Words to say, and a world that needs to hear them

Friends have asked me from lack of me bringing it up, who my father was. I am tempted to respond with some mixture of God or the mountains. I was raised in the mountains. A steep and violent landscape with sweltering heat from proximity to the sun to frigid cold from being so high above the warmer valleys. The only problem with mountains is that you don’t realize how high you are, when among the peaks until you look up from the valleys. I thought lowly of myself as a child and young man. I would labor with all I had from my earliest memories to survive. I would split snow in a blizzard, mend fences in scorching heat, and fight to find a bite to eat along the way. I was a wiry kid with a tan where my shirts stopped and a constant cake of dirt, not worth the constant battle of scrubbing it off. Though this was my life, it was not my world. I watched as many of the children I grew up around became taller from more nutrition and smiled more from more constant fun. A deep bitterness of coveting set upon my heart as I watched the large chasm between myself and them, expansive and widening. What made them so much more special that they deserved it, and conversely, what made me so much lesser?

From this knowing how to strive, I did what I knew best. I fought against the world around me to scrape out what I needed to survive. The years that followed found me to be a thief, a homeless man, and one of the last great American cowboys. All along the way, a deep sense of missing out on a life of normalized luxuries weighed on me as I began to accept my lot. In a fit of rebellion I have been known for, I looked at what fate offered me and I swatted it to the side as I proposed something better in my mind. I knew that my shere will would have to war with reality to bring it about. Despite being a lonely child of the wild, I swore to fit into the world around me. Despite being only through enough gradeschool to know how to read, I promised to become an academic and receive a degree. Despite being a poor dirty farm boy, I vowed to amass wealth enough to shield me from the world that made me.

From my skills in striving, I learned how to adapt them to just this. I achieved my goals and found that I could be a leader, could be learned and capable, and could work hard enough to bring about whatever I desired. A deep irony set in as my effort’s objectives came about, but I found myself missing something. This world I had fought to bring about was one that haunted me. I found the sociality I had built could be shallow. I found the degree I earned was just to prove what I should have been able to see all along. I quickly realized that all the things I could purchase, could never make up for what I made of myself. I found, as many have, that at the end of my desire was their own inconsistencies as reality would simply never allow such a goal to function holistically. I then fell down. I fell to a place that doesn’t yet have a language to explain, but has certainly had enough weary travelers to explore, or even be trapped there. This world my kind had labored with increasing vigor to bring about all we ever wanted, but once it was built and could be beheld, this was an uncanny variation from what we are designed by God or fate to live in.

This place I fell down may be familiar to you. It isn’t like the pain of cold, the sharpness of hunger, or the bitterness of heat, but rather an emptiness found when all discomforts are taken away. Humanity had made their aim pleasure, but in its fruition, it led to a suffering deeper than any wind or current could bring about. Gone were the natural and whole sufferings of loss, fights to survive, and horrendous freedom and with it were replaced love never to have been had, wondering if survival is worth it, and a sense of helplessness that comes from lack of power. That is just the issue. Above all, a being needs to feel a sense of control or strength against its problems rather than to feel nothing exists. Instead of the aims of life being pleasure and happiness, I replace them with striving. This striving tracks onto the fact hood of suffering and takes it into account.

Having these thoughts whirl and swell in my mind, I went back to my aims, and found the fighting toward them was the thing that mattered most. I stepped away from this world I fought so hard to be in and with that, rose myself from this place I fell. I have since gone back to the roots of my being. I have built myself a small home in the wooden fashion of my ancestors away from the city. It is a simple place with no running water, forcing me to fetch it daily. The heating keeps it just above freezing, leaving me to feel my body's discomfort. There is no infrastructure to run technology, allowing me to be present with my inner and outer world. I am once again left to strive. I hike into canyons in brutal weather as I fish, I run into wild animals as I have to ease their anxiety as I back away, and climb mountains with no rope or harness to look down at the land below as the wind tries to steal me from my victory. I am back, not where I discovered I belong, but where I created myself needing to be. I am back in my mountains.

I will always have problems and woes, but I have made them natural and real. I hesitate to use the word “good” as it is just messy and complex enough to lose meaning. Rather, I find in its stead and in this sense alone, we can replace good for that which is natural and evil for that which is synthetic. In the distinction between what is and what ought to be that morality gives us, I wonder if how the world ought to be can be found in part by how it is. Whether by intelligent design or wonderful accident, you and I are perfectly suited to fit into the world we lived in. Our biological imperatives are now not being met. Humanity distinguished itself by becoming the first beast to change its environment around themselves instead of adapting themselves. This has lead to a large variance from what we are made for and what we live in. This discrepancy leads to health issues, social isolation, and an existential dread that is nearly impossible to attack. I am writing an academic paper on this now, but wanting to remain timeless and worrying about the epistemic possibilities, I won’t use specifics. However, I think I can paint a picture in your mind that resonates with the issue at hand.

