Tag: existentialism

Liberalism: Making Mankind into Cattle

Liberalism is the transformation of mankind into cattle.
-Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878). I.67

What does this mean? Liberalism, in the philosophical sense that Nietzsche is using it, is an ethical framework in which man is free, equal, and autonomous. While this conception of man resonates with most as evidently true, I maintain that this is an illusory conception of man. Do we really believe that we are free? Equal? Autonomous? As with most comforting notions, we avow these ideals simply as a means of preserving the familiar, a mechanism of evasion that allows us to avoid the biting reality of our situation; namely, that we are not free, nor are we equal and autonomous.

What does Nietzsche mean when he says that liberalism is the transformation of mankind into cattle? It is the process in which individuality is smoothed over en masse, in which minds are watered down into a cloudy collective consciousness, where man is no longer a thinking spirit that possesses a unique soul but a mere facsimile. Being lead to believe that our thoughts are freely chosen, that we are as valuable as any man, that we can choose according to a unique volition, we cease to employ our internal reason, fail to reflect on our position, and assume that the ideals in which we derive our greatness are a right rather than a product.

I insist that freedom is a state of being that follows from mind, but my fellow man would hold that freedom is a state of existence that follows from body. Where these most evidently diverge, in my opinion, is when man finds himself in a state of perfect equilibrium.

When man has all his bodily needs satisfied, with every desire or whim or passion cared and provided for so that nothing is wanting, do we have a free man? Such a man would be no more free than a domesticated animal whose instincts have been muted and dulled, like an animal coddled and conditioned with pleasures generated by no necessity of its own. My fellow man, swept up in his allegiance toward the sensational, would insist that a man with all his desires satisfied is free, for what more could he want? But I would ask whether this standard– of having pleasure metted out in proportion to wants– is a good mark of freedom. Where does this standard leave man? In a perfect state of equilibrium. But is equilibrium man’s greatest achievement, his highest aim, the natural denouement of successful living?

I must ask myself more about equilibrium to discover whether this is a good measure for judging man. What is equilibrium? A state of rest or balance due to the equal action of opposing forces, an equality of balance, a calmness. From this definition I would ask whether we could equate equilibrium with man’s desire for self-preservation; is their aim one in the same?  Self-preservation is a process of maintenance of body and mind, so as to keep alive or conserve existence, or make lasting. In this light, equilibrium and self-preservation seem to be compatible states, achieving one in the same end, namely balance or preservation.

I must implore, however, as to whether this situation is reflective of nature, or a product of man’s mind? Is nature constantly seeking to retain equilibrium? Is life characterized by preservation?

Let’s observe the most obvious characteristics, in my mind, of natural experience: when my mind meets with the impressions afforded to me by my senses, there are two reigning features which traverse through all collective experience past and present. These being the continuity of consciousness and the constancy of change. The continuity of consciousness, I can conclude, is not a feature of experience, for even when I sleep I possess a consciousness, but a feature of mind alone. The constancy of change, however, is a guarantee endemic to nature, indelibly present throughout the physical world, that renders every moment of experience wholly unique and never the same.

Can we say that equilibrium and change are synonymous features? Certainly not. Does life stay the same, or is it in perpetual change? I would reply that life is in perpetual change, for I am not the boy of  my youth, neither is a frog still a tadpole or butterfly a caterpillar.

To exist occurs in the moment, to live occurs over moments. I hold then, that equilibrium is death, whereas disequilibrium is life. In this way existing is a mode of self-preservation, whereas living is a mode of thriving.

In summation, the satisfaction of desires, the end of want, places man in a state of equilibrium that is typified by the complacent tranquility which is characteristic of death. For man to be truly alive he must evolve, he must seek out disequilibrium, living in a state of anxiety and incertitude. To do this, man must not feign satisfaction, nor be satisfied with equilibrium.

Freedom, then, is disequilibrium, a form of living that transcends and expands consciousness. When change occurs, the man living in disequilibrium, having no complacent expectations, and always ready for change, does not flinch nor does he hesitate to move or act or think. His life is a fluid change.

This is freedom. Not all men possess it. Those who do act alone.

“Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks—those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.”
—Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

Existential Freedom: Simon de Beauvoir

Beauvoir presents an existential account of freedom by continuing with Sartre’s thinking of man as free, but emphasizing the ambiguity man faces by simultaneously existing in freedom and facticity, as a free being in a concrete world (7).  Man escapes from his natural condition, she says, through the freedom of rationality and the pure internality. Men have “striven to reduce mind to matter, or to reabsorb matter into mind, or to merge them within a single substance.” (7) What arises is the inherent paradox of man.

Beauvoir does not want to escape the ambiguity, like so many philosophers and thinkers have done in the past, but to accept the ambiguity and live within it, that is, “accept the task of realizing it” (13). She calls the tendency to deny, or negate, or escape the ambiguity of existence cowardice, saying that this method doesn’t pay. (8)

The existential conversion, Beauvoir says, “does not suppress my instincts, desires, plans, and passions, it merely prevents any possibility of failure by refusing to set up absolutes the ends toward which my transcendence thrusts itself, and by considering them in their connection with the freedom which projects them.” (14) This passage addresses the incarnation of subjective ends through subjective freedom. In this way she says that the world is a place willed by man which “expresses his genuine reality” (17). She emphasizes the “plurality of concrete, particular men projecting themselves toward their ends on the basis of situations whose particularity is as radical and as irreducible as subjectivity itself” (18).  This raises the question of how unique and separate men can live in ethical harmony. Her answer is that “an ethics of ambiguity will be one which will reduce to deny a priori that separate existents can, at the same time,  be bound to each other, that their individual freedoms can forge laws valid for all” (18).

To be free, then, requires the conscious spontaneous choice of projects undertaken moment by moment. These projects must be positively assumed, says Beauvoir, and the weight of the concrete consequences of these choices of the will must be accepted as a result of our fundamental freedom (24, 32). Meaning “surges up only by the disclosure which a free subject effects in his project.” (20) Thus, the principles of ethical action will be discovered as inextricable from choices and freedom (23). In the same way, the will to be moral and the will to be free are one in the same. (24) But a tension arises nonetheless from the disclosure of being. While the justification of life requires the realization of particular concrete ends, it also requires itself universally (24).  As a result, the relationship of a being with others is integral the Beauvoir’s existential thought.

Beauvoir emphasizes the failure of man as a central component to freedom, citing philosophers who wrestle with this failure as absurdity or anguish, the otherwise overall lack of answers. Beauvoir states that “nothing is decided in advance, and it is because man has something to lose and because he can lose that he can also win.” (34) In this way life is marked by activity and ambiguity enmeshed in the situated affairs of other men, all of which objectify the others.

Beauvoir describes the complex situation that free man finds himself in by illustrating the condition as men born into the world like children. A child comes into the world that is determined for them. They act according to the rules and structures pre-established. So long as a man continues acting according to this world, and never for himself, he is kept in a state of servitude and servile. (37) There is no exercise of freedom and the world is seen as a serious place. (38) Eventually the infantile world gives way to adolescence as questions are asked and discovery of subjectivity arises. (39) Not so with slaves. Even women, Beauvoir says, at least have a choice as to whether to choose or consent to the world imposed on them (38). The child is unique in that, whereas man draws upon the character of his past to make choices, the child has no character to draw from and must set it up “little by little” (40).

Beauvoir sets up several categories describing how humans seek to escape their responsibility and freedom by delineating the nature of the “sub-man”, the “serious man”, as well as the “nihilist” and the “adventurer”. The sub-man is a manifestation of bad faith and apathy by constraining activity through the denial of their freedom (44).  The sub-man is barely man at all, living in constant boredom and sloth. This sub-man is often manipulated by the serious man as an object. The serious man is an attitude that seeks freedom of objective standards and values which in turn denies freedom (47). The serious man does not act authentically because the action is not willed from freedom, its goals are not established with freedom as a goal, but rather as instruments revered in various ways as useful or right or good for some end (48-9). As soon as these objective external ends are removed from the serious man, his life loses all meaning (51).

The nihilist is a failed serious man, essentially “conscious of being unable to be anything, man then decided to be nothing” (52). The assertion of nothingness is not a result of freedom, but a result of denial found as a disappointed seriousness which “turns back upon itself”.  The nihilist is right in thinking that the world possesses no justification, but forgets that it is up to him to justify the world and instantiate himself (57).

