"Don't speak," God

Earlier today I caught myself humming some melody that I was really emotionally jiving with, and for some reason the first thing I thought was "please be that No Doubt song that I was thinking about earlier."

I wanted it to be the No Doubt song because I was talking about how awesome it (and the rest of 90s pop) was earlier with a friend, and if I was humming something that emotionally caught me now, it would be awesome if it were the same meaningful song I was talking about earlier, rather than some random Other melody that just entered my head. Because then it becomes more than just a fleeting song. It becomes recurring, unified, more meaningful, almost meant to happen.

I identified this yearning as completely synonymous with a religious one. The religious quest to unify all events, no matter how disconnected they may seem, into a single justified recurrence--God or something--stems from the same impulse. I don't even think science is that different, showing that all distinct events and phenomena are a collection of atoms subject to the same scientific procedures and measurements. Perhaps the human yearning for meaning causes us to unify all of the wonderfully disconnected events in our world into a simple recurring framework so that things can, as with the No Doubt song that popped into my head a second time, seem 'meant to be' in some sense.

The desire for unified meaning leads to fundamentalism.

Maybe we should just leave things in their separate spheres of being. I kinda feel like that's what space is for? Like space allows us to separate things from each other, because they're in different regions of space. So does time. But then we try to override it all with some framework ultimately generated by language. But this ironically only further distances us from the world that we are indistinguishable from, because it gives us shelter in abstraction.