Understanding that people aren’t perfect, but that we have an ideal for what we should be, and everyone we know falls short of that ideal, is a tough one to embody. A simpler way to put it is, ‘don’t judge others.’ Well okay, but why? Because they aren’t perfect, and neither am I–and there might come a time when I’d like for everyone else not to be overly critical about my behavior; after all, I am only human? It seems to me that I want everyone to fit in my box of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, but more so, I want to hold people's actions as accountable as I hold my own–and I think that’s most people's mindset. What some have deemed ‘wrong’ or ‘evil’ for themselves, gets subconsciously projected as the same moral standard for everyone else. The real trick here is that we don’t see our behavior objectively, in fact, we have an extreme bias when it comes to our own moral behavior. We feed ourselves the stories about our realities that we need to in order to survive in it. We are in a constant state of adapting to our surroundings, this means that we create psychic blocks when interpreting our own ‘good’ and ‘evil’ behaviors. We like to bask in our ‘good’ behavior, while simultaneously blocking out our ‘evil’ behavior– or, we will often put some twist on it to present ourselves as ‘good’ to ourselves. It’s a constant confirmation bias of stories we interpret our reality with. We are not an objective narrator of our own reality. So, if we project our own moral standards onto everyone else in the world, but we cannot even see or understand our own behavior, then what is it that we are judging others with? A delusion? This is why it’s best not to judge someone else’s behavior at all. Let it go. We learn by making mistakes, and some people only learn through big mistakes. By the time we are an adult, how much can we change our behavior anyways? The moral standard we hold ourselves too is usually just an adaptation to the time and space we are born into.
Between evolutionary adapting, dogmatic beliefs and ideologies, genetics, childhood trauma, and the time and the space we were born into, we have a 0% of experiencing an objective reality. We experience the reality we need in order to survive all of that. But that can’t be true, can it? For it was, then there would never be suicide. We experience the reality we believe is true–I cannot begin to claim that I know what that means, but that’s my best guess at it. The psyche loves its games. The left brain, and the right brain, something like a venn diagram, with our reality, mixed with belief and unanswerable questions, lying in the middle. I believe there will always be a crack in objective reasoning where the mystical will seep through. The mystical lives in the unanswered questions, and there will always be unanswerable questions about life. Science, psychology, and philosophy need to anticipate the cracks, and combine the rational–the objective–with the mystical–the internal. The psyche is a maze we will be stuck in for a while, and it seems to me that studying it will lead us deeper and deeper into it, before we make it out–there may never be a way out though, there may only be progress combined with the cracks.
Progress. An understanding that everything is a process. All of thinking and all of being is a process; with hopefully–ideally–something like a slow and steady march forward. A trap is the hubris, but we’ve known this before Homer, yet still, it persists. Thinking we know more about reality then we actually do, that is the hubris. The hubris lives in the dogmatic–and lets be honest here–the dogmatic lives in the science and in the religious. Any assumptions about reality, which we have so many, is the cumulative hubris of man; in both the science’s and the mystical this is true. Hairless apes with an over-inflated sense of purpose? Or, delusional manipulators of nature? The problem with using physics to conquer mother nature is that she bites back. We will improve the quality of life for a while, but when nature bites us back, many lives will be lost. She’s a delicate mystery, mother nature. We are meant to live in harmony, and not as conquerors planting our poles in her at will. There needs to be respect, no, a relationship, with her. We are products of nature, separating ourselves from her, that is the hubris again.
And then there is this, my philosophies–my hubris. Who am I to navigate through life and think I can glimpse the maze? Well you’re right, who am I to see such things? I am no one. One of 7.8 billion. One of all time and space. Just a man. There is no reason to read a man’s ego, and if we are not extremely careful, philosophy can just be an expression of one’s individual ego. Exhibit A: Nietzsche. I am not an Antichrist, I am an alchemist–experimenting with life, attempting to turn my lead into gold. I am also a fool who likes to write. Even though I am the fool, I am still hesitant to publish any philosophy. The problem is, it seeps through my cracks, and comes out in my poetry and in my life. We embody what we believe if we truly believe it, and maybe that’s free will, our choice in what we believe in. I am trying to embody the philosophies I believe in, or at least, the one’s I am trying to believe in.
-C.H.