Sacred and Ordinary
Burst and Burst
It all began with a burst.
A symphony of light, colors, texture. The breath of your mother on your skin, the way your father held you to his chest.
You often wept when you fell, but your mother always picked you back up. Despite the tears and the pain, she always patched you up with a smile, the skin around her eyes creasing.
Love.
And from this, you learned that this scary, expansive world has pockets of refuge. You learned that the human essence is good.
Self and Illusion
I am nothing more than a loose binding of chance, illusion, and distance.
The effect of the "I" is felt in retrospect. A flicker, an echo, a whisper.
To others I am nothing more than a snapshot.
To myself the "I" is my most gently held illusion. I do not exist in reality. I dance each day between the loose sewing of my "I" and the inevitable unravel.
I notice patterns in my actions, my thoughts, and my perspective of my world. If I had been born in the Middle East, my thoughts would be radically different. My actions would be radically different. My perspective would be radically different.
To the Reader
I pray that you develop nourishing roots; there is nothing I want for you as much for you to feel rooted to this world and fully alive.
Am I allowed to say "I pray" if I don't have a definitive stance towards theology?
I pray that the harmful people exit your life, and that one day you escape the persistent, haunting ghosts.
I pray that you always have the strength to overcome the smallest, grating annoyances of modern life.
Crucible and Chance
Affliction has a wondrous capability to reduce its target into their most fundamental unit: a trembling human.
Our anesthetics eviscerated.
Raw, disorientating, searing perception.
This is the nature of our crucible.
Transfiguration or reduction: the result of weighted chance. There is no honor in the result of luck.
To emerge from the crucible with a greater capacity to love is the echo of miracle. To defy the pull of affliction is supernatural; it is beyond my cognition.
Sacred and Ordinary
All manner of sacred things in this world are defined by an inexplicable ability to defy the gravity of reason. In other words, the limit of language withers at the boundaries of the sacred. How can we speak about things beyond reason? Any attempt is approximation. To speak in certainties about the sacred is arrogant; the only respectful action is to dutifully trace the outline. If sacred things, like love, grace, or transcendence, are fundamentally unspeakable, then the truth lies in describing only what it is not.
Immolation and Genesis
To become something we must consent to becoming nothing.
Are we already something before becoming nothing?
The self: a compound of illusion, chance, and distance. Its constitution: total sincerity.
It is always the edges, the failure points, of systems that buckle.
Humanity: a system of systems. Countries, provinces, counties, families, friendships.
The self is the fundamental failure point.
Is a foundation of illusion, chance, and distance stable?
Consciousness is a haunted blessing. The same gift that produces joy, wonder, and love produces the self.
Perception and Hubris
The great trouble in human life is that witnessing and acting are two different operations.
The highest arrogance is the belief that we see in full clarity before we act.
A politician proposing budget cuts for reduced school lunch programs. The total belief that their moral calculus, the redirection of funds from the hungry, serves the greater good.
I was seven years old when I learned other kids were worth more than me.
On Searching for Purpose
"What do you want to be when you grow up?"
From the surface, this common question towards children seems innocuous, but it bleeds with cultural illusion. This question is veiled with curiosity, but the undercurrent is insidious. Instead of asking a child about joy, love, happiness, hobbies, it really asks, "What role would you reduce yourself into? What singular shape will you force your selfhood into?"
The child hears joy and feels wonder, who wouldn't want to be a heroic firefighter or vet?
Jumping on Glass
The fog: the metaphysical state of being under existential pressure. The cave. The natural order of things. The undercurrent piloting hazy life.
The default state of being is a jarring disorientation. One so invasive that it convinces the soul that it sees clearly. The beckoning siren, promising the self that its comfort is proof of clarity. Cancerous illusion multiplying through sincerity.
The soul mistakes comfort for virtue, for clarity. Why would someone sedated by the celebrated life interrogate this contract? To do so is to press a scalpel against the numbed self. It is to vicariously threaten the foundation of the lives one influences. To doubt the normal and comfortable is heretical, both to the self and to society.
Ordinary Evil
The horrors of humanity breathe in plain sight. Evil owns homes with beautiful lawns and large cars.
It grills on Sundays.
It pays HOA fees.
It chaperones field trips to the zoo.
It adorns its home with beautiful furniture and tacky signs.
It beats its son in the car, blaring the radio afterwards to muffle the screams.
It eats dinner, as a family. It smiles, and then it forgets.
A hopeful, trembling seven year old. A young boy who adores Spongebob, The Legend of Zelda, and stuffed animals.
The Machine
To live a moral life revolves around one simple question:
Am I witnessing, or am I possessing?
To witness another soul in full fidelity is to revere their humanity. It is an acknowledgement of the approximated divine. It is to whisper to a fellow human, "What pulls at your soul?"
To possess another soul is reduction. It is to reduce another sovereign human into a resource, a tool, a source of comfort. It is to command to a fellow human, "What can you do for me?"
Union Is Not Love
American culture posits that to join another in union, like in dating or marriage, is an act of love. This is a common cultural misdirection. What's celebrated is not love, but the visible entanglement: the merging of lives, schedules, assets, and futures.
