Personal blog by Khanh Vy
When I was young, I loved writing and poetry. As I grew older, I gradually lost the feeling to write anything and thought I could not write anymore. Maybe it was because of the hustle and bustle of work, limited time, or simply because I had changed a lot. How could literature be possible with such bare emotions, my mind only thinking about work, startups, products, sales, etc. But today I write again. Writing gives me the feeling of meeting an old friend, which is myself, in a softer version. What I write is not to share knowledge, because my knowledge is limited, not qualified enough to convey anything to anyone. I only dare to write about the thing that I am best at, most thoroughly, which is my own ideas.
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Compared to my immature days, I have gradually become more hesitant to share morals or express something on social networks. Not because I am afraid of being judged, but because the “morals” in me change over time. It would be like an unstable person if today I say A, tomorrow I accidentally discover B and declare C after realizing some principle halfway between A and B.
So, I just kept quiet and explored the world. No affirmation, no denial.
It feels good to immerse my mind in many different categories of every concept, thought, way of life, personality, viewpoint, culture, prejudice, custom… in the world. This world is too big and interesting to stay stuck in one place. So I allow myself to be free to think , selectively, I love change.
When you realize that you were born to commit, all changes from within and without are consequences, the toll of the path called experience.
So what do I explore? And how? How? — I just sit and mind-travel. Explore what? — The inner world, the deepest part of man.
Yes, besides running startups marvyco.com and octokit.co (launching in June 2022), exploring the human soul is what I feel most interested in in my life activities. You may see humans as just annoying creatures full of drama, but I see them as miniature asteroids. You don’t need to go out to explore the world, just go deep inside a person, you will see the whole universe. Immerse yourself in an entity and wander their soul. That’s how I travel. For example, after enjoying a beautiful work, such as Trinh Cong Son’s music, Ngo Thuy Mien’s music, poetry, paintings of any artist, I am extremely curious about what happened in their soul and what materials were used to produce such works. My curiosity never ends. Among the 7.7 billion people on the planet, once an object catches my curiosity, my mind will continuously jump to the number of harmless questions:
Why are they who they are?
What has this person been through, what circumstances have shaped who they are today?
Why do they have the expressions/ perceptions/ mindsets they have?
What is the true core of this person?
What will their personalities give and take away from them in the next 10 years?
Questions that no matter how hard I try to collect all the evidence, all the speculations, all the observations, the answers (that I find myself) never satisfy me. I want to go deeper. I want to go deeper, I want more of everything. There is plenty of data on personality types, the Enneagram divides people into 9 personality groups, the MBTI divides people into 16 types, and psychology has a history dating back to the 19th century with countless research documents always open to anyone who wants to really step into it. In addition, there are horoscopes, astrology, zodiac signs, physiognomy, numerology… so many useful tools to read human tendencies, I know them all. But can the deep and detailed thoughts of people really be revealed based on such a general theory?
Traveling inside someone’s heart means getting to know them as if they were a lover. Get to know them long enough. You have to look at their education level, family, friends, habits, interests, demographics, mindset, views… You have to dive into their past, encounter their emotional wounds, their inner child, their childhood, their feelings, their journey of forming their personality. The important thing is to do all of the above with the least prejudiced mind, with the most open heart. This is not easy, and you also need to be very selective. Because first, getting to know them the wrong way will turn into ‘breaking into their inner self’, becoming uninvited guests. Second, not every soul is worth spending time to get to know. Luckily, in this world, there are not too many individuals that interest me to ‘learn more’ so deeply (otherwise I would have become a criminal investigator or a busybody who likes to meddle in other people’s business). I have met and passed by so many similar types of people. Those who ‘stay’ usually have to make a strong impression on me, have new characteristics beyond my understanding, or be people… destined for me. I also have to thank a few official and unofficial relationships that have passed through my life. After all, they are like… experimental creatures for me to study the human psyche. I analyze their actions, words, thoughts. I ask, ask a lot, ask about their childhood, experiences, journeys, emotions, from A to Z. Luckily, they are all honest and pour out their hearts to me. Many times they have not researched themselves as much as I have. Many times they do not know where their fears, bad habits, and hidden psychological corners come from, until I ‘unearth’ their source. In the end, I just want to see the most naked version after all the surface layers, who they are. Who we are .
My ‘research’ does not stop at my lover but also other people I have met in my twenty years of life. The results are very interesting. I have met many highly educated people but empty inside, people who look ‘plentiful’ and lush on the outside but inside are black holes. Some people have dark, negative ways of thinking, strange expressions compared to the majority, but have a strong artistic potential, the highest ego and the lowest self-esteem can be happening inside them, at the same time. There are people who look stupid but turn out to be extremely intelligent, their intelligence requires time and a spiritual zoom to realize. And so on and so forth… No matter how good/bad the expression is, those personality aspects are extremely interesting to me. Data about human psychology is endless all around, the important thing is how we receive it with our eyes.
