Recently I talked with this brilliant person. We hit it off immediately and We talked about things beyond our perception. Like, God, ghosts, souls, and the afterlife. I remember she first asked me if I believe afterlife or not. I answered no, but in a vague way. I'd like to make myself clear. As long as there's space to imagine, we can imagine whatever we want. We need a way to explain things in front of us. Imagine you are walking on the road and suddenly you bump into something, say, a monster. Ooh. Hey, why do you think of it as a monster? Right there. You named it. That's the concept. It's the concept to cope with something unknown. Maybe it's just a big fatty dog. Maybe it's just your hallucination. The thing is, we just need to have reasonable explanations to describe what's up in front of us. Maybe it's wrong. Maybe not. But that doesn't matter. What matters is, if we don't have explanations for "something unknown", we'll just get crazy. Poof! Your world gets corrupt. So conceptualizing things is a convenient way to organize our mental model of the world. We need to be relieved, believing that we are in a world that's stable enough to be fully explained. And it also applies to more transcendent concepts: God, free will, and time. You can feel or imagine them, but you can never reach them, actually. What's happening here is the pragmatic processing of our cognition. Maybe you don't believe in God. But you have to "assume" that time exists, right? That's the fundamental principle in our view of the world. But no one can prove it. We assume that time exists and it just...works. it's so convenient that we cannot throw it away. So we can't laugh at the ancient people who believed in evil, monsters, ghosts, witches, or the afterlife, whatsoever. They needed ways to explain things. That was the conceptualization of their world. I guess it worked so well. And as long as it works, why not use it? So it's okay to believe in whatever you want. Let's just be open to possibilities. Okay, but remember, after all, it's merely an assumption. Maybe there's something. Maybe not. You just "use" the concept. Well, you can be nihilistic here but I do think it's better to be pragmatic. And if we can stay pragmatic about transcendent concepts, I also believe that it's our task to "design" our view of the world. And it eventually becomes...real. That's the reality. The collection of our belief system. Technically, it's the multiplication of the possibilities as to Wittgenstein. You believe this, and that, that, and this. There's a tremendous number of "true or false". And that structures your reality. As long as it works and explains things clearly, it's gonna be your world. And there's a massive amount of white space out there, right? Go ahead and go design them. You can imagine whatever you want, though it's gonna be bloody tough work I'm sure of it. And it also contains the possibilities that lead to awful (often violent) outcomes. But anyways you ARE the one who designs your reality. Maybe it seems unreal. But if you can feel that everything is clear and in its right place, I mean, if there's rational structure, it becomes right as fuck. By the way, my religion is beauty. Because beauty requires things to be structured as if everything is coming from only one source. There, everything feels so natural that I can't doubt anything. It is the feeling when you face beautiful nature like big mountains or a massive ocean. It should be bloody powerful and violent enough to scare me, but because of it, because I fear, I totally believe there is rational logic behind everything. And that's when I feel beauty. Because everything's in its right place and they don't give a fuck about me. And then I can completely forget about myself. There are no thoughts, no naive concerns that come with human consciousness. There's no other state better than this "moment of beauty". And I guess this is the state where I want to be through my creative process. I wanna see a world that is artificial, yet highly natural so that I can feel like in another world of possibilities. And everything in that world should look like going toward something transcendent. I don't know what it is. But if I ever achieve this, that's when I find beauty.