Essence

What is the essence of an object? Of an animal/plant/person(though arguably people fall under "animal" too)? What is it that is essential in these things?

Take a look at say...essence of Vanilla, and in this case i am refering to the synthetic vanilla essence, not vanilla extract. Because Vanilla is becoming rarer (due to various reasons i wont go into here) the price of real Vanilla pods is increasing and too high to be very economical for personal use, say in baking (and most industries would not cut thier profits by using real Vanila, unless of course thier product was extremely expensive making it less accessible to consumers) but before i get carried away into economics lets get back to the fact that essence of vanilla, really isnt anywhere near a match for the real thing. How then can we say it is the essence of Vanilla if it is not as rich as the natural vanilla?

Lets look at, essence of chicken. (Maybe i was hungry when i wrote this or something) Its that funny liquid in bottle, which is supposed to be the essence of what the chicken is. Alright perhaps to say that is hoping too much, it is supposed to be all the good nutrients we would normally get from chicken, only it is in that liquid form. However, it can not be any substitute for an actualy meal of chicken. If we were to eat only essence of chicken we would probably starve, if we ate actual chicken, the worst you can go is malnutrition due to an unbalanced diet.

I suppose what i find is that, when you strip away the 'access' of something, and try to find and then separate the 'essence' from everything else, we lose much of its value in the process. In other words, in attempting to find the essence of something, we are, in fact losing the very thing we search for.

Picture your most identifying feature, then take it out from your image of yourself, and place it alone in your thoughts. It is simply a characteristic. without the rest of your experience, how you look, what you think, what you feel, without the rest of 'you', it becomes something which could apply to anyone. Definitely not your essence, not something solely associated with 'you', that someone would look at and immediately say "Ah yes, that's totally 'so-and-so'!".

There is no part that is not essential to something or someone being who or what they are. To take away a part from the whole is to make something else.

Hurt

Only those you care about can really hurt you. Once you have no one and nothing, you wont feel anything. You will be free, but utterly, hopelessly empty. Without direction and motivations, truly apart from your fellow man in that you have no feeling anymore. Blacken the soul. Crush the heart. Close yourself to people. What use are these in this world. Any other reaction is an invitaion to pain. Life is pain and suffering. But you are a coward to do so. A fool to hide from people. To isolate yourself. Surely this will simply lead to madness. Or have you been down that path for too long now?

The Beauty of Women

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" famous words, but how true are they?
To a certain extent there are many types of beauty, and what a person percieves as beauty. However, I think when we look at women (sorry I don't do beautiful guys in this topic, perhaps this will warrant more analysis later, ok got sidetracked oops) As I was saying before I interrupted myself, in women beauty has a lot to do with childbearing, strangely enough. Of course I didnt really see it that way untill I read Gene Wolfe's THe Fifth Head of Cerberus. In this book, one chapter talks about how you can simply break it down to men seeing how fit the member of the opposite sex is to bear his children. Not much of a suprise really considering we're all wired to procreate as much as possible, ensuring the continuation of our genes and what not.
So we look at what a woman from the top down (I'd say there are quite a few guys who would start elsewhere, but lets go in a systematic manner here). First the face, the facial features are simply an indication of the overall health of a person, 'most' of the time if a person looks after themselves their faces will reflect the care they put into thier health. Moving right along we come to the...uh chest area. The breasts are quite obviously the main source of nutrition for a child (or at least it used to be, I'm not so sure how popular breast feeding is nowadays). Further down we get to the hips, of course this is where the baby will actually come to form and be born from. Then the legs, women leg muscles are usually some of the strongest and largest in their body, and this is to bear the additional weight of a child (this is the one point I added to Wolfe's, see I contribute!) and of course longer legs mean they can run faster from predators and such.
So the full breasts, wide hips and long legs we men rave about seems to simply be another instict in us to find appropriate child bearers. I know what you're thinking, its not like the notion that all guys thought about was sex needed to be stated again.

Uni Life

Studies are in full swing now as the first slew of midterms come up and kill almost all my free time. Living with so many guys and girls who routinely get drunk/high is a very new experience. Most of the time I don't really bother to join them in thier partying. I'm not really comfortable with crowds anyway. I find myself one of the only people who on my floor who doesnt drink, smoke or do anything basically. I always say its against my religion to drink, but honestly, that decision is a personal thing. Constantly we decide on what we do (this contradicts my previous post about having no choice whatsoever, but hey, no one said I was right in the first place) for example the aforementioned smoking and drinking. it may be banned, illegal or against your religion, but lets face it. If you really wanted to, you'd find a way. Everytime we have a choice to either start (or continue) any one of these things. I wont really say they are "bad habits," since I honestly do not know (having never tried it myself) and so I think it unfair to judge others, as if i'm somehow above them simply because of my abstinence. If I tried it, decided for myself I didnt enjoy it and gave it up, it still would not give me the right to tell them what to do.

