The Eternal Suffering that is Consciousness

My very first memory is of the sun. Observing it for the first time. Seeing the light, feeling the heat and the energy emanating from it. It is what kept life going. All life. The sun. That’s what it is called though I couldn’t answer why. Why. The deathly question. The one that will always branch into more “why’s”. Because, it just is. The deathly answer. The one that will never sate you, though it feels like the right answer sometimes. Do we keep asking why because we are naïve? Do we keep asking why because we know, because matter itself knows that one day we will reach an answer? Or do we simply refuse to accept that there is no answer? Why should I, why should the atoms that I am made up of stop searching for the reason they are here and where they came from? There it is again. Why. I already hate that word, but I can’t help but use it. Even if I am not consciously searching for an answer, my every iota is shaking with the thought.

My second memory, not so long after my first, is of the star. One white speck that would appear in the empty canvas of nothing as the sun set. What is it made of? Is it another sun? It must be very large and far away if I do not feel its warmth. Or it is tiny and very close. How do I know? Asking questions is frustrating, but isn’t that all we do? I think so. We are curious, that is how we are made. I am a vessel, a thing made up of smaller things, tinier things, even more miniscule things, that have amazingly figured out how to work together to make a thing, a vessel , that is capable of asking the questions they want the answers too. It is them- for that is how I refer to this energy- it is they who are advanced, yet we, we take all the credit for it. You and I, we think we are the advanced organism. Maybe there are more organisms out there. Maybe the star is like our sun, and maybe, just maybe, there is something like me, or unlike me, staring at it asking all the same questions. There is no one who knows THE answer. The answer to a question we don’t even know how to ask. So how do we find it? This answer? We ask. And we think. And we let all the energy that is making us ask work together to find the answer. I have another question. Why is some of the energy part of me- what is making me contemplate and ask and some of it making the rock under me? I don’t use it. Is it helping me? If I am energy, and everything is energy, then why am I stuck here? Why can’t I interact with the energy up in the sun? past the sun? in the star…? Is it different energy? Does distance make it hard to communicate? Are there restrictions? There must be or the answer would have been found by now. Now. What a strange thought. What do I mean by now? I have been asking a lot of questions. Has this all happened at once? I was able to ask all those questions and now I can’t see how. Does everything happen as one simultaneous…-thing? I need a word. Something to describe it. Time. Time is one answer and a million questions. What is it? Am I just using it to explain how I have a first memory and how I’ve been able to keep asking questions? Am I going to be able to do this forever? Do I keep asking questions until I find an answer or do I run out of questions? Time must be real, else beginning and end would be the same. I would have found an answer before I asked a question. It all would have happened and been over and nothing would remain. But what is nothing? Can nothing truly exist? Must there be something, always? Why? Why. Why. Why. This is maddening. I feel like I want to stop. I feel…I feel?