The last is the adventurer who rejects the attitudes of the serious man and the nihilist (60). He accepts his freedom and projects, but he forgets the role of the others and thus exists in pure egoism and selfishness (61). He is therefore apt to treat others are mere instruments and sacrifice others for the attainment of personal power. In this way the adventurer is the ultimate tyrant, seeking independence and submitting to no other master but his own ends, no other master than the supreme master he makes himself (62). In this way the adventurer maintains a subjective positivity that is not extended toward others. Thus he exists in a false independence that falsely believes one can act for oneself without acting for all. (63)

Works Cited

de Beauvoir, Simone. The Ethics of Ambiguity. New York: Citadel Press, 1948.

Existential Freedom: Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre wrote Existentialism and the Human Emotions in response to the critics who viewed the corollary of his existential philosophy to be solipsism or quietism. Whether existentialists are religious or secular, Sartre states that it is impossible for man to transcend human subjectivity. Thus, subjectivity is the necessary starting point, for “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.” (15)

Sartre says that man is conscious of imagining himself as being in the future and consequently is what he has planned himself to be.  Man is a plan which is aware of itself, where nothing exists prior to this plan. (16) This runs contrary to the Cartesian paradigm stemming from “I think, therefore I am” where essence precedes existence, where concepts are the genesis of operating processes (13). In this view man is dictated by and in bondage to a priori ideas and concepts as a way of existing. However, man’s existence precedes preexisting determinations. In this way existence precedes his very essence, rendering man totally free.

Freedom is the predetermined nature that establishes a commonality of human nature. Existence is a universal human predicament, a condition that precedes consciousness, a situation man finds himself in. (14) Man’s commodity is his necessity to determine, his freedom in choosing to be. With this freedom, Sartre says, comes a responsibility for determining what he is. Every act contributes to the creation of man’s image so that every choice establishes an essence of man. (17) Man is always responsible for his choice to choose what he is to be and how he is to live: he is always in the making, continually projecting himself into the world and materializing his freedom through action, through deciding. (50)

Sartre emphasizes the responsibility man has to this freedom. A dishonest man is one who believes in passion and other deterministic excuses. Man is responsible for his passions. There is no conception prior to what man has expressed through his actions. (23) Man fashions himself through his actions, by expressing himself through a series of undertakings, through an ensemble of choices, in which he is the sum of the organization and relationships contained therein. (33) This image of man forms a constitution that is continually manifested through his total involvement on the basis of the repeated acts he forms. (34) In this way, man is a destiny unto himself in which his actions enable him to live. (35)

This freedom extends not only to the individual, but to others. Because there is no a priori conception of man, what he is and should and can be, every choice and action contributes to what we believe the image of man ought to be. (17) By allowing for the understanding of self and others, intersubjectivity establishes a universality among men that is a comprehensible human condition. Sartre says his choices to pass beyond or recede from limits or deny or adapt, represent a configuration of man in a set of circumstances. (33) This configuration is perpetually made through choosing or building an understanding of other’s configuration. (39) Thus, since the creation and invention of man’s image occurs our freedom comes with a responsibility to all mankind.

Sartre says that the fundamental project of human reality is the desire to be God since God “represents the permanent limit in terms of which man makes known to himself what he is”. (63) Freedom is the choice to create itself its own possibilities. Consequently, freedom is a lack of being. By being something concrete, one is not free. Therefore, the annihilation of being is freedom. (65) Man’s project, Sartre says, is to manifest freedom through a lack of being by making itself the desire of being, that is, making “the project-for-itself of being in-itself-for-itself”. (66)

Works Cited

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Human Emotions. New York: Citadel Press, 1987.

Existential Freedom: Albert Camus

Camus wrote the Myth of Sisyphus as an essay on the relationship between individual thought and suicide as a solution to the absurd (6). Camus used the Greek myth of Sisyphus as a metaphor for life and the seeming absurdity of living. Understanding Camus conception of absurdity is necessary for grasping the role of freedom in human existence.

