Impressions that I associate with pain of such high intensity as I've never experienced, like those of people getting burned alive, mauled by wildcats, or compound fractures.
I wonder if, assuming panpsychism is right and mental states are ubiquitous, suffering is also ubiquitous. I wonder if I could, despite instinct, accept, even choose some profound future suffering of mine as a necessary part of the infinite tapestry of experience with martyr-like grace. I want to be a zealot, I crave certitude in the sublimation of my will, its harmony with a duty attendant to my self, implicit in creation itself, but I won't allow myself to indulge in it until I believe there to be adequate (i.e. self-evident, following Leibniz's theory of truth as tautology) definition for it (the prospects of which seem very dismal at this point due to prohibitive epistemological barriers and plausible ontological theories that negate the ethical significance of choices), for the most basic of these duties must be to discern the others, otherwise they can only be accidentally fulfilled by the will; the sublimation is false. Hence my research, the progress of which has so far been distracted by the allure of "intellectual lotus plants" like the Internet, alcohol, video games, etc.
I joined the army out of high school expecting to serve with people like me who wanted to understand duty, but what I found was a corporation dominated by vacuous professionalism fetishists, materialists, and careerists that pretended to be the credible armed forces of a country that was content to rely on the U.S. for defence.
Now, with my views irreconcilable with those of society and the military, I don't know what to do except chase what might be the mirage of a more perfect understanding of the universe.
