yungdeleuze

The smallest part of the body is an impermanent flux, infinitely complex and impossible to predict or control. And you think you’re being “rational” by worshipping your own tiny ego?

“Oh, but I am a part of the infinite reality. If I just think about chocolate, surely more chocolate will come my way. This proves that I’m a spatially small, but infinite chunk of God, akin to Nicholas de Cusa’s mathematic metaphors!”

There is an infinite void between this tweet and the person tweeting it. You can’t perfectly replicate the quantum algorithm I run. And you think to compare yourself to that which created the supernovas which created the Carbon molecules that act as the algorithm’s substrate?

I never felt good about my aesthetic preference as a child. I always thought other people’s creative expression was better than mine, so I stopped trying. Eventually, I became “creative” by rebelling against the religion I was raised with.

Ever since, I’ve clothed myself in a spiritual materialism based upon a pressing desire to figure out a perfect goal to shoot for so that I could calm down and focus on living. I had figured out how to execute tasks and be a useful engineer in my teens, so I rode the momentum.

I wouldn’t stop searching until I was sure that I was right. I got better and better with philosophical word games, ever more complex.

I didn’t allow myself to grow too attached to my own personality, because I wanted as little baggage as possible as I continually constructed and reconstructed my ways of thinking and being.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_materialism …

I had a mathematics college professor who taught a small class part-time at my elementary school. He taught me to approximate and how to think about hard problems. If someone asks a question about mathematics and you don’t know the answer, the best guesses are: 0,1,infinite

For a long time, I subscribed to the Buddhist notion that one’s ego should be annihilated: 0. In the spring, I tried Nietzsche’s idea that ego should be maximized: infinite. Now, I’ve realized that ego is not harmful if it resides in the proper place: 1.

1 is a number that is meaningless on its own, as all numbers exist solely through their relation to each other and the ways they can be manipulated. So what is the ego, 1, in relation to?

If A is an ontological frame that holds your world together, in my case Christianity, and b is your own personality, then: [A b] = the product of your life, with some noise (inaccuracy/sin) thrown in

Imagine A is an infinite dimensional matrix Imagine b is a vector with an infinite number of values For the sake of discussion, assume that the experience of your life is the fusion of these quantities and that they end up multiplying

For 3.5 years, I repeatedly discarded b while continually computing new approximations of A.

Ego, b, develops naturally on its own. The real ego trip I’ve been on for the past 3.5 years: I continued to periodically kill b after it had developed for a while and replace it with the byproduct of a new conception of A.

The person never matched the ideal, so a continual unhappiness and grasping towards perfection continued.

I feel so relieved now that I can accept having a personality. It feels better, more natural. Buddhism exalts nothingness to eliminate suffering. Christianity exalts wabi sabi to maximize the Passion of humanity over the longest span of time possible.

Buddhism implies an ontology shaped like: [A] Christianity implies an ontology shaped like: [A b]