The philosopher has fled to the role of academic pretension. This allowed a wave of new thinkers to come in: The scientist. Science as a concept has merit, despite some definite critiques. However, science as it happens to have been contingently, has been a utilitarian means to crush the exact vital discomforts we need, while bringing about a lulling constant pleasure that finds one disinterested. The sense organs of a human sense change rather than static states and as such, comfort becomes relative and meaningless without a rich balance of natural suffering. The flight of philosophy, the cheapening and minimizing of faith, and the ridiculing of mystic narratives removed the means of making meaning out of an existence that so desperately needs it. In my day, the technologies have compounded in such a way to neuter the mind, stimulate the body, and starve the heart. This exponential process has a positive feedback on its self compounding in nothing intentional or natural. From our desire to feel pleasure without careful aim, these synthetic emergent properties wear down our humanity. Cunning minds then use this power to centralize more power as it is stolen from our minds. Loneliness has never been worse. The world around us groans under the pressure of our pleasure as it falls apart. The rat race of technological advancements ramps up the precedence as the human soul gets crushed under the pressure.

There are plenty of critiques from greater minds than mine to answer the specific issues at hand, but this is not a critique to point out how broken society is, but rather to say how possibly strong you specifically could be. When I left this society behind, I left behind its way of making enemies of people or seeing them as groups either for or against me. I speak not to this society, but to you. There being so much more I could say about this existential vacuum we find ourselves in, I am sure you can elaborate from examples in your own studies if not from your own experience. Am I inviting you to join me in the mountains to escape a world not made for our kind.

Perhaps we would both enjoy that together, but this is not how I can help most. Rather, the point of sharing this dismal account is to show the space where Esse Maxim can occupy, and show that you may need it. I am not the physician, president, or priest needed to begin to fix the world, but I am the thinker who wants deeply to bring real and powerful aid to the minds in it. For those who seek to live deliberately, with love in my heart and a tear in my eye, I throw them Esse Maxim as a tool and lifeline to construct what they need. Better philosophers and mystics give them the contents to place there, along with their own thoughts. There will always be a part of me that seeks to see this world as I think it needs to be in my hubris, but I know better than to think I can. I think, like I have done, you can change your world. I think you need and deserve someone to help you in this. My motivation comes from a love without possible example to compare or word to express, and yet it is there. A deep gravity pulls at my heart from the longing and needs of a world that could be supported in its existential and conceptual war. I am weighed down by any way I fail or misstep, but this is just another example of a great type of suffering for a wonderful cause.

A few days ago, I had a nightmare vivid and horrifying enough to peak the many that I have had. It carried this bitter new synthesized evil with it. I am writing about it in novel form now. In this nightmare, there was an entity I call the “Hollow Man.” Every day, the creature would have some new rule and decree on its chest as it stood there imobile. In the night while we slept, if we did not keep the command, one of us would be brutally slaughtered. In my dream, I was the last one left alive as I lay there pretending to be asleep as the creature came up behind me. I had completely given my will to it. I always told myself from my readings of the horrors of history and my fight to survive from my father, that the human psyche was unconquerable. I have since found that it was rather just the last thing to be conquered if no fighting is done and ground is being lost. When consciousness loses its will, there will be no reason why the universe shouldn’t collapse in on itself at once and forever. I implore you now, to join me on this journey as I seek to share and find to share what is needed to maintain this freedom that espouses a yes to life. Though I will ever be unsure if I am sharing the thoughts well enough, I am sure that the world needs them

On the obverse side of this nightmare, I was meditating on my life and its many lessons and possible meanings. The striving to survive stood as a pinnacle of those things that fill me with pride, honor, and a deep sense of gratitude. I thought back to times when my life was in peril and this rebellious part of me fought back. I pulled this aspect of myself into my mind. I saw it as a powerful and proud beast, an untamable and unconquerable beast. This creature needed to roam and never belonged in that hole I fell into.

Now, I go through the intense effort of understanding this and making it sharable and actionable. In my heart I built the tool for deliberate striving, in recent years I moved this concept to my mind, and from reading of great thinkers I am now beginning to move it to words. I hope with a depth of love I hope you can trust that something about Esse Maxim and all my thoughts around it can, if only metaphorically, find you among your own mountains.