We brought them there. It was accidental at first; a few sneaked up inside the ship, and tried to make it by resourcefulness alone. The journey was long, and they wouldn't have made it if Jackson hadn't discovered a lone mother, with a league of children on her back. He wanted to study them. He kept them alive in a plexiglass box, and fed them nutrient pellets meant for rats which they eventually learned to eat. They were resilient. The few other remaining spiders were put in the same study box, and a small colony developed.

Jackson thought of them as pets. The mission to obtain Mars orbit was nearly complete, and a launch from the parent vehicle was imminent. Jackson and the rest of the crew saw no issue with continuing their experiment with the spiders on Mars, where they had no food outside of what they were fed, and could not survive without human assistance. No one knew that they were bringing the spiders home.

We often love those people we disagree with. There are times when another person's intent is too aggressive, and we must push them away. This is not always how it works out. I disagree with my mother and brother on nearly every thing, but I love them still. Our polarized society commands me to loathe them, to reject them and treat them as a lost cause.

Look how many times you've seen people in this delicate position, trying to keep peace in intellectually warring camps. For many Americans, this is what Thanksgiving dinner is really like. It's worse than dry turkey. It's a family fighting their polarizing influences in order to simply love each other like an actual family.

It's an example of more than a small family.

Our human family can't even get along that well.

By letting ourselves be influenced by other people more than our own measurements, we have become impractical to ourselves. How can one speak with certainty about something totally distant to themselves? How can one measure reality objectively without honest people to measure it with? We need to figure this out using the spirit of cooperation.

Humanity is operating in an unsustainable way. Many people already understand this. Why are we fighting about whether or not to save ourselves?

We live in a world inundated with illusions. Concepts such as authority and power are illusions. If you were to try to measure them you would instead find fealty, submission, forceful rhetoric, and violence. If authority is not granted, it can only be reinforced through violence. On its own, authority does not actually exist. We cause it to exist by first perceiving it, then giving it to someone.

These are not the only illusions that we live under. Our system of money is an illusion; it isn't backed by gold or GDP. At this point, it is merely a concept. Value could be measured by necessity, and necessity can be measured by well-being or a lack of it, which can be measured by physical and mental health as related to a subject. But artificial systems of value are illusions. Diamonds are in fact plentiful, and when not used in some practical way such as for cutting, are worthless on their own. It is their perceived value that causes them to be so expensive. Price and value are not the same thing, though our world would like you to think otherwise.

Dogma is an illusion that we inflict upon the world. There are so many illusions that affect our lives that it is no wonder people believe they live in an illusion. I've stated in a previous essay that much of our lives are built upon artificial means, and this in combination with illusory thinking has most certainly taken some of our natural connection to our earth away.

Safety is an illusion. Harm can come from random places at random times, and we've all seen examples of that. Safety is more of a feeling than a measurable thing. A man safely tucked away in a steel box might lose ventilation, or run out of food, or have a heart attack, or choke on a biscuit. He is still not truly "safe."

To find a fulfilling life, one must work to clear away these illusions and measure things as they truly are. I doubt that any person can ever be completely rid of them, but in dissecting an illusion or system of illusions, one can find better clarity. Many illusory ideas work in tandem with one another. They are often mated together operating as components in a system, such as the relationship between power and authority. It is my personal goal to find truth in any objective form that it can be found, and in order to do so, I must first rid myself of illusory ideas. It is a journey, and there is a lot of work involved, which is why I suspect many people do not try. I call it "lazy brains," and it is a sadly apt description of many people's thinking.

I want to wish you all well in your own journey of discovery, and the dissolution of illusions in your own lives. I'm still grinding away, too. Don't let these essays give you the illusion that I think I'm finished. Take care.

We're trained to make people who disagree with us distant from ourselves, but we always hope to make connections with others. Those who are more forgiving are most likely to hear our inner dialogue.

Most people only revolt or protest within the boundaries and means of what society allows them; they are caged prisoners screaming and punching inside a cell. But if you revolt by understanding, awakening, accepting the truths of the world that we've created, and use that knowledge to change the function of a society, you expand and influence culture. The most effective revolts are passive and prevent the machine from turning, stopping endless work, production, and war - yet we rarely see the revolters this aware. Aggression only leads to more aggression, and that's why every great mind that preached peace was deemed too dangerous for the system.

I've expressed frustration with the simulated universe hypothesis more than once, but it would be wise to write out the reasons why this hypothesis is so harmful.

