Soulgazing

The vastness of a star-speckled night sky,
The most beautiful tapestry in the entirety of human existence,
The capacity for love and darkness,
Of hate and death and children's laughter,
In your eyes,
In your eyes.

So yesterday I was pretty depressed, hence the dark-ass post. Today I’m feeling much better. So I decided to take a peek inside myself, an act of metacognition. A lot of it has to do with thinking, surprising absolutely no one.

These are the important parts I found, off the top of my head.

Spoiler alert: All of the below are candidates for future full-length posts.

Maxims @ 33

Every person is way more complex than anyone can imagine, a jumbled combination of genes and lived experience, thousands of threads of different colors and sizes to form an impossibly intricate tapestry that makes up our selves. There's a whole universe in each of our heads. We have dreams and drives, wants and needs, quiet thoughts that whisper from corners and loud thoughts that we can't get to shut up, we have pleasing thoughts and memories and dark thoughts, darker than we'd ever let anyone else know, lest they judge us as outcasts. We create entire fictional universes, and 99% of them is inaccessible to us, beneath the surface, in our subconsciousness. All of us are more or less tangled messes just trying to get by.
Judging others, and yourself, based on their words or behaviour is fruitless: it is very likely that they don't even know the true reason they acted that way themselves. Until you've gone diving beneath the surface, reserve judgement.
Humans are pattern-seeing monkeys, but our pattern-recognition subsystems are over-fit to purpose and flag lots of false positives. We very quickly assign reasons for our own behaviour based on the 1% of our conscious minds we can analyze directly. If you don't take the time to reach deep down and look at your roots, you shouldn't be so hard on yourself for your mistakes.
Knowing yourself is better than not. Like a fruitful lifelong relationship is built on mutual understanding and trust, so you must understand and trust yourself. But unlike a life partner, there is absolutely no way to move on; you are stuck with yourself for the rest of your life, whether you like it or not.
People who live in alignment with what they find important and enjoy doing lead better lives than those who don't. Once basic needs are met, this is the source of most unhappiness.
We are the universe experiencing itself. Novelty is the ultimate expression of cosmic potential.
Clarity is superior to chaos. Clarity often comes from learning, then lit by an ignition, which snaps a crystal lattice into existence. Something from nothing.
Struggling against the darkness is noble. Succumbing to it the ultimate failure.
Entropy is the arch-enemy of all existence, but at the same time, the source of everything that is. Unfortunately, it is impossible to live without.
Storytelling is the deepest-rooted means of communication that humans have. Logic, rationality, data, empiricism, none of them stand a chance against a story that resonates with us. Use this power wisely.
Related to stories, words have real power. Language is what we base a lot of our thoughts on; it literally shapes what we think about. People from different places in the world view it differently based on the meaning of the words in their vocabulary.
Presence is a superpower. The most spiritual experience I have ever had is being completely, 100% present in the current moment. Now is everything that actually exists; the past and future are just constructs our minds invent as crutches for our limited monkey brains.
Philosophy is the highest calling there is. It is the (as far as we know) bleeding edge of the universe's own understanding of itself.
Music has the power to touch souls. A performance can, and does, change lives. It's the only thing that has managed to even nudge my atheistic inclinations.
Writing is also magic. It serves both as a means of personal synthesis, communication with the rest of humankind, and as a compounding effect of letting civilization explode in complexity, building on the thoughts of those of us who are not around anymore. Reading Aristotle puts you inside his brain, two thousand years later. Literally magic.
Books are the most consistent format I've found for growing your knowledge and expanding the horizons of your thinking.
More profound but less consistent are deep, completely judgement-free conversations with another human.
Poetry is similar to music but in word-form only. It also has transformative power, inherited by the power of words, storytelling, and finally in its approximation of transfixing and explaining beautiful things.
A poetic philosophical story expressed in music is the ultimate form.
Touching a person's soul is more intimate than any physical connection. The combination must be the definition of ecstasy.
Time spent higher on the consciousness staircase is better than time spent below.
Understanding how to win others to your way of thinking is both extremely manipulative and extremely effective. Apply wisdom as required.
I aspire to become one of the immortals, those who still haven't died.
The immortals are those who have amassed great power. Ramses was a ruler, Jesus a storyteller, Plato a thinker. We remember them all, but the power of the thinker is the most noble.
Complaining rarely makes things better. Everybody has their own flavour of suffering.
People like people who do things. People with engines.
A dichotomy hides between striving to become the person you wish you were and accepting yourself for who you really are.
Another is between being content with what you have vs striving for what you don't.
A third between philosophising and being present.
A lot of life revolves around balancing two such extremes in a way that you find meaningful and enjoyable.

I am still young and very aware that most of these maxims probably aren't actually true or even meaningful. The chance of my having stumbled upon the correct answers to all of the above already is very slim. Most of them aren't deep, profound or grounded, and some probably contradict each other. But they are mine, and they are the best I've been able to come up with so far.

I feel like I have barely scratched the surface.

A self-psychoanalytic mapping of my traits and biases @ 33.

Most of them I have yet to nail down the root cause of. Work in progress.

I am Biased toward thinking. I think (lol) this is due to it giving me satisfying results. There are good and bad forms, five-whys: good, analysis (generally): good, brooding: bad, and self-flagellation: useless.
I am Biased toward getting stuck in minutiae. Rationally aware that this is inferior, constantly find myself there anyway.
Unresolved.
I am Biased against action and initiative.
Unresolved.
I am Biased toward being different. Non-conforming, against the crowd, alternative.
Unresolved.
I am Biased toward timidity, against confrontation.
Unresolved.
I am Biased toward starting, against finishing.
This seems like human nature, but unresolved.
I am Biased toward listening, against talking.
Unresolved, but my gut feeling is that people say so many things that don't matter, and adding to the cacophony just increases entropy, which is anathema. I also judge my own words by whether they add something I care about to the conversation: Depth, mirth, novelty, reflection, validation. Usually, I don't have anything worth saying. Platitudes and appeals to lower denominators are also anathema.
I am Biased toward depth, against shallowness.
Unresolved.
I am Biased toward compassion. Currently flip-flopping on whether suffering matters.
Unresolved.
I am Biased toward seeing the good in other people.
People are struggling against the darkness; I refuse to believe that they can be composed of it.
I am Biased toward optimism.
A negatively framed life doesn't seem worth living to me.

End transmission