Tag: thoughts

Streaking Canopy

I can’t sleep. Insomnia has plagued me. Not insomia, per say, more of a total lack of diligence. I’ve been observing myself from afar the past few months, and I can’t help but think I’ve degenerated into a raving lunatic. There’s something of a compensatory malaise that’s settled on me, a disease of the imagination, one of the heart. I’ve succumbed to old vices, justified desultory behaviors, yielded to impulse, all in the name of fulfillment. And while I can’t say I’m in a state worth complaining about, I’m not exactly sure I feel any more fulfilled because of it.

Where is the self-discipline? I rationalize my passions, these unpredictable tyrants, with aphorisms like “reason must be a slave to the passions” and other nonsensical speak. What is balance? Before the structured society, nature imposed her rule, through time, the seasons, the setting sun. I’ve lambasted society’s strict structure as a pathetic excuse to escape responsibility from her order, all in the name of wildness. But am I an animal? Where is my personal narrative, my imagination? Why can I not call on a thread of story to sow meaning back into my life? I find myself with fading preoccupations that come and go with the tide, and I proclaim my evolution. But all the while the shore recedes and I am left with less than when I started. Am I too harsh? I have declared the reclamation of merit to live on a whim, but at what cost? Have I regressed? Have I grown into myself, or out of myself?

Change is something of a comfort. I’m tired of these thoughts, these stagnating feelings, these perduring words that have etched themselves into my psyche, that beat incessantly at my consciousness like a dripping faucet. Stillness breeds pestilence: placid pools choked of a streaming consciousness. Familiarity has evaporated fresh thought, leaving me with more of the same. Where are the revelatory insights? Do they come and go? Do I implore the world for more of her wisdom? or do I dig and mine for it from within? And what of the world and my proper place in it? Do I tell stories? do I listen to stories? or do I create them?

I am surrounded by enablers. People that feed my ego, that affirm the worth I continually seek to discard. I need to molt, to metamorphisize into something grander. Can this happen in my current state? Should I seek new frontiers? How should I employ my experience? How should I demonstrate my value? Where might I find something that doesn’t reek with past association? What is it that I am trying to escape? Where does this restlessness arise? Do I stab at it with self criticism? Do I strangle it with satisfaction?

But I want to do great, I say, want to change the world in an unprecedented way. I keep my eyes cocked, one pointed outward toward the world, the other inward toward my soul, to achieve balance, I say, but I only become disoriented. What will salvage this soul of mine? Is it literate? Do I leverage words over the minds of men, persuade them to embrace the clairvoyent alms I offer, the values I impart to the world? Do I act as a torch to light the way? And who will light my path? Is that for me alone? Or do I light the torches within other men, one by one, so that they become their own beacon, their own true north?

There are only questions, endless seas spanning leagues and chasms and planes. If I was a bird; I would have a voiced graced by divine inspiration and wings to carry me above the rising currents that bake the earth. I could soar across new landscapes, traverse valleys and streak up the hills, catch secret shade in towering canopies, and greet frontiers of wide open blue. Where is my place in this world? Is it in words, in symbols, in relations? Do I steep myself in meditation, in reflection? Or do I act with unrequited abandon and throw myself into the world? But the balance, you say, the moderation that beckons every stable being, where is that in this wide open dream?

Facebook, these digital landscapes, falsifies reality. The updates. The information. We are drowning in information. Do we need more knowledge? Does this world need more knowledge? More abstracted meaning? More stuff to fill our minds, to clog our souls, to muddle our mental machinery? I believe we are overflowing with information. Do we need more scientists? What of all the science we have? Are we getting any closer? What is the end, here? What have we achieved? Is our society any better off? Are we any better off? Do we have any more answers than when we started? So what is the goal? Should we make more of an effort to learn more? To stuff our brains with more symbols, more words? Will that provide the meaning, the answers? Will that suffice? I believe we have reasoned from the wrong premises, and our conclusions, natural as they may be, will fail us. I want to start over. From where?

I will secure a j-o-b soon. I type it like that because it’s often said like that, as if the word contains a frightful taboo, a terrifying reality that we should shield ourselves from. Upon securing this job, what have I to do then? Apply myself, earnestly produce value for my employer, all in the name of a paycheck, in the name of some core values and mission statement coined in a conference room by men wearing pin striped suits whose aim is to devise a moral incentive to maintain company performance. Workers are numbers, applicants, positions: faceless and nameless in the sea of business, in the market of operations. Performance is dictated by necessity, and beliefs are formed accordingly. We have bills to pay, mouths to feed, cash to accumulate, things to buy that extol our worth and achievement, and suddenly work becomes meaningful. But when all of that is provided, life suddenly becomes meaningless. The only outlet is pure self-expression, artistic screams that cry for some transcendental worth to imbue activity with meaning. But the crowds are fickle, and appealing to them for direction and value is a fruitless endeavor. No, you must dictate direction and value to the crowds.

Figures in authority ask the questions. It is not your place to question me if you are inferior, they say. Who do you think you are? I ask the questions, and you provide the answers. Let us educate our workforce in this way, silly complacent children.

The boys come and go. They are preoccupied with the thoughts of others. They seek approval of their worth, so they act the part, play the role, pander to the appraisal of others. Their lives, like most others, are empty; their own thoughts do not stay close but pass through them like a sieve. What is retained is a shallow film scraped from the sides of their hollow canisters. It is the same grime, the same soot, the same slime that festers across the airwaves, that penetrates the media madness, that trickles across the ticker, that dawdles down the twitter. The same information, reaffirming our crumby selves, our empty selves, devoid of self imposed rule, of self affirmed value. We become machines, with machine minds and machine hearts, latticed with everyone else’s ideas, with everyone else’s dreams, pipe dreams.

Truth Hear

In customary social interaction, I tell people what they want to hear: the truth. And for that reason truth is the most insidious instrument ever to have been invented.

When I want to move people into feeling, I talk in terms of their truth, what they perceive to be real, however far from reality and actuality that may be. Does this cause injury or harm? Do we like being shaken from our dreams?

That is why I let people sleep. Very few people want to be woken from their slumber.

Truth anesthetizes the senses the same way repetitive knocking becomes silent background noise: first it is salient, then it is comforting, finally it disappears.

Repetition lulls man to sleep. It dulls his senses by incessantly chipping away at his resistance until he is made more facile and docile, more tolerant to the beating drum, the inculcation.

Very rarely do I talk in terms of actuality. Far too many people shiver at the prospect of losing ground in their truth. Very rarely do I have the courage to disrupt their cool delusions. Am I wrong? Does this antagonize their delusional trance?

Though exceedingly rare, it is only when someone opens a conversation with hope and self-criticism simultaneously do I test the waters of actuality with my toe, making sure to create the most gentle ripple across their placid consciousness so that I may observe how they react to these waves. If there is no hope, such a ripple will likely cause them to thrash and drown. Where there is hope they will tread water, perhaps reluctantly; and where criticism can churn waters and whip waves high above their head, they will rise with the wake and achieve greater perspective.

What is unfortunate, however, is that most have no hope. No hope in their ability to think critically, to tread in tumultuous waters, and gain perspective. As a result they shirk from novelty, they preserve misaligned bias, and they maintain a certain xenophobia to all things foreign.

While I strongly resist any notion that man is inherently limited by nature, rather than strictly limited  by self, I can only conclude that most prefer the tranquility of sleep, the plush luxury of feeling comfortable in their current state, and that the herd, though bewildered and duplicitous, offers the only mentality capable of capturing this feeling of familiar.

 

Learning the Art of Coming to Be and Passing Away

“It takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and—what will perhaps make you wonder more—it takes the whole of life to learn how to die.” –Seneca

Upon reading this quote, my initial thoughts relate to the competing processes of enculturation and creativity. More exactly, conforming and proforming. I use proforming, a neologism, rather than dissent only because dissent seems to breed thoughts of destructive opposition rather than constructive opposition. Creativity is a glamorized form of dissent which society embraces, usually only after it has been deemed innocuous.

