How Hard
Pain is how hard you get it.
Suffering is how hard you take it.
Toughness is how well you take it.
Bravery is how hard you give it back based on how well you take it;
any other base is ego, self, revenge.
Procrastination
Procrastination is laziness with an excuse and contempt without attitude.
A little more, and…
Virtue is like walking a tightrope:
a little more to the left, and you fall to the left;
a little more to the right, and you fall to the right.
Why “Why?”?
The “What?” and the “How?” challenge the mind,
but it is the “Why?” that sustains the will
Sights
Looking forward is a progressive disposition to life,
but true wisdom is found in the correlation of sights
(foresight, insight and hindsight) within present-sight (the ‘now’).
Play your part
Play your part and you will save a part,
play your part and you could save the day.
Sacrifice
Compromise is upholding one good at the expense of another.
Sacrifice is giving up one good for the sake of another.
While compromise often leads to and breeds dissatisfaction,
pain and even anger, sacrifice brings peace,
harmony and deep satisfaction.
Who you really are
‘What’ you are when you find your peace
is ‘Who’ you really are.
faith, hope and charity
By ‘faith’ we conceive the receipt of all that we strive for;
‘hope’ nurtures our conceptions over time
until ‘charity’ is duly satisfied,
by which time our dues are paid and our rewards due.
Learn more
If you listen like you know,
you’ll hear only what you already know.
If you listen like you know not,
you’ll learn more than you already know.
Ultimate token of conquest
Though seemingly confining, there’s no greater universe than the mind,
no greater world than the heart – the spectacles of our tangible creations
first take seed and blossom within them; their boundaries of inhabitation
are infinite, their sources of resourcefulness ubiquitous; the greatest
battles are fought therein, the greatest treasures amassed therein.
A befitting adornment and the ultimate token of conquest therefore,
is peace of mind and love for all.
At a quarter to dawn
You can be real, or you can be a charlatan.
You can be scorned for being true to self and live free,
or desire the praise of others and live a lie.
It is better however, to be king of your world
and master of your own destiny
than to answer a call to play hero in others’ dream
at a quarter to dawn.
Failure dispositions
The best disposition from failure is as wonderful
as the worst is horrific:
- Catharsis: once beaten, ever schooled – perpetual mulligan
- Phobia: once beaten, ever scared – retrogressive debacle
The crystal task of keeping class
Don’t talk in someone’s back
what you won’t say to the person’s face.
Whatsoever you do, do with ‘Class’.
What is ‘Class’?
A modest yet enviable exhibition of prowess
and understanding at a level/degree/depth
better than the rest or paralleling the best,
yet distinguished from every, in substance,
context, content and/or feel.
Class – poised and elegant display of refreshing character or transcendental artistry.
To ‘speech’ with class
To ‘speech’ with class, you need three constitutional courtesies: context, consent and cogency.
Context – situational, spiritual and content awareness: know what your content is capable of, and be cognizant of the environment it’s being created in or released into
Consent – target knowledge: know your intended and unintended audience and who it’s capable of being. Then provide within and without same ‘speech’, freedom of ingression and egression into and from the content and environment of the ‘Context’
Cogency – freedom integrity: express boldly freely; let your expression do what it was created and released to do, in the spirit and with the virtues of ‘Context’ and ‘Consent’; and let your expression be complete – without loss or undue compromise.
The Audacity of Authenticity
Do onto yourself what you would have, done onto others.
Against oneself
Fear is an eye borne in the depths of a being for its self-preservation,
to spot and alert body or soul of any weapon fashioned against being;
but in blind pursuit of the aforementioned,
fear becomes the dagger fashioned against oneself,
lethal enough to stab the heart,
fatal enough is its mutilation of the mind.
