The Infinite Treasure
In collapsing the wave function of probability into something real, we exercise the prime purpose of our potential: to create; to create something meaningful out of the empty voids of the meaningless
“What is the meaning of life?… The revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark… This, that, and the other… In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing,… was struck into stability.”
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Wolf
The thrill of any good treasure hunt is in the search.
It’s within the processes of discovery, and of traveling along the ascending veins of potential, that the worth of any sought-after fortune earns its weight in existential gold.
In this irony can be found a rather powerful clue: the whole enterprise seems meant to be a subjective adventure, one that pays some rather meaningful dividends.
The real obsession that grows out of any endeavor worth pursuing comes from the personal pilgrimages of possibility - of transforming the potential into the actual.
It’s only when objective standards and values become over-imposed upon the subjective quests that the initial point and purpose of any goal loses potency.
Because the ascent —or the need to get better— is a search for reward that starts and finishes from within; the fact that this natural law creeps into our conscious navigation of reality should come as no surprise.
In other words, the more personal we make the adventure, the more fulsome of a treasure we stand to discover at the end of it all.
“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”
- Henry Miller
It’s all tied into the physics of what we are.
From neurochemical deployments that sustain the feedback loops of a reward-based progression, to the cultural threads weaving generations worth of evolution through space and time, the human enterprise is all about a search for that magic thing that makes the ship worth steering, a hunt for progressing itself through an infinitely deepening environment.
The treasure of life itself is thus something that’s not finite, and it demands a perpetual love of finding and living out the whole impetus of existence.
It’s not just us - all systems in nature seem to orient themselves along such an ascension, maneuvering towards greater statures of existence, always seeking to progress upwards and outwards.
“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
- Søren Kierkegaard
A sacred aspect of any treasure hunt is the process of materializing a dominion over that which is dragged from the realm of possibility into the domain of actuality.
In collapsing the wave function of probability into something real, we exercise the prime purpose of our potential: to create.
Moreover, to create something meaningful out of the empty voids of the meaningless, to pattern the noise and breathe value into the otherwise chaotic nonsense of our environment.
This is why we have the kind of conscious agency that we do - to participate in the subjectively constructive process that reality seems to ask of us and that we seem designed to enact.
“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment, and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles.”
- Terence McKenna
The more we chase after the possibilities that seem impossible, the likelier we’ll be to achieve them, and the higher standards we’ll consequently overlay onto forthcoming endeavors and probabilities.
Expectations are the only agonist for failure and perspective is the only catalyst for success.
Nonetheless, it’s when we set our sights high and chase after the dreams that seem all to unreal that we begin to touch the unbelievable - that which can define a life and provoke the deepest kind of reverie for all that it has to offer.
