All the best things in life are incomparable. It is unique to the person that holds them, and to even think of equating it to the possession of another seems the height of foolishness. How can I share my view of the sunset with anyone else? Who can take it away from me? To feel the brush of the lips of someone you love, shot through with the taste of cherry and lime from the drinks you shared underneath the green leaves and rays of the sun, these things are yours and yours alone. Every life can only be perceived through the lens of the person behind those eyes, the entire world conspiring to give you something that is only yours, something never to be seen before or after for all the time that the universe exists1.
But how are we to speak of things that we cannot even hope to share? To try and tell you the way last night made me feel, the fluorescent lights of my lamp bathing the table in the shades of the sunset, paradoxical in the darkest night, the moonlight cascading through my blinds and dappling my face, thoughts racing through my mind like horses gone wild while my heartbeat sounds like marching drums for a war only I fight - that is an exercise bound to end in failure. And for you to tell me what it feels like to look at even the simplest of things is also impossible - to endeavour to understand even a fraction of the visions crafted and molded by a lifetime of neurons firing and connecting and pruning themselves to craft a human from primordial biological soup is a fool's errand.
And so we retreat to the world of the familiar, the comfortable, of that which is easily named and spoken of, apples to apples and oranges to oranges and money to status to intricate, unspoken games played to climb metaphysical ladders that hold immense significance to the collective, but are pointless to the individual. It is perfectly natural to want to be understood, to have another trace and carve the sceneries of your mindscape, intimacies and connections melding past skin and flesh and bone to a union of more than one, in the breathtakingly beautiful endeavour of trying your best to understand each other despite the absolute futility of it all. Even connection of the more mundane kind is one of the great pleasures of lived experience - stupid jokes that you can only laugh at with brothers of experience, embarassment from moments that will forever live only in the hushed mentions and smirks that you share with those that were with you when it happened, conversations had and long forgotten until the only thing you remember is the vague outline of how it felt - these are the strokes that build the canvas of you and the masterful painting of your life.
But this appeal to the collective, this retreat to the familiar, is all too easily corrupted. The familiar is only valuable when it is authentic and self-originating. For missives originating from outside the self to dictate the entirety of how one lives is a recipe for a life lived in misery. The language of the self is one that is discovered only through long and arduous struggle, through uncertainty of the accuracy of one's motivations, because it is a language that only you can speak, with regards to experiences only you understand. There is no dictionary or manual for a language that came into being with your birth and will die with your last breath. This journey of understanding is confusing and scary by the very nature of its being - nobody can understand the material that you are working with, or the extent and complexity of the inner world that you wrestle with.
So it feels much safer to say that this obscure inner world is the problem, and to try and mold it to the legible language of the collective. The language of spoken things is something everyone understands, is it not? And thus you decide that value only resides in that which is seen and understood by everyone, and perhaps by pursuing this value you can tame that inner world that seems so foreign and illegible. Everyone understands the language of status and money. Everyone understands the language of communal approval. Everyone understands the language of credentials. And thus in its pursuit you find safe haven. Why question it? Everyone around you seems to agree that this is a meaningful system of values to uphold, so it must be right, shouldn't it? And boy oh boy, if you happen to be good at playing this game, it seems so much more rewarding then all that time you spent wrangling with feelings and concepts that you could find no reprieve from, all for nobody else to acknowledge that struggle or your efforts. Tame the world of that which is legible, and praise and celebrations shower down from all sides. The highest level of this is simply communal approval, but on a much more fundamental level the language of the world is one that all of humanity can understand. Of value exchange and things we can touch and see and interact with. And taming this world is all you really need to prosper materially, really.
This is not to say that the world of that which is legible is lesser in any way. This is the world in which you interact with everyone else, can do good for others, can help others, can lift millions of people out of poverty from, can feed those that cannot afford food for themselves. But, fundamentally, the world of the understandable is a communal one, and its domain should be restricted to that and that alone. This is not a world that should establish dominion over your self. It is a world that exists because as humans, we need to talk to each other, we need a common language, we need to be able to name things so we can cooperate and trade and communicate and engage in shared pursuits. It is this world that has driven humanity from caves to rocketships. Everything that we consider emblematic of greatness, every action that bends the arc of civilization, resides in this plane of understanding and communality - because by definition, all that we can understand of others resides in this world. The inner world lives and dies with the individual, which means that there is a stark scarcity of abstractions and communal knowledge surrounding it. This is not to say that this knowledge does not benefit from the progress of humanity at all - over the millennia that we have roamed the earth, there have been veritable mountains of literature written as signifiers for the less concrete, platonic experiences that constitute everyone's inner world, but this knowledge is really only internalised by the individual through experience and reflection and cannot be taken at face value and benefit from abstraction like a lot of other forms of knowledge3.