But what could Seneca  have meant? I believe that, much like Plato’s representation of Socrates’ philosophy, enlightenment is a process of dying to one’s old beliefs and biases. In the Phaedo, Plato describes Socratic philosophy as preparation for death. More specifically, philosophy’s critical thinking works to reveal our ignorance and produce a greater understanding of truth, or the form of the Good, which in turn purifies the soul, preparing it for its final resting place. This may sound obtuse but the message is very clear: we must detach ourselves from the worldly meanings and beliefs we accept unquestionably as an adequate guide to understanding if we are to attain truth and understanding.

As it specifically relates to Seneca’s quote, the first half of our life is spent acquiring inherited habits of thought that supposedly teach us how to live and flourish, while the second half of our life is learning how to shed these habits of thought and escape the limitations contained within them. Fyodor Dostoevsky highlights this situation, almost satirically, saying  “It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.”

In order to make any worthwhile contribution to “progress” an individual must upset the old order of things, overturn the status quo and spoil convention, but this is impossible if he possesses no original contribution of his own.  Originality can only be achieved by shedding the old and adopting the new. This means recreating your being through the assertion of your sovereign will-to-power in order to establish a wholly novel identity totally independent from the existing powers of worldly trappings.

Of course, I have also read this quote to mean the process of acquainting oneself with the world, of growing attached to all its eidetic sumblimations that ligature the soul and body, only to discover that age furtively attenuates these impressions, and it is the world that first begins dying to us before we die to the world.

*

I’m additionally drawn to the writing’s of Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu; specifically to Althusser’s ideological state apparatus and Bourdieu’s concepts of doxa and habitus. Other concepts I loosely associate with these two is nomos and plausibility structures derived from Peter Berger’s The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociology of Religion which deals with the individual’s metaphysical necessity for affirming cosmological order in the face of chaos. Put concisely, this necessity gives rise to a reflexive dialectical process of internalisation and externalisation among self-denied values and the absorbed collective values which establishes a “psychological constellation” of legitimization. This constellation in turn serves as an indispensable substratum for all future social institutions and their structures (nomos) which effectively “locates the individual’s life in an all-embracing fabric of meaning”. (Berger) His first book The Social Construction of Reality addresses the subject of social construction wholesale.

 

Fid

Words are like capsules of feeling. When properly strung together they become pearls that you wear in your mind so that the light of experience reflects and refracts into a brilliant rainbow of color, decorating and illuminating your inner chambers of thought.

Confidence is attractive. Why? I believe it has something to do with appearing genuine. I know that’s a load of crap, cause being confident or being genuine doesn’t guarantee one or the other, but I believe we like to think it does. When you aren’t confident, there’s uncertainty. And people become uncertain about their impression of you. People like control. They like a world and people they can count on. If you aren’t confident, you probably can’t be counted on.

I’m not saying everyone should be confident… but yea, yea I am. Fake it. I believe you should be confident about your shortcomings, about your limits, about your lack of understanding, about you strengths, and so on and so forth. Be confident where you stand. Be confident that you may be wrong. Confidence manifests as assertion, as declaration. It’s important to project yourself onto the world, every facet and flaw and gem of glory you possess. That’s the only way to truly know yourself. That’s the only way to truly be yourself. And as you gain confidence, you gain a greater sense of being. And you begin to incarnate an ever evolving life that effloresces in time.

*

Moments and modes. My roommates use these words to describe what appears to be my various desultory states of being. I change modes, overturn ethics and morals, undermine and contradict myself. For the moral man, this behavior appears inconsistent, untrustworthy. But I don’t think I could ever trust myself, my thoughts and conclusions, if it were any other way. I like to think that adopting different modes allows for the advent of new perspective. The only way you gain perspective, I believe, is if you change some variables, like values or the weight or significance you give to certain entities and activities and events in your experience.

Some of my modes include prioritizing writing, introversion, reading, an antipathy for socializing and culture. Others include the opposite, where action without much forethought is prized, where people and relationships are put on a pedestal. And still other modes include a mentality of pure success and domination, a lack of empathy and care for others that fail to aid my journey of achivement. But there is a spectrum.

People can be bland. (I can be bland, that’s why I feel like I can make that statement) Maybe adopting these modes all the time makes for unpredictability, but isn’t that life? We try to control, control, control. Which is nice in some modes. But you really can’t embrace the idiosyncratic fluctuations of colorful experience when you’re in complete control. Your control, the premise for your control, is that the future will be like the past. But that certainly isn’t the case. And additionally, that mentality doesn’t allow for the variegation of change to work its way into your life so that growth can take place.

I was going to say more, but whatever I was thinking escaped me.

So this semester I’ve been on the domination streak. Not much thinking, and it’s been feeling great. Lifting six days a week. I weigh 195lbs now at roughly 15% bodyfat. Not shabby. Feeling all nordic and vikingish. Getting strong. Doing my work. Taking 18 hours. Working 15 hours (or struggling to work 15 hours). I’ve been allotting time for socializing and pleasure. I’ve been practicing my guitar quite a bit, and even formed a little jam band with my roommates. We have a drum set in our dining room now. It provides a nice, Nashvillian decorative touch.

I actually have a lot that I could write about. It doesn’t ever occur to me until I begin writing, then it just starts pouring out. I have class. Write more at a future date.

The Great Dichotomy: Passionate Power

Random musings.

Money to get power, and power to guard the money.”
~Medici family motto

Dichotomies are interesting. Many are none other than existential paradoxes: mind and body, thought and matter, possibility and necessity, spiritual and physical,  and the list goes on. Kierkegaard, as well as Nietzsche and other agents of enlightenment, was a literary guru when it came to expounding upon how to live with these irreconcilable realities. Over the years I’ve learned to cope with the resulting blindness of these realities, the otiose character of life and the recondite disunion of body and soul. I’ve compromised with myself and learned to live with one eye pointed inward and the other pointed outward so as to balance introspection and aspiration.

In recent years I’ve faced a dilemma of deciding what to do with my life and career. It’s not like I didn’t see this crisis coming, but I guess I didn’t realize how many times I would be wrestling with my conclusions and convictions. Despite the temporary setbacks and failures mottling my youth, I’ve orchestrated my education beautifully over the years, exploiting a multitude of disciplines of thought and growing ever cognizant of how achievement is actualized. I’ve gone to great pains to realize the context of my condition and the contingencies of my aspirations.

Out of my experience grew two concentrations of study, economics and philosophy, each representing the broader dichotomies encompassing life. One satisfies my intuitions about what I perceive other people to value, the other regards what I value in my heart. I’ve tried to reconcile these over the years and explain why this dichotomy exists, whether a balance can be achieved, or what direction I should favor. For a long time I decided to refuse to sell out. But this clashed with the omnious system that I would face upon entering the workforce: success seemed tantamount to abiding to the myriad of expectations laid out by others.  As I have no trust fund to lean on for support, no assets to buy my way into fortune (compounding investment: you must have money if you wish to accumulate more money), I faced the reality that no upper echelon would endorse my musings, my art, my thoughts, unless I belonged to them, to their network or, by chance, satisfied their criterion of worth.

The citizen of the world in me refused to conform to the ‘system’, to the authority that dictates standardized achievement and propagates worldly values. The autonomy within me bucked as I studied philosophy and developed the tools and methods for critical inquiry, tools I used to ridicule the backward nature I learned to see in the world. The pragmatic element of my spirit recognized the utility of conformity and uptook various preoccupations that would fashion my mind according to them, such as the study of economics and finance.

But I ask myself: what does it take to be successful? I always like referring to the context in question. I’m American. I live in a ‘democratic’ country where the few rule the many. The few in this case are not the parasitic politicians (although in many cases, when it’s convenient, they are one in the same). The politicians are figureheads, merely the arm or scepter of power, not the head of governance. The true source of governance and power resides in the wealthy, the capitalists, the business owners, the stock holders. These are the greats that arbitrate the economic and political atmosphere. They embody the will to power. They pass the laws, set the wages, orchestrate the commerce, conduct the symphonious marketplace we’re lead to believe is free and open. The current sentiment is that if governance is left to the people, we’ll be in a real mess. The populous is simply a bewildered herd, uneducated and incapable of self-rule. (The Wagner Act of 1935 was the last real effort of the masses to mobilize. Since then these efforts have been squashed. Unions are ‘evil’ and communist.) This is why we live in a ‘democratic republic’ where we elect a small group of ‘leaders’ to instruct the masses on which policies they should live by.