Karate

I have been practising for around 6 years of my life now. Shito-Ryu Karate-Do is once again a big part of my life, and I find it helps so much in dealing with stress. I think I know why I almost gave up on practising the past year; simply put, I wasnt stressed out. I wasnt having the work load of studies (and in the case of late 2004, I simply didnt have a place to train). As such I didnt feel the 'need' to go and train to the point of physical exhaustion. Now i'm back to being a full time student (summer made me feel like a jobless bum on a sabbatical) I see that its actually rather important part of my life again. Perhaps its also the fact that almost anything seems better than actually doing my work! But heres hoping i'm just missing the karate.

Back to school

Well i'm going to University in a week's time. My summer holidays passed by pretty fast. Despite all the things man makes to save time, make things more convenient, we seem to be having less and less time to spare. The days just fly by now, in the end we may be just using too much time up trying to save it.

Self and the "Self" We Present to the World

"Be Yourself"
I find that incredibly difficult. If I want to impress someone, I certainly wont be myself, I'll just be all the 'good' things in me around them. Of course when i'm with someone i'm comfortable with I would probably be a lot more me and a lot less what I would want them to think I am. But I dont think I ever give anyone the whole picture. In fact, I dont really know the whole myself. I feel quite a lot of us barely scratch the surface of self awareness.
I wonder if I will ever know myself, and have the courage to let others see that 'self'. I feel much too self concious most of the time to show the world anything but what I'd like to be. If I ever find out who I really am, I wonder if i'll like him.

Population Control and Natural Selection

Overpopulation is such a problem today, and yet we continue to allow ourselves to spead to every corner of the planet. And we continue to strive to keep as many people alive as we can, seeing life as sacred isnt wrong, but seeing how people are spreading uncontrollably, and destroying so many other species as we go, the sanctity of life seems to be the last thing on our minds.

Modern medicine is supposed to let us all live longer and healthier, but does it? Diseases continue to mutate and we get more and more deadly viruses and bacterium. Which we counter with more and more of our own medicines. THe cycle continues. Some time in the future I feel there must be a limit, where either the diseases win, wiping out most of the human race in one mighty epidemic, or humans manage to find the answer to preventing disease and spread out over the planet and most likely to other planets too. Seeing as they are always one step ahead of us, with humans struggling to find cures to new diseases, i cant help feel a little pessimistic.
And pharmaceutical companies are more interested in making money then curing people (well thats the impression i get). The drugs they produce stop the symptoms from showing up, but are they really curing us?

Getting back to overpopulation and natural selection (yes that is the title of this post!) medicine has completely screwed up nature's way of removing those who are not fit to survive. Ok that sounds really terrible of me, but its true, and i'm not saying we should just let those we are not fit/get sick die or anything, but I see disease as nature's attempt to stabilize the population of living things. The effects of our messing with nature and evolution (if you believe in it) will certainly be seen one day, but not in our lifetimes.

What's the Truth?

I once believed there would always be an underlying truth in everything. Well that was a long time ago...Now days I think there is only what we make of the world. I mean no matter what, we just cant escape subjectivity. There are no unbiased, objective viewers of a matter. Everyone is human, and thats not a bad thing, but it is definitely not something that is impartial. People make the truth for themselves; people see what they want to see.
Personally i think this is what allows some people to over come extreme situations, they just dont see it as something hopeless like a 'normal' person would. Our outlooks on life determine how we act. they say the greatest illusion of all is 'free will'. To a certain extent, i believe it is true, there are so many things in our past which mold us to what we are now, that our responses to situations 'force' us into the paths we 'choose'. So even if we do have a choice, the way we have lived our lives make us lose our free will, makes us slaves to ourselves. We do what we would always do, preferences and favourites make us lose much of our unpredictibility. which is where i think the line is drawn, because in the end if we do something unpredictable perhaps that is a sign we still retain some of our freedom after all.

But I'd rather have a bowl of cow cow pops...

I was watching this cereal commercial the other day, Cookie Crisp I think it was. The animal (some sort of humanoid feline creature if memory serves) could never manage to get its hands (paws?) on a bowl of the cereal. This reminded my of another cereal, Trix, where the poor rabbit would actually get a bowl of the cereal, but would be unable to eat any, since "Trix are for kids!" In fact my friend pointed out to me yet another example, where a koala bear has to go through the trouble of making up some immensely long tale just to get ONE piece of the cereal (koko crunch anyone?)
Why on earth do these marketing people make these poor creatures go through so much? It's hard to tell which is worse, not being able to get anything, or just being given a measly reward for immense effort. Perhaps worst of all is the fact that these advertisements were put out in the first place meaning somehow most children would find it amusing to be selfish, thankfully none of the mascots were human or we may have an even worse problem on our hands.