Monday, October 15, 2012

Please fill out the form clearly.


.
Please fill out the form clearly.
Reason/s for dying:

It was the time she stopped believing in the mission. Customer number fifty-three. Customer number fifty three was unremarkable at first, but then he threw the whole purpose of the mission. We sold him purpose and he came back and tried to return it. How we sold purpose is we erased their memory of buying their purpose so they felt they always had their purpose, that we didn’t simply create it for them because if you knew your purpose was a creation, a purchase you would not believe in it and the nature of purpose requires belief and that is why no one has ever tried to return the purpose they bought from us because they don’t realise they bought it. They think it real when it is a fabrication. Yet there he was.

- I want to return the purpose you gave me he said.
She glanced furious at me, something gone wrong in the memory erasing.
-What are you talking about, we don’t sell purpose because there is no such thing there used to be in the past but its extinct now, everyone knows that, it’s been proven.
-Well I have one, I don’t know how, but there are rumours about this clinic and I’m following them up.
-This clinic provides assisted suicide only. There’s no such thing as a rumour anymore, it is also extinct a rumour is a claim to knowledge that may or may not be true, all knowledge is known now, it’s been proven.
-Except for one item, what happens after death?
-Wondering what happens after you die is counter- productive in trying to live, that has been proven.
- I find it baffling that many of your customers come out alive with no memory of ever visiting here.
She looked genuinely scared. We should have prepared for this before number fifty-three, prepared that this was going to happen. That someone would realise, that they would shut us down, they would rob us of our purpose, the service we provide, taking our purpose away from us and making us like any of the population and then we would too have the desire to die again. That’s when she stopped believing because surely someone who now held the joy of purpose should have understood its importance should have understood not to take it from others. That’s why she said we didn’t have to prepare for this situation and yet there it was happening. So that’s when she stopped believing in purpose and the nature of purpose is that it requires belief.

 Life is not a gift, gifts can be returned. Yes we can return our life but then we face the unknown. When have you gone into a shop, returned a gift and instead of being returned the money you’re given a question, a question you can’t answer.  Maybe things would be more interesting that way. Some people find a thrill in the unknown. People like that might find the prospect of death the biggest thrill of all because it presents the ultimate unknown.

So how did we create the mission? The society we live in knows everything except what happens after death. Everything but that. This was great for some and detrimental for others, after all there are those who strive on searching, on discovering and there was only one thing left to discover and there seemed to be only one way to find out. The result was an increase in assisted suicide. She was one of those people like me. She was looking for purpose. She found me. We were in the waiting room of the assisted suicide clinic. Reasons for dying read the form, I looked over my shoulder, she wrote to ‘discover the unknown’.  A shock ran up my spine. Other people thought this way. Others had lost their purpose because of certainty. I spoke to her immediately

-Do you think we’re the same, of a certain disposition?
-No, it’s been proven that people who commit suicide are a variety of different dispositions….Everything’s proven.
She ended rather bitterly then continued.
-Everything but what happens after we die.
-Is there another way to find out?
-No it’s been proven that this is the only way; it’s been proven to account for the slight increase in assisted suicide recently.
-Do you think it’s a bad thing? People like us dying
-Bad, there is no bad or good, that has been proven. No one caring about us dying is probably a consequence of that. Consequences are relevant only to those who care, no one cares anymore because when you care about something you believe it to be bad or good and now we know nothing is either bad or good. No one cares anymore, everyone just knows.
We sat in silence filling out our forms but my mind whirred. You can’t create answers, they have to be there, you have to discover them but what about questions.  Could we create questions? Answers came from questions so we indirectly create the answers. We are only given answers because we ask for them. So we should ask how do we create more questions and we would be given the answer.
-I have another question that we don’t know the answer to.
-That’s impossible she said, there is only one question no one knows the answer to and that has been proven.
-How do we make more questions? I whispered furitively.
Her eyes lit up. She had what I now had, she had a purpose, we both had a purpose together. We both possessed something unknown that no one knew was unknown.
-We can’t die, we need to find the answer
-I agree.

That was the start of our lives together. We truly believed that finding the answer would benefit humanity, that if we could find more questions and give them to people so they could also look for answers, then they would have purpose and purpose would make their lives worth living. We found the answer. Now we had to give people what we had. We called it the mission.

We live with many different purposes, but the nature of purpose is such that there can only be one true purpose. Life is the purpose. The only true purpose is to live. Some would say there is no way to die without having fulfilled that because only the living can die. Yet we kept witnessing the young coming to die, but you didn’t have to be young to have not lived, you just had to have not tried, which wasn’t your fault in this society where everything is provided and there is hardly anything to try for. This is where the mission has brought us. They filled out the forms in our clinic, it was for assisted suicide but we provided another illegal service. Reason for dying the form read. The answers varied but if they fitted the broad category of no reason, no purpose, no meaning, to find the unknown. We welcomed them, we told them we could provide another service if they were interested.
She is dead. I am waiting now. Has this answered your question?