To be successful you must be a sycophant. More specifically, you must possess utility for those in power. If you cannot help these people achieve more power, you are worthless and will amount to nothing more than a cog, expendable and interchangeable. But the wealthy will not extend a job or opportunity to just anyone with ample capacity and a strong will. No. They must be familiar with you. You must possess some wealth, influence, charisma, intelligence, talent or power that they can leverage for their own gain. Posterity is as empty as truth. Rationality is an instrument of the powerful: they dictate the rules of the game, the vernacular, the premises and logical structure of your success.

“All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” (Nietzsche)

Rationality is a function of motives, of intention. Pin-point desires and motivations and you can construct a cathedral of reason to leverage against those in power to mutually achieve independently contrived ends.

The questions that have wracked my mind most over the years: Do I follow my heart or my mind? Do I follow my passions or my prudence? What it’s come down to is that, given the current state of affairs, given my context as a young American, passions are prized only in youth, as is freedom. With the coming of age what is most prized is security, with the passions left to fantasy much like the irrealism of dreams are left to enamoring vagaries. We discard our passions and convictions, our fantastical visions of grandeur for a better world, in favor of a ‘realism’ scented with a dark cynicism that dispels illusion, that acquiesces under the ‘system’ that we obey out of sheer necessity grown from our will to survive. What has been trampled is our will to power, but it is never too late to revive this urge.

The artists, when they are not lining the capitalists pockets with profits, are simply muses in the most passive sense of the term. These artists are no longer concerned with inspiring as much as they are fixed on entertaining, or ‘amusing’, for their agenda is the same as the capitalists: money. They render the audience as docile and facile as possible, getting them in a blurred frenzy, caught up in emotion, totally distracted from the realities that oppress their sad existence. The poorest, the most impoverished left with only their intangible dreams, love these entertainers the most. Since they cannot live through possessions and materialism they escape through fantasy, artificial emotions induced through hollow emotives.

I’ve decided I want to sell out, for a time. I want to master the system so I can one day create the system. Considering my background, I’ve played my cards right up until now: the best university, the best internships, solid degrees, great grades. What is necessary now is to capitalize on these achievements instead of forfeiting them for the preponderances of my heart, the longings of my spirit, the existential conundrums I unravel in my reflections.

What I need to do is exploit the source of power for my ends: finance. I need to get into the industry where all the wealthy have a mutual stake. Wealth is the common denominator of power. Investment banking, wealth advising, asset management.

I need to toss these ephemeral thoughts about passion, about right and wrong, about selfless creation, to the garbage. They are fruitless. If I want to succeed, I must capitalize on my strengths: people skills, smooth talking, will-power, vision, charm, intelligence, good nature, pleasant appearance. I can be obedient. My rebellious nature was resistant to obey arbitrary authority, and my attitude throughout school and to my superiors proves this. But this needs to be corrected if I am to succeed and dominate. I must fawn these superiors in order to advance. There are many who wish to succeed, but only those who stroke the ego’s of those holding the keys to power will allow be to ascend to their true potential. I look around me and I see so much talent. Young automatons do everything right, except they haven’t a clue that doing everything right has a ceiling. You must not only serve the interest of your superiors, you must also create value for them, you must learn to hijack and supplant their vision with yours in order to aid them in their accumulation and concentration of capital. In this way achievement is guaranteed.

Morality does not exist. There are no facts, only interpretations. You cannot have a universal moral conscience as a businessman, as a ruler of wealth: only a fabricated justification that accepts the inequality of man as a rule. Nietzsche said, “The reasons for which ‘this’ world has been characterized as ‘apparent’ are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable.” Those in power dictate these reasons. Their are the moral clergymen.

It’s interesting to consider the influence of media control. The media is the mouthpiece of the powerful. As Chomsky said in his book Media Control, “Propaganda is to democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”

Who rules the world? The powerful, the elite. These are the American ruling class. We elect proffered politicians which have been paid for by these elite with the single agenda of taming the bewildered herd, of keeping the masses complacently compliant.

Slavery was replaced by share cropping, which has been replaced by credit and loans: all of these forms of debt rob the citizens of equality, life and liberty, and it’s legal. Bankruptcy laws. Capital gains taxes. Trickle down economics. Sub-prime mortgage lending. Failed education reforms: No child left behind. The war on drugs. The rise in pharmaceutical psycho-therapeutics. Currency manipulation: Coinage Act of 1972. Foreign wars and fear mongering, communism, creating enemies like Russian and terrorists as a means of keeping the populous paralyzed and fearful, of keeping their attention turned outward instead of inward. All creating fear. All manufactured to suit the ends of the elite. All propaganda.

Truth and lies are one in the same. They condemn or praise according to which subjective end you are most vested.

 

Know Your Enemies: Insecurity and Threat

You can always spot those who are threatened by you because they will be the first to compete with you. Anyone who sees you as a threat is an enemy. The surest way to crush your enemies is to avoid competition. This does not make you weak; rather it makes you superior. Those who want to compete are attempting to bring you down to their level, to their preoccupations, and judge you according to their inferior criterion of worth. To preserve your prestige and remain impervious to your enemies, stage all competitions according to your rules and only your rules. By acquiescing to another standard of competition you compromise your integrity and forfeit the very values used to justify the individual greatness that they view threatening.

Your enemies suffer from insecurity; therefore they are threatened. Their lack of self-confidence is a lack of responsibility, a lack of faith in their ability to rise to the challenge or overcome or equate to external values. If they possessed faith in themselves, they would be secure. They would not be threatened by anyone or thing, nor would they compete in a test to measure their worth against another man.

Men of greatness compete with themselves and themselves alone, never compromising their self-generated criterion of worth. When someone extols their personal achievements, you can be sure that they struggle to possess an authentic sense of self. If the measures of greatness are self-generated and self-imposed, what need is there to publicly announce your achievement? The only hope for this announcement is an external affirmation of self.

When you live authentically, self-worth is derived through a process of becoming. Each man lives according to his own ends, as each man possesses his own set of demands afforded to him by life. He becomes more of what he embodies, of what values presuppose his every thought and action. It is vital that these values bolster the purest and greatest sense of self, the highest self-esteem possible.

Competition is death. Domination is the elimination of competition through sheer superiority of values. Would any competent man compete with an invalid? This is how the superior man, the over-man, must think. His values place him above such competition, out of sheer pity or principle. In this way he is morally superior: any competition must occur out of charity alone. I maintain that charity is the gravest form of oppression as it leads to domestication and enablement. Charity is a false generosity that ensures conditional dependency and establishes a hierarchy between the self-sufficient and the self-deficient.

Do you want to maintain superiority? Never compromise your values through competition except when you dictate the rules of the game. Otherwise, let the success of your self-guided actions speak for themselves. Never compromise your integrity, your authenticity, by playing to the rules of another game. Other’s will pine for your competition, but you must never stoop to their level unless the guarantee of winning is indisputable and inevitable.

Recall: familiarity breeds contempt. If you wish to know your enemies, see how they behave when they are lead to believe that they know you. Present yourself plainly as if there is nothing more than meets the eye, nothing deeper below the surface, and see what reaction this elicits. If there is insecurity, your enemy will capitalize at first chance to highlight the superiority they believe to perceive. Do not let this sway you into competition or emotion. Your self-worth, your value, is internally generated, not externally imposed. Any insecurity they voice through comparison or judgement reveals a chink in their sad suit of defense. Capitalize on this error at a later time.

Remain quiet. Do not speak of your achievements. Genius is often seen and seldom heard. When other’s pass judgment, do not flinch in their direction: remain stolid and steadfast. If need be, recalculate the rules of your game and press on toward self-mastery. Those who continue living in competition never reach heights of greatness because they fail to realize that greatness is attained from within. Greatness is demonstrably true, not by way of judgment, but of effect. Your impact on the world will be proportional to the original value you create within yourself.

Collected Thoughts and Aphorisms

I carry around a book that I use for jotting down snippets of notes and ideas that occur to me throughout the day. In an effort to organize them I decided to digitize some of the shorter, more random thoughts. These were taken from a weeks worth of entries. And here they are:

Embrace suffering: it is the impetus of growth

Continue reading “Collected Thoughts and Aphorisms”

Manu

So I mostly try to maneuver my way into whatever conception a person wants to be me in, so long as it allows me to retain a certain control. I hate not having control. I love being able to manipulate responses. I exist in various states. I’m not one person. I am many people. I do my best to be whoever I can to whoever someone wants me to be. I am sensitive to peoples needs and I make sure I can superficially satisfy them with the right responses and behaviors.

