Homocentric

You understand life better when you have broken through your cultural constraints, the moral injunctions, and the so-called good behavior. 

How will you know what it means to do all the things that people do without doing them yourself at least once?

Go to the pawn shop, the wine shop, the red light area and so on.  You need not be doing that which the people there do, but if you don't go there you will never know how life is lived there, what kinds of thoughts and behaviors are possible by people living there. 

Life is the high and the low and everything in between. A life unexplored is an unfinished business, an incomplete understanding, a myopic outlook, a blinkered existence. It is the totality of life that gives understanding. 

What excites our interest is the out of the ordinary in the context of life that we lead. Though we may condemn it or condone it for whatever reasons, it never fails to Venice interest in us. We are forever curious about the lives led by other people. Gossip is symptomatic of our curiosity. We talk about others in awe, in wonder, in disgust, in reproach, in praise and in contempt. In so many ways that we feel the expression is an indication that we are alive and not just buried under labor and struggling through pain and relieving through pleasure.  

In all our communication the subject most inserting and arresting even is that of ourselves. We are ever in wonder of ourselves. As a species. Much more than we are thrilled by auroras and the marvel of technology. We are a narcissistic species. Our curiosity begins with us and ends in us. 

We have worshipped ourselves as gods and daemons. We love and hate each other. We respect and insult each other. In short, all our emotions - thoughts and feelings - that we experience are directed towards ourselves, more than at anything else. We are self-centered, that is, we are at the center of the universe of our life. We are homocentric. Not necessarily due to arrogance, but mostly due to fascination. A fixation that is shared by all of us and in some degree. 

Sent from my iPad