The existence of a great thing requires its opposite, all that which is not great. In other words, an extreme may only exist in contrast to another extreme.

"My stepfather loved me as his own son, even though I hardly knew him": an outlier.

"My biological father did not love me at all, even though I knew him from birth": an outlier.

Deep love and shallow love are only understood in relation to another.

The Cane and The Cross

But, in my heart, he did not gain the better of my mother's piety and prevent me from believing in Christ just because he still disbelieved himself. For she did all that she could to see that you, my God, should be a Father to me rather than he. In this you helped turn the scales against her husband, whom she always obeyed because by obeying him she obeyed your law, thereby showing greater virtue than he did.

Our Divine Ascent

We are, by all definitions, flawed and limited beings.

Unlike a god who simply exists, an everywhere-but-nowhere and everything-but-nothing, we find ourselves damned to always be nowhere and always be nothing.

Our hands ache of labor, our hearts cry tears of heartbreak and love, our brains robbed of depth.

By all marks, we are nothing. We struggle endlessly until the day we return to the void's embrace, like a child returning to a forgotten childhood home whose name escapes the tongue.

On Fine Things

You tell me of all the fine things in your life: your Pinterest boards, the aspirations of your home; your incredible home, intricately adorned with fine fabrics and woods; your car, providing a luxurious ride to work; and your job, as a member of the managerial class.

These fine things provide you immense joy, and no doubt exists in my mind regarding that. Your work, a grinding ascent into the heavens, provide you currency to curate and buy those other fine things. Not only are you recognized and promoted as someone exceptional, the toil of your labor enables the agonizing curation of the fine life, one marked by abundance.

On The Neighbor-Love

You crowd around your neighbor and have fine words for it. But I tell you: your neighbor-love is the highest love one can provide.

There are people who have encountered the dark fervor of corruption, their bodies and minds whipped and cracked. Many of them lost the ability to love themselves. But those who sublimate their ache and absence into unfiltered love for their neighbors are a miracle.

This is grace.

The Mechanical Intimations of Lost Yearning

I want to write this in the future, so I will keep this here for now. I read maybe 5 pages of Plato's Phaedo and felt compelled to jot this down.

1. Western society is largely founded on a rationalist and materialist perspective of the world
2. Both perspectives require a common tradition of logical primacy.
3. What can be explained in a scientific approach is greater than that of a mystical, intuitive approach
4. This means that rigorous reasoning is often associated with material explanations: love comes from oxytocin and signals in the brain, depression is of low serotonin which can be fixed with SSRIs
5. That which can be observed is greater than that which cannot be observed
6. Unobservable things like God, transcendence, grace, and purpose are lesser than their psychological and sociological explanations based on the observed world
7. This leads to the reduction of unobservable things into theories and arguments
8. People are born in western society, but many of them still yearn for those unobservable things
9. Many search for those unobservable things through observable things, like obtaining purpose through quantifiable progress - promotions, job title, net worth, etc.

Unknown Love

The greatest power in this world is the ability to renounce the word 'I'.

The great struggles in this world are the result of the word 'I'.

Can you imagine a world without the differentiation between us and them, him and me, myself and the world? Can you imagine a society where people can breathe, where humanity was prioritized over baseless concerns like greed?

We see the world as a collection of snapshots, and we mistakenly believe them to be the full picture. Each snapshot is steeped in bias, in the arrogance of clarity. Like a blind man who can feel the face of his lover, but never can truly see her true beauty. Humanity, the world, the people we love, even our spouses: all there, but forever out of true reach.

Contemplative Literature Requires an Anchor

Spiritual and contemplative literature has the capability to be a mirror reflecting the raw, unfiltered human experience. The widow who reads the Bible sees not just stories of others facing loss but a reflection of herself, the realization that she too belongs in the lineage of the human condition, that she is not alone even in her darkest moments. But contemplative literature that refuses to connect even the most ineffable ideas, even if futile, shatters the mirror. A complete divorce between the reader and the literature itself. Literature that hides behind pure negation and the refusal to link material reality with the inner human experience is a blatant disservice to both the power of literature and the humanity of the reader. Such writing is better off never published: it is a failure to humanity wearing the mask of mystical rigor through pure negation.

