Reflecting on Reflecting

Inside my essence exists a ghastly chasm between my rational mind and the void.

There are truths that I can logically recognize: I enjoy writing, I enjoy thinking, I enjoy petting my cat.

There are phenomena that I can not logically recognize: why I feel compelled to write, why I enjoy thinking even though it seems futile, why I feel such connection, adoration, and love for a temporary being.

In early July, I wrote Progress and Collapse where I theorizied and reasoned onto the page that human progression is inwards obliteration, an implosion of… everything.

I felt like I had to write that. I had to wake up and interrogate what human progression is.

And about three weeks after I wrote Progress and Collapse, I lived that inwards implosion through the Generative July Crisis writings.

It was the most spiraling descent into nothing I ever felt. Spatial ideas themselves fractured - I was everywhere but nowhere, I was everything but nothing: total implosion of all facets of my self, my relation to this world, and my soul.

The demands from the void manifested in my spiritual world. And from my inwards obliteration emerged a person closer to the truth.

It is beyond my cognition. All I know is that I must obey.

Why else would I choose to exist?

I recently spent time with a friend, and his house was beautifully suburban and ideal: a curated living room, just messy enough to seem authentically and charmingly alive. Despite seeming fake, the walls pulsed with stability and life.

At the time, I wondered if I would be happier if I was less intense, if I too had the same thing.

But I am so relieved that him and his wife are happy and thriving; that is all I want for them.

Truthfully, I don't believe in personal happiness as the highest human good anymore.

The void, wherever that may be and whatever it might be, compulses me to write and reflect.

To orientate all my energy, soul, and attention towards radical witnessing of affliction, my contradictions, this world's contradictions, is to orientate myself to the highest human good: clarity.

How weird that my illusive clarity, my illusive truth, comes from somewhere beyond reason.

And yet how beautiful.

Gratitude.