Piety – the fundamentals of Subsistence
(the universal directive of human responsibilities):
- Be just
- Be civil
- Respect life
- Be kind to nature
- Share truly
- Hope generously
- Be compassionate to essences outside or beyond your cause
Respectful Esteem
Modesty is the external show of humility. It’s the base form of humility. Just as verbal commentary is a base form of wisdom. The true measure of wisdom is in actionable applications. The true measure of humanity is in the degree of awareness behind the exposition. Modesty is disposition and humility is comprehension. Modesty is physical and spiritual inclinations and compliance to respectful esteem. Humility is physical and spiritual aspiration and application towards ever transcendental levels of esteem.
The seed of evil
You sow the seed of evil in that instant you fail to contemplate
the effect and consequences of your actions on others.
Beauty in all things
Seeing the beauty in all things should not mean
seeing beauty through and through in all things through and through.
While admirable, seeing all beauty in all things
may require indulging in negligence or indifference
to two blind spots: naiveté and denial.
The more realistic perspective is
seeing the beauty in all things true and true.
Self-respect
An urge soon becomes an urgency if unchecked at the gate
and admitted unscrutinized by ‘self-respect’.
Self-respect is: the most complete balance of one’s fears and one’s cares
captured in an awareness that exposes one’s strengths and weaknesses,
flaws and fortitudes; causing self to invest in the optimal yet non-socially destructive cause
for self- preservation and augmentation.
What the eyes do not see
What the eyes do not see, the heart does not grieve about;
what the ears do not hear, the mind does not contemplate;
what the heart does not know,
the mind does not corroborate and the eyes do not quest for.
And after all is said and done,
the true state of mind, heart and body is in the wish of will;
and the true test, in the integrity of act.
Same Coin
All feelings and all human reactions have evolved from one of two origins and flow from either or a combination of both: fear and love.
“Fear” and “Love” are two sides of the same coin; the coin being Self-preservation.
Fear incites the collective acts of thriving and survival while love pursues the *elevation, extension and expansion of self.
*The realization that all that is ‘self’ is inexorably subject to confinement in space and time, and of the fragility and ephemerality of this circumstance; hence, a striving to manifest the existence, substance and purpose of self to a fuller capacity and capability, and beyond a “here and now”.
KIGO
The popular term is GIGO – garage in garbage out. But when it comes to knowledge, the black-box of the being (heart, mind and soul) is a key player. So, the presence of Understanding therein will produce KIWO – knowledge in wisdom out. The general lack of Understanding, or specific lack of the requisite elements of Understanding brings forth KIGO.
Choices
Life is a panorama of events.
At any given time, an event lunches an individual into a pool
– a pool of choices.
There are choices with benefits and choices with consequences.
At any given time, the choice will always be
and has always been a mirror of the individual’s state of soul.
Of a human soul
No other situation exposes the hypocrisy and selfishness of a human soul
as when “it hits home” or “close to home”.
The aftermath is an awareness that brings hubris to revere humility,
arrogance to bow to modesty,
and negligence, disregard and snobbery to prostrate at the feet of understanding
in fear and plea for hope.
The cycle, the feedback and the internal environment
Most of our hells on earth originate out of horrors perceived by our senses, which then form, shape and elaborate internally, our predisposition and preconceptions, for better or for worse, in denial or in truth, in exaggeration or in conciseness; and in a perennial feedback loop, this very internal outcome then instructs the senses in their external consecrations. So, create your own interior life – from the predisposition of love and peace, or from that of hate and destruction. But remember, the outcome will in turn, create the proverbial and adverbial fountain of bliss or sorrow from which your senses draw.
The undead
What does not kill you makes you stronger? No, because what does not kill you can leave you good for dead. But that which leaves undead an essential faculty (any aspect of your being – of mind, body or soul – that is to become the mainstay to the new strategy and tactics you must now develop), makes you stronger.