Waiting and Miracle: Our Obligations Towards Studies

The truest method of study is the miracle of waiting.

Pascal writes in his Pensées: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

To sit quietly in our studies takes the most particular type of attention, one devoid of possession, ego, or desire.

Put simply, it is the consent to study for hours and to accept that nothing revealed is itself the revelation.

Force and Reduction: Destruction And Life

The true destruction of man's spirit, the true unthreading of his own relation to himself, lies in self-alienation. The alienation that fractures the essence of a man, the tool that masters wield in delight, the enabler of systematic harm, the harbinger of ruined lives. This alienation from the self is often silent and pathologized, for most alienated men there exists not an outward, visible plea for help; rather, what once used to be a connected body and spirit is now a walking corpse and a contorted, buried humanity, dooming most to a life of strife towards wholeness. Simone Weil herself paints the picture of force against the body clearly in The Iliad, or the Poem of Force:

Death Before Death

Can you die before death?

A man who breathes without reason, who wakes without purpose, who walks without guidance; his flesh and blood remain warm, yet his essence that once pulsed with vitality is now calcified and turned to stone. Even in his most beloved, intimate moments he finds himself alienated and isolated from humanity, like two lovers separated by the thinnest opaque glass screen. No matter how much he yearns for connection, for warmth and community to restore his essence, he always finds himself just tangentially out of reach from life. He feels the radiation of warmth, yet it never meets him. His heart pumps, his eyes see, but is he alive or is he a thing? Which is to say; although alive, is he simply a walking corpse?

Exploitation and Hierarchy

An essential need for the human condition is that of order. The most obvious example of constructed order is the hierarchy of society. In this context, hierarchy is the natural split between those in "lesser" roles in society and those in "higher" roles. For example, we may consider a senator to be of higher position and any common worker to be of lower position, based merely on the collective potential for influence, creation, and exclusivity between these two disparate roles.

Love And Self

I should only love myself to the capabilities of my love for the other: as a stranger.

Love ascends by falling.

The only love we are capable of giving to an utter stranger is one of the most tangential relation: you are human, just as I.

To be capable of more is supernatural.

My Beloved America

My beloved America, why has your soul turned to stone?

What could have thrived with life, pumping with warm blood, is now calcified.

Our neighbors our enemies, our children reduced to a tax burden, the world itself reduced to an abstraction.

Death!

Death in the spirit. Death where it matters: our humanity. Our shaking, trembling, suffocating humanity.

Us and them. Salvation and sin.

In other words, manufactured division. Rotting within.

To The Reader, Again

This world can be suffocating, overwhelming, and nauseating at times.

If you're tired,

If you feel broken,

If you feel devastated and beyond repair,

Know this:

You have my undying support.

Yes, your pain is real. And it is consuming. Who wouldn't feel grounded down by life?

But I have faith that, somewhere deep within, there exists space that can survive affliction. The part of the human spirit that can't die.

Grace, Undone

Cassian: Take my hand, and let us walk to the edge of this world.

Valerius: Why should we go to the edge of the world?

Cassian: Reality exists at the edge of our existence.

Valerius: But what is at the edge of the world?

Cassian: The place where breath vanishes, where tears crystalize, where our hands tear away from another. Where affliction crushes our armor under infinite weight.

Valerius: What remains without our armor?

The Demands of Writing

What does writing demand of us?

I just read a technically excellent essay on the erosion of public education. The author is autistic, about to be pushed out of her job, and facing the brutal machinery of austerity. Her essay would be well received in most academic circles, I believe. I can describe it as very competent analysis.

