Rick and Morty and the Meaning of Life

Metadata
Highlights
- Turns out the truth is a long, strange trip into the nightmare that lays at the dark heart of reality.
-
The search for ultimate meaning is not about meditation and doing nothing and staying right where you were all along. Itâs about going somewhere, exploring everything and going through profound and painful self-exploration, where you strip away whatâs not real layer by layer, like eating yourself alive.
- Thatâs what most of us do. When weâre offered an adventure we say no fucking way. Just like Beth we mumble excuses about family, obligations, work and âas much as I hate to admit it ABCâs âThe Bachelorââ and go right back to pretending everything is fine.
-
Youâre more likely to be a victim of enlightenment than the beneficiary, since enlightenment is not what weâre sold (beatific smile, no fear, happy all the time, blah blah) but rather it means âtruth realization.â In other words, figuring it all out and shedding all illusions and bullshit beliefs for good.
-
We believe we want to wake up. But the real truth is weâll give anything to go back to sleep, to return to the dream that is our life.
- âKnowing the truth, that nothing matters, can actually save you in those moments. Once you get through the terrifying threshold of accepting that, then every place is the center of the universe and every moment is most important moment and everything is the meaning of life.â
- âWorse, youâre smart. When you know nothing matters the Universe is yours and Iâve never met a Universe that was into it. The Universe is basically an animal. It grazes on the ordinary. It creates infinite idiots just to eat themâŚYou know smart people get a chance to climb on top, take reality for a ride, but it will never stop trying to throw you, and eventually it will. Thereâs no other way off.â
-
At the root of everything is a black hole of nothingness. Eventually you wonât exist and despite millions of years of comforting beliefs thereâs probably nothing after the grave, meaning weâre just gone as if we never existed. We have as much substance as dream dust. Beyond that nothingness, consciousness is the only thing that actually exists.
- Where it leads is that if consciousness is all that exists beyond nothing, itâs really a singular consciousness, meaning weâre all the same stuff underneath, looking out on the universe with a trillion set of eyes, aka God/the Universe is a solipsist and/or an atheistic clockwork machine.
-
weâre not aware of our basic interconnectedness, so we spend eternity in a pointless âfestival of massacresâ, killing, maiming and torturing other versions of ourselves because we canât see weâre all the same stuff, which is by design. In other words, our awful ignorance is built into the very fabric of the system and we are quite literally insane because we are blind to our true nature.
- Now, going a little further we find that the singular consciousness underneath it all is really perfect, which means that it creates/codes/dreams a perfect universe, a clockwork universe, an amoeba or animal like universe and/or a multiverse, where everything that can happen does happen (another theme of the show â the multiverse).
-
Essentially it means that even when you can understand the fundamental nature of reality youâre still subject to it. The Universe will feast on you too. âThereâs no other way off.â In other words: The only way out is through.