First child

Nothing* can prepare your for the experience of the birth of your first child and the stress of the first few days.

*metaphorically speaking

Here's a tip

Happiness doesn't actually exist. And neither does nirvana. They are both red herrings. 

Comedy is enlightening

Because it shows us nothing is sacred

All the religion you need

Is yin/yang for perspective and the golden rule for morals.

And because it's so important i will repeat it explicitly - don't force your ideologies onto others.

Morality has evolutionary benefits

At the personal level having morals constrains the ego and results in group benefit by facilitating cooperation. Of course like everything else morals are relative.

"In the absolute we are forgiven, in the relative we are responsible"

Everything i do matters and does not matter simultaneously. It matters because everything in the universe is interconnected. It doesn't matter because the universe itself doesn't matter.

The entire sequence of events starting with the beginning of the universe culminated in me writing these words now. That is my fundamental nature - a manifestation of the universe.

My morals, like everything else, are dictated at least by the sum of all my experiences.

Does it matter if i chose to be good or bad?

Ancestors

There is no separate me to whom life happens, i am life happening.

Everything is interconnected and interdependent, nothing exists by itself.

Reincarnation, or perhaps a better word would be recycling, is real.

It's easy to understand these things now with our knowledge of physics, thermodynamics, psychology but to arrive at these conclusions thousands of years ago is simply amazing.

The funny thing about ego

The shattering of the ego - the understanding that i am truly unimportant, nothing special, no different than anyone or anything else, seeing through the illusion that there is no distinct i and realizing i am the universe - should automatically result in lack of all desires, including the desire to live because fear of death is ego.

Why doesn't it then?

The simple answer is that i have not yet reached the point i'm describing above. But if self preservation is directly proportionate with the size of the ego, why should i even want to?

On a more abstract level, the ego is as natural as anything else, so all the points of view about it are equally valid, be that egofullness or egolessness and anything in between. What is then the buddhist middle way good for i wonder? Is it simply follow the "everything in moderation" rule of thumb? But to what end? To live a mediocre life for as long as possible? Both egofull and egoless men die and nothing really matters in the end but isn't one more fun than the other? Fun being pleasure*, isn't hedonism the only thing i'm really doing in this life?

* by pleasure i mean any kind of self-satisfaction (and not just immediate), no matter how altruistic or noble the actions they still ultimately give me pleasure thus feeding my ego (even suffering can fit in this category like if by it you can save someone's life or if you sacrifice yourself for gains in the future)

Compassion is

the extension of your nervous system to things outside your body

Universal Truth?

What if there is no such thing as truth (in science) much less universal truth (in philosophy)? For one, it would render all religious pursuits worthless. For another it would challenge us to not think in absolutes anymore.

Karma and Reincarnation

Karma is nothing but the phenomenon of cause and effect and reincarnation is just the laws of conservation of matter and energy.

This too shall pass

Persian: این نیز بگذرد‎
Translit: īn nīz bogzarad

Lonely

I've known the theory of this for a long time but only now i'm coming to truly feel it. Friends is what's most important. Having somebody to share your experiences and life with. I'm realizing that is what i'm lacking most in my life - having an intimate group of friends. I've had that in the past and i miss it so much...

Why is it so hard for me to make new friends? Why is it hard to keep the current ones?

Fuck you love

FUCK. YOU.

Progress

This nostalgic tendency to think that things were better in the past and that everything is devolving as we go on is a very counterproductive idea. Humanity as a species is most evolved right at this moment in our history. A corollary to that is that things are best at this exact moment and will only get better in the future. We needed a lot of time to sort society out in a way that was conducive to the scientific process, the industrial revolution, the information age through which we're currently living. We are at our best now, despite any one else's claims (self, religious people, old people, republicans, etc.)

"Better" of course is a very interesting thing to define ...

Spontaneous symmetry breaking

Perfect beauty is destined to fall apart. That is essentially what the spontaneous symmetry breaking theory of physicist Yoichiro Nambu tells us. The world would not have mass if it were perfectly symmetrical (that's how it was in the beginning when the big bang happened) and only by breaking that constraint (thanks to the Higgs boson) it gives rise to existence.

We live in an age where physics is intersecting philosophy. Those revelations that thinkers, philosophers and enlightened people knew about for millennia, the unifying field that connects everything. The fact that there's is no such thing as an isolated event, the realization that time and space are in fact the same thing, egolessness and the lack of self-importance. All that was discovered by physics and science in general when we started looking at the smaller (bacteria, molecules, atoms, elementary particles, quantum physics) and bigger (the solar system, our galaxy and the universe) scales.

Seeking answers is perhaps the greatest virtue humanity possesses.

Omniscience

It is a human flaw to tend to attribute omiscience to enlightened figures (Buddha, Jesus, etc). They are no different than any normal person. They do not know everything and thinking otherwise is a sliperty slope to organized religion and the mass brainwashing that that leads to.

The meaning of life

What is the meaning of life you ask? The meaning of human life? The meaning of your life? Well, what is the meaning of a butterfly's life? Or a hummingbird's life? The answer is the same.

The Computational Age

In the post-industrial age a lot of professions will become obsolete. We'll transition almost completely from manual to intellectual work. Most mechanical tasks will be performed by robots while humans will be pursuing science and exploration.

Computational power will become our main asset for finding answers to any question across any domain. As this power grows, existing computational techniques (like machine learning, generative design and simulation) will offer us better and eventually even perfect solutions to problems in the main fields of chemistry, physics and biology.

We will genetically engineer and grow perfect food that takes the least amount of resources and offers the best nutritional value.

We will come up with the perfect engineering materials with properties such as high strength and low weight for alloys, smooth surfaces with perfect reflectivity or transparency for glass, biodegradability, superconductivity and dense energy storage.

Robo doctors will both diagnose and treat any medical condition. Eventually we'll start genetically engineering ourselves to resist and even become immune to diseases, ageing, radiation, etc. We'll make ourselves live long healthy lives while consuming the least amount of resources.

Even some intellectual jobs will eventually not be entrusted to humans any more. Political and judicial disciplines will be implemented by artificial intelligence or at least by computer optimized systems that minimize reliance on humans and our biases.

All of the remaining future-proof professions, that is chemists, biologists, physicists and maybe engineers, will be reduced to operators of our computational tools, whatever form those might end up taking. Imagine an AI controlling a completely automated laboratory and factory. All you need to do is formulate the problem and it will find out the best answer as well as produce the physical product if the problem requires one (food, medicine, organism, mechanical device).

What is life?

Life is a self-replicating algorithm in search for the philosophical concept of the best.

Say you need to create the best creature. First you need to quantify that. If you knew what purpose it should serve and what environment it would exist in, you could come up with a list of characteristics that it needs to possess. The only way to find the quantifiable best of something is to produce and compare all possible variations of that which you're looking for. So, you'd make every possible variation of the creature with all its required characteristics, then test and compare them in your particular environment and in the end you'll find the absolute best. 
 
Now imagine you have to do the same, but you don't know any of the answers. What is it for? What environment it goes in? What characteristics does it need? Life is a way to search through all possible characteristics in all possible environments and for all possible purposes.