You will never touch this ground. Never. You have been taught to walk and to find it strange to bring your body close to the outside tiles. And because you have been taught to do so, all else is strange and all else is to be looked down upon. You say I am mad and you walk past me with your snout held high. And so you will never touch this ground. Never. But you do not even realize that you are stuck in your stuck up ways. That is the saddest part; your unawareness.

Our appearances are not something we should be reduced to as humans. To then call someone beautiful or ugly has no real significance. It should then not be a significant topic for any speaker nor one for any receiver. When someone calls someone ugly, they have made the mistake of focusing on this. And when the receiver is hurt by this, they have made the mistake of making their appearances part of their identity.

You ask me if perhaps I am thinking too much and you say that it does not bring much. I ask you then if you work too much and what it brings you. You say it is your job and that it brings you money and helps the people around you in some way. So also, is it my job to think; to observe and contemplate everything. The job that I have chosen out of the passion of my entire being and a belief in a ‘better’ society. 

The mistake you make is in thinking that the thinkings of a philosopher are the same as your own. You think to yourself; I could have thought of that and now that it has been thought and brought to me, I understand it. Of course you understand it, for it has been taught to you: you are a product of the past and so also of the thoughts that were introduced there. ‘It comes naturally to me that the world is meaningless,’ you say. Of course you say this, for you have been raised to believe it and to be prone to experiencing that. Also those who raised you were raised in a place that was already sown with the seeds of these thoughts.  

So must we say no original thought exists? Of course not, but their origin is not to be found in anyone’s upbringing alone. Their origin is found in philosophy; the source of original thoughts. And as I have said these original thoughts then (sometimes) become conventional ones. Telling me that you understand some conventional thought is no impressive feat.

We shower our children with these thoughts that we have received when we were children. We tell them that they are special and that we as humans are special; that we are the main characters. And so our children grow up to believe this. But this belief is contradicted in the real world; there we are merely another part and not a main character at all. And so we are confused when what we have learned as children does not add up with the real world. And since we do not like to be confused, we avoid it and lull ourselves back into the illusion that we are indeed main characters. And then we teach this to our children and the cycle of deceit and illusion continues. And we stray further from realness.

Certainly, my life will once again fall into ‘decay’, as we like to call it. But precisely this falling into decay and rising up from it again is what it means to have a life. It is inevitable that we sometimes return to our base; ‘the state of decay’ or better said, emptiness, nothingness. It is inevitable because what we build has no ground and therefore it should not be surprising or shocking that it will come crashing down. Now you may think, oh no, my life is doomed to crash down. But this is not a terrible thought, for it is normal for our lives to ‘decay’ (which I hope is clear now, is not at all a decay) and therefore we should not fear it. Only be aware of it and accept whatever decay or non-decay our life receives.

Do not worry about emptiness; it is not something to fear or to avoid. It is our base, our neutral standard. 

This human experience, how laughable it may be, is still some beautiful thing. How privileged I feel to exist and how uncanny it feels to leave existence after some time. I try now to understand human existence and existence as a whole, while in a few moments I will no longer be part of it. How absurd.

I refuse to act! I can do that no longer! What disgust has come over me! How have I lived this way for so long and never understood? I will not act! I will strive to achieve realness! 

But this is no simple task, for if all others act, how can I respond only with realness? And if I have been acting my whole life, how then will I never act again? If I am not even sure what this realness is in daily life, how then will I adopt it in my heart and life? Nonetheless , I must try; this is what life is, try. And it is what being human means; to try to change, largely fail but slightly progress. I urge all who read and understand this to try also; try to live in realness and not on the stage of the social theatre. The social theatre is not where life truly happens, it is only a practical place and to make it more practical we have started acting, because realness is harder for us. And so realness was lost and with it a part of a true life. 

It is very human to have suicidal thoughts. It seems to me a fundamental thought and one that all persons will or should at some point consider. Why should we live? Why does that make any sense? If we brush this off and ridicule this as an absurd question, then truly we are disrespecting life itself. In doing this we say that we should not fully consider the meaning of life. And so we avoid the meaning of life by escaping into it; how cowardly. But understandable, for humans seem prone to fear that which is the most real. They would much rather live in their stories and structures that they have made for themselves. And so we deny life itself.

And in our stories, we have truly become insane to the real world. 

Sit down, close your eyes. Let all the eyes in your mind drift away; they matter not. What some person thinks of you tomorrow is not a worry for now and perhaps not a worry at all. When these eyes have gone, you can see life itself more clearly. And sit there and observe it, feel it.  

And feel that nothing has a base, nothing has a fundament, nothing has a true structure. Think to yourself why am I doing this and realise that no satisfying answer will ever come to you. ‘Why do I work?’ And you realise life is a series of ‘next steps’ and no true ground. This ‘having no ground’ is fundamental to the human life, it is its essence. Bask in the uncertainty that overwhelms you: you are home! Can you not laugh because you know that you belong here, in this nothingness? Do you not recognise it? Or has your fragile mind forgotten its own existence? Or perhaps it has never known, and has lived in illusion since birth. Then this realization is the stripping of illusion. All persons break when the illusion is stripped but all are more real for it. Those who live still in illusion are cursed to be but actors, to live in fakeness and delight in delusion for they do not know it is delusion. So I say to you: break! All those who hear me: break yourself! Break yourself and so rid yourself of illusion; become at least aware of it. 

For awareness is but the first step, as it always is. Yet even in awareness, the illusion is not easily avoided. It is perhaps even impossible to live truly without it, since it is somehow essential to human life, as I have said. 

Hindsight makes fools of us all 

(said also by John French) 

Yet we do not seem to realise that this very moment is the moment of hindsight. This very moment is the moment you will look back on and say ‘I was but a fool’. 

We grow out of this moment and it will be some part of an ancient past. Do you not look back upon yourself and see that you were still a child, even when your mind and body had matured? You think you are not a child now, that you know things and even understand them. I laugh heartly at you, for you are a child, like I am a child. And in many years you will laugh at yourself also. And many years more you will be dead and unable to laugh at yourself. But if we were to believe in some sort of life beyond life then surely you will laugh at yourself there. 

We laugh when we see a fool, but hindsight tells us that we are all the fool, that we all should laugh at all of us. 

How much did they pay you, tell me, to sell your soul to this puppet master? Or is it not money that they offered you? Did you give yourself voluntarily over to be controlled?  

And when you feel the wire on the metal flesh hook raise your arms in the sky, do you not regret your life? Do you not wish to be free of this when you look in the mirror and see not yourself but some shadow in the distance?