Freewill vs. Choice
What is the difference between freewill and choice? Freewill is a construct, choice is not. Freewill is the assertion that the subtotal of our behaviors (character, attitudes, dispositions) is under our conscious control. And even though this is a view that can be an immensely helpful tool in curbing the unbridled tendencies or policing the unruly inclinations [“battling your demons”, so to speak], every evidence points to the contrary: evolution, biology, ecology, anatomy, physics, chemistry, genes, genetics… All evidence supports and points to the fact that we are a product of our environment and a constitution of it. Choice on the other hand, is a function of the realistic – a factor of reality: once the space has been defined by existence and life, the axis of reference is entirely your call. Note: if you are never going to make that other decision you thought about because of fear or need to survive or out of love for family or from being constrained by insurmountable consequences, then it certainly was never free to your will – it was a choice in the manner of “the devil and the deep blue sea”, “a rock and a hard place”, “the lesser of two evils”, “a catch 22”, “a tight corner”, “a double bind”, “a vicious circle”, “a lose-lose situation”, “an impasse”…
How do you differentiate a construct from a reality? Any and everything that is borne of or born out of reality is falsifiable (can be shown to not exist or shown to be non-implementable in some form in its defined state), and has the capacity – presented with the condign catalytical conditions, events, situation, circumstances – of tracking on either or both axis of a good and/or bad, right and/or wrong, graceful and/or evil – be it fire or guns or water or a smile. Anything that tracks definitively on one axis as either completely autonomous and entirely uninfluenceable from without, or eternally good/right/graceful, or eternally bad/wrong/evil, yet unfalsifiable, yet infinite in its scope is a construct.
Fitness
Fitness is of the mind, soul and body – it’s of the being.
…of the mind: wisdom
…of the soul: joy and peace
…of the body: strength (forcing mass through a distance), endurance (suspending or resisting force for a bout), and agility (distributing force and mass through as much space and for as long a duration as possible) – work-out.
Of the being: power (draw wisdom from adversity; sustain joy and peace through the thick & thin of existence and life; carry strength the distance; stay in, and do the time with endurance; span the capacity for agility and make every period count) – work-in.
Fitness is the wholesome threesome and prowess of unison of being.
‘A’ before the ‘A’
Addiction is an infliction deeper than the cause and beyond the present; affliction is the wound, the pain and the suffering after the destruction. The damage begins with abuse – the destruction after the excess. The buffer is the right kind of love and knowledge tapered with the right amount of fear and understanding: respect – for all things and self.
Needle in a haystack
In a plot of vested implicit interest, bias is like a needle in a haystack, the hay, your mind. The chance of being pricked into fairness is slim to none.
Internal freedom
The final step in attaining internal freedom is to free your conscience. The process begins thus:
- get knowledge about everything your conscience holds as firm.
- separate the facts from the assumptions, the superstitions, the unsubstantiated and those preserved not for their truth but for ulterior motives and benefits.
- identify and acknowledge the intersections of this new found knowledge and yours fears with respect to your conscience.
- have this knowledge confront your fears – the chambers in which your conscience has been secluded; the perimeter by which your conscience has been restricted – and have this knowledge engage in battle in your soul to eradicate all fallacies, reform your understanding and set your conscience free.
- your conscience now free, assumes it rightful place as the justice, the judgment, and the judicature – its scale, knowledge, its mallet, fact; and following, establishes ‘the ideal’: the refined values and principles by which the entire soul is to be reconstructed – your spirit, emotions, memory, will, passions.
But be careful not to kill or corrupt the conscience in the process; for if your conscience sets you free, you are free indeed – but if your corrupt conscience sets you free, or your soul is set free to no conscience, then you are eternally enthralled and ravished by your demons, visible to everyone except you.
‘you’
It’s generally accepted that your emotions and your feelings toward other reside in ‘the heart’, and your intelligence and understanding of things is a function of ‘the mind’. All colors of the rainbow, a plethora of shades elaborate ‘the heart’; both good and bad, rights and wrongs cohabit in ‘the mind’. The interaction between your ‘heart’ and your ‘mind’ reveals your ‘soul’.
