CRANIOTOMY: Dissection of your Human Condition
How to finally achieve your potential in life. Regain your focus, awareness, agency, and use your subconscious mind to work for you. Collection of letters.
“I have led a toothless life, a metaphorical toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting, reserving myself for later on. And I have just noticed that all my teeth are gone.” —Jean-Paul Sartre
On Craniotomy, an introduction
After observing the behaviours and attitudes of the average person today, an observer needn’t spend much time before questioning themselves entirely. This spectacle: so absurd, so ridiculous, so strange, that it is more comforting to imagine that it is not society that we observe, but a zoo. An enclosure of some sort. The creatures inside of it, barely clinging on to their consciousness. Online, this conclusion becomes more accurate:
Rodent is the rule; and vermin, an honest critique.
This assessment, without the necessary explanation to explore it, will sound harsh and unhelpful. So it is better we discuss why it is true.
The Hamster Wheel of Wasted Potential
Allow me to paint the vicious expression above with a more vibrant colour.
The fact is simple, it is not that people themselves are ‘vermin,’ or rodent-like in structure. Of course, they possess all of the necessary characteristics of a human being - in its inherent glory, and magnificence. But the truth should not be sugar coated.
The majority have not lived up to the full measure of their potential.
This statement can be made with grim certainty. And more devastating still, is that their current trajectory offers no hope or promise that they will achieve the zenith of human experience before their final breath. Recognition of this is rarely direct. No, most maintain only but a dull consciousness of it. Still, it lingers with a quiet persistence.
This is the cutting knife that twists itself ever so deeply when pondered too long. The blade that slices the hollows of ones viscera, that nestles itself within the cavern of the gut. It is quite painful, and can seldom be ignored. This sharpness reminds one of its presence when there is nothing to distract from it.
Therefore: few will ever do it, there are so many clever ways that one avoids this honest confrontation. Truthful acknowledgement of this fact—how far one falls from their potential—is always demoralising to the human character.
Reader, I cannot speak for you, and so I project my own experiences and shortcomings in these following letters to you. When I address ‘you,’ understand that I often speak to an aspect of myself. But I suspect that upon reading this, you recognise some of these things ring true for you as well.
What is peculiar about Man is that he exists with an inescapable knowing of his condition. To gaze into a persons eyes is to meet them at the point they have met themselves; one carries their personal gradation in their eyes. It is always there, and it is known - in every cell, and every fibre of the being. It is known.
It simply does not go away.
Through nature herself—as if by cruel jest—those endowed with the greatest potential are more likely to suffer this existential dread. This… knowing.
The greatest potential births it own torment.
So, with every rotation of the earth a new failure is marked: another declaration that has not manifested into reality. Seasons change yet most remain largely the same - trapped in repetitive cycles that leave no lasting impression in the soft clay of memory. They maintain this cycle, consistently rotating on the hamster wheel. There are very little rewards for their efforts.
It makes little sense, they work ever so hard. We should not consider them lazy, the problem is something else. More insidious, more sneaky.
On and on they go: despite this perpetual and endless cycle, they spin like gerbils endlessly. As if by some miracle the wheel is one of fortune, and suddenly everything will change if they continue to spin the loop. It has been years; yet they spin it still.
I write this with a growing suspicion that it has started to resonate with you rather uncomfortably.
They say they wish to be great, or at the very least humbly fulfilled. Yet, their actions do not seem to align with their desires. An insurmountable chasm of paralysis and procrastination exists between their intention and execution.
How can they allow so many of their days to blur into each other? Each year passes faster, and the months become the same, the days themselves now disappear. Repeated again and again. Repeated again and again.
Time can never be remembered when one lives this way. And in its petty spite, time returns the favour: it forgets those who slander it to waste.
Claiming the virtue of ambition means very little because anybody can state large goals. Everybody has big dreams—and so this proclamation would make you no different from anybody else. Eventually, you realise these words and exalted phantoms of opinion are worth just as much as it costs to say them. Nothing.
“Words are sweet, but they never replace food” — Igbo Proverb
Nobody wants to waste their life.
So why do so many people do it?
In the past, I have seen it phrased quite similarly to this popular anecdote:
If you were to read a book that was important to you, and you were told that you could never turn back the pages, imagine how much attention and detail you would apply to each page. Think of how intensely you would savour each word, how purposefully you would take each page to inhale its contents. Your life, of course, is exactly the same.
Again, reader, I cannot be certain this is you - only you can make this judgement, but to diagnose it accurately: allow me to dissect further.
You will know if you have been wasting your years because of the subconscious punishment you inflict upon yourself.
In the worst moments, you stop wearing your nicest clothes, the sweetest perfumes and fragrances that chemically exalt your surroundings remain untouched, you never light your best candles, you become ignorant of your best health and beauty products. The best of your grooming efforts rarely see the light of day.
The very thought of real action exhausts you. It is all so bothersome. You miss events, opportunities, even the things you used to enjoy are drained of the previous colour they had. Even if you had all of the things in the world, a part of you knows you probably wouldn’t enjoy them. There is something else.
This emerges from an unspoken self-judgement. It is an aggression against the self, and it speaks to everybody in a language even the illiterate could understand. It tells you that your present self is unworthy of life’s richness - unfit to bathe in such opulence. You save these things for later. You save them for the version of you whom you deem worthy of such things.