I picked up the phone, but my heart sunk and my fingers trembled at the thought of what I was going to say. It didn’t exactly matter, but to me it did. To me it mattered a whole lot.

What should I write about? Being hollow. I hate harping on being hollow. Blah. I dream of an ideal life and it begins to bud and blossom, lifting a veil as though the gray began to evaporate into brilliant blue. I can see myself, full of passion, or diliberation, or something intentional rather than half ass and half meaningful.

I want to be hurting. I want pain. I do not want equilibirum. I don’t know how to impose equilibirum, but when it’s imposed on me I become pacified and passive, utterly facile and fatuous. My life’s meaning suddenly exfoliates and falls to the ground and I’m left looking at an empty shell of reasons and motives.

What story? I need story. NEED. These words. They designate some necessity, some compulsive demand. But there is none. It is all percieved. Content, like the stoics, I brush off the ‘need’ for this or that and instead I chose these vices, addictions, and the like as a matter of taste rather than necessity. It becomes silly and trivial.

How to transcend your mind? Get out of this shell? I wonder? Meditation. Drugs? Perhaps. Perhaps it’s throwing myself into the unknown, the unfamiliar. But god.. it’s all familiar. Then it dawns on me… the nausea. It begins to creep again. Meaning evaporates under its heavy wings, and coolness chills my world to the bitter bone. I begin to gnaw at this bone, in anxious compromise, in negligent care of my self worth. How to speak worthwhile? How to choose?

Why do I feel like I’m swimming in a generation of utterly retarded everything? BAEofheaihc

More Time

‘To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.’
— Robert Louis Stevenson

Sometimes people will look down on the wanderers, saying they have no direction. I laugh at these people. I would rather travel everywhere and arrive nowhere, than travel somewhere just to arrive there and there alone. How bland. I would rather my cup overflow with experience than fill it up once and savor it drop by drop while never knowing anything else.

Although, I can see how it cuts both ways. Direction is good. Arriving is good. What gets me is ‘settling’. Or thinking that there is one direction, one path, one way, that we deem best or best for us. We are infinite creatures. Thus, we are strangers to ourselves. Experience is the best mirror for showing us to ourselves. Better yet, experience that was unplanned, uncharted, unexpected, and- best of all- uncomfortable! Only then are we given the opportunity to grow- or whither if we choose to shirk.

There is no ‘arrive’. Let’s discard this notion. Success is the continual realization of a worthy ideal. Who said you need just one? Can’t I have many? I want them all! Too bad my time is limited. It forces me to make choices; or, more specifically, sacrifices. But choices are good. They are a reflection of our selves, our values: the culmination of past experiences that have shaped and molded my present being.

Reflexivity. Second-order cybernetics. Now that’s an interesting study.

*

So. There are about 7 billion people on this earth. How can you make a difference? How can you make change and lasting impact? I know not everyone wants these things, but I do. You have one life, ONE LIFE. Then you die. Sure, you can talk about afterlife and the like, but the bottom line is, we have one life. This life. What makes ours any more unique or worthwhile than the other billions of people? I don’t want to pursue the masses and their meek or grandiose delusions. God. It’s so damn easy to adopt the cultural imprints we’ve been handed. It requires no thought. We touch a flame, we get burned. We learn. We do something a certain way, we’re told that’s wrong. We learn. But why don’t people challenge their behaviors more often? blah. Same ol’, same ol’. There’s utility in doing what we’ve always done, I suppose. But I need to get deeper into this issue. Need to study Path Dependence.

“The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a wide-spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible”
—Bertrand Russell

Tomorrow I’m gonna read and study and write a lot. I have a lot of thoughts that need hashing.

I have a pet peeve: People who don’t communicate well. More precisely, people who refuse to communicate and fail to seek mutual understanding or compromise through dialog. I guess we don’t really need to communicate to everyone about everything. We can pick and choose our battles.  But I guess I’m referring to the people with ego or pride issues. They refuse to compromise because it freightens the shit outta them. It’s like it reveals a chink in their egos armor, a devastating weakness that leaves them vulnerable. Drop the ego, dammit. Or, if you’re gonna keep it, be confident enough to retain a sense of self that doesn’t vaporize every time it’s challenged.

That’s the other thing: The best way to win an argument is to avoid it. The best way to win a fight is to choose fights you can win. You want to beat a competitor? Do it on your own terms, not on theirs. Look at all the successful companies and people in the world. They were revolutionary and they succeeded because of it. They were not successful because they beat someone at their own game. These people rarely get the same acclaim and recognition as someone who dictates their own battles and rules of the game. I think of apple. There are so many companies who can do what apple does, but apple did it first.  Or Microsoft, or GE, or any great company or philosopher or leader. You can’t very well be a leader in anything if you are pursuing a standard someone else set. You can’t beat them at their own game. Everyone else becomes a sad copy, a weak imitation, no matter how great or hard they try. BUT, it’s often the case that if you want to make your own rules you must first master the existing rules.

*

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! Simplicity of life and elevation of purpose.”
-Henry David Thoreau

I need to simplify! My thoughts, my goals, my life. And ELEVATE a purpose, make it the sole and central focus of my life!

Thoughts: Perspective

“Does the sun rise?”  This question seems intuitive. It’d be hard to imagine too many people who’d argue the matter of fact. “Of course the sun rises! Just wake up at dawn and watch it yourself!” they might exclaim. But is this a matter of fact? Suppose we juxtapose this question with “Does the earth revolve around its axis?” When seen in this light the matter of perspective begins to emerge. We can accept that the sun doesn’t rise, rather it is the earth that rotates. But does this challenge the matter of fact? It is all perspective and experience.

Truth is much like this.

Brief Thoughts: Happiness

To those who say, “I’m on the pursuit of happiness.” I ruefully reply, “Happiness is never found; it is created, within you.”

I don’t even think it’s found within a person. It is always there. Happiness, like any feeling, is a choice. Some choices may be alien or uncomfortable, but we always have a choice, especially with something as fundamental as our thoughts.

I like to think of our thoughts as fodder and kindling. Some thoughts add to the flame within us, causing it to grow hotter and burn brighter. Other thoughts stifle this flame, causing it to whither and grow cold. Certain thoughts warm our insides, and the longer they burn, the longer we feel their warmth. Even in the face of life’s most brutal elements, where the coldest and harshest moments of life reside, we have all the necessary kindling within us to weather the storm. As humans, we generate life, feelings, entire worlds with our minds. Looking for and pursuing such things as happiness, as if they are not already in our possession, will only leave the flame within us unattended. We can’t rely on the chance of circumstance to animate our flame.

We bring happiness to the world. It is not something to be mined from the world. The world is nothing without an eye to perceive it, just as a home is nothing without inhabitants or a gift is nothing without someone to receive it. We bring our mind to the world, our eye to nature, and give it life. We rouse and rally and wake the world with a perceiving eye as much as the world rouses and rallies and wakes the perceiving mind. Anyway.

Life: Feeling and Thinking

Since when did you hear a man say “I think alive!” Never! No one thinks themselves to be alive. Life is left for feeling! “I feel alive!” says the man. There is nothing rational about life!

I like to entertain that, whereas the happy man feels, the sad man thinks. On a whole it seems that there are much less rational optimists than there are rational skeptics. More often than not, it seems, the happy are the irrational. The sad men are the skeptical, the realistic, the rational evaluators.

However, no one thinks himself into a fulfilling life overflowing with goodness. This is left for feeling. Rich, ripe feeling.

You cannot rationalize feeling. You can only move yourself into feeling. We are moved by our senses, by the sensuous stimuli composing experience. Life is meant for feeling. After all, we do not think senses cognitively; we feel senses intuitively. Likewise it is that we feel alive.

“I think myself to be happy” one might say. This would suggest that there are reasons for feeling. Does one need a reason to be happy? And what if there are no reasons? Is that good reason to feel any differently? Certainly not! We may give ourselves reasons to be sad, but we certainly don’t need these anymore than we need reason to be happy!

