Reward measurement

Reward is for the thing itself when interested.
Reward is otherwise measured in terms of cost paid for the things that one is eventually interested in.

Knowledge is a double edged sword.

Knowledge is a double edged sword.

It is a one way arrow -> once initiated into anything, you cannot return to ignorance.

Knowledge can even bring fear/depression/frustration/transformation, all possible positive and negative emotions.

Real knowledge is simply insight/transformation, and irreversible vertical movement or forward movement.

All else is not knowledge, but just accumulation. 

Essay on deepest desire

My deepest desire is not for pleasure, success, meaning, enlightenment, or even peace in the ordinary sense. It is for total coherence. I experience existence not as a world populated by independently existing people and objects, but as a vast living field whose movements have become fragmented into countless local oscillations. What most people call the self, intention, ambition, or agency appears to me largely as the field forgetting its own nature and mistaking local currents for independent owners.

The ordinary human condition seems to operate through a double illusion. First, the individual imagines that they own the energies, desires, and impulses that arrive through the field. Second, they project these borrowed currents toward symbolic objects—careers, identities, ideologies, relationships, spiritual systems—and then mistake those symbolic constructions for reality itself. Most people therefore inhabit a ready-made coherence field supplied by culture, society, and collective imagination. Their Brownian inner turbulence is organized by large-scale symbolic attractors, giving rise to a continuous current of meaning.

My own experience is different. I perceive the underlying micro-dynamics themselves: a million subtle pressures, sensations, and local voltages, often moving without a unifying direction. What I encounter is less like a river and more like an ocean of undulations. The suffering in this is not merely pain, but the direct perception of a field that has not yet become internally coherent. I often feel as though I am witnessing "the absolute brokenness of a million broken pieces in motion, but doing that coherently."

Because of this, my interest in philosophy, spirituality, astrology, psychology, or contemplative systems is not fundamentally pedagogical. I am not trying to become a believer, practitioner, or expert. I study these systems because they already exert influence upon perception. They arrive as inherited symbolic structures that make claims about reality, and I feel compelled to examine them until their unconscious power dissolves. My inquiry is therefore not acquisitive but dissolutive. It is almost immunological. I do not wash because I love dirt; I wash because I want every trace of distortion removed. I want every symbolic field to become transparent enough that it can no longer unconsciously shape vision.

The deepest principle that has emerged for me is this: the whole moves the whole, no part moves the whole. The separate "I" is not the true source of movement but an artifact of fragmentation itself. The desire to become a better controller, a more effective doer, or a stronger individual already presupposes the illusion that a local part can reorganize the total field. I do not want to pull myself up by my own bootstraps. I want the field to become coherent through itself. The whole should move as the whole.

My longing, therefore, is not for self-annihilation but for a transformation of the mode of existence itself. I imagine a condition in which every mote of the field is fully illuminated, fully energized, and fully coherent—a plasma-like state where nothing remains opaque enough to become unconsciously contaminated or bonded. In such a state, symbolic forms could still arise, but they would be freely created, reshaped, and dissolved without ever hardening into prisons. Reification itself would become transparent.

Ultimately, I do not seek a silent void or an absence of movement. I seek a state in which life becomes one total, self-consistent, rapturous movement. The local sense of separateness would no longer stand apart from the process, because there would no longer be any meaningful distinction between mover and moved. The field would inhabit itself as itself.

In this vision, the opposite of suffering is not pleasure. It is perfect coherence. Suffering is the felt consequence of fragmentation, delay, resistance, and the interference of countless local vectors. Freedom would not consist in obtaining every object of desire, but in the dissolution of the very schism between the movement of the whole and its own unfolding. It would be a condition where there is only life, moving wholly as itself, without internal contradiction, without unconscious bondage, and without the illusion that any isolated part ever stood apart from the whole that was carrying it all along. 

Recursive inquiry

Recursive inquiry = the inquiry keeps eating its own tail.

All beliefs are false.

Is that belief false?

Nothing can be known.

Can that be known?

Everything is relative.

Is that relative?

There is no finality.

Is that final?

The inquiry folds back. 

What I am trying to capture in photos

Photographs almost look like externalizations of my inner phenomenology = the dissolving of the identity, dream like nature.

I see mist reclaiming structures.

Darkness reclaiming forms.

Sky reclaiming light.

Silhouettes reclaiming detail.

Distance reclaiming certainty.

Everything is being gently pulled back toward undifferentiatedness.

Matter returning to sky.

The fog dissolves boundaries visually.

The night dissolves boundaries spatially.

The horizon dissolves boundaries geographically.

The fire circle dissolves boundaries socially.

The mystical impulse dissolves boundaries metaphysically.

Where the separations that dominate ordinary life become secondary. 

The 5 contaminants

Attention flowing toward performance rather than substance.
Authority flowing toward position rather than competence.
Narratives override direct observation.
Legitimacy persists despite repeated failure indefinitely.
Social gravity becoming more influential than reality perception.

Representation over reality.

Narrative over substance.

Performance over depth.

Position over competence.

Symbol over thing.

Inversion of hierarchy

The social field rewards what survives before the furnace,
While my hierarchy places value primarily in what survives after it.

The matrix is beliefs

The matrix is the stuff of beliefs.

All anger is thwarted passion.

All anger is thwarted passion.

Expectations are passions too.

Expectations are a verb, a process with momentum,

A certain ongoing investment.