This self-sabotage does not relent. You begin to discover cleverly subtle ways to ruin any plans to take control and direction in your life. How easy it is to convince yourself that you do not care about allowing the highest form of yourself to materialise; to become nonchalant about your life. Loose, uncaring. To insult it. To live with a technique that degrades and slanders it.
I say this with genuine truth and kindness:
It is not your fault.
However, since it is your life, then it does not matter whose ‘fault’ it is. You are not guaranteed a second chance, therefore, it is your responsibility to curate your experience in the time that you do have.
This is no mistake; I have put this to repetition so that it might find sufficient resonance with you.
Nobody wants to waste their life.
Thus, my intentions with this letter—and the subsequent essays that are contained within it—can be stated more precisely:
To dissect, with exactness, that which prevents you from achieving your highest potential. Not to lament or frustrate, and not to tear apart the aches in your chest with cruel vexation - but to atomise your circumstance and examine it. To provide keys that will exalt your life forever.
Above all, we must ensure that you can form easily sustainable systems for repeated success. One win is never acceptable, it is useless to me, and it is only one singular victory you attain then I would have miserably failed in my writings to you.
No nonsensical abstract prescriptions. No superficial instructions to exercise, walk, or state self-affirmations in the mirror. Regurgitated tropes that are so exhausting in the digital diaspora that they are lazy echos at best. Annoying and frustrating at their worst.
Equally, there is no uber-woo ‘just heal your inner child,’ or ‘shadow work’ - both of which have been reduced to conceptual phantoms so abstract and clumsy they have no real meaning at all.
You know these things already, and you have heard them countless times. So I will not insult your intelligence so egregiously.
Rather, I write to you as someone who has been blessed. Blessed in suffering the misfortunate of humbling themselves to crawl from the lowliest depths. Who, once overly abundant in pride, was reduced to slithering on the ground like a debased invertebrate - desperate for motion.
I have found that one’s perspective is made raw and true when they have had their spirit defiled mercilessly, and the geography of prayer was explored through nightfall and necessity. Surrender and begging.
Thus, I speak to you with sickening exactness. Every spark of linguistic intensity is deliberate when I speak to ‘you’ directly, and because it is you who feels like you have been wasting your potential in life then it is important.
ON WHAT IS GOOD ABOUT YOUR CIRCUMSTANCE
It is curious. The years spent in melancholy, self-neglect, anxiety, and with a fragmented attention with dormant capacity have not depleted your potential at all. It works quite strangely, and these times and feelings have only served to enhance your potential exponentially.
On it’s head, this sounds nonsensical - but I promise this is true.
Let me explain.
The greater the duration of accumulated tension within your psyche, the more favourable; the more profound your upset and dissatisfaction, the better. Picture this more vividly:
Imagine a dam that sustains injury as it struggles to contain the magnitude of growing water that dashes against it with increasing furiousness. There is nowhere for the water to go. Or more carnally, the coiling spine prior to its abortive expulsion. With such prolonged frustration it hums with electricity.
Once you psychologically unravel, and you are able to direct this energy stored, then you will find no rival: not a moment of stagnation was squandered. The fragments coalesce with perfect coherence. Everything makes sense when it has to make sense.
You develop what is termed an autotelic character—from the Greek words "auto" (self) and "telos" (purpose)—engaging in activities for their intrinsic value rather than for measly external rewards. This is a fundamental reorientation that occurs organically; as though guided by divine instinct, you surpass ordinary limitations with an effortlessness that you cannot rationally explain.
Achievements are no longer so elusive to your grasp; they always materialise at precisely the perfect moment. The mechanism that propels this consistent success reveals itself with elegant simplicity:
The system of excellence is you.
From this profound simplicity emerges a genuine humility, and the mechanism transcends all logical comprehension. Articulating your triumphs becomes impossible. People will ask you how you do it, and you can never explain it. Not really.
It sounds ridiculous to state that you suspect the fundamental forces of nature are aligning themselves to ensure you win. You become lucky. Not as a sly insult to disrespect your efforts. It is literally the case. You keep winning, repeatedly. Again.
More.
The fragmented parts of your attention piece themselves together. It is easy to focus for hours. So easy. No longer are your thoughts so scattered that they seldom reach impressive conclusions.
The acquisition of knowledge is no longer laborious and taxing; it is natural. Your speech attains newfound eloquence; your written expression manifests crystalline clarity; your diction, ever so succulent and smooth. Liquid silk.
Confidence.
The need to impress other people dissolves. You simply are impressive.
The world responds to your authentic living without any conscious deliberation: colleagues offer their assistance and sacrifice; strangers gift radiant smiles as if to mirror your intrinsic luminosity; animals bathe in the presence of your tranquil, and infants too—who possess an uncanny sensitivity to all that is invisible—find sanctuary in the flow of your stability and warm presence.
There is no “I’ll just bookmark this for later”—There is no more denial of the best version of yourself with excuses that delay. This letter found you at exactly the right moment.
There is no more procrastination,
because your upward spiral starts now.
CONTENTS OUTLINE:
On Craniotomy, an introduction
On Psychic Entropy
On Awareness and Presence
On Thought Loops
On Attention and Focus
On Identity
On Man, When Magnetised
On Practical Solutions: Step by Step
It it my recommendation that you read the essays in chronological order, but ultimately your reading experience is completely up to you. There is however, a consistent build of the philosophy that solidifies each concept. Honestly, it’s long, and dense, so it certainly does not require reading in one go.But the entire purpose of Craniotomy is to regain your attention, focus, and maximise your potential by gaining control over your life, so it is best to take time with this. And so, with that all of that said…