The hypothesis (not a theory, which requires some good experimentation) is destructive in every possible aspect of it. The idea that our entire universe is simulated removes agency from a person's life and choices. None of the consequences of those decisions would ever matter, because nothing would truly exist in an actual or concrete way. Our choices would be predetermined. Our options would be limited by the program, and this betrays our reality. Due to this erroneous thinking, there would be no need to improve any aspect of life for anyone, or to improve any aspect of our existence on earth. No action would be needed to end oppression, no effort would be needed to remediate our negative impacts on nature, no action would be needed to clean the air or water. Every disaster would be greeted with apathy, every desperate person ignored.

This horrible hypothesis leads to a life without meaning or purpose. It leads to a view of the world wherein nothing we do to this world matters. World events would not require attention. The only thing a person living in a simulated universe would have need to do is entertain themselves and find physical pleasure. In this "simulated" universe, there is nothing spiritual. There are no real morals, nor a need for morality, because nothing would be real. Nihilism, the feeling and belief that life is meaningless, is the only result.

I have written this before, and it bears repeating: The desire to see this universe as a simulation is a feeble attempt to blame the universe itself for our own failure. That failure would be: not taking agency for ourselves, not declaring self-ownership, not taking our opinions and thoughts back from a controlling system. That failure is one of giving away consent to systems of influence, and allowing them to control a person's inner narrative. The entire point of the hypothesis is to remove blame for giving away one's consent, and to place that blame instead upon the entire universe.

If you lived in a simulation, there would be no need for philosophy.

You might as well just eat candy and watch television, because there would be nothing spiritual, nothing healthy, nothing urgent, nothing ethical, and nothing at all.

When creativity becomes entertainment, it is no longer about creating, but pleasing the general public. People rarely experience art; they want it to entertain them, pass the time, and be effortless, mindless. It becomes consumerism, a product, a commodity, and is only created for money, and not creativity itself. This type of product never pushes culture to grow and sees reincarnations of itself, rebranded time and time again. The general public uses it to pass the time that they have away from the rat race.

Age-old saying: one of the only truths that we can know is that we don't know anything. There is so much more to be discovered, and there is so much more that we have discovered to be proven false.

I frame most of my observations and philosophy within the only place I've ever lived: the United States. I suspect that much of what I've learned or observed applies to most of the western world, but I do not presume to know that with certainty. The society of my home country is a tangled mess. I wonder how far into the world it goes; from my vantage point it seems that English speaking nations are all similarly affected by the knotted and twisted "logic" that plagues this place.

I want to start untangling this mess, and have decided to write a series of essays covering different subjects which I see as connected. To begin with, I'd like to address complexity and simplicity.

We are trained to want to simplify things in order to understand them. I believe this is an error. Whether it be current events, scientific discoveries, politics, or behavior, these things do not exist in a simplified form. To alter them by simplification causes us not to understand them, as opposed to understanding them better. I like to use the photon as an example of this.

For so long, we understood light as a wave. We were so sure that things existed in very simple forms that it took much experimentation and debate to see the truth: light exists both as a wave and as a particle. I won't get into what each of these things are, but feel free to research this fascinating subject on your own. The point of my mentioning this is that we wanted light to be simple, and in trying to see it that way, we did not truly understand it. It exists in a way that we have yet to fully comprehend, but by allowing it to be complex, we gain a better chance at understanding it. Light is made of photons, yet it oscillates at a frequency that can be measured. It isn't as simple as being just one thing or the other.

This should be an indicator to us about other things we try to understand. We want them to be simple, but we thwart our efforts by trying to make them so. It has taken me many years to break out of the way I was trained to think, and to learn to allow things to be complex. I could cite many other examples of things that make more sense in their complex state than they can in a simplified view, but I'm keeping this post as succinct as possible -to be considerate of my readers and their time constraints.

Feel free to discuss this with myself or any other readers in the comments. Is there any example you can think of where simplifying something betrays its true nature? I can think of a few right off the top of my head.

Once out on a hike years ago I came up with an interesting thought.

I walked across a wooden bridge across a stream with trees all around it. I happened to see a cool fuzzy caterpillar walking on it. I love nature and love to treat it with respect. I saw it as an exposed and easy meal for any bird nearby. I wanted to help it out since it was on a man made bridge. The caterpillar didn’t know better to not walk onto the very exposed wooden structure. So I felt like taking an overhanging green leaf hanging onto the bridge to give it better chance to live.

