Experience

Your mind is a vacuum. Don’t clog it with filth.

Well. It’s three in the morning. I’ve written close to six thousand words in two days. Not a terribly astonishing feat. This whole book writing process will prove to be a novel experience (no pun intended). It’s about the only thing on my mind at the moment. Not exactly conducive for managing studies and extracurricular commitments. Writing a book is difficult. I feel like in order to produce a single book, you have to write about three times its length, at least, in order to clarify and construct the themes and content, not to mention all the prose and poetics. I could see myself rewriting entire chapters over again. Half the process is simply getting the material out. It feels great though.

I had a long conversation with a friend this evening. We stood in the parking lot and discussed the merit of ‘new experiences’ and deriving value from these experiences. We can’t do it all, so we must choose to manage our time and our experiences wisely. What experiences do we choose? What goals? Who is setting these goals? Am I choosing, or am I letting some other force- such as peer influence, parents, or culture at large- deciding their value for me? Are all experiences equally valuable? Potentially equally valuable? Being a subjective judgement, no experience has inherent value as it’s only the value we give it (Perhaps life is valuable? But who’s or what’s? To whom?) Can we choose what we value? Where do we draw the line for experiences? Those that don’t lend to accomplishing long term goals? Short term? What is your long term goal? To be a cog in the system? (Or an intricate organism in the ecology of capitalism- more pleasing to the ears) To be more fully human? What are we trying to achieve with these goals? Happiness? Contributions to mankind? Why? Who decided that your current goal was a contribution?  Say we decided that a utilitarian approach yields the best answer, and we use a cost benefit analysis to examine the short and long term pros and cons of each experience we decided to undertake. Is experience life? Is experience a sampling of reality? A snapshot, a crude distillation of what reality is about? If life is a continual experience, and we are one perspective, one sampling of this reality, won’t more experience bring us closer to understanding the full nature of reality?  More traveling, more people, more relationships, readying, studying, reflecting, confronting, risking? Just as collecting all the worlds knowledge, past and present, will lead us to the most accurate illustration of reality? There is no reality to speak of without a mind to behold it and speak it. The more minds, the fuller picture of reality we acquire? The more we engage experience- life, perspectives- the more fully we understand reality? Or is this all wrong? Can man have faulty paradigms that taint his experience and render it useless? just as a faulty camera will not take more accurate pictures of the world no matter how many pictures it takes?

So I am interested in changing paradigms, changing the lens with which peole view the world. How is this acquired? Through new experiences? Possibly. Reflection? Possibly. Study and knowledge acquisition? Possibly.  I want to be able to understand the human condition, nature, and reality, from the objective, subjective, and inter subjective sense. I want to submerse myself with these insights, synthesize them, and disseminate them into the world.