According to Camus, absurdity can be found to occur anywhere, on street corners or in revolving doors. (12) It strikes in moments throughout a man’s life when the uniformity and routine of existence—the habituations of thought and regularities of action—are broken and man seeks to reconnect and repair them again (12). Camus says that “before encountering the absurd, every man lives with aims, a concern for the future or for justification (with regard to whom or what is not the question).” (57)

Absurdity arises when the inference of reason reveals itself to be wholly dependent on cognitive activity alone, the sole work of consciousness. In this event inference ceases to follow from the nauseating compulsion of objective necessities and the world readjusts itself as a relative, subjective condition of man. Camus says that “A man’s failures imply judgment, not of circumstances, but of himself.” (69) Inference positions itself as alien to the world from which we attribute it (21). When man posits the question ‘why?’ and weariness sets it, he reveals the lack of inference in his mechanical routines, and elucidates an impulse of consciousness. (13) This consciousness either dissipates as man falls back into his life’s motifs, or he realizes, through an awakening, that inference is a device imparted to the mind, rather than a process inherent to the world. Camus says man comes to terms with this awakening by embracing suicide or recovery. (13)

Camus holds that life is indeed meaningless, full of contradictions and confusion, and has no inherent values other than those that we create. He entreats, however, asking “In the face of such contradictions and obscurities must we conclude that there is no relationship between the opinion one has about life and the act one commits to leave it?” (7,8) Certainly not. Rather accepting the futility of our world as an excuse for suicide, and rather than accepting the leap of faith that religion calls for, Camus proposes that we consciously accept the futility moment by moment by revolting with freedom and passion (64). In this way living is keeping the absurd alive, retaining the possibility of happiness and meaning in moments in between, whereas suicide would negate the very absurdity and possibility that established it. (6, 54) According to Camus, revolt as “the constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity” is one of the few acceptable philosophical positions. It means we must “challenge the world at every second” (54). This revolt is defiance, an exercise of freedom, which intensifies life’s value maximally in a way that no other ideological thinking can guarantee (55).

Camus paints three extreme portraits of absurd lifestyles given the form of the lover, the actors, and the conqueror (90). While there is nothing exclusive about these lifestyles they provide a caricature of the absurdity as a joy of living creatively. Inasmuch as life is absurd, life is creation (94). “To think is first of all to create a world” Camus says. Through creation man manifests ends and aims and realities so that just as an artist “commits himself and becomes himself in his work”, a creative being commits himself and becomes himself in the tasks he lovingly chooses for himself (97). Intelligence must refuse to reason the concrete, concluding that “expression begins where thought ends” (99).  According to Camus, gratuitousness is a hallmark of the absurd life and a life with hope: with no revolt or divorce from illusions, there is no gratuitousness. What is necessary then is this constant passionate detachment (102).

Works Cited

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. New York: Vintage International, 1991.

Existential Freedom: Viktor Frankl

Viktor Frankl’s conception of the freedom of human existence spawned from his trials and observations in WWII concentration camps. Throughout his duration in camps he identified certain attitudes and behaviors that his fellow inmates exhibited when faced with death and meaninglessness. These experiences would later form his logotherapy approach. For Frankl, man’s search for meaning is the primary driving force in life. (99) The search for meaning is uniquely fulfilled by the subjective interests and responsibilities of each individual. Frankl’s logotherapy revolves around the “will to meaning” as the driving force propelling man to achieve fulfillment.  Psychiatric problems arise out of an ‘existential frustration’ when the will to meaning is obstructed. According to Frankl, values and defense mechanisms are constructs fabricated by man as a result of his desire for a meaning. (100)

This search for meaning is fulfilled in three sources. These sources of meaning are love, work and suffering. Frankl describes love as the saving ‘why’ that facilitates the ‘how’ contained in work. The final source of meaning is contained in suffering. Frankl quotes Nietzsche and says that “He who has a why can bear most any how.” He cites two reasons for why suffering is good, namely that it creates inner freedom or spiritual freedom, and that man can choose to see suffering as a task in which he can suffer proudly. Again he quotes Nietzsche saying “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” In this way suffering becomes an achievement which ‘transforms a personal tragedy into a triumph.”

Frankl stresses the importance of attitude toward life. Taking responsibility for life meant seeing life as tasks to complete with right action and right conduct (77).  Man always has choice in his action. He is responsible for his life. This responsibility is an essential response to the will for meaning. Man desires a fulfilling life; he desires meaning and worthwhile achievement. It is important to note that Frankl isn’t concerned with what man wants out of life. He is concerned with what life wants out of man. The demands of life present tasks. Man undertakes these tasks by exercising the freedom of inner life and choosing his attitude and how he aims to respond to these tasks.