Let feelings stand alone, justified singly by the resolute rapture of existence!

Soft Summer Songs

There is nothing so satisfying as an opulent ocean of redolent rays gleaming across the sublime summer sky.

Relationships: these interesting symbiotic syntheses of feelings and minds and circumstance. Two people, pulled by fate, like magnetic force, yield their defenses long enough for a daring gesture of interest to find its way into their intimate chambers, where their egos reside with the risible recantations of a wry world.

Two men exchange their thoughts, like young twins speaking their own tongue, referencing their experiences, in blissful agreement: “Yes, yes” and “yea”, “but of course” and “oh right!” These affirmations of love, spoken in frank response.

Write with freedom, with unrequited passion; the world will never return the favor with the same fervor. Never mind it. You are a model, a leader. As a writer, your words do more than etch new thoughts and moods among men. They reverberate through time. Their roots wrap and coil around future gardens of growth.

I need to journal more. What do I mean by journal? I mean, feel more deliberately. Writers experience life twice. Why would I want to deprive myself the experience of living life with any less feeling the second time? Full and fabulous.

I want to be a writer. I want to capture the human condition, to communicate existence with humanity, as a comfort, a beacon, that life is not a lone journey, but a universal struggle. The journeys are all different, but the struggle is all the same. The phenomenon of each journey may be irreconcilable with another’s, but the limitations are universal, uniform, consistent.

Writers are sensitive, acutely aware of details, of the incantations strewn by the senses throughout the consciousness.

When I write, I feel. I never write without feeling. The best thing one could do for oneself is be transparent with their thoughts and feelings. Thoughts should reflect feelings, so that when you feel intensely, thoughts follow with equal force and vigor.

When I write, I write through my states, through the moods moderating my memories and mind. Like a performer, my heart commands and my fingers obey, with precise form and clarity of expression. There is nothing wanting. The audience is a lone traveler, hungry and thirsty, searching for anything to quench their parched and pallid imagination. The routine of this journey weighs, and each step adds another circular chain to their load. Starving eyes, so eager to capture the faculties of imagination so they might dispel their locking illusions. They long to shed the weight. The writer offers this salvation.

Relationships. These are a peculiar breed of experiences. The man longs to be free, the woman longs to be secure. Each seek to liberate or enslave the other. In this way each relationship seems over before it has even begun. But this is precisely the bond that brings them together.

Everything persists by demand, and it is through this demand we experience a command, a resounding order abounding from the passions. To disobey is mutiny: a self sabotage.

There cannot be freedom without activity. To utilize humanity one must act. But activity must be chosen every moment. Routines develop into chains as circular habituations take hold of choice. We must attend our freedom like a fire, gently stoking its embers and fueling its flame. The inattentive watchman risks losing the fire, the light of his soul; or it bellows beyond control, consuming everything until there is nothing left to ravage. Either way the man is lost: losing his way or losing his life.

Passivity is slavery. Unreflective choice is slavery. Impulsive choice is slavery. Any thought or action that is not chosen via volition is inauthentic. Passivity encrusts the consciousness, it clouds and clutters and confuses. There is no I without action, no subjective perspective without freedom and action.

TV, advertisements, anything generated from a capitalist society that engenders humanity as a static condition of a whole, is an assault on freedom, on authentic living. Man cannot manifest his freedom by doing nothing. He cannot create ethics or values or tastes or preferences that reflect an original genesis of choice unless he acts through himself, for himself, as himself. Men should not be whipped with their past. Advertisements: propaganda that illuminates man as a predictable creature, as a rational creation, with no faculty of imagination, objectifies man and indoctrinates him with alien laws and limitations.

Poetic Stirs

Colorful images seep synchronistically at the margins of my meditating mind. Shadows dance on the back of my eyelids. I open my eyes. The sweeping sound of rain pitters against the paned glass. The sky leaks onto the earth like a faulty faucet. I turn my eyes to the squinted blinds and observe: muted silver carpets of rolling moisture blanket the upper atmosphere and heather the heavens.  My mind baths in this stillness.

I think about the work ahead of me: fifty pages of writing within the next seven days. No easy task. The thought of it wrenches my gut.

My existence is binary; my mind, on or off. It teeters at the peak of propensity. Like a push car, once momentum is gained, it is an unstoppable force. Without the initial force, it lays unstirred, waiting, dreaming in quiet desperation for an impending impetus.

When I walk, I like to think that the world moves around me, like a standstill treadmill. The universe hinges on my perspective. All change is a discontinuous illusion extending from the reticent reaches of awareness. Life is but a recall of disingenuous memory. Labor and difficulty, a figment of flouncing imagination.

Warmth emanates from my underside. I lay prostrate. My supine stare fixes on the fan as it spins sedulous waves of coolness into my leeway of leisure.

I don’t have anything to say. I suppose my mind drifts to past relationships, with family, friends and females. Work, school, play.

Lovers. What is a lover? These intimate bodies are too numerous to value seriously. They multiply and divide and subside. What makes a lasting lover? The mark of friendship is the foundational formulation of any marriage of minds. Lovers are nice, but that’s about the extent. Friendship is much more rare. Much more loving and supportive and understanding. There’s substance that goes beyond the intimacy. That is how I judge these matters. Substance is to be prized above all else. The aesthetics of romance incite the passions, but the passions are prone to whither and change. Substance, real substance, principally endures. There isn’t sufficient time to spend chasing shadows and ‘licking the earth’, as Pascal puts it. I value a person’s values. That is appreciable substance.

Not Divisible

I want individuality. I apologize for not being more honest. I think most people do. I believe they long to be. This life of ours, the times, we’re swept up in the illusions, the lies. People want real. That is what is lacking. It’s all so superficial. It’s all symbolic. Everything is a metaphor for something else. But we haven’t gotten a clue as to what the hell is at the bottom of it all. As a result, it leaves us feeling entirely disconnected. Empty.

I just want to say what I mean and mean what I say. I feel like if there is ever a flame that illuminates the shadows, that is it. Honesty. It’s not easy. You gotta know the truth to say it how it is. The truth about who you are, where you’re at, where everyone else is in relation. Don’t sugarcoat it. The world does enough of that for us.

Do people think? Do they think about what it means to be an individual? Perhaps these notions are entirely misguided. Perhaps we’re suppose to be drones working for the queen, for the government, the nation, the invisible ideals that bind us together.

I don’t want to buy that. There are heroes (God, am I really opting for the heroic? Is that what I want? To be a hero, rather than an individual? Not every individual is a hero, but every hero is an individual). These heroes make contributions and their names echo in the ears of eternity. Philosophers, leaders, artists, scientists, athletes. They inspire generation upon generation. They left a mark. Probably unwillingly. More than likely they just followed their passion without a moment’s thought to their legacy. That very thought adds to their greatness.

Do you ever feel like a chameleon? A creature that adapts and loses itself among a background? A backdrop of people? and things? and occurrences? ‘Most people are other people’ says Wilde. I don’t want to be anyone but myself. But who is that? I’ll tell you what… an individual isn’t ashamed of who they are. They proclaim it wide and loud. They let it blare with every gesture and remark. They declare it. They don’t hide it. They don’t blend in. They don’t water themselves down. They break rules and conventions. Proudly. They don’t shrink.

I always get the feeling that it’s been all said before, all done before. I look around me and my perspective is two fold. On one hand a misanthrope festers inside me and I despise the lack of originality and boldness I see in people. On the other, I am enthralled, lost in utter wonder at the achievement, the creativity, the innovation that my fellow beings produce.

I read great writers, philosophers, I look at great works of art, I talk with well traveled men and women and think to myself: where is my place in the world? I wanna carve out a home for myself. I wanna make my mark as a unique creature. God. I am terrified of being a duplicate. I wanna think. I wanna really really think.

I think the trick is this: less think, more do. There needs to be a productive praxis of action and reflection. When you are doing you aren’t worried about the world. You are not reflecting on the past or future or others or success or failure. All that matters is what is at hand. The now. Eternity is in the now. That is where lives are made. Stories are formed. If we spend all our time other places besides the now, we’ll definitely never leave a mark.

