Realities???

Realities

You know the facts. No need for me to specify. You are always defensive and easily upset. You are not evil, but you are not sweet, not very loving, and thus not very lovable. You are self-centered and in so many ways a child emotionally. Your ego is fragile, and you will lash out to protect it, instead of going with the flow and  bending with the wind. 

Remember, only you are important to yourself. Deep down, nobody, not even your children and your grandchildren care more about you than they care about themselves. That's why to be human is to be lonely because selfishness is the instinct of safeguarding one's resources for rainy days. To be blessed in love is when a person behaves like a saint, and is able to override the selfish instinct and to love the beloved more than he loves himself. Parents do that to their children. Even in romantic love, that parental love has to be replicated otherwise one can spend the whole life feeling lonely even if he's married. If you are a flower, bees and butterflies will come to you without being asked. But if you are a croak of stinking shit, no bees nor butterflies will come near you. The choice is yours: be a flower or a piece of stinking shit. 

Being defensive, angry, sarcastic, and self-righteous is being a piece of shit. 

It's better to be late than never. Learning begins with self-understanding, especially one's emotional defenses: do I have any and why are they there? 

Real love focuses on the object/the beloved, not the agent of loving. You are capable of love, but you still defend yourself way too much, in spite of facts and truths.The day you see the validity of my statement, it is the day you have mental and emotional liberation. You cannot argue against facts and truths, no matter how unpleasant they are. There are moments in my current life when flashbacks occur and I cringe in pain and humiliation, but I realize they are signs of my growth: I finally see how stupid and wrong I was. However, I don't wallow in regrets. I move on. I was stupid, but now I am not stupid anymore. Learning can be painful, but we all have to recognize its value: no pain, no gain. I am a late bloomer. I am still growing up. I am making progress. One day I will, if not already, surpass those who grew faster than I did but have become complacent and are resting on past laurels. 

I don't know if I am really intelligent or not, but I take pride in my ability to value logic and facts as tools in the process of thinking (which includes reasoning and debating). Thus, if you followed any debates I had with certain monkeys in the past, you would see that I esteemed fairness and justice, unlike the interlocutor chimps who were driven by ego and woeful ignorance of book knowledge, and then had to seek refuge in cheap sarcasm and even outright lies in order to comfort themselves and to lick their wounds after suffering humiliating defeats at my hands. But I didn't take pride in beating them at intellectual contests. They were lightweight contestants and were not evenly matched against me. I never once regarded them as my intellectual equals. To me, they were intellectual pygmies. 

Another indication of the healthy functioning of my brain is my persistent resistance against cheap indoctrination and brainwashing and thus I have not become prey to nonsense and wishful thinking such as beliefs in a Personal God and reincarnation in the sense that my consciousness will come back on earth in another manifestation. 

Rigorous thinking is a hobby of mine. That's why I am attracted to the subjects of philosophy and cognitive science. 

The gay, tormented engineer turned philosopher Wittgenstein who inspired much veneration and head scratching alike, once famously concluded in his first and only published book during his lifetime, "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus", that "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent". I have not remained silent. Speech is a vehicle in my search for truths. Speech, unlike popular conception, is not synonymous with language. The former is one vehicle for the latter. Manual (hand) signals, graphic signs (including written symbols and smoke), sounds, and body gestures are other vehicles. 

Language itself is the vehicle for conscious thought. It's not easy to think without language. The interplay between language and thought has fascinated me ever since I tentatively tried to express myself in borrowed, secondary languages which I acquired during my teens and later. The health of a person's  brain can be seen in how a person expresses himself verbally. 

(To be continued)