Works Cited

Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston: Beacon, 2006.

Content

The life. Routine. Same old. Familiarity. Its rotten cold stench fills the room. My nostrils. I hate it. I want it exorcised from me.

What has become of me? Of my mind? Of my heart? The baseless ruminations and trivial imaginings. No. I don’t even imagine. I hide within myself. I shirk and weakly accept defeat. I let this massive framework constructed by others fill my mind. It’s terrible. Simple terrible.

I need to squeeze it out of me. Bang my head. Smash it out. Beauty. That is what I want. Nameless, formless, ethereal beauty. Something that transports my senses and desires to distant wholly righteous lands. Whatever the hell that means. And that’s what I’m talking about. All this nonsense about sense.  All this stupid schooling. Agh. School. It dampens the mind. Leaves boys and girls dull. Robotic. Refined.

I want RAW. I want RAW talent, raw emotion, raw feeling. I want the rawness of life to scrape against me, rub me into an agitated state so as to wake me. I want to open my eyes and see this rawness prevail over the population. Forget refinement.

Its a sick joke. The mass mania. The delusional enterprises of gratification. Of economy. This American dream. This American nightmare. This world, filled with animals. Walking talking animals. Empty in mind and spirit. They consume. They eat and drink and take in information.

NO. I refuse to go down that route. I want my chest cavity to peel back. I want my heart exposed and beating. I want to sink into the soil and rot and give new life to a bed of flowers. Composting new thoughts.

Have I forgotten myself? Is it the civilization that has high jacked my fantasies? Have I become irresponsible with the individual I am? Where is that small voice? Where is the voice that speaks against the grain and into the wind?

No more aphoristic speech. I want sheer agony to escape from the lips of my mouth and tips of my fingers. I want a song, a wretched song, a song so beautiful it renders the masses in agony. Their unworthy ears.

To foster passion, you need to get angry. You need to be shaken. I need to assert myself with some originality. Who the hell knows what that means at this point? So many conventions. They become rote and soon my brain disconnects from my heart and I spill apart. God. The pathetic ramblings. The pathetic complaints about rambling.

Get me out of here. Out of this body. Out of this mind. Into the raw texture of life. Wrap me in it. Submerse me in its itchy or smooth or terrible or awesome rawness.

The lights dim. Creativity? A voice? Originality? All pathetically manufactured. They have no meaning. They have been robbed and we have been fed a lie. Zombies.

Spatia Ante Materia

Spatia ante Materia (Spatia Rem or Spatia et Materia)

Is consciousness chosen? No. Therefore, there is no free will.

Consciousness was pulled out from within, forced into by demand.

The objective of life is to satisfy demands. All matter is a response to space. As matter, we exist to fulfill these flowing demands of space.

I want to write a magnum opus on a theory of everything which explains phenomena such as mind, knowledge, and reason. The theory will take on a form resembling mathematics, whereby balance and equilibrium serve as the natural progression for all cause and effect.

The exposition will begin by grounding three main concepts: polar pairs  (+, -), equilibrium (=), change (, ->)

What is important is not what is included, but what is excluded. Cause precedes effect, just as demand precedes supply, as space precedes matter, as form precedes substance.

Demand and Supply

Demand: (-),space, empty, negative, cause, pull, question, eternal, infinite, possibility, freedom

Supply: (+), matter, full, positive, effect, answer, temporal, finite, actuality, necessity

Equilibrium: (=), balance, harmony, synthesis, (life energy of being)

Change: (), (->), condition, (A third relation between +&-)

Why do we live in a dualistic world?

Phenomenon: L.L. phænomenon, from Gk. phainomenon “that which appears or is seen,” noun use of neut. prp. of phainesthai “to appear,” passive of phainein (see phantasm). Meaning “extraordinary occurrence” first recorded 1771. Plural is phenomena.

What is the origin of phenomena? Occurrence? Change?

Equilibrium, a balance of tensions, results from change.

Why is there space at all?

Life is a progression of changes toward equilibrium.

Entropy is a progression toward an equilibrium state.