But the writing felt dead. Polished, well-structured, deeply informed by Marxist analysis… but lifeless.

Tangentially Divine Love

At the essence of our being is a tangential connection to divinity.

Not some god, not some symbol, not something abstract.

That inexplicable space within the soul - the one that survives affliction.

The space where mere mortals are capable of withstanding the infinite pressure of life without dilution.

The extraordinary is within the ordinary.

All I wish for the world is love. Trembling, struggling love.

May each day I burn my self to the ground to make space for divine love.

Capability and Perception

One of the most enduring illusions created by The Machine is the idea that we must "earn" the ability to independently think. That to have an original stance requires sacrifice.

Status, degree, labor, suffering. The belief that you must pay to enter the realm of authenticity. Most crucially, the systematic illusion that others must recognize your payment as the requirement of radical self-trust.

The most insidious violence: The Machine does not say "You can't think independently"; rather, it says "You can't think independently yet"

Limitation and Reality

A common critique I've received on my moral philosophy is that it is unrealistic, that it is only possible in imagination rather than reality.

First, everything I have written is the product of my own life, just stating my thoughts and experiences.

Lastly, why is it that when moral philosophy leaves the realm of moral calculus it is suddenly divorced from plausible reality?

Do we live in a world where moral seriousness - treating individuals as humans - is discarded in favor of spreadsheets, line items, and abstractions?

Trust and Self

As an American, I was taught that personal freedom was a critical virtue. That I am the governor of my self.

I was taught that personal liberty was sacred. The core of my being is freedom.

Yet the moment I express myself outside of the given lines, the accepted American way of life, staunch opposition meets me.

When I speak of wishing to emigrate, the default assumption is that I am naive, that "this could be a grass is greener scenario."

Power and Futility

Something that bewilders me is, what seems like, the human desire to accumulate massive amounts of power.

I understand that the word "power" can mean many things (it didn't take me two books of analytical philosophy to say words mean different things in different contexts, and I certainly am not Austrian :D).

In this context, I believe power is the ability to influence your outside environment at differing scales. From the local, the regional, the national, the global, etc.

Progress and Collapse

Exile and nourishment.

Human ghost and human desire.

Deprivation and abundance.

Optional and required.

Genesis and precarity.

Exile requires the lack of nourishment.

What is a movement without a beginning and an end?

A line must start and end in two points, like movement.

What is exile to nourishment then?

Is exile both the start and end? No, deprivation is genesis. The absence of nourishment is the start of exile.

Experiences and Loss

A defining characteristic of my life to this point has been the lack of common modern experiences.

I did not grow up with two parents, and I certainly did not grow up with a parent who loved me.

I did not really get to experience homecoming, prom, etc., because I am gay (if you know, you understand).

I did not physically attend a four year university because of the pandemic & burnout. I actually went to an online program for my bachelor's while working as a data engineer.

Society and Abstraction

Doesn't this society we live in feel deeply wrong?

We live in a society that values abstraction over human dignity.

Publicly traded companies are legally required to act with fiduciary duty to its shareholders. The raising of stock prices to increase the return on their investments. This is stock primacy, which conflicts with providing fair, good, and quality services. Extraction becomes the driver of growth.

As someone once said, "The business of business is business."

Terror and Peace

Language is a poor companion: it merely outlines what I think and feel.

Events in my country terrify me right now. I see extreme division, the reduction of vulnerable people into abstractions. I see unfiltered suffering that is openly mocked and used as a political tool.

The usage of affliction to further political agendas is terrifying, and it is everywhere.

But even in this well of fear, even in my prison of personal influence, I feel peace.

Moral Philosophy and Living

Should a moral philosopher live his or her ideas?

The word "should" is troublesome: it invites faith arguments on what life demands.

Perhaps the easiest argument is that because someone's ideas may benefit humanity outside of their personal application, then they have value. If their unlived ideas have values, then it is fine to not live his or her ideas.

A more important question is, "What do your ideas require?"