The roots of two souls become one, and this enmeshment is mistaken for love. Doesn’t it feel natural to believe that two people who merge into one must be in love? In this, we reduce what should be sacred in our dark world to the outcome of structure.
The Soul
The human soul can only be described in regards to what it is not.
The soul cannot be grasped. It is ineffable and unknowable. The soul is not the infinite, though it approximates the boundless. Thus, the soul is beyond true cognition: we may only describe its outline. Like the boundary between childhood and adulthood, the soul is felt in retrospect.
To exist in this world is to suffocate under infinite pressure. This short human existence unfolds beneath the weight of affliction. Even in the most outwardly stable and wealthy neighborhoods, there lives abuse, theft, lies, coercion, the quiet erasure of souls, and other sufferings. Across the world, there lives genocide, famine, and wars. In the personal life, there lives the whispers of eventual death. To truly witness affliction is to stand on the precipice of collapse.
Among Strangers
I spent this weekend, May 16th - May 18th, in Portland. It was an incredible experience, and I feel the only suitable place to distill my thoughts is here.
I witnessed suffering, glimmers of hope, and, for a brief moment, felt the weight of exile temporarily dissolve. I should start from the beginning.
I ordered bus tickets from Corvallis to Portland. When I arrived at the stop, I noticed a man waiting patiently for the bus, too.
Nourishment and Erasure
The greatest desire of the human soul is to be fully witnessed.
To be known not in fragments, but in totality. In full fidelity.
Indeed, radically witnessing another soul is the most holy love one can give. To do so borders the divine.
A love without possession or illusion. To love someone without the self.
A brief immolation of the self, not to consume, but to become empty hands capable of cradling another soul.
A Turbulent Era: A Warning
We live in turbulent times. Or maybe conflicts are just more visible with technology.
Either way, I urge you: strip away your ego when looking at conflict.
Reflect critically on the information you consume. For what you deem trustworthy, I beg you to sit with it.
In stillness.
In full, radical witness.
I sometimes struggle with this. Who wouldn't? When your environment paints the world in black and white, day after day, it's difficult to see the soul beneath the figure. Our souls are feeble.
False Idols
The mind is fleeting and weak. The future becomes real only in retrospect. Until then, it is a fiction of the present tense.
The human soul: a finite resource under infinite pressure. To continually witness demands what language cannot hold.
The natural result of a fragile essence under sacred demand? Life within fog–misdirection so complete that the self believes that it sees.
Within fog, all light is worshipped. Stillness demands sacred immolation without relief.
Fragments on the Moral Imperative
What is the greatest moral imperative that gives weight to our actions?
Death.
Painful. Terrifying. So much so that we smother it with games, money, prestige. Anything to avoid standing before it, naked and awake.
To face it daily would destroy most.
Why is death the greatest moral imperative? To see it clearly is to accept the finality of our lives. To recognize that our actions carry moral weight, even the smallest ones.
Balancing Output and Justice
I struggle with balancing timely output (software tickets completed, writing, course development) and justice.
In this context, justice is:
- Ensuring that my work is undoubtedly correct (depending on the task, this is fluid)
- Ensuring that my work is grounded in clarity
- Ensuring that my work honors the human consumers with empathy
- Ensuring that my work has a solid mental model and my ideas are valid
- Ensuring that my work provides some benefit to consumers
- Ensuring that my work moves the needle forward, however so.
I see the process of creation to be a moral act, not a productive one. I create writings, code, and systems to uplift and benefit others. Despite my limited clarity and the other painful human traits, I want to provide a service to others rooted in clarity and justice.
Evil For Good
A poor mother stealing food for her children.
An abused spouse manipulating their partner, encouraging them to leave the home so that the abused can escape.
A father reporting his contracting income lower than reality, so that his child can qualify for free lunch.
A whistleblower breaking the terms of his or her NDA to expose deep injustice.
A queer teenager hiding their true self from religious family to avoid being homeless.
Reflecting on Class Disparity
I know a kind man in coastal Florida. He is a true friend of mine–a truly resilient soul. The type of person to value other souls as higher than his own.
He works two jobs, and his girlfriend works at a casual restaurant. They have a two-bedroom apartment, one room dedicated to her Twitch streaming. Some might call it irresponsible. But even if every decision they made was perfect, they are one event away from collapse.
Doubt
I write because I must. Yet, I can't imagine anyone less fit to write or speak.
Who am I to proclaim what "true" love is?
Who am I to decide what the highest moral good is?
Who am I to publish my unfit, unrefined thoughts?
I see how flawed I am, and I'm sure that I don't see the full picture.
In fact, I struggle most days. I believe that clarity is the highest moral good, yet I find myself constantly fighting the fog. I spend so many weekends returning to the works of Seneca and Simone Weil just to feel that clarity.
Love Without Possession
Originally written as a private letter, now as a reflection on love and detachment. I hope you can take something good from this work, even if only for a brief moment.
I deeply believe in you. You are intelligent with a strong perception, and I have no doubt that you are capable of achieving all your goals and dreams.
You should know that I truly love you. I think it is important to define what I mean by “love” because that word has been contorted and damaged by societal norms.