I had one instance of good fortune with the butterflies today and tried to take the best of it; almost came home empty handed, but then two butterflies started their dance above the road and…

I took those with the 135mm, because the 100-400mm was too much for me to carry, considering what kind of an astral shitstorm I have to deal with; hiking up hill is hard enough, and doing it with a big setup was too much for today.

The lesson from this as well as the previous hike is that all it takes is one. One scene, one butterfly, a few seconds of opportunity, and if you have the equipment with you, failure turns into success. Just a few seconds of a window of opportunity. If that didn’t intersect with me, I’d come home empty handed after carrying heavy gear up hill.

I wonder what lesson I would have learned had I climbed that hill twice with multiple kilos of equipment on me, and in both cases that one lucky opportunity didn’t arise. Would the lesson have been “fuck this, I’m not carrying this stuff here again”? I’ve seen this in business; occasionally, some people just get lucky and end up with money, and then they think they are competent and successful; they try again, and they fail, again and again, because they learned the wrong lesson. They didn’t understand how lucky they were, and how rare and improbable success was, and how little it depended on their own competence. People seem to learn wrong lessons from success, and, quite likely, also from failure. They might think there’s something wrong with them, but maybe they did everything right and those butterflies didn’t perform for them at just the right time when they walked that road, and they came home with an empty card. All those “spiritual teachers” in the 1990s talked about how this world is a school and we are here to learn lessons, but they don’t actually seem to be the good and useful lessons, when I think about it. We learn that certain things don’t work, and others do, but what we actually learn seems to be more degrading than helpful, because receiving spiritual feedback from a place designed by Satan and inhabited by morally flawed beings works exactly as you might expect it to. For instance, I learned early on that I will be beaten up, insulted, humiliated, ignored, ridiculed and degraded regardless of what I do. The feedback will always be negative, so I might as well do whatever. It took me a while to un-learn that lesson, because I almost became human garbage and a criminal, resulting from my parents’ stellar upbringing. 🙂 My brother, on the other hand, learned that the path to getting what he wanted is to play victim and whine loudly, blaming me, and then I will be beaten up and he will get to play with my toys. Since he never actually practised yoga, he never unlearned that lesson, and he’s still thinking in terms of blaming me for his misery in order for the fundamental law of the Universe to be triggered, where I will be beaten up and he will get my toys.

Do you know how I un-learned that harmful lesson from my childhood? The one that I’m doomed regardless and feedback will always be negative, so I might as well do whatever? I decided that the first part is indeed correct: the feedback I receive is probably always flawed and I can’t rely on it in order to correct my actions. However, I also decided that the second part, where I might as well do whatever, will result in utter doom. It would harm me terribly. So, I needed to think of a way of correcting my actions without taking human feedback into account. I learned to judge my actions against an ideal – good people that I know, good characters from literature or film, holy scriptures. Darshan of God, ultimately. I understood that my life is not a performance for others, because others will not be able to save me if I fail. There was no use in emotional signalling; just understanding what was wrong, and fixing it. Repeat ad nauseam. No audience. No use in whining, or feeling bad or depressed about mistakes. Just fix them, and align with the template of perfection, that is of course constantly updated. Fuck up, fix, repeat. No audience. No useful feedback. Just deception and false information from the outside, stuff that’s meant to discourage, harm and degrade, stuff that will praise me when I’m doing poorly and ridicule me when I’m doing everything right, with just enough randomness to make it completely useless. Do what God would do in my place, not what gets me praise from humans, because humans are sinful, deluded, ignorant, evil or just fucked up. They will criticise what they admire because it hurts them, or they will praise what they find pathetic, because it makes them feel good.

Being able to stand in the presence of God and feel like I belong there. That was the motivation.

Also, I assume that I’m probably doing everything right, and the lack of results is merely a normal thing if butterflies haven’t crossed my path by chance. Thinking that you’re doing something wrong just because there are no results is like thinking your camera choice or photographic skill need to be improved if you came home with an empty card that day. Were there any butterflies around? No? If so, how is the absence of butterfly pictures surprising? Correcting your course too often, and based on unreliable feedback, is not helpful. For instance, Biljana was with me today and she came home without any good pictures. Why? Because we were both very tired on the way down, under terrible astral pressure, and when those butterflies appeared I went after them, fiddled with autofocus modes until I found something that managed to lock and track, and kept them under rapid fire for half a minute or so. Biljana was just too tired to give a fuck about butterflies at that point and left them to me. 🙂 What conclusion should she draw from this? None at all. She did everything right. Doing everything right, however, doesn’t mean that you’ll have good results on any given day. Another day, she might have excellent pictures and I will have nothing. What conclusions should I draw from this? Absolutely none. Learning lessons from everything is highly overrated.