How do we judge others?
Homo Sapiens is a social animal species, living in groups, herds, and tribes that fought for food and territory. This invisibly created a trait that can never be changed in the modern human genome: superiority . ‘Us’ vs ‘them’ ‘I’ vs ‘them’ ‘Ego’ vs ‘it’ ‘I’ vs everyone else. Most of the time, when faced with new personalities, customs, and practices, people often compare and automatically lower things that are different from us. In fact, there is nothing wrong with having a high ego and always feeling that we are better than others. But the biggest lesson I learned when I started studying human personality is 3 words: less prejudice . Less prejudice against things that are different from us, that do not please us, or that we feel are not valid. We dislike a person because we are only facing one of their dozens of personalities. They may not be good to us but they are an angel to someone else. Or, we meet this person when they are 20 years old and have a bad impression but may not have the same feeling if we first meet them when they are around 30, even if they are the same person. Because people do not need to die to live another life, the miracle of life is that we can be reborn or transform continuously in the same life, living with many opposite personality versions, at many different times in life.
In terms of personality, no one is completely good or completely bad, like yin and yang, black and white are in harmony in one universe.
All the opposite states of good/bad, from the most noble to the most despicable, must exist in parallel in the world of life. In addition to helping to create the law of balance between yin and yang, they are all a piece of data from the Source – of universal intelligence. The highest Source (also known as God) is all matter, properties, forms, and thoughts combined. God can be an almighty savior of humanity, or a stripper in a nightclub with a tight silicone butt. The most sacred and the most profane are all created by humans. In other words, each of us and everything out there is made up of a piece of God. If it only included the good, God would no longer be God, and this life would not exist.
So there is no right or wrong, only difference is the ultimate principle that creates an infinitely diverse, infinitely great universe.
Life is a series of choices. Every choice (good or bad) has a price to pay, a karma to bear. As for choices or viewpoints, there is no such thing as absolutely right or absolutely wrong, only what outcome we want to receive at the end to choose the starting point and the middle point that is suitable for us. For example, Ms. A marries a rich man, Ms. B is self-reliant, working hard to start a business. Although according to the general point of view, Ms. B’s path seems more noble than Ms. A’s, in truth, no one is more noble than anyone else. Each has their own reasons, their own hardships, and the risks that come with them. Depending on the circumstances, personality, thinking, and vision of each person, they will lead to two choices. Therefore, we should not judge whether a person is living rightly or ‘living wrongly’. They may be living wrongly in our frame of reference (and we have the right to stay away from them), but they are completely ‘living their life to the fullest’ within the boundaries of their own understanding, their own thinking conditions, their own moral scope, or within a certain lesson that the universe is designing specifically for their own lives.
Poor ethics is also a choice.
When we refer to everything that happens in life as choices , we can look at the overview of hundreds of choices to analyze more deeply about a person’s personality and inner self. In my opinion, a murderer has chosen an immoral path among countless other paths that he could have chosen. Because clearly, to kill a person is not as simple as Thanos snapping his fingers, but requires a combination of choices, choosing the time, place, choosing the weapon, during the time of making those decisions, he must have thought about the consequences of killing, and he still firmly walked on this path.
Spectacularly speaking, our personality/character is not necessarily predetermined, given by fate or by our parents, but is all our own choice.
However, there are exceptions, no one wants to choose a bad personality for themselves. A person with strange behavior cannot be explained simply because that person is inherently bad. It can be due to countless reasons such as the environment in which they were raised, trauma in the subconscious, lack of understanding, karmic roots from many previous lives or other deep causes that they themselves cannot control. If still within the framework of morality, human vices should be tolerated and transformed in this life by returning to the subconscious, finding out the cause, and healing with generous love. The important thing is that the client himself must be enlightened about the importance of spirituality, aware of how every action he creates will affect the overall situation of his own soul in the endless stream of time in the future. The deeper we delve into psychological issues, the more we see that humans are pitiful creatures, having to both drown in the wheel of reincarnation and be stuck in the material and spiritual cycle that we ourselves have created. The more we understand spirituality, life, and the universe, the more we feel that we should love and be more forgiving towards people. The more we experience, the more we realize that we know nothing.
What does inner travel bring me?
I mentioned a sentence ‘ I love change’ at the beginning of the article. Experiencing a soul gives me the feeling of finishing a book, completing an adventure, even living a strange chapter of life. And after reading a book or traveling, we will more or less change inside. I receive academic knowledge when meeting a knowledgeable person, learn carefree when being with a ‘street’ friend. Regardless of origin, degree, a beautiful inner self will always shine even if the outer layer is dirty and patchy, and conversely, no matter how flashy, masked, or literary, it cannot cover up an empty personality.
After all, I realized that I was not studying people because I was curious about them. I was studying them because I was studying myself. When you look into someone’s eyes, you don’t just see them, you also see yourself. I am still continuing to delve into myself…
Saigon, April 2022 Khanh Vy.