I was thinking the other day: If you never make the same mistake twice, you will never fail. It’s alright to make mistakes. For god’s sake, it’s how we learn. The problem is, people are terrified of making mistakes. There is a perceived failure in mistakes. Instead of a learning opportunity, mistakes become something terrible and life changing.

What is it to think? Creatively? To do? To produce something meaningful? Insightful? With force? I feel like a person plants seeds. Slowly. They generate a following of ideas. They construct a cathedral of knowledge reinforced by specific experience. They hone it and then act on the world with this arsenal of ideas. They pierce the hearts and open the minds of men.

Daydreams: you’re heart grows wings and takes flight… you get excited and lost in wonder… you imagine.

Today, I did absolutely nothing. Actually that’s not entirely true. I slept, surfed the net, read, watched a documentary called “Exit Through the Gift Shop”, drank a beer, and downed a bottle of wine. I justified it to myself. I tell myself I’m taking 18 credit hours, I work 15 hours, I go to extracurricular meetings for the fraternity and other on campus obligations, I study… so a day off isn’t gonna be the end of me. Of course, it may be considering how much work I have. Double the work for tomorrow. Such is life.

Individual: “a single object or thing,” c.1600, from M.L. individualis, from L. individuus “indivisible,” from in- “not” + dividuus “divisible,” from dividere “divide.”

Recent Random Thoughts

Don’t tell me how to live, man. Show me.

Random thoughts collected the past few weeks:

Words. The vehicle of ideas. Words are empty without affect. Like ether hitting the air, once spoken their sedating effects escape and are gone. One may find their memory trapped and resonating in the occasional hearts and minds of men. Words implant ideas: sewn through vapors; inscribed on soft tissues. Men are the leaves of time. And every man must fall.

Never wait till it’s too late. Never wait till the time is right, for that is too late. Prepare the soil long beforehand. Prepare, organize, go out of your way, smile, pay compliments. No detail is too minute. Everything you do will lead to a moment. Do not wait for that moment. Treat it as if it has already arrived. Not as a point, but a process.

That which moves me is that which moves the world.

If you cannot instantiate a generality, you have no imagination. The task of philosophers is to produce generalities from particulars. The task of teachers is to produce particulars from generalities.

Perspective requires distance between two points. You must allow time to fill this distance. Time is necessary for experience.  But not all time yields experience.

The young are naive. It is curious that people long for youth.

If you are going with the flow, you are not swimming against the current.

There is no unity. There are only modes. Modes of being, existing, thinking, feeling, perceiving. Do not seek to unify, but to diversify. Employ these modes, these states of being. Make them work for you. Do not be one person, but many.

Dislike

Whenever you see something you dislike, it represents something you are repelling inside you.

This world exists wholly in our minds, constructed from the myriad of experiences composing life. The world is not an objective place. Meaning is not inherent. We imbue the world with meaning, subjective meaning, meaning conjured from the toil and joy and heartache we wrought from it. From an amalgam of experiences limited in perception and imagination.

When I look at something I dislike, when I have a negative reaction towards something or someone, my first inclination is to ask myself ‘why?’ What am I opposed to here? Past associations wrapped in irrational and emotional bias? I must never catch myself reacting without fair trial. My conceptions are as limited as my experience, something infinitely oblique and narrow. In order to grow I must be willing to step outside experience and into unknown and uncomfortable confrontations. I must aim to actively dispel any negative reactions inside me.

I must remain open and free from the vice of hasty judgment; in this way I may remain free from judgment. Love the world, in all its spectacular curiosities. We do not judge the people we love.

However, I must say, judgment does not mean doing away with discernment and prudence. We must act wise, reacting in the interest of goodness with truth in mind.

Silent Virtue

“Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.” -Plato

I am ever painfully aware of my contributions.

I have nothing to prove to myself. My knowledge is my own and needs no verification on the ears of others. I do not offer a supply where there is no demand for fear of flooding the citadels where fragile egos reside.

When one is fully competent in their knowledge, in their experience, in their ability to responsibly manage their inner life, one earns a reverent respect for humility and the virtue of silence. Open doors reveal the inner chambers of existence and expose the relative beauty or disarray where mindful solace is sought. When one speaks incessantly, without merited or solicited warrant, one does not offer up new knowledge but new insights to these potentially barren chambers of existence.

When we talk, we do not extol the storehouse of our knowledge but, more often than not, the lack thereof.

Irresponsible Man

“It is remarkable, all that men can swallow. For a good ten minutes I read a newspaper. I allowed the spirit of an irresponsible man who chews and munches another’s words in his mouth, and gives them out again undigested, to enter in me through my eyes. I absorbed a whole column of it.”

-The Steppenwolf

I deactivated my facebook. I should have deleted it. I will not read the news any longer. No more mindless humdrum from the journalists besotted with duplication and mass delusion.

I find myself perpetually engrossed in the petty mulling’s of a world from which I am entirely too detached. I refuse to endorse the pleas and cries and pathetic wimper’s of worldly ramblings. What need have I of their thoughts? Haven’t I my own? If one should read, one should think; just as one should eat and digest. I realize I have not been obedient to myself as of late; gorging as it were and swallowing unmasticated material whole. It becomes evident when I look into the mirror and painfully press my gaze into the amorphous reflection of a hideous schizoid.

My masks continue to meld with each dram I swallow and soon I find that I can come up with no identity for the occasion. Instead I wear the obvious, a ghostly conglomerate of faded and bitter glories that foul the air.  It is bad taste to feign the obvious.

I oscillate between beast and man, occupying not two poles, but the spectrum in between, scuttling between the shifting margins of good and evil, asceticism and hedonism, restraint and indulgence.

Solitude is independence, a wall-less cell, an open cage. How to choose between buying in and buying out?

Thoughts are Things

“I hold it true that thoughts are things;
They’re endowed with bodies and breath and wings:
And that we send them forth to fill
The world with good results or ill.
That which we call our secret thought
Speeds forth to earth’s remotest spot,
Leaving it’s blessings or it’s woes
Like tracks behind it as it goes.
We build our future thought by thought,
for good or ill yet know it not.
Yet so the universe was wrought.
Thought is another name for fate;
Choose them thy destiny and wait,
For love brings love and hate brings hate”

-Henry Van Dyke

Passion bleeds through my pores and seeps onto the world, reflecting back in miniature the kaleidescope of color within my soul. I want to hold these wandering whims close. I want to guard against anything less than brilliance.

Living Anew

I have just started living. Every moment I catch myself with a renewed sense of wonder. I want to continue catching myself all of my days.

Brief recap on end of December and beginning of January:

2011 has begun. The holidays have come and gone and provided much time for reflection and contemplation. It’s good to let things settle in the mind before swirling them up again.

Finals ended, for the most part, well. I came home to Jupiter Florida and traveled with my family to St. Augustine Florida where we spent Christmas in a small cottage a block from the historic district. The cottage itself was quaint, two bedrooms, a fire place, a christmas tree, a small bar and kitchen. It was definitely a dated home. There was a bed and breakfast adjacent to the cottage where we indulged in home made breakfast every morning. It was great. I felt spoiled this year. I am blessed.

St. Augustine is a great little town chocked full of interesting things to do and see.  It was founded in 1565 by the Spanish and is the oldest continuously occupied European-established city and port in the continental United States. Cool little fact.

After Christmas I swung back into Jupiter and had the opportunity to spend new years with a lot of my old friends, which was nice. I went out a good deal. Drank a lot. It was good.  New years was great. I need to call some people and thank them for hanging out with me and showing me such a good time.

On January 1st, the afternoon of new years day, I got in my car with my sister and continuously traveled fourteen hours back to Nashville to convene with my Alternative Winter Break group. I arrived at 8:30, packed my bags, and met up with all twelve of them at 10:00am. The next eight hours I slept until I arrived in Natchez Mississippi.

I believe in volunteer work. I believe in giving yourself freely to people. Sharing yourself is so important. If we don’t give, we become too attached- to our time, to our things, to our money. You are not free if you cannot part with things and become attached. The more things you own, the more those things own you. Anyway.

In Natchez we woke at 830am and began work at the Sunshine Shelter, a place for children of abuse to reside between foster homes and what not. Its a safe haven where rehabilitation can begin taking place. We painted walls, cleaned up the yard and garden, did repairs, and talked with some of the children and teens there. It was extremely rewarding. As anyone can imagine, the shelter wasn’t exactly the finest of facilities. Most shelters and places like this struggle with funding and maintenance. They barely get by with state support. Yet, they place such a crucial role for rehabilitating victims within a community.