However, it is essential to understand that despite its many achievements and undoubted significance to humanity, the role of the legible world is only to dictate and host that which is understandable, signifiable and communal. To try and deal with the illegibility of the self by substituting in values and morals from a framework that is meant to deal with something fundamentally different is a massive misstep. By turning to the outside for questions of the interior, you lose a fundamental part of yourself. You are never going to be fulfilled if your pursuit of meaning and the contours of your day-to-day are predicated on a response from this world of legibility.
This is also where the central conundrum lies - for someone brought up and conditioned to solely interact with and conceive of this world of externality, the rules (or lack thereof) when dealing with things that have no name to them, with experiences that live and die with an individual, to only be felt and not shared, makes it feel like a fundamentally different world than that of the exterior. Everyone knows what the interior means - but its domain is often only restricted to matters of less import and of little to no consequence. Of course your happiness is important, but if your passions don't make you money, then what's the point? The boundary between the language of the communal and the language of the self is set in stone, with the self only meant to come out on vacation or in times of leisure.
Oftentimes striver types get so obsessed with the world of the legible that to make decisions on the basis of the illegible or to treat it as valuable is seen as a liability. How morbidly hilarious that the egregore of the understandable can hermeneutically seal its vessels off from any hope of salvation by making them think the true and beautiful are the folly of lesser men.
For all this talk of the importance of interiority, I have not addressed how exactly to get a feel for it, primarily because I'm not too sure how to explain it. The world of the legible exists in the presence of easily perceptible significands for the signifiers of language. The contours of the self do not reveal themselves that easily. However, although the exact shape and makeup of the self is not something that can be exhaustively and prescriptively detailed, there are quite a few processes that iteratively reveal truer representations of your internal world and will eventually lead you to a robust and persistent appreciation of the things that you can't really talk to other people about.
In my head, I divide this process into two parts: liberation, and understanding. Liberation is the process of shedding the shackles of the legible on your internal world, allowing yourself to conceive of a life lived well outside of the legible frameworks espoused to you, outside the status games and reductivism that reduces the individual to a single maximand, be it their appearances, their TC, or how many apricots they can fit in their mouth. To do this is scary. If you turn out to be wrong, there is a feeling of being hopelessly left behind, since the imposition of the communal on the internal tends to collapse value down to a single dimension that is easily measured and offered up as a scale for meaning2. This means that to cease to progress on this single axis, even momentarily, is cause for soul-wrenching despair because in the few minutes you took to appreciate the sunrise your competition has slingshotted irrecoverably ahead of you. I do not have a convincing argument for you as to whether or not this is true, because how true this statement is is directly tied to your belief in it. It is a self fulfilling prophecy. Fundamentally, liberation from the legible, much like liberation in most religious doctrines, is a leap of faith. If you feel like there is something more to the world, something that you can't quite put your finger on but still want to understand because your heart won't let go of it, you just have to tell yourself that you're going to abandon the value system that got you to where you are today and embark on a journey into the unknown.
If you comprehensively resolve to release yourself from the shackles of the spoken world, congratulations! Time to start understanding. You are now confronted with a gaping void, a veritable tsunami of unfamiliar and alien sensations within your mindscape. You have saved yourself from looking at the face of God by biting away at the parts of him that you could stomach and understand and filter through the safety of that which everyone understands, and you are now left naked as the day you were born in the face of a primordial force whose inner workings you have made every effort to ignore for the past many years of your life. You will try to put a name to it, and you will turn to religion, psychology, therapy speak, mysticism, buddhism, eastern philosophy, western philosophy, utilitarianism, stoicism, deontology, tradition, perhaps Spinoza's Absolute and Hegel's Geist, and innumerable other attempts at trying to understand and put a name to the same thing that you stare at now, and through this quest, you will learn that all the true parts of these texts point to the same thing in the noösphere. As to what its true name is, I have no answer to, because it is a part of your internal world. But be not afraid. It is your friend. It is a feeling of such ancient and abundant joy and interconnectivity that you will begin to question whether or not the reality that you have seen for all your life is meaningful at all.
