”Become more authoritarian”

We may not ever truly know who we are, so we should not act like we're even capable of knowing.

"Observation of the external is not supplementary to observation of the internal" To observe is something YOU do, if you can observe the internal, then you are not the internal.

Are we a soul - a consciousness - or are we our thoughts and behaviors? If we are a soul, then trying to understand who we are is merely an observation of thoughts and feelings. If this is true then thoughts become part of the external and observation of the internal becomes impossible. A soul cannot observe itself. Trying to understand who you are becomes natural phenomena pondering about natural phenomena. The goals of living is to live and the goals of observing is to observe. If there is no universal meaning to life, there is nothing you ought to become. And if there is a universal meaning to life it is in its definition; to live. Thus there is nothing you ought to become.

To some extent you are correct though, I came to these conclusions by "looking within". Yet there is nothing that says I have uncovered the truth. I have a hard time seeing how you could ever uncover something universally true about something within. The nature of us means, it seems like, there are some things we will never know. The truth of the soul and the truth of the reality we see around us, including that which we see in our thoughts, are equally unknowable. It is also very human, I think, to reject that. We want to know the unknowable and we will stop at nothing to try to understand. This includes me. We can never know what was before the universe, yet we still ponder. We are full of contradictions and absurdities. We are humans.