The Holy Grail and Ordinary Cups

In my quest for the holy grail, I've ignored the readily available cups along the way with which I could have easily quenched my thirst. I search the internet far and wide, consuming copious articles, opinion pieces, and comments, appealing to authority to tell me The One True Way I should direct my life energy. Perfectionism dovetails with procrastination, and I die of thirst surrounded by water.

I do this with spirituality as with my work-related endeavors. I'm perpetually afraid of publishing a piece of my soul for the world to see and potentially criticize. My desire to give stunted by my fear of rejection, a ball of tension builds up inside and slowly cripples me. What I resist are actually the answers within myself.

Ironically, I'm afraid that if I set them free, they will set me free. Who am I to express myself fully? Special snowflakes get crushed in this heartless world. Stay in line and wait your turn for the meager handouts of the welfare state. Don't even try to make something out of nothing unless you're guaranteed it will be a big success.

Wise meme says Jesus saves while Buddha does incremental backups. I don't have to wait for the holy grail and the accompanying rapturous deluge; I can just take the ordinary cup in front of me and start sipping on the ambrosia of life today. Today's mugs have these message inscribed on them:

Kintsugi: Embracing imperfection

1. Making someone's day just slightly better is more important than hoarding information about how to do it the best way.
2. Fear is a compass pointing you to a courageous vision within waiting to burst out of the cozy illusion of safety.
3. Mistakes are golden testaments to your initiative and perseverance.

Denial of Evilution

If I were God and had to redesign life, I would remove the evil from evolution. Organisms change to adapt to the changing environment, but they do not change to outcompete other organisms. When a trait is obsolete, it changes immediately within the same organism, not in a mutation manifest in the next generation. Death is therefore unnecessary for adaptation to occur.

Sexual reproduction is unnecessary. All organisms can reproduce asexually, and they do so when they sense the abundance of resources. Instead of pleasure from sex, they experience pleasure akin to sexual pleasure when they help another individual heal or grow.

This form of mating involves only giving for the pleasure of giving rather than an exchange although exchange naturally occurs because the other party also derives pleasure from giving. There is no competition for mates because there is no need for exclusivity and there is no scarcity of opportunities to help.

One is not attracted to another due to their physical beauty or resources but lack thereof because the pleasure is in helping the other enhance those qualities. What a wonderful world this is, where the impoverished are taken care of by biological design!

What would be the point of life? Simply to grow and multiply across the universe, soaking in the beauty of myriad environments.

How different is this from this nightmare world, where we must fight over resources and the right to pass on our likeness. We worship our genes when we jealously guard our exclusive relationships, even murdering on command. We fight to the death to defend our way of life. Why did we choose such a hellish existence? Why do we maintain it by adhering to the dictates of our genetic and social heritage? Or more practically, how do we decide otherwise?

I begin by rejecting my apparent reality. If I'm wired to experience the hell of insatiable seeking interspersed with brief pleasurable moments and culminating in oblivion, I must be mistaken in my interpretation of the world. It makes absolutely no logical sense to try to maintain such an existence. It's like trying to produce a positive value by multiplying zero with a million different numbers. I must have been programmed incorrectly. I can adjust the program.

I imagine a different world, like the one I describe above. It doesn't make sense right now because my mind is so habituated in conventional thinking, but knowing that conventional thinking is itself illogical helps me be a little more open minded. This new story is probably inaccurate, but that's okay. I'm just using it to unlearn a definitely inaccurate model.