They Will Not Control Us

You are not the prisoners of context. You are not the prisoners of your own bodies. You don't have to be.

You can transcend this interaction. You can transcend stimulus-response. You can transcend your impulses and urges.

Set yourselves free. You have the key to your attitude. How will you confront the world? How will you defend yourself from the onslaught of circumstance?

You have the power to change. You have the power to stop. You have the power to start over. Will you allow yourselves the opportunity to become something greater than yourself?

Christians say that Jesus died for your sins. What exactly did Jesus change? Did he change the environment? Did he change the laws of genetics? Did he stop complexity arising from simplicity?

How did you and I get here? We evolved. To such great hands does the creator of the Universe entrust its creation! Our current state is the direct result of doing whatever we could to survive.

Fighting, fear and fate. These are the masters of billions of years of natural selection. We have been engineered to survive. You have been engineered to become amoral beings. To be or not to be.

That is the sole moral law of our universe. Every act you consider good is only designed to ensure a fair chance of survival. Every wrong you do is wrong because it hurts another survivor. What's the difference?

Everyone wants to survive. What's fair to me is what I could get in my position if I were you. It's easy to deny someone else. It's preferable to look out for number one. Let me repeat: to be or not to be is the moral law.

However, you are not the hostage of fortune. This is the good news. You can be better by cooperating. You can transcend your fortune. You can defy fate. You can master probability. Do you want to transcend your own mere survival?

We can create a better legacy. You do not have to be controlled by your environment. You do not have to be consumed by your urges and impulses. You each have the ability to question everything you do. Inquiry is the ultimate path to transcendence.

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This post found inspiration in Muse's song "Uprising" and in The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

Colour My World

Can you imagine the color blue? Do you know what it looks like? Have you experienced it? Is it meaningful to you? Do you see it all around you?

Can you imagine exuberance? Do you know what it looks like? Have you experienced it? Is it meaningful to you? Do you know how it feels? Do you see it all around you?

What if you were color-blind, to emotion? What if you couldn’t feel that sense of connection: that spark, that vividness of experience?

When I notice my friends’ care-free celebrations, their quiet joy, their loud anticipation of pleasurable sensation, I feel blank. I notice a void: there is a lull where the storm should be, and there is a shattering where there should be calm.

I stretch my arms and flex my muscles: here I am. But why don’t I feel like everyone else does? Why do I have the sensation of dis-ease? Why is my life so awkward and unwieldy?

I wish that I could live in the present: I wish that I could forget about everything and just live for once. Sometimes I am depressed, but I don’t want to die; I merely want to live as if I am alive.

I don’t laugh because I have some insight that others do not; I laugh because I realize that I may never understand.

Strange Thoughts and More Like Them

The inner workings of the brain are something I can only contemplate given my severely limited knowledge.

It must be like some kind of machine.

I heard someone speculate once that there must be programs which can "crash" the brain, just as there as programs which can "crash" a computer.

I wonder what such a program would be like?

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There is an image which keeps re-appearing to me again and again, in several guises:

The lego constructions I used to build when I was very young: the elaborate manipulation of the bricks, followed swiftly by near inevitable destruction or implosion.

Numerous colonies of bacteria in a plate, consuming agar, reproducing themselves into oblivion.

A panel from the comic "Peanuts" when Linus spends a long time carefully molding a soap replica of a Navy clipper, only to see his creation obliterated by his sister Lucy.

Things arisen, things consumed, things destroyed.

And this visage repeats over, and over, and over.

What do I make of it?

I think that is a question for all of us.