I see most human pursuits as compensations:
loneliness -> friendship
worthlessness -> achievement
boredom -> stimulation
uncertainty -> certainty
emptiness -> meaning
insignificance -> status
separateness -> romance
Civilization ends up mistaking its coping mechanisms for its values,
Because the compensation is visible while the wound is hidden.
When one is comfortable with the original condition,
The world doesn’t merely become less attractive,
It becomes less self-evident.
The more comfortable you become with the qualities listed on the left,
The less reason there is to do almost anything.
My view on romantic love
I view romantic love as a window through which my ideal becomes visible.
What draws me is not the belief that they are the ideal itself,
but the sense that, through them,
I momentarily glimpse it.
The attraction serves as a doorway to the dimension of Beauty.
A glimmer of sunlight on a distant mountain is not the sun.
Yet it can arrest the heart,
not because it is mistaken for the sun,
but because it bears witness to its presence.
Like two rivers meeting.
For a time they intermingle, exchange waters, alter each other’s course.
Neither river leaves unchanged.
A new take on fear and desire
Fear = attraction meets perceived self-loss.
Desire = attraction meets perceived self-gain.
The attraction itself may be prior to both.
Fear resists change.
Desire resists stagnation.
Both are anti-inertial forces.
Attraction + inertia → desire.
Repulsion + inertia → fear.
Desire and fear are not the motion itself.
Fear says: “Do not go there.”
Desire says: “Do not stay here.”
Both are objections to the present trajectory.
Both desire and fear are manifestations of resistance within a system trying simultaneously to preserve itself and transform itself.
Love in my definition
Shared reality is what love feels like from the inside.
Inhabiting the same field of significance.
The opposite of love, would be mutual unintelligibility.
What we call “falling in love” is maybe the progressive discovery that these layers keep aligning farther than we expected.
Participation/Continuity vs Experience/Completion
Participation keeps life going by continuously extracting from the present, so experience is never allowed to finish.
Stillness removes the need to extract, so experience can fully arrive and fully exhaust itself.
Participation converts moments into continuity.
Stillness allows moments to complete.
The animal, human, and mystic
The animal wants to survive,
The mystic wants to dissolve,
The human stands between them,
Haunted by the echo of both.
A very abstract breakdown of power
In my vision, from a very abstract view, experience has only 3 qualities:
* Vision = The extent of your seeing.
* Power = The extent of your power.
* Sustainability = The extent you can sustain the power.
Power, in its purest form, is self-transformation.
Everything else is a kind of shadow or substitute.
* Control over others or environment = A consolation for lacking the power to see and transform oneself.
It’s reactive and it needs endless force and maintenance.
It is also just blind loyalty to a self you have falsely identified with.
* Self-control = An intermediate step.
It’s internalized power, but limited.
You can restrain impulses or habits, but you’re still structually bound to the mind or circumstances.
It’s like steering a boat along a river you didn’t build.
* Self-transformation = The ultimate power.
Especially when Vision + Power converge: You see what you truly are + actively shape your consciousness and being.
It’s the ability to remodel the very field/structure of existence you inhabit.
True agency is always inward first; everything external is secondary.
Ofc, generating a massive burst of power is not as difficult as sustaining it.
The real challenge is in re-engineering your system to sustain that power/voltage.
Understanding vs Connection
If connection is there, understanding is just a luxury, not even necessary.
When there is no connection, understanding becomes necessary and mandatory.
The more separate you feel, the more the necessity to understand.
If deep heart resonance is already present, then 2 people can simply join in that ecstasy of shared resonance and synergy (without needing to reflect or understand in post).
Transcendence, in a sense, involves total separation, therefore total understanding too.
When connection is absent or fragile, understanding becomes the bridge.
To do even one thing, you have to do everything
No action is truly isolated.
Every real act arises from the totality of who you are in that moment.
Nothing is isolated.
Every act done is also an act of reorganization of the entire being.
True mastery and the ideal oddly comes only once one is no longer seeking anything from it
I intuitively feel that the only way to live the ideal way in any area of life, is once all desire from that area of life is completed/over/saturated/finished/outgrown.
True mastery and freedom in any domain often comes only when one is no longer seeking anything from it.
This is in every domain: love and relationships, creative work, spirituality, material wealth and success etc.
The highest ideal and freedom can be lived only after desire, not through it.
It’s almost like the difference between karma and dharma.
Dharma seems to be possible only when there is nothing left to extract from that domain.
In other words total dharma is possible only from total transcendence,
And total transcendence is possible only when all desires are consciously lived and thinned out to fade.
Journey to the Abstract 