Rebirth
Believe in something enough that you give up everything you’ve got and give everything you are in pursuit of it. In the process, lose everything to the point of death and a hair’s breadth away from extinction. But then by the perseverance sustained in the last spark of your existence, gain one thing – the one thing from which you regain everything: truth and the clarity of your essence; emerging bigger, better, braver and born of the greatest conquest a living soul can ever know.
Character abhors a vacuum
No one is born a paramount of virtue or a repository of vice; just a manifold of susceptibilities to either and both. Like becoming a master in any field, virtuosity of high-mindedness is hard work. Vice is that which fills the vacuum in absence of such effort or capacity.
Happiness
Happiness is simply the absence of pain with, by or for the presence of desire. But prolonged absence of pain or unquenching desire does not mean prolonged and superfluous happiness. Because, there’s no such thing as prolonged and superfluous happiness. Rather, the absence of pain in the appeasement of a momentary desire is happiness.
Joy
They say the recipe for happiness is having someone to love and to be loved by, something to do, and someday to look forward to. But happiness comes full circle (joy) when ‘passion’ is the ingredient – the connecting and sustaining thread.
Perfecting
No one is perfect. Your singular duty in existence and life is to come into the awesome you while learning to live with and better the flawed you.
Tempted
Tasked with doing the right thing in heaven is several degrees closer to a luxury than to a test. The true test is when living with, journeying through or trapped in hell, the temptation presents itself disguised as an alleviation or a way out. If that offer is eliminating the hell or alleviating it for all or some, then this time you’re tasked with doing the right thing in hell. The grand test is if the offer is exacerbating the suffering or horror of fellow travelers in exchange for a slice of heaven.
Moral Twin
Which is nobler: to give your life for who or what you love or to sacrifice who or what you love for a greater good? It’s only noble if experiencing, exercising expressing one means experiencing, exercising expressing the other.
puppet, master
Nature is the puppet-master; our senses are the puppet; the strings are access (increases usage), speed (increases the rate of consumption) and dose [volume over time] (increases the tolerance for usage and the capacity of consumption). Tightening the strings [short-cutting tension, stress and strain by asd instead of pdr (patience, discipline and resiliency)] reduces susceptibility threshold and diminishes sensory inhibitions to any of nature’s speciated evolutionary components, and ultimately, opens the floodgates to an incumbency of insatiability — addiction.
Dope
anticipation; pleasure; nostalgia (dopamine)
dread; horror; terror (norepinephrine)
the future is within grasp; the present has caught up with the future; the past is at present, a future (life)
perspective – that on the stage, chess board or the mercurial jungle that is life, unless death (in which case it all ceases to matter), there’s always a next right move, a next blissful move, a next powerful move... (serotonin)
Belief – boldness, bravery, tenacity, resilience, resurgence… (adrenaline – in the moment | dopamine – in the future)
Tranquility – interior silence, exterior collectedness, internal resolve, ulterior and expressive calm, impeccable composure…(endorphin)
Dope II
Desire dopamine… want (active)
H&N and all others… need (reactive)
Control dopamine… can (proactive)
Dopamine (baseline) + all others [foundational gene communication, mutations and neurocadiovascularities]… like — choice (panactive — para-active)
The Subconscious
If mathematics is the language of the observable universe, art the language of nature, then philosophy is the language of the subconscious, mediating between consciousness and the evolutionary levels of the being that hold the latent primacies of desires and compulsions towards whole-being survival and gene replication, thus attractive to ideologies, mythologies, superstitions and schools of thought, with culture, customs, traditions, rituals and rites as its media of accessibility to both worlds; whereas, the media to the observable universe for consciousness are the senses, and the media to nature for the evolutionary levels of the being is genetics and natural selection – all three sets of media inducted by the prevailing systems and practices of education: religion, socioeconomics, Academia and science.
fear and shame
There’s such a thing as the liberating impact of shame and the protective influence of fear: the latter warns of the imminent, the former puts the fallout in perspective.
