And so we have both the presence of absence and the absence of presence. Is there a difference? When you open the garage door, and you see that your spouse's car is not there - that is is the absence of presence. However, when you open the garage door knowing that it will not be there already - that is the presence of absence. Both contours of reality exist simultaneously - as you perceive, and your pattern-recognition software makes predictions, such data as that which fulfills a pattern creates a presence in the mind. Expectations of that pattern set up a binary - there/not there. When you perceive that a pattern is not met, or expectation fulfilled, you have the absence of presence - the notion and feeling that something is missing. But a pattern that tells you there is inherent incompleteness, something that you know cannot be there, that you would like to exist or be true; there is the presence of absence, the void, the abyss. So it is with god and the self.

Because in order to really create something, something significant and objectively meaningful, you have to die. Perhaps an artist's death can be the greatest thing for their art; we've all seen it happen - but before their physical death, every creator has to undergo their apotheosis. You begin by questioning everything - yes, the foundations of your society - and arrive at a point where you believe you have finally discovered the world for the cannibalistic incest-rape that it actually is: and then you can begin. You begin to deconstruct yourself, your every past life and interminable moment of rumination, and the causes and effects and identity kits of your wants and needs and desires and fears, and you start cutting. You rip away at yourself, an ouroboros of pain addiction, tearing sinew from flesh until you find that at the heart of it all is nothing. There is no bottom, no core, no foundational truth upon which you can rely - cogito ergo cogito: there is no sum, all is tautology. Then, the iterative recursion of perception, and then, the iterative recursion of self-perception, and then, the recursion of iterative perception, and then the humming eternity. Through this background noise, you collapse into the singularity, and you die. The realization that you have always been dead is not lost upon you, but seems unworthwhile in exploring when you arrive at the place where there is no time.

If there's one thing that I've learned, it's that everything is exactly as much bullshit as you think it is. When you see, read, or hear something and decide it's not for you, then you have drawn a line that separates you from it: that's okay to do. However, you have to own that line. Everything has something to do you with you - physically, emotionally, institutionally, or even in that sense when you close your eyes and recognize the contextual nature of your identity and know the interconnectedness of the human experience - there is nothing that has nothing to do with you.