Seed of Opium
The Inner Perennial

Inclusive to the philosophy of Trans-Futilism, its premise that futility exists as the practical fundamental of the universe, is the understanding that within the human nature, ultimately the human condition, there exists the constant instinct to at once deny and pursue futility, regardless of its guise, for no other sake than that of futility itself.

Emphatic among the kaleidoscopic expressions of this primary human contradiction is the pursuit of opiation, the derivative of the word being only the connotative form of pursuit but not the most common or even the most destructive form, for opiation is the psychological flight from one aspect of futility that interprets as challenging to another aspect of futility that interprets as inspiring or ultimately relieving; hence, the interpretive range of opiation can be as vast and abstract as interpretive futility itself despite its own absolute. 

Long before any opiate, substance related or otherwise, begins its technical work, the human yearning for opiation – the addiction, at this point subliminal – has long been set in effect by the pervasive, inherent sense of human futility that is at once positive and negative, though not until given expression good or evil.

The creative nature of living makes life itself the great opiate, and inclusively the even greater opiate is death, in all its mystery, its singular physical expression as well as its infinite metaphors.

At the emotional level of life's opiation, love, which is as interpretively mysterious as the life experience that embodies and proves love, towers in supremacy as the opiate of greatest fascination, greatest confusion, and greatest classification and expression; in fact, every pursuit of opiation, whether predominantly creative or destructive, is quintessentially the pursuit of love. How perverse, though, that the alcoholic's disillusionments and dejection in relation to love are of the same motivation that devotes the composer to his music, the mother to her child, the cleric to his god. 

It can be observed that when one thinks and therefore believes that love cannot be derived from life as reality, one then pursues love as death whether as physical self-destruction or as self-enlightenment through egoistic self-destruction. Indeed, love's quintessence resides and presides in the spiritual suffering and ecstasy of the soul as well as in the physiological suffering and psychological ecstasy of physical addiction, the pursuit of death being the pursuit of ultimate reunion with the creative force through which all life – and love – becomes expressed. 

The inhibitions destructively created by fallacy and illusion are creatively destroyed by opiation and the true self thus set free – one way or another – but always in pursuit of love. Interestingly, the realms of religion and romance, semi-opposing but no less equal in eroticism, offer promise in their respective opiates just as surely and often just as dangerously as the dealer of drugs who prostitutes dreams commonly in the street.

Truly there is a moment upon awaking from the soul's waking hours (physical sleep), before the mind begins to gather thoughts, when consciousness prevails, and that is all; it is the pure "being" of birth renewed and remindful with each day and by extension the symbolic reality of spiritual awakening from the sleep of waking, walking opiation. 

Once thoughts come to the resurrected mind therein arrives the addiction – awareness of futility – nebulous or associative but in material reality always to be conquered; moreover, depending upon the quality and ratios of one's personal clarity and adulterations, one makes the transition from pure consciousness into the cognitive opiation of daily living either with childlike enthusiasm or with mortal reluctance to relinquish sleep, death's most emulative metaphor and the semantic promise (too literally) of every "morphinic" base.

Just as oversleeping, literally or figuratively, can indicate addiction to the opiate of unconciousness or in "real" terms, escape, insomina as a disorder can be addiction to the opiate of consciousness that is so manifestly yet deceptively inclusive of every opiate and every addiction.

It is no coincidence that drug-induced opiation is referred to as being "high" while moral achievements in the religious, spiritual, cultural, political, scientific realms are also descriptively represented as high, as in "high art," "heavenly," "uplifting," "lofty," and somewhat pejoratively, "highbrow" and "highfalutin." It is also no coincidence that a "low" must be ingredient or at least bystandingly present as influence in every ascension, as with a body's interment following its soul's release, the artist's transmutation of a mundane reality into an idealized conception, or the addict's primary addiction to depression or subculture motivating his/her resultant addiction to chemical substance.

In the futile whole of universal opposites – futile in this sense meaning neutral, not purposeless – it is perhaps the very pursuit of opiation, the chase itself, that is the most glorious and condemning euphoria of all because its experience as faith, hope, and promise is all inclusive and never ending: the vast horizon that beckons without ever being reached; the temptation greater than any temporal satisfaction; the supreme addiction by which we all endure. In other words, blessed oblivion is neither the beginning nor the end but the ongoing creative merging of two manifest extremes that essentially are not extremes at all but two functions of one constant, one futility.

As the human condition evolves, namely as a "society" betters itself materially by presuming its quantitative rise, it creates by its own diversity of opiates the very means and conditions for qualitative fall; such is an ever-modern feast for psychology's id and an ever-steady starvation for the imperceptible soul as it perceptibly bears out psychology's death wish, literally as well as metaphorically.

Treatment for an addiction always commences with acknowledgment that the addiction exists. Practice of the philosophy of Trans-Futilism also commences with acknowledgment, but of futility which, for the purpose of this discourse, can be defined as the ideal addiction from which all other addictions practically derive. 

While the state of addiction presumes that something must be had, the state of Trans-Futilism presumes that all is already had, preexistent and possessed in futility, in nature, in the person, in the universe, hence the inner perennial of freedom from bondage and bondage in freedom.

Trans-Futilism is to believe not only in freedom by truth but from truth because truth sets even itself free once futility is acknowledged.

Spiritual immortality aside, perhaps physical immortality or at least great longevity may be achieved, not by an anxious addiction to life that struggles to deny futility and then escape such denial, but by an enlightened adherence to faith that serves to perceive and welcome the true value of futility as infinite potential and thus discipline life and death with love, purpose, and free will as categorical liberties gracefully bonded to futility's yoke of oblivion.  

– Mary Jo Magar –