To be filled with the light of god, one must first be emptied of everything else. The darkness must bleed from the wound. And one must feel all the pain one can while he’s bleeding. And from the wound one shall receive the light. And by this wound shall one find god. And then again when all the life bleeds him dry, one one shall die. He must then allow himself to experience the death, so that he can be purified by the light.
My goal for several years to come is to train my mind and body. My mind on the art of conducting reason, and of obtaining correct judgement about everyday matters. This is not the same as obtaining knowledge, but rather the higher function of the mind. My body: to take action swiftly and to determine the best way to execute my reason’s judgement.
It is in the fate of a great man to be able to use all that god has given him to its best, and to spare no effort in standing true to it. For youth is either spent after the distraction, obtaining the end results of the immense desire that characterize the life of youth, which will wear him out by law of necessity (Necessitas mulierem veterem currit— necessity that makes the old wife trot) or it is rather worn out righteously, in pursuit of god’s bounties.
And following that reasoning, i must be in the habit of actively creating my reasoning faculty, after destroying all that does not help it obtain truth from correct judgement. And I should proceed with the understanding that my current mental faculties are faulty, and that it cannot produce correct judgement, and even if it was correct it will not be free from mistakes of assumption and omission, adding that which leads me astray and misses the bullseye, subtracting that which is necessary to the function of its truth ¹. As such, all my desires today should be tainted with the colors of ignorance, and i must hasten to recognize that i am at best just that— ignorant. The ignorant person then would either be conscious or he will not. If he be conscious he would realize sooner that he desires nothing, for it is merely an illusion of his past experiences, and if he is not, he will then be following his ignorance into desiring absolutely anything, without deterrence and bereft any reason for moderation in obtaining their fruit.
This is the test of the times: to wear yourself out of all that has been mistakenly given to you, inherited, or adopted. And how would this test be easy if at every moment your desires will be calling onto you to believe in their power? that you should be from the helpless lot who are unable to decide, and who erect idols² out of their desires, worshiping them at one point, exhausting them at another. And to answering their call, while your mind shows you the truth in them and your heart the right course of action to be taken? This contradiction will serve to wear him out before he could put into use what god has given him to obtain its fruits. It is precisely the test of times because the reward far exceeds all rewards from scripted tests and fake problems that men of today’s world are given to fend of with, wagging their tails like a dog who is thrown a stick to play fetch. It is true that average men are no more than dogs when it comes to solving problems, since a reward of any kind suffices to keep their tails wagging and their buccals salivating. To abdicate desire is never in the mind’s eye of modern man, since it is a risky business that would cost him his identity, his relationships, and his world. He stands in a slippery place upon the brink of either the unpredictable destruction of the fabric of reality, or of the total annihilation of his reasoning faculty outsourcing this reasoning to anyone but himself ³, be it the hivemind, his demons, or his boss (somebody must always be there to throw the stick!). And he is apt to slide into one of these discommendable extremes, to either consciously suffer and master one’s impulses early, or be mastered by them through fate.
Desire is the residue of past valuation misapplied to present contingencies. When unexamined, it overtakes belief forming man’s belief forming abilities, it produces distorted representations of reality. This culminates in the projection of man’s internal constructs onto the external world, which are then misidentified as independent objects worthy of pursuit. Reason, in its proper form, is the only faculty equipped to neutralize this distortion and realign the man’s epistemic compass. This is because desire is subordinate to reason, even if it was faulty. ⁴
¹ - When priors are uncertain or corrupted, all conclusions derived are unreliable.
² - Cranmer’s anthropology: “What the heart desires, the mind rationalizes, and the will obeys.”… This is idolatry, not just religiously but also psychologically. Unexamined desire becomes the worship of illusion.
³ - In Martin Heidegger's philosophy, Das Man (translated as "the They" or "the Everyone") refers to the inauthentic mode of existence where individuals are dominated by the opinions and norms of the crowd. It's not a specific individual but rather a social phenomenon that encourages people to live according to what others are doing, rather than authentically choosing their own path.
⁴ - Considering it from first principles, desire is a value judgement that can be both a cognitive distortion and an epistemic error, to demonstrate, consider its structure, which several assumptions:
i - That the desired object is perceptible and real ii - That its possession or attainment will lead to positive affect or reduced suffering. iii - That the agent has a reliable model of cause and effect, which tells them that action X leads to outcome Y.
Each of these assumptions can be wrong. Therefore, desire is vulnerable to epistemic error (wrong belief about the world), cognitive distortion (biases, mis-attributions), and ontological confusion (mistaking representations for reality). On the other hand, in epistemology, an epistemic error is a mistake in forming beliefs, and desire can do this in at least three ways:]
i - Confabulation: You want something and so you justify it post-hoc. ii - Confirmation bias: You only attend to data that supports your desire. iii - Value-loading perception: Your sensory experience itself becomes skewed toward the attractive object.
The result if one proceeds in life without putting his desires in check is that he will begin to see not reality (and therefore never be able to obtain truth) but he will see a world-shaped-by-wanting. In this way desire would precede judgement and pollute it,