Anyway. We also worked at the Boys and Girls Club and Kyle’s House by painting and doing repairs. Kyle’s House was a day care facility for toddlers and children with special needs such as downs syndrome and cerebral palsy. It was a wonderful experience seeing those children and knowing that laying tile, applying fresh paint to grimy walls, and cleaning the yard was making a direct impact on their lives.

Natchez was a great little town with a ton of history. The weather hovered in the mid to upper sixties throughout the entirety of the week so we did a great deal of exploring the historic and more picturesque landscapes of the town.

The twelve students comprising the site were a phenomenal group. I don’t think I could have asked for a more dynamic, funny, and caring group. It was amazing how close we all became by the end of the trip. I sincerely hope we keep in touch throughout our time at Vandy. They are all incredible people, and brilliant in each their own way. Big things in their future.

One of the best aspects of the AWB trip is the relationships that are made within the group. This is facilitated by the life maps which are shared each night. A life map is the story of your life, from birth until present, that details every conceivable detail and event that have shaped you and the world view you have today. It offers a unique glimpse into the inner workings of your mind in a way that not many people have the priviledge of hearing despite how close they seem. The life map takes anywhere from one to two hours, but some last even longer. They are surprisingly emotional and usually deeply moving as you implore your depths and share the findings with this group of strangers. The vulnerability is exactly what brings the group together in such a unique way.

Although its not exactly realistic, I almost wish that life maps were a standard convention of our culture. It’d be cool to share your life story with every new acquaintance. We’d have such a greater appreciation for those around us. It really shows that appearances are deceiving and that we should always withhold superficial judgements about people until we hear their story and walk in their shoes.

Anyway.

Classes begin on Wednesday. I will be taking the following classes this semester, and I can barely wait!:

  • Philosophy of Knowledge (Epistemology)
  • Philosophy and the Natural Sciences
  • Philosophy of Psychology (Advanced Philosophy of Mind)
  • Existential Philosophy
  • Modern Philosophy
  • History of Economic Thought

Eighteen credits right there, and worth every one. I decided that I like school, and that I want it bad enough. That I am done being inactive. I need to be busy. Beyond busy.

History of Economic Thought is the only economics class I’ll be taking this semester. It deals with  the evolution of economic ideas from the ancient Greeks to the contemporary world with attention to the seminal thoughts of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, J. S. Mill, Alfred Marshall, and J. M. Keynes.

I’m not exactly keen on resolutions, but I do like renewing commitments and redefining goals according to priorities. These include:

  • Eat better
  • Work out 4 days a week
  • Lose fat/ gain muscle
  • Be positive and optimistic
  • Smile more
  • Promptly answer phone calls and return messages
  • Budget my money/ spend less!
  • Read more! Diversify!
  • Schedule time efficiently
  • 4.0 GPA -> Study: 1 hour in class=2 hours outside of class
  • Eliminate distractions!-> no procrastination!
  • Develop “Do it now!” philosophy of action
  • Blog minimum of one page per week.
  • Finish book additions, revisions.
  • Wake up/ go to bed early: Never sleep in or stay up late!
  • No more drinking (Can I? Yes. Should I? Hm…)
  • No smoking
  • Look at goals daily
  • Create a purpose: long term, mid and short term.
  • Stay organized and clean

These are just a handful, but extremely important nonetheless. I’ve thought or struggled with one of these recently and need to make a point to stick to it. Anyway. Sleepy. More thoughts tomorrow.

“When you want something bad enough, you make the time – regardless of your other obligations. The truth is most people just don’t want it enough. Then they protect their ego with the excuse of time.” – Rework

Death

Random thoughts on death:

The ultimate meaning is found in death. We procrastinate the inevitable by creating death denying illusions.

I was looking for meaning and running into dead ends. I recently read up on Ernest Becker and his thoughts illuminated a good deal of what’s been on my mind.

We are going to die. The more we deny this fact, the greater confidence we can maintain in our ability to be. Death reminds us of our frailty.

Our world is divided into the physical world and the symbolic world. We create symbolic meaning in order to transcend the physical. The physical world is marked by change, by finality, by inconsistency, by impermanence. The symbolic world is enduring, consistent, eternal.

Beliefs and ideologies manifest as mere illusions. I look around me and I see self-deceived masses. I ask myself why people adopt such deceptions. For what reason? These deceptive beliefs offer a denial of death. We are the hero in our beliefs. We seek eternal life through our beliefs and ideologies. They provide life by allowing us to procrastinate death. Traditionally, any different belief is a direct threat to our life and should be annihilated.  We do not practice tolerance to differences. There can only be one illusion. If we are wrong, we must reconcile and face our death.

Life wants to deny death. It creates devices such as technology in order to prolong life. All knowledge is a death defying mechanism. Humans want to be god, want to maintain an eternal life.

Content, comfortable. No one wants to die. We all want to live. Dominate or be dominated. Who’s illusion is stronger? Has stronger evidence?

More thoughts later.

Watch this movie

Thoughts on the denial of death

Death: all is in terms of death; death is metaphor for all meaning

Relationships
Bad/ death= Good/ life
nietzche elucidated this in genealogy of morals:
Denial of death= Will to power

Anything that threatens life becomes fundamental.
Conservative is preservation
Progressive is growth

Two choices (one metaphor); Dichotomies:
Physical & symbolic
Body & mind (aka spirit/soul)
Beliefs are devices which deny death or Procrastinate our finality
life or death
Oppressor or oppressed
Subject or object
Good or bad
Busy or lazy
Right or wrong
Physical or spiritual
Point or relation
Love or hate

When you accept death, you are free.

Sin is being toward death. Man is a being toward death.  (Heidegger said man is a being-toward-death)

3/ delta: Us-> otherness-> ?
Why is 2 important? Binary
3? strength, life, eternity
7? Perfection, completion

Examine etymology of ‘subject’ and ‘object’

All ideologies (religion/ gov/ nation/ culture) perform death denial and transcend us from the inevitability of death.
Death reminds of the finitude of existence. It allows inconsistency.
Death destabilizes.
Anything that stabilizes, performs to sustain, is adopted. is an illusion.

Treat others different-> causes division and threatens life.
Treat others as same-> reinforces life illusion

Any difference is perceived as threat to life/ illusion/ denial of death.

All difference- that is, all threat- must be dealt with through total annihilation.

All human activity is an act to deny death.
All human activity is characterized by the denial of death.

Iraq war? Purpose? Create threat. Distant threat (ideological/ symbolic threat) that doesn’t threaten physical life.  Consilidates ppl’s ideologies. Preserves ideology. Creates false binary perception.
Truth/ falsity exists. Logical positivism, could exist. Doesn’t matter. Towards what matters. end ultimately matters. Conclusion matters. we start with ends, then justify means, elaborate means, beliefs, concepts, morals.  All ends Can be justified with premises- created or preexisting. But do they/ premises correspond to other means? must produce a harmony between means. (See Velleman)

Truth/ false doesn’t matter. Asks wrong question. What matters is conclusion and who that serves. Validity is besides the point.

Which illusion did you buy? Which best deludes the inevitability of your death? The most spiritual are the most threatened.

Thoughts and Books

“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.” -Buddah

Although it’s been coined in different ways by different people throughout the ages, the message is the same. We are what we think. We become what we think. As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. A man is what he thinks about all day long.

The first step I took in personal development was fully recognizing the significance of these aforementioned words. It’s not enough to read them or understand the base meaning of them. You need to get meta. Their power is contained in reflection. ‘We are what we think’ implies that you have a degree of control over what you think about, and how you think about things. You must look at your thoughts as if they are not you. They have been following you your whole life, attached to the proper name that you are: Michael. All those thoughts that follow you are not you.

You can change what you think about by changing your actions. We are a product of our environment. This means our thoughts are influenced by the things we are surrounded with, be it the geography, the people, the culture, the religion, the media, the education, etc.

Changing your thoughts means exposing yourself to new knowledge, new experience, new environments. One of the first and best ways I came across for exposing myself to this knowledge was through books. Books offer insights that men took a lifetime to glean from their life experiences. In many cases, the collective lifetimes of several men. They contain gems of knowledge.

