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When named, a thing loses its beauty. Ego names so it can manipulate with precision. Because it's trying to keep things from getting knotted. But ego's presence itself is what's causing the knots.

When precision is desired when it is unnecessary, it can kill the mood. Like having to ask "May I have permissions to have sex with you now." It kills the mood b/c it signals that you aren't on the same page. It's like if someone's hand was cut off and you asked "does it hurt?"

The presence of ego or 'thinking too much' is being 'there', naming and pointing out things when you don't have to. It's thinking about how you swing the golf club or swing the racket while you do it.

What you see around you is literally lit up by light rays around you converging onto your eye. When the rays are straight, it feels like fireworks or the suns rays. When they're squiggly, it feels like a tentacle blob.

When ego is unclean, it distorts those rays. That distortion comes from trying too hard to interpret the environment. E.g. trying to get reality to fit into the mental model instead of changing the mental model to fit reality.

Depression is the seeing the distorted rays but it solves the problem incorrectly. Instead of re-focusing the lens, the light is turned off. Surviving depressions gives you new perspective because you had to find an original source to have escaped.

Having seen 'true' fire you now have a touchstone with which to recognize and reject distortions. You can fall into another type of depression where you don't realize that you yourself are the source of those distortions.

The first type of depressions leads to being dark and emo. The second type leads to being overly bright and guru-ish.

As a 2x2: Radiant and Distorted Radiant and Non Distorted Dark (The distortion doesn't matter when it's dark)

The point is not to change your level of radiance, e.g. how famous you are, how much "you" is seen by others. It is to remove the distortion, which can be done at any level of radiance.

You can remove the distortion both at the dark end and the light end with different pros and cons for each path

At the bright end, you'll realize that no matter where you go, who you're with, or how much money or status you have. Nothing changes. Your happiness always ends up at the same base level. You realize the futility of chasing external things.

At the dark end it's far less easy to be dazzled by distortion and illusion. You're less likely to fall into the trap of chasing higher highs which can lead you on decade long goose chases.

Because distortion and non-distortion look the same in the dark, you also bump into moments of beauty more often. Though they're small matchstick fires. The depressive artist sees these brief moments of beauty and tries to shine it into the world.

'Successful' artists inspire the crowd to wave their lighters in the air. They create a sea of small flames, that then extinguish.

Though beautiful, they never found a fuel source and their light went out. They kept trying to make things catch fire. They kept trying to make it into the world. They forgot that they themselves were all that they needed.

Artists that succeed in catching fire don't stay artists. Their passion has connected to their lives. They're far more like Da Vince or Steve Jobs.

For artists who never catch fire their legacy lives on though. Like buried flint and stone, they recreate sparks lifetime after lifetime.

Nowadays we're in a sea of constant sparks, firework after firework. Never ending, yet also never warm. Just smoke, loud sounds, and blinding light.