Free to be
Freedom of any kind is like encountering a body of water of submergence capacity. One can be a good swimmer, or one can be a terrible swimmer; it can flow like a river, or pooled like a lake. One can express autonomy sea bathing at the shore, or swimming out to sea. Notwithstanding prowess, when indulging in reckless abandon in the middle of the ocean, certainty is exponentially heightened – of being lost to the waters.
In-vestment
Investment is a personal, and could even be an intimate venture. In the investment of the non-impersonal where luck is not the consequential, you can only invest in a thing as deeply as you trust it. So if you must choose to invest, you must choose to commit completely; and to commit completely, you must choose to trust – you have no choice but to. In investment, no matter how minuscule or elaborate the wager, there’s no such thing as partial trust; and when it comes to the payoff, partial commitment will yield you the exact same as zero commitment.
The one and only ‘G’
Grievances are like auctions – it goes to the highest bidder – the most ardent, unwavering and full-throated sympathizer. All grievances are narcissistic. When it comes to grievance, a soul will always consider its own grievance, and certainly its deepest grievance, the god of all grievances, the center of all wrongings and the apex of true and pure indignation, around which all concerns must revolve, and all efforts made and actions taken towards its satisfaction or alleviation. To suggest otherwise would be blasphemous.
Pride
Pride is that feeling you get when your truth or the truth you know or believe in ascends to glory, prominence or universality;
or that feeling you get when your truth or the truth you know or believe in transcends its conflicts and oppositions impeccably and undisputed.
Sometimes, pride is the satisfaction you get when your truth or the truth you know or believe is lived, or simply recognized.
Arrogance is combative pride.
Arrogance is pride devoid of gratitude.
Caution is not suspicion. While both members of The League of Survival Instincts, the former in the always, serve you well; the latter in the always, and you’ll slip and slide into the spiraling deep of irrationality — finding paranoia and delusion your only buoyancy.
The true character of a soul is what one is when no one else is watching; who one is with one’s greatness or flawedness hidden from the world.
An inconvenient Trust
Trust in its lowest level of potency is a mere feeling. Trust is convenient when it doesn’t have to be exercised. Trust at its most potent level is practical faith — colossal and daunting in its practicality, is its demand on the spirit.
Full of empty
Self-love without self-awareness is chaos of interior life and mayhem of disposition — and a fertile ground for narcissism, selfishness and unbridled propensity for vain gratification.
Cloak, Dagger, Mirror
The most insidious and malignant evil possible is to wish on or bring on another, a punition or misfortune for the same lack of good present in you.
Woebegone Paroxysmal Perennial Chasm
It is said that pain is universal, but suffering is uniquely personal – where the uniqueness is a response to the depth of hope and love that cradles that soul towards its desired quantity. Hope is the entanglement between a soul and another quantity (tangible or intangible) when their union is delayed or suspended. The greatest suffering a soul can know is pain robbed of hope.
fall, not free
Like freedom without judgment or affinity unaccompanied by principles or priorities, free-spiritedness without discipline is: a horse behind the cart; all brakes going uphill and none going down; a minefield for a dancefloor… It’s the relationship between a cascade, gravity and an untethered falling body in the midst.
Nothing, won’t
Allow your convictions to be challenged viciously by contrasts and assaulted by reality, that if triumphant, its designation is indisputably, ‘truth’. Because whether fact or fiction, there’s nothing a mind won’t welcome once it convinces itself it’s for the greater good and its justice. There’s nothing a soul won’t tolerate once it’s convinced it’s in principle and for a higher cause.
Positivity
Positivity is not about saying all the nice stuff. Positivity is acknowledging the reality then being optimistic about it, then executing the blueprint of that optimism with focus resilience and an unbreakable spirit. Because when it comes to growth and knowingness, empathy and incorporeal evocation is a useless exercise. You just have to do it to know it to become it.