Is life the most efficient form of entropy?

Reality is a question; not an answer.

Time a measure describing a rate of change, . Time is not constant but relative to rates.

Knowledge is never so pure than in its moment of conception.

Change must not be rigid, otherwise is will not adapt. Knowledge is inherently rigid: determinate; composed and formed. Understanding is fluid: indeterminate; flexible and open. Knowledge sufficiently supplies for necessary demands.

Where S & + are matter and D & – are space:
MP: S->D/ S// D
MT: S->D/ ~D// ~S

Demand is a necessary condition for all supply: without demand, there is no supply; without space, there is no matter; without problems, there is no knowledge. Supply is a sufficient condition for demand; knowledge is a sufficient condition for problem. As a sufficient condition, demand may be satisfied by any posited supply; problems may be satisfied by any posited knowledge. Equilibrium is reached by a supply that accounts for and satisfies maximum proximate demands.

LEM: (+ v ~+), that is (+ v -)
LNC: ~(+ ∧ ~+), that is ~(+ ∧ -)
LI: (+=+), that is (+<=>+), reflexive relation/ tautology

Mind

Intentionalism:

“In an intentional state, something is presented to the mind. So any intentional state is a presentation. What is presented is called an intentional object; for a state of mind to have an intentional object is for it to be directed on that object, So, insofar as a state of mind is directed, it has an intentional object. The intentional object of a thought is given in the answer to the question ‘what is your thought about?/what is your thought directed on?’ For a state of mind to have aspectual shape is for it to present its object in a certain way. And so, insofar as the state of mind has aspectual shape, then it has intentional content. The intentional content of a thought is given in an answer to the questions ‘what are you thinking?/what is in your mind?’ Since, according to intentionalism, all mental states have directedness and aspectual shape, then all mental states have an intentional object and intentional content.”

-Crane, Stephen: Elements of Mind (2001)

I would like to explore the origin of presentation. The presentations that give rise to mind result from causal demands. All matter maintains a spatial relation between other matter. Equilibrium progress manifests relations as tension from unresolved demands. Bodies present themselves in relation to other bodies; everything else. Matter is not inclusive, but exclusive. This relational tension manifests a pull, a demanding force, a gravitation. All bodies, exclusive and distinct, are in misrelation until an equilibrium reaches universal homogeneity.

Consciousness

Consciousness was pulled out from within, forced into existence- into a condition, a being, a change, a continuous enactment- by demand.

Self

“The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.”
— Søren Kierkegaard

The notion of self. Self. What is self? What is consciousness?

I can’t just dive into it. I must rivet it out of me. The self is reflexive. It is an enactment, a verb, a being. The self is a struggle, a despairing misrelation between polarities, between infinite and finite, temporal and eternal, possibility and necessity. It is idealism and realism. It is the struggle that we cannot stand still within and move without.

How to consider what is and what will be. Induction and deduction. Static and flux.

Life stands out in all its sinewy gnarliness. The rudimentary lines drawn along the edges of contoured bodies, people and trees and other furniture filling the landscape of life. Self. There is no intermediary between the subject and object: there is only the self. We stand between ourselves. We are the demons that claw within, we are our own worst. The relation. The self-hood. This reflection.

I stare into the mirror and see a body. I move and this image moves correspondingly. An extension. A living breathing extension. I relate myself to this image that is myself. The dilating eyes. My dilating eyes. I cannot objectify this experience without losing hold of it. Thus we have the story of self.

The world is like a painted canvas. These objects are nothing but smearings of color that bleed in time and space and affect my sensitivities, prompting an involuntary response. I manage by distinguishing these smearings.

Distinctions. The whole is a comprised of parts, distinctions. Let us grapple the whole. Let us toss the parts. The whole is the self. We cannot construct a full self with handfuls of parts. Everything is a distinction. Dissolve distinction; then peel it back. Peel back the teguments and unveil the nature of experience, awaken your being.

Intention: Directedness that holds objects and content; point of view, reference, marked by aspectual shapes. We point and see the contours of experience.

The self is a continual realization of what was and what will. Faith places one in the now, somewhere in between.

