A smart self includes a smart ass.

https://lsobrien.substack.com/p/potshots-at-the-sun

https://lsobrien.substack.com/p/i-a-failed-stoic-or-the-evening-nothingness

https://lsobrien.substack.com/p/i-eclipse-or-a-worldview-raised-to

Check this out if it interests you, I went and filmed me reading some aphorisms in fitting places around my country (Northern Ireland), and did a bit of a presentation about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeRdZA1_Iuw

The ending is especially fun. If anyone knows who Billy Joe Shaver is then you'll appreciate it.

My two favourite from the video:

1. All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle.

2. God could cause us considerable embarrassment by revealing all the secrets of nature to us: we should not know what to do for sheer apathy and boredom.

At the end of the day, the best people are their own judges. For other aphorisms like these you can follow me on Reddit and others social

Love every post so far

cEP.

This randomly occurred to me today. I'm sure someone has said this before, but I don't know who to credit.

"Comedy is the antidote to Tradgedy, it's how we make light out of the dark.

If we fail to laugh in the face of the abyss, it's the abyss that gets the last laugh."

I came up with this a while ago, but never really had a good idea about where to share it.

I think that a lot of people reflexively reject certain forms of comedy, or the idea that certain topics should be joked about, simply because they have not experienced the benefit that true, raw, dark comedy can bring in the depths of tradgedy.

I think my aphorism sums up one of the benefits of comedy, and furthermore captures a mission. What are we trying to do with comedy? Make each other laugh. To feel joy, to feel good. We're trying to make light out of the dark, or make light of the dark. To reduce the power that darkness and tradegy has over us.

When you can laugh at the darkness, it no longer has the power to hold you captive, to trap you in a state of despair, or control your emotions.

The line between genius and madness is a tricky one to define, because to achieve what no one else is, you have to do what no one else is doing, the definition of madness.

A novel effect requires a novel cause.

If you see what no one else sees, if you hear what no one else hears, if you do what no one else does, if you think what no one else thinks, then people tend to call you mad.

Personally, I think that madness is unexpressed anger at the insanity of society.

People doing the same things over and over, and expecting things to change.

It takes someone of vision and courage to try something new, in order to achieve something new.

To do that, you have to be willing to be seen as mad.

The world will hate you for your anger at their ways, but their ways are wicked, for look at all the suffering their ways bring.

Bring new ways. Bring new destinations. Bring hope. Bring change. If people tire of the current situation, the only solution is to change.

And it takes a genius to realise the most simple and fundamental truths.

That's the paradox of our insane existence. Only the madman can see clearly. Only the madman sees things as they could be. Everyone else sees things as they are.

The genius is really the layman.

"Pain and suffering are the seeds of growth watered by the tears of our hearts."

I came up with this a while ago when processing some deep pain and suffering and noticing the tendency of all the things that bothered or hurt me at the time they were present to actually contribute to positive growth and improvement.

I realised that all pain is like an unwrapped present, and it's only by processing it, especially by allowing ourselves to cry, that we receive the benefits contained within.

The reason why we need pain and suffering, why we need the darkness, why we need the cold is that meaning cannot exist without context.

No thing (nothing) is self-sustaining. Things need other things. Something cannot exist without everything.

Things are meaningless without relativity, without context. Unless things are embedded in a wholistic structure, they fall away into the abyss.

There must be a contraction before there can be an expansion, or vice versa. A rise to infinity cannot occur without a fall from infinity to zero.

We want joy and happiness, peace and love. But these things are more than just the static snapshots, or processes unto themselves. They are actually the process of a rise. We do not experience joy as a specific point on a graph of neurochemcials. In a vaccuum, these are meaningless. But instead, joy is the curve, not the point.

True meaning, reality, consciousness. These are waves, not particles. It's about the journey, not the destination.

The destination is a marker for the start of a new journey. A place to rest and consolidate all that has occured. The aim is never the aim. It's the process of aiming that is the aim. It isn't about the target. It's about hitting the target.

If it were about the target, we'd walk up and admire it. But instead we admire the practice. We admire the arrow flying through the air. We admire the pulling of the bowstrings back.

The target is a structure that makes the practice possible.

The destination makes the journey possible.

