Aphorisms VI

On Being

Unless we have in mind all the things — or just some things — that define who we are, such as memories, names, titles, accomplishments, or the opinions of others, we mostly go about our lives without any consciousness that we are anything other than a consciousness existing in the world, and usually not even that.

We feel the need to anchor our being in an external source that is beyond all known being, because we cannot even begin to fathom how being can be at all.

Our being is constantly defined and modified by the people who populate our world, the opinions we think they have of us, the opinions we have of them, and by all our accomplishments, actions, deeds, successes and failures amongst them. Without others, none of us would be ourselves.

We live naturally, thoughtlessly and organically with all that is around us. It isn't until something goes wrong that we notice that something is at all.

The world just appeared around each and every one of us and the world will one day just disappear again.

We speak of individuals and groups, ourselves and others, I and they, bodies and minds, mental and physical, but when it comes down to it, there is no difference between any of them. They all are part of just one thing: Being.

We cut the world up into little digestible bits because we do not have big enough perspective to see, let alone comprehend, being as it is.

There is no mind without body, there is no me without they, nothing is known without language, and there are no words without speakers.

There is no pure deed untainted by some kind of perspective, interpretation, value, opinion, belief, meaning, purpose, objective or moral angle. Those are the condiments we pour over our deeds to add a little taste to the bland banality of reality and the underlying feeling that every deed and every action is, in itself, meaningless, pointless, and absurd.

On Philosophy

The beginning and end of all philosophy is the same: It begins with “Since before the dawn of time…” and ends with “…but we will never know.” Each of us fills the middle bit in as best we can.

The beginning of all philosophy is vanity, a seeking to gratify one’s fascination with oneself.

“To Know Thyself” is the beginning of all philosophy, and also its desired and futile end.

The fundamental prejudice of humans is that we are always destined to conceive of the universe, life and everything in terms of beginnings and ends, of birth and death. This is natural, since we don’t know where everything came from, nor where it’s all going, and so we believe it must have started somewhere sometime and must end somewhere sometime. This is why we will never truly understand anything.

An idea has no beginning or end. It’s always been there and always will be. We just stumble across it and ride it out before leaving it behind again, ready for others to stumble across it after us. An idea is always older and more resilient than we are.

The truest thoughts are those which conform to instinctual prejudices within us which we have no power over because they are more primordial than even our memories or our desires.

“We never encounter the same person twice,” says Heraclitus to his erstwhile acquaintance.

Heaven for me would be a place where I could at last, without any existential dilemmas or problems of conscience, be what I am, what I is: nothing. That is, if heaven could be a “place”, and if I could “be” nothing. Herein lies the limited capacity of the human: our inability to extract the ego from any of our thought processes... our inability to conceive of anything outside the spatiotemporal context in which we understand — and create — the concept of existence.

Within this bundle of emotions, thoughts, memories, ideas, dreams, insecurities, knowledge, doubt, envy, hate, love, smell, sight, sound, fear, laziness, action, intelligence and stupidity, from within this whole cacophony of distress and desire, this incoherent jumble, arises a strange, foreign yet familiar voice that declares “I am Attila.” And thus, once again, has been eluded the most sinister and slippery of questions.

A diary individualizes universal experiences, whereas philosophy universalizes individual experiences. 

There is no explanation that does not itself need an explanation, ad infinitum.