either way, there is no room for anything divine or anything supernatural; assuming that there is a connection, a design in it all, it's nothing too special to begin with. So why do we continue our futile search? Why do we continue to play the role of Sisyphus?

To be very honest, I'm a radical skeptic, in fact even a solipsist, at heart. There's no way that I can be sure that there is any phenomenological discourse taking place. However, playing the role of the agnostic theist, I have to speculate on why I continue to seek some sort of higher purpose behind all of our meandering. I'd say that it's an extremely human thing to do. Now, I can already hear the cries of "hypocrisy!" and "contradiction!" when linked with my previous arguments against perennialists and neoclassicists. Some might argue that I'm proposing some sort of metaphysics within the human experience... which, to be honest, is kind of true. Human experience is not a purely biological experience, considering that our experience does not base themselves on a biologically-conscious level. Well, perhaps it is. After all, we must ask ourselves if our thoughts are some sort of activity that occurs in an abstract dimension that is beyond the reach of physical measurement, or if they are merely a coherent pattern of neural firing and self-conscious information embedded within some sort of probability field that defines the field of the universe (although the latest of the proposed mechanisms is probably something that is even more fundamental than biology itself). But what the fuck am I talking about?

In the end, there's no need to say anything other than "WE'RE FUCKED!! HOLY SHIT WE'RE FUCKED!!!!" As depressing as it sounds (not to mention terrifying), there's a certain comedy in it. I mean, it's really hilarious if you think about it. I don't know why I'm laughing. Perhaps it's because the other option would be crying. But if it's so depressing and so hopeless that you can't cry about it, doesn't that mean we have no other choice but to laugh?