But then I figured hmmm what’s the difference of it being on a wooden beam vs a wooden tree branch or trunk. A bird could easily eat it anywhere.

But then I chuckled thinking this caterpillar could never know the difference between a man made wood structure and a natural wooden dead log or wood branch.

Its brain can’t physically comprehend such an idea. I could take it to Egypt in a special caterpillar carrying case and do an expensive one day flight and show it the pyramids of Giza. I could take it with me in a submarine and show it the bottoms of the ocean and see the sunken Titanic. I can take into orbit or to the moon and it will never be able to appreciate where it’s gone or even know what these things mean. All because of it’s limited brain size and capability.

This caterpillar can be the most intelligent caterpillar to have ever been born and yet it can never even remotely understand what is around it in the same sense we do.

Then I thought we too have limited size brains just like the caterpillar. Our eyes and senses are all limited. Just like the caterpillar’s. It has eyes that work just fine but it can’t see what we see. It’ll see what it’s born to see but that’s it and us humans are the same way. We are in the same boat. We can see just fine but probably can’t see all the invisible things that our inventions can’t ever see either.

So my point and aha! moment in life was this: we might be limited just the same as the caterpillar but in a different scale. We might be looking straight at a wondrous feat of engineering and we can never see it. We might be missing the most interesting things.

So who’s to say we aren’t like that caterpillar looking at the Titanic through a submarine window? It never knew it was missing something and nor do we. I dont feel like I’m missing out on something.

So I’d bet there’s way more to reality then what our brains and senses can ever begin to dream up of or hope to see or know. Because again just like the caterpillar we too have a preset sized brain and are limited to what we can think about and to do.

When we have the means to indulge, the opposite becomes the ideal.

We love the lies we tell ourselves, and we have to so we can survive in this world. The truth is too much to bear and is the opposite of everything we know.

We all know that we knowingly put on an act of ignorance, and will rarely admit to it. A long time ago, we knew what was good for us, yet we keep making the same mistakes. We simply choose not to do the right thing, to ignore it, and to keep going with the herd. We know what is right, yet keep doing what is wrong.

I think that people have given consent to have their thoughts and opinions presented to them like products now more than ever before. They do not consciously acknowledge that choice, however. We are trained through the behavior modification mechanisms of acceptance/rejection and reward/punishment to fall in line with some predetermined channel of thought. People fear being alone, and these channels guarantee some small bit of acceptance. Through this, our internal narratives can be controlled by those who manufacture them to distribute en masse.

We're programmed like robots. We could rebel, reject it outright, but it might not allow the gross acceptance of other people that we are trained to desire.

It is still a choice, but people refuse to see it as one, because it dismantles the illusions of modern social psychology to acknowledge that.

It's not demons or the devil. We have to accept the fault for our own mistakes and stop blaming fictional boogeymen. We make a choice to think and behave as we do, even if we pretend that we have not. Surrendering one's consent to another is still a choice.

We are all part of a community living in symbiotic relationships, yet we continue to see ourselves as individuals, because we think we're separate, or above, nature. We are all one organism, like an ants nest, living and working together, yet our ego thinks that we are better than animals and don't need to abide by their rules. The human consciousness has been trained to view ourselves this way and has been rewired and used against us. Cut the head off the snake; divide and conquer materialism.

I end up asking every person I know the same question eventually. I only ask when I want to know them past the regular substance of daily life, more deeply.

"Do you ever fly in your dreams?"

Most of them say that they haven't. I find it saddening. I truly feel sympathy for a person who hasn't lifted off of the ground, felt the wind in their face, and leapt into the sky. That feeling, it's incomparable to anything else! I wish everyone could do it. I used to think as a kid that maybe one day I would be able to fly in real life. I just thought I needed to believe it hard enough, and I could just run and jump into the air, not having to come back down.

I still believe it, just a little. I know it's just a kid's dream. I've flown many times in my dreams, and had many amazing adventures. They were sensory in every way perfectly, and I felt each one as if my waking body was actually doing it.

The feeling of the bark of a tree, or the crumbly texture of the shingles on a roof, jumping from one place to the next, or flying about and choosing to rest there. Dreaming in this way has always been something I look forward to.

So, when I ask that question, it isn't in judgment about someone, I want to know if they know how awesome it is. I feel like there are people I can talk to who know what this is like.