Tired

I cant sleep. I went to bed at 230am thinking that I’d be fast asleep by now but no… that isn’t the case at all. Instead I twist and turn and adjust and readjust the covers and think about random thoughts. Just dwelling. Where? I haven’t got a clue. Somewhere on the margins of my mind where passions mix with memories and modes.

Clouds with eyes. Snail eyes. They petrude from the starry night sky and blink. You reach out to touch and they retract, only to inch their way out, slowly with caution, and peer once more.

Some friends stopped by tonight around 100am. Very uncharacteristic for this crowd, but then again its finals week and they’re all finished up. I, on the other hand, have an exam at 1200pm tomorrow. I need to wake and take my sister to work and study for a few hours more. At this rate I’m not sure if I’ll get the sleep I need.

My thoughts. What thoughts. It’s all the same. Over and over. Cruel. To have form or be formless? To mold to the world, permeate and penetrate its pores, saturate and shape with its contours and fall gently on my feet with formless grace? Or do I ram and butt and blow the world around me? Do I force it to mold to me and make it in my image?

Colorful stringy things. Lily pads. Plum fruit.

All I had today for food was an eight ounce steak, an apple, a coke, and a glass of milk.

The ants go marching. Giant iron telescopes. Lion eyed. Smile. Flash.

We are the source of it all. The juicy details. The leviathan. Concentration. Attention. Ten-hut. My toes are cold. I battle with my room mates to keep the heat up. I don’t like paying more in utilities as much as the next guy but you gotta stay warm for christs sake. A home needs to be habitable. And not just habitable so long as you’re wearing seven layers of clothing. I like the nude, and winter doesn’t jive too well with that. I have to compromise and wear a lot more clothing. But anything more than two layers, in my own home, is just unbearable.

I need to sleep. Care bears. Clouds. We see people as we are.

The waterfalls cascade upwards. Rain trickles up in binary digits. Cascading code.

I need to smack the shit outta myself. Wake up. Not now. But in general. Now I need to sleep. In general I need to wake up. I need to get zesty about life. I don’t wanna talk about meaning, existence or any of that bullshit any more. I just wanna be content with whats happening.

Freckles and a smile. Cubicles. Rows of cubicles. If you lived in a digital world, there would be no more icicles. Only cubicles.

Who am I going to be? Every day I become more of that person. Who will I be someday? What will compose that person. Breath in ten times. Feel light headed. Be absurd.

Erase. Pink e-racer. Ticonderoga.

My lap top is half closed on my lap. I’m typing with my eyes closed. Images pass through my mind. They exit through my finger tips. Leather hats. Feathers. Beads. Mountains. Glorious mountains. Ice capped mountains. Their peaks frosty and blue. Dark blue against the azure sky.

Echoes. Giggles and playful things. Smiling eyes.

Sleep. sleep. Leather. Dark leather. The story is ending. The scene is closing. The plot has unfolded. Turn the page. Turn to the last page. Moustache.  Blur. Hard work.

I press the eraser into my eye.

The sky is beautiful. Not now.  In my head. It is majestic. Pink . The flowers move back and forth in the breeze like excited little school children. They shake with excitement. The sky is bleeding upward away from the horizon. It bleeds with the dreams of those who sleep. Our dreams will bleed for those still awaiting the night. What a magical place. Inside my head. The arches. These twin arches. They transition from silver to gold and back again. Family is important.

I want adventure. I want to so bad it ruins the taste of life. Adventure. Daring adventure. Risky adventure. Adventure that is open and bright. The adventure where everyone is expecting you. Where there are countless paths and everyone has something marvelous in store. A new person. A new discovery. Wonders lurking like salamanders. Cool places rich with surprise. Every corner turns over a new leaf.

Vermont. Chapped lips. Pine trees. Maple trees. Gray skies. Blankets of sullen snow. Virgin snow. Snow like a canvas stretched out on mother earth.  A half painted canvas that wears its way in with every passing day the sun shines brighter. Each trail is a bursh stroke. Summer sets in as cold gives way to warmth, as pallid playgrounds portray their hints of color. With these days the canvas becomes full of life. The canvas is no longer pale but teeming with painted living. Vivacious life. Under the shade of great big trees. Pine cones. Water ice. Dusty trails. Dew drops. Sweat.  Patios. Insects buzzing around, landing on pages as you rock in the breeze. Nod your head into its arms.