How we determine the landmarks and pathways of our inner landscape — of our own mind — necessitates a re-understanding of what it means to chase ideals.
Thinking for ourselves is an ideal. Self-determination is an ideal. Individualism is an ideal. The re-understanding we must have is that, unlike ideals in the natural landscape (the perfect food, mate, shelter, etc), human ideals are unattainable.
What is both beautiful and sublime about being human is that we are ever moving toward or falling away from ideals. There is no such things as failure in this pursuit, except that each of us pursues our own, unique idea of perfection with integrity.
We are all of us good, but we are often mislead by ideals that keep us landscape-bound instead of qualiadelic. When we self-determine the landmarks and pathways of our own, inner landscapes, we must, for starters, be wary of Big Dopamine-inspired goals. So much of what we live for is determined by warped, human landscapes. We wouldn’t need many of the ideals we hold dear if we weren’t all so much like addicts, causing each other so much suffering in the first place.
If we can get away from the pursuit of what we desire, and be happy with just what we need, we will discover qualiadelic ideals. Our needs have always been provided for by ecosystems, even if they have passed through factories and farms along the way. Ecosystems are the source, and all ideals should lead us back to ecosystems. Goodness and integrity flow from an innate awareness of this. That is what it means to be qualiadelic.
So, the landmarks and pathways we follow — our ideals — should always lead us back to ecosystems, because if our ecosystems are healthy, then we shall have all we need. Striving toward or falling away from our ideals is nothing more than growth and decay, just as we see in ecosystems.
The gifts of ecosystems come to us in the form of qualia, and we have only to notice. Qualia leads us toward ideals: the sight of a berry makes us think of a ripe berry, and every word has an ideal within it. We strive to find our ideals in creativity, in craft, in service, in heroism, or in an amazing cornucopia of actions. But truly, being qualiadelic is much simpler than that.
Thinking for ourselves is a quality that has been praised for centuries, but much thought in the history of mankind has been landscape bound. Our thought, however, comes to us as a gift, yet another gift from ecosystems, and so any thinking, any reasoning that does not honor ecosystems, is simply not good.
Just being aware of our individual uniqueness, aware that we ourselves determine the landmarks and pathways that we follow, is what is important. We don’t have to be the creators of them, just as long as they are not created by Big Dopamine-motivated persons. Self-determination, and thinking for ourselves, is really an act of grace bestowed upon us by ecosystems, and goodness and integrity, at bottom, is just gratitude.
Tony Brussat