Matthew Moulton (@Onideus)

*takes a toke at this* Reading is one of the greatest powers we have as it lets us access the knowledge and understanding of others. We share a lot of the same pains and struggles in life, we all paint in different styles and shades of each emotional color, but we see the same reality, regardless of how we paint it perceptually. That's why Jesus taught in parable format, because his teachings work best through relatable experiences and imaginative plays. If your work isn't relatable it likely wasn't inspired by anything other than ego. Real artistry is when you consider humanity apart from yourself and your own personal problems. You set your own ego aside and use your emotions as a means of understanding problems with people. Because if you've ever felt hurt, remember this, if you can feel hurt that bad, so can everything else! Trying to figure out and understand the seemingly invisible rocks we keep tripping over in life are key to overcoming the influence of evil. We encode that knowledge in the form of artistry because we know that evil is based in the wanton removal of effort for constant reward seeking. That means evil is driven to covet, acquire, imitate, exploit and destroy art in order to take control of the literal metric of superiority itself. Because the least efforted way to win is to simply cheat by deciding who gets to be the winner and who doesn't. But that ability doesn't afford evil the ability to understand, comprehend, empathize or relate in any way to the artistry of the experience they're trying to control. Evil can only see the surface of artistry, so you can hide information and understanding inside it, in a way that evil won't be able to effectively read or imitate because it requires more effort than their cognition is capable of rendering. To be human is to see human connections. To see yourself in others, instead of seeing them as different or disconnected. But you need to remember, sometimes there's dark parts of yourself, parts you don't want to look at and when you ignore those parts inside yourself, you wind up ignoring them in others, creating blind spots for evil to exploit. At a default we learn to hide out of instinctive fear, like a child under the covers, but as an adult we learn to hide out of reasoned risk. Cowardice is unthinking escape. We do not have dark thoughts because we are dark people, but because our brains recognize the risk of perceptual cancer as a result of reduced effort seeking (depression) or worse, pain seeking (dysphoria). Dysphoria is the pursuit of incessant gratification that leads to incessant discomfort. Try eating at McDonalds every day until you start throwing up and then keep trying to force yourself to eat it, even after it starts making you throw up. That's dysphoria. Terminal over-indulgence. We have dark thoughts to imagine the worst monsters that such a damaged mind could produce, even our own, so we know where to avoid, when to stop, when to seek help. We do not blindly hide from evil, we take the bother to recognize it, to read its nature, to discern its origin and to mitigate its influence and control. The same with art, but the inverse. We look for inspiring art as a means to inspire us to a more idealized/sustainable life. We imitate art because we find art comforting because the human experiences we encode into it represent sustainable cycles between struggle and strength that lead to happy endings. Because the ending isn't ever important without a pursuit. It's like losing weight. It's hard to do! One of the hardest things to do! That's why being skinny is coveted as a form of beauty, because it takes more effort to avoid the evil of over indulgence! If you simply steal the label of beauty, if you started calling fat beautiful, all it would do is exemplify laziness, a lack of effort and then no one would want to be beautiful. Evil never understands that simply stealing the label won't steal the artistry, the effort, because that's the thing they're always trying to avoid. That's why, to a real artist, it always means more to be compared to other artisans than it is to ever win any award. Not to say that artists often enjoy being compared to others, most don't, especially the younger ones, they'll throw an outright fit! You know, cause you always want to be different than your daddies. But when you get older you realize you weren't really trying to be different, you were just trying to be impressive by trying to achieve something more. Real artists learn that the path to greatness comes from trying to improve and impress upon greatness that came before by recognizing what was most important about that greatness. The ability to inspire. It's what every true artist really wants. To help people feel something greater than themselves, so they have something meaningful to work towards. Art creates meaning for the effort of life to want to strive towards. #HashDate0224 #Newsreal #Weedstorming #Godwork