Conviction Illusion Compulsion Delusion is a non-disillusioning of the soul that is the contraction of “ubiquitous faith” and the perpetuity mainstay of “confirmation bias”: when Faith or a system of organized or personal belief is the stand-in for everything, strengths and shortcomings alike. Even a lie when passed through this “prism of belief” in the afflicted souls, scrupulously produces “a truth” – their truth. And when their truth becomes a feedback through the same, they serve to harden inherent scruples and fortify the prism.
Version U.0
Software cannot unwrite hardware. It can increase or decrease the efficiency; improve or worsen the performance. But software cannot override its hardware. Why because software is in itself hardware. Software is simply hardware operating at a level, speed and frequency closer to the speed of light.
Your thoughts cannot override physics. Your feelings cannot unwrite biology. Why? Because your thoughts and feelings are themselves actuated physics and biology, though the paths they follow are indicative of the ideals, convictions and practices you imbibe. Positive thoughts and feelings about yourself WILL improve your well-being. Positive ideals + convictions + practice WILL transform who and what you are. In other words, software can evolve or devolve hardware incrementally and possibly fundamentally over time, but not foundationally.
Your hardware is “what you are”. Your software are the various versions of you that are possible, feasible or infeasible – ‘who you are’. Software is implemented codes. Unimplemented code is not software, it’s just an idea; an abstract, distinct and separate from the hardware – a version 0.0.
Hardware with enough iterations, enough diversitization, enough assimilation, can all be converted into software – in the same way E=Mc^2 (all mass can be converted into energy). But not before the time is right; not before the grind is complete. Not before true is due.
And yes, software can appear indistinguishable from hardware. So, how does one know then that they’re operating within the feasible or the infeasible version of themselves? Well, education – someone who’s been through it or has been trained in it needs to show you. What if those educators themselves are operating an unimplemented code. Well then, you’re screwed.
Karma & Blessings
That “the unruly and unloving may prosper in spite of their ways…” is because blessings are not tied to acts and actions. Karma is. Karma is simply providential distribution, realignment and reconstitution of universal love and other spiritual energies. People’s acts and actions will eventually find Karma, but not so with blessings (unless afforded or denied them within the same realm, the same circle, the same sphere or the same corridors of space and time – in other words, by ‘like-minded’ people (sentimental or economy investors), or systems instituted by like-minded people). Blessings are not tied to acts and actions. They are tied to conscience. Conscience is tied to a person’s ‘truth’. A person’s truth is the mainstay of their conscience. Therefore, a person’s truth, as long as the conscience agrees, will always remain pure or at least functional in its role in mind, body and soul. You can therefore act in violation or in accordance with your truth. And you can ascribe and abandon to a greater and bolder truth or a lesser and narrower truth; thereby, diluting or augmenting your conscience, and consequently, your blessings as attainable from a world, a universe or the Universe. Both Karma and blessings work to define a person’s fate and destiny. In this cycle, Karma lags blessings or blessings lead Karma. So, Karma eventually comes; and if merited by purity of conscience, so does blessings.
The most potent currency
Never compromise reputation for love. Reputation is both perception and reality, and the most potent currency of trust; and the mutuality of trust is the contract of true love. Yes, love can be blind and shameless; but it’s not love if it takes down reputation on the way to fulfillment. It’s simply fear and desperation. And sacrifice is always love.
Silence
De-abdication of Self
Once integrity and love become the operating system of your wellbeing, then you must – with absolutely no alternative – love yourself unconditionally. To love yourself unconditionally is to understand profoundly what it means to “love yourself, yourself “. Loving yourself, yourself means to never feel bad about yourself ever, no matter what the circumstance. Loving yourself, yourself means recognizing your flaws and mistakes and feeling sorry when they produce damage or hurt, but to only focus on the solution and on the beauty that comes from making things right. Why? Because having attained this integrity-love equilibrium with the requisite depth height range and all radii in-between, your operating system is eternally transcendental.