Lost in the fire but still in the fight can’t tell the difference between day and night. Lost in the pain you’ve gone insane sitting on the edge of your bed hand to the head feeling all the feeling all the guilt and shame that still remains

Too scared to pull the trigger shaking with fear you shed a tear you pull the trigger

Out in the darkness you remain forever together to be insane

Off to the lake of fire to burn in your desire I remain lost in the same pain

Then a vision softly came I die and die and die but still remain stuck in the darkness

Most Pleasantly Thought Engaging One of Perpetual Šniffs, Life originates and gravitates towards primordial patterns. If there is life on the science fictional planet of the three “chaotically” rising and setting suns, and that this life is either dependent on or threatened by the energy of these, observing the interaction between the three and the biomes on that planet would reveal the patterns seemingly within the chaos, that these predictable events systematically happen as often as within a 24 solar system earthly hours’ period, or that they happen “once in a blue moon,” or, but not temporally limited to, as often as our solar eclipses do. Same therefore goes with what we’d perceive, from the only currently conceivable standpoint of what we categorize as life on Earth, as unfathomably irregular natural catastrophes caused by the three suns.
I place emphasis on that which is unfathomable, in relation to the piece of fiction which you cite in one of your talks during your 2022 lectures on Universality & it's Glitches which I have the honour of linking back to Philosophy Overdose who introduced me to Princeton’s lectures, where your work resides. Though I have not read the piece you cite, and I look forward to, I (perhaps haphazardly) don't think it necessary that I do. Clear it is to me (rather than it being clear to me, the former being found as such, the ladder being manufactured) that the depictions of life on this “chaotic” planet would be nothing close to what we know. Allow me to present my stance below.
When sentient and introspective, though it is constrained in its self-perception by the structures of its own making, Life is the product of chaos. For, to be truly unpredictable, to avoid being paradoxical*, chaos must, at odd times, be predictable and therefore somewhat organized. If it was never organized, that would make chaos predictable in its state of unwavering unpredictability, and thus, not be absolutely chaotic. Furthermore, what we describe as chaotic and possessed of destructive irregularities is often discovered upon intergenerational examination to be a pattern of predictable causes. Such as lightning, volcano eruptions, evacuating crowds behaving like gas or liquid molecules depending on the density of the sample, and so on, and so forth. I am not trying to write here that I have a good idea of what absolute chaos would be, as I am constrained by the logical and predictable side of itself just as much as anyone else who can ponder on the existence of absolute chaos.
Life, if absolute chaos is true, would be the amalgamation of all these randomly occuring patterns acting in symphony as a whole. Life is a circular thing in definition… Like an orchestra is composed of multiple instruments, one pattern is one pattern, one instrument is one instrument, our definition of life is what happens when we observe multiple patterns acting together all at once. Being primordially made of patterns, we cannot accurately imagine anything that isn't as such, and true chaos in absolute, from which we originate by the generation of predictable patterns as to remain meta-unpredictable in chaotic nature, can therefore never be observed as such. We don't know where to look for it.
The question we should ask then, one that I don't suggest you proposed and that I am arguing against, isn't so much if there is order in the chaos that supports human life, but rather where is there life, and if so, what patterns is that life representative of? Find not what patterns are best suited for life, but find life to flesh out which patterns it is dependent on. Non-human animals can notice recurring causational events. Patterns come before words. Babies learn how to pragmatically cry before they learn to use speech in the same fashion. To define life is to verbalize the set of patterns you have already noticed, notice life as all patterns within the chaos to discover new ones.
Using a strict definition of life as we perceive it, to then build an imaginary world where the product of this “chaotic” environment is the same as we have it on this planet… This is why we call this type of literature fictional, rather than philosophically allegorical.
It's for this reason that I fail to see the parallel between this fictional world, and the direction Earth’s life is headed in.
*Paradoxes themselves are only enabled by the fact that sometimes, some things are predictable, and therefore can contradict themselves when they no longer are. This is the closest we can get to noticing the presence of absolute chaos, when logic becomes contradictory to the reality that allows it.

The beard gets in the way of 2nd observation objective facts.)

Also, let's ignore the double negative lads, t’was a jolly good talk, I daresay. Biscuit. <[This is what square heads sound like saying "hon hon, French baguette" while talking about frogs.]

Anyway, here's the link: https://youtu.be/uA5GV-XmwtM

Disclaimer: idk who any of these people are, but I like the order in which they place certain words. And the interior architecture.

cEP.

The only way to vanquish it is to ignore reason and act out of emotions.

No starving one will procrastinate on eating despite their feelings. Unless there is a reason to hold off. So their young ones can eat, or in anticipation of a greater reward (hunger protests from incarcerated priests who wanted the freedom to practice their religion.)

Using the logos to ignore one's feelings is a perversion, as we understand reasoning today, as one is always meant to complement the other. Metaphorically, too much logos, not enough emotion is antisocial personality disorder, too much emotion, not enough reasoning is borderline personality disorder.

pffft. (André Sauvé).