And here lies the next fork in the road. True comprehension of the scope and glory of the internal will irredeemably change your worldview. Your conception of the full range of human experience will be torn apart and widened to such a degree that to capitulate and dissolve into the magnitude of its Eternity seems like the most logical choice. And here we are again, with the language of the internal and indescribable now overriding that of the legible, painting the world in its eldritch strokes and convincing you that all that is real and embodied is simply a reflection of this greater concept and that to give up all of it to commune with your God is right and just. The tyranny and shackles of the legible have been broken and ascended, you are now the embodiment of Truth and Beauty, and in your revenge against the systems that tortured your soul for so long you retreat from society and seclude yourself to understand this new world that has opened up to you, or dedicate your life to upending the institutions that perpetuate the tyranny of trying to render the world in their image because you have seen what really matters, and of course anything that opposes this ultimate truth is against it, and thus evil.
But to stop your quest of understanding here would be a great folly. In trying to reinstate the primacy of the language that only you speak, of your mindscape, of the unknown unknowns that you could only hear whispering to you in the depth of night before your liberation, do not lose sight of the value of the communal and legible. They exist for a reason. The material world is the plane on which you interact with everyone else. Problems of flesh and blood and brick and mortar might not hold the same beauty that the internal does, but they are meaningful problems nonetheless. Your existence is an opportunity to do almost untold amounts of good for other people. Spiritual liberation does not care for ones material conditions, but the march of scientific progress is one that has lengthened lives and allowed people the security and freedom to pursue projects of their own, as well as projects on a civilisational scale that fundamentally alter the collective noösphere of humanity with its existence - things like the moon landing, the general theory of relativity, and the project of civilisation.
Most people have the relationship of the internal and the external completely backwards - they strive in accordance to the material to chase internal fulfilment, while slowly grinding away their sense of interiority in the process. Purposelessness is not fundamentally caused by ones material circumstances, and cannot be solved simply by rearranging atoms. The discovery of the internal world, the purely platonic world of mathematical objects and untold beauty, is a pursuit that is solely individual. It is aided by the freedoms and circumstances of the material world, but solely addressing the problem on the material front is ultimately futile.
But in this world, there are a few things that are uniquely illegible, yet able to be shared with one or a select few. Love is one of those things. Another is friendship. Communal joy, to an extent. It is possible to live a good life completely alone, if you treat the illegible with the respect it deserves and strive to do the most good in the material world. But these few collective illegibles, these human things, these moments where you create a shared unnamed with the other consciousnesses that you are honoured to shared your time on this blue rock with - they are the crowning jewel of this experience that we call life. And what's beautiful is that on this front, there are truly no barriers. No requirement for introspection, no grand war to be waged or mission to be chased, no prolonged agony to be fought through. It is as accessible to babies revelling in the warm presence of their parents as it is to the Buddha teaching his disciples. It is in no way enough by itself to make one's life meaningful - but even in the wake of complete understanding, of harmony in every domain, these pleasures remain unmatched. How quaint that the most accessible joys turn out to be the most profound.
This is primarily hyperbole. My opinions on materialism, infinity, and whether every single configuration of atoms in the known universe could occur again and recreate a particular moment ad infinitum are still maturing. ↩
I have a theory as to why this may be, and it primarily has to do with information compression and the importance of ability in today's society. Given that we currently apportion responsibility and respect via a "meritocracy", signals of competence are more important than ever, and measurement is a lot easier if we have a single axis by which we measure people. But this doesn't override the reality that everything is abundant and that there are ways to interact with the source code of reality such that flimsy societal structures like this give way under the sheer force of proof of excellence that you demonstrate. ↩
Another way of looking at this is through the lens of path dependence - most empirical knowledge is path independent because it has been verifiably deemed epistemologically true through peer review and repeated validation. I do not need to learn of phlogiston to understand how atoms work. With the internal world, however, one must work through each and every conflict and resolve it before truly understanding the meaning which these texts seek to impart. It is a type of process knowledge, not propositional knowledge. ↩