The secret stops being a secret once you hear it.
At December 23, 2023, I experienced a groundbreaking moment. In one of my random experiment#5899, I discovered something that changed my life forever: I was able to successfully demonize someone in less than an hour. It was just a joke experiment, something that I expect to fail immediately. Something that I did for the laughs. Yet it succeeded, and now I have to take responsibility.
And that's when I learned, that the main element of any fantasy is mystery. People fantasize about something because it is mysterious to them, they have not experienced it, they have not seen it. Thus, they cannot help but obsess about it and wonder how it feels.
Interestingly, this whole cycle breaks once the person experience it in reality. When they finally confront it face to face, it stops being a mystery and starts being a part of life. It's not as interesting or important as before, it becomes no different than the grasses on the ground and the clouds in the sky.
It's like when you have been wanting to eat a tasty food that you have never tasted before. You keep thinking about it, watching about it, fantasizing about it, dreaming about it, and obsessing about it. Then when you finally get to eat it, you experience an expansion of reality, a phenomena that happens whenever one's imagination becomes reality — for a moment, they feel the vastness of the universe and the endless possibilities that awaits them. I had two expansions of reality yesterday, it's a very surreal feeling.
Afterwards, the seemingly mysterious thing stops being mysterious. The glow disappears and everything returns to normal. What was once called mysterious is now a normal part of everyday life. A poor person may fantasize about money but a rich person doesn't think about it that much. A thirsty person may obsess about water but other people only takes it for granted. This is the reality of life.
If I were to touch and taste the moon, the moon will stop being mysterious to me. If I were to hold the stars on my hand, they will stop being mysterious to me. If I were to explore the infinity of space, it will stop being mysterious to me.
In the end, nothing is ever truly mysterious. The world is open for anyone who wants to explore. There's no point obsessing or thinking about something that you're bound to encounter in the future. It's only difficult because you haven't mastered it. It's only scary because you haven't tried it. It's only magical because you haven't experienced it.
It's really funny how the importance and value of something is extremely inflated when one has not experienced or encountered it. But when they finally do it, when they finally experience it, it becomes just as mysterious as the stones on the ground. It's difficult to believe that anything we perceive as important can instantly become unimportant once we have discovered its mystery, but it happens more often than we think.
Now that the initial glow of the treasure is gone, now that you have bought the pet you have been wanting to have your entire life, the initial happiness is now replaced by the constant cleansing of poop and urine as you teach your pet about potty training. Eventually, you learn to appreciate and love your pet for what it is. You came to have it because it is trending but stayed with it because it is now a part of you.
We don't instantly abandon something when we have discovered its mystery. We may stop being obsessed with it, it may have completely lost its mystery, but now we get to see and appreciate its true essence, one that we cannot see before because of its initial glow. Even if it became meaningless and useless, we will still keep because it's now part of us.
(So cringe, but true.)
Another pattern I discovered in my online explorations is that most strangers are generally able to tolerate 0-20% imperfections, which, in this context, defined as the percent deviations from their expectations. This means they'll often reply to twice or thrice before making their judgement of either continuing to talk with you or ghosting you.
Fascinatingly, there is a simple way to increase their tolerance: Honesty. In my several online experiments, I discovered that people are generally able to tolerate 40-100% of imperfections of strangers who are honest about it. They become more forgiving of mistakes and failures if people are not trying to hide it but freely showing it to others at the expense of being vulnerable. This is at least twice higher than their baseline social tolerance, a noticeably significant increase.
(do I sound like a cool scientist now? ehe~)
Of course, honesty without empathy doesn't help, in fact, it does the complete opposite and makes people more hostile. So what really works isn't just honesty but honesty that considers how other people feel. One can be brutally honest while considering how other people feel. One can also be brutally honest without any empathy or consideration. The two may appear indistinguishable at first but once you experience being the receiving end, you will see the difference.
Indeed, honesty and empathy are not mutually exclusive. They are supposed to work together and move together. To focus only on one of them while forgetting the other will make them incomplete and ineffective. Resist nothing and you will not be resisted. Force nothing and everything will move naturally.
After all those binge reading of webtoons and binge watching of anime, I realized something. No matter how good the webtoons and anime are, there is nothing I can do about them. I cannot touch their trees, eat their food, and smell their flowers. It's an incomplete experience. If I was born without any sense of touch, taste, and smell, I still wouldn't have considered anime and webtoons as complete reality.
Why? Because I still have the sense of pain and if I don't feel physical pain while watching any anime, then they are far from real. Pain and suffering is what distinguishes reality from fantasy. It's exactly why people indulge in fantasy — to stop feeling pain and suffering. This is the line that fantasy cannot cross.
Freedom, by quality, is real and not an illusion. It always include pain, no, it MUST include the possiblity of pain. If any one of the senses cannot be utilized, if there is no possibility of pain, then it cannot be called Freedom — that is just fantasy.
(nai wa~)
Freedom then, is not a paradise, it cannot be a paradise free from any possiblity of pain and death, for that betrays the meaning of freedom. It involves pain but not necessarily suffering. To suffer is to identify with pain, people are free not to identify with their pain, to simply let it happen without wasting a single thought.
Pain cannot exist without imperfections. Freedom must include all imperfections, for people are free to be imperfect. Everyone is to free to be imperfect. Everyone is also free to work hard and make themselves less imperfect. Everyone is also free not to work on their imperfections. The type of Freedom that excludes imperfections cannot be called freedom — that is just fantasy.
Thus, to embrace freedom is to embrace all pain and imperfections. The perfection of freedom is the inclusion of all imperfections. The universe we live in is a universe of freedom. We were born in a world of freedom. We are all free beings, more free than any characters of fiction.
To be free then, is to feel the burning warmth of the sun. It is to bleed from being accidentally pricked by the thorns of rose. It is to experience the taste of water.
Truly, a minute of reality is more satisfying than ten thousand minutes of fantasy. Seeing a perfect cake in fiction cannot compare to actually eating an imperfect cake in reality.
Ah, I've never been so glad that I can smell, touch, and taste this world. I've never been so happy that I can feel pain and experience the consequences of my actions. Not even virtual reality can compare to this realism. This is... all of this... is truly beautiful!
I AM FREE!
"Even the darkness stops being terrifying once you're familiar with it."
"It is extremely painful to be pierced by the sword of honesty. Apply empathy to the sword and it becomes painless and heals wounds."
"I am the Harbinger of Chaos, the Ruler of Freedom, the Demon Lord of Silence."
(Kyaaa, so edgy!)