I recently took to reading some of the best Literature and Philosophy that has ever been written. These books have inspired genius, started cultural revolutions, and elevated the consciousness of men since their inception. Here are some works that immediately come to mind:

Literature

  • The Brothers Karamazov
  • Nausea
  • East of Eden
  • Brave New World
  • 1984
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray
  • The Fall
  • Walking on Water

Philosophy

  • Pedagogy of the Oppressed
  • Genealogy of Morals
  • The Will to Believe
  • Nichomachean Ethics
  • Self Reliance
  • Civilization and It’s Discontents
  • Plato’s Five Dialogues
  • Meditations on First Philosophy
  • An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
  • An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
  • Truth and Lies in the Non-Moral Sense
  • The Gay Science
  • Candide
  • Philosophical Investigations
  • The Social Contract
  • In Defense of Anarchism
  • On Liberty
  • Man’s Search for Meaning
Books. Yum.

I admit, I feel a bit of shame for not including more. This isn’t even the tip of the iceberg. I’ll have to supplement, revise and refine this list later.

Meaning of Life

Random thoughts

I was thinking about the meaning of life and how integral it is with intention and activity. Some of the ideas are self-evident but I figured I’ll get them out anyway.

Intention. What is intention? The idea of intention has stuck with me the past few days. Intention is characterized by some end-some purpose or aim; it can be said to be about things. It is an orientation, so to speak, a mental or emotional disposition, with a relation. It can be said that a person possessing an intention maintains an intentional state. If thinking and feeling can be marked by changed, one can conclude that an action caused something to occur to bring about this change. In this way the process of thinking and feeling can be considered actions. The intention is a property of being about something. This about is characterized by the end.

All knowledge is a result of actions that bring about an experience that elucidates the nature of the intention. If there is no experience, is there is no meaning? Yes. Even a thought or emotion is an action and surely we experience thoughts, i.e. memories and reflection. (I need to think more about what an experience might be. A property? A substance? Must it necessarily exist? A thought?)

Intentionality gives rise to meaning through human activity. With no intentionality there is no end or purpose. With no end or purpose there is no activity. With no activity there is no meaning.

Depression can be marked by a lack of intention which leaves one to conclude there is no meaning. Anxiety can be marked by an over awareness of intentionality; that is, overwhelmed by the possibilities to act.

Action gives rise to meaning. Action generates experience. A first hand empirical account gives rise to personal meaning. The first hand empirical account is an experience which is attained via sense impressions. The experience resulting from sense data gives rise to meaning when reconciled with the intentional state. If the sense data does not have anything to do with the intentional state (or maybe a peripheral intentional state), it is rendered meaningless.

Meaning is gleaned from the accretion of new experiences and eventually contributes to a web of beliefs, likened to the character or the constitution of a person. A web of beliefs forms as each new experience assents or dissents according to the meaning of past experience. As a result of conditioning and habituation, meaning slowly forms beliefs which cause a person to respond in predictable ways. Establishing unique personal intentions requires that the consciousness critically engages reality for itself. In this way wholly original and unique meaning can be coined that correspond to beliefs and convictions that were personally cognized and verified through personal experience. This is a bottom up approach to arriving at meaning.

In the same way, meaning can be adopted through enculturation. That is, the observation, experience and instruction as a result of human interaction. Meaning, and the beliefs and ideologies they constitute, is transposed onto us second-hand through others. This meaning is not immediately personal or relevant. On the contrary, it is oppressive and robs a person of a critical consciousness that cognizes personal intentions. This oppression transplants meaning and intention that was cognized by another. This is a bottom up approach to arriving at meaning.

If one hopes of finding meaning in life, one need only to adopt an intentional state and act upon in. That is to say, one only needs to set purposes and goals for himself and act upon them. The more focused and deliberate the intent, the more meaningful the action. One can create a life of meaning from the bottom up by cognizing and choosing intentions that are personal and relevant to their degree or interest for themselves. They can weave a web or beliefs that are unique to their intentions, their actions and aims alone. Activity alone will not breed meaning. It must be accompanied with an intention that carries a distinct and clear purpose or aim. One can act without thinking. For example, any oppressive action is simply forcing one person’s intention onto another. It is simply going through the motions. This is why personal goals are necessary. They elucidate the intention and give activity a context for meaning to develop.

The specific nature of the purpose or properties of the end will bring about an activity that is proportionally specific. That is, the more specific the goal, the more specific the activity. For achieving a specific goal, one needs to undertake specific activity. The clearer the goal, the more exact the activity, and the greater likelihood for achieving that goal.

Blah. Anyway. I need to continue clarifying these thoughts.

Bottom line is this. If you are anxious, focus your intention, your mind, on something specific. If you are depressed, chose a purpose or aim and get into action. Chose an intention and act on it. It is near impossible to be sad with your mind is occupied with a purpose and acting on its attainment.

Language as Human Activity & Impression Preservation

Regarding the social nature of man, a realistic or productive theory of language cannot be developed that doesn’t include human interaction. Any such theory rests on private language arguments where, even if a code were developed within the mind, it is by nature inaccessible to any other mind and therefore indecipherable.  With regards to memory, the reason language helps aid in recall is because of the iterability of signs. The continual convergence of passing theories gives rise to normative linguistic practices as a result of learned conditioning. The repeatability of a word allows for a reliability of an expected usage to emerge and a convention to persist that provides words with their semantic force during a conversation. The conditioning of language is no different than any other form of conditioning. By performing an action and monitoring a reaction we become conditioned to a predictable sense of the relationship between the two. It doesn’t seem that a private language would necessarily develop as a corollary.

In fact, I’d almost say that memories (the ability to recall past impressions that results from conditioning or habituation) can be just as harmful as they are helpful. If the repeatability of words is the conditioning force that anchors meaning into the memory, and if we think in words, then these words can seriously distort a clear perception of reality. If our operating system, our belief system behind our world view, is inured with meaning constructed from words and thoughts conditioned from the past, then we are left with a clouded perception of the present. We exist within a world representative of the distorted figments of past impressions that do not represent a lucid state of being possessed in the now. Our inner world manifests an illusory outer world through a bundle of habits perpetuating memories of fictional meaning that pull the mind into the oblivious past. The memories constructed from our language possess the pervading ideology that manifests as our identity through every psychological and physiological action.

Niet.

I need to get a bit more positive. A renewed feeling in my bones, in my breath, in my step. Something that springs me back instead of weighing me down. No significant revelations as of late. Procrastination seems to be at an all time high. Self esteem, conversely so. I’m battling between these oscillating feelings of meaning, worth, and value. I can’t seem to find anything that sticks.

I thought for sure I had it figured out, that I could will myself hard enough to believe anything that served my ends. Actually, I think I know what happened. I have slowly grown comfortable, too comfortable, with the demands, pressures, purposes that I set for myself. Instead of embracing them with an exuberant determination, I have bastardized them, leaving them to atrophy and wither and rot until I look at them as if never knew them. Then I wake up and find myself in a place totally foreign to me and ask myself “what is this life?”, “have I chosen this life?”, “is this life worth living?”. Perhaps. I’m not sure.

Back to the positivity. I noticed that my mental attitude has been crummy lately. I need a sense of wonder and awe that inspires an optimistic foresight that breeds hope for better times. This is the positivity I am lacking. My mind is entirely too neurotic. Too paranoid. Too sheltered by sensitive judication to protect itself from who knows what.

It’s too damn cold.

People only want to hear themselves.

When evidence for doubt is presented to people, they almost always entrench themselves deeper in their beliefs rather than pulling themselves into question. Funny huh? You think that evidence would open people’s minds but the fact is no, people are not interested in hearing anyones conclusions but their own, and they will fight for those conclusions until they convince themselves, and anyone that will listen, that their beliefs are justifiably real.

A passive populous needs a proactive leader. A proactive populous needs a passive leader.

Human contact facilitates trust and a greater level of understanding and agreement.

Laundry has become a chore. My dryer is located in the basement garage. This requires a roundabout walk outside and into the basement each time I need to load the washer, transfer clothes to the dryer, and retrieve clothes for folding. bah. It’s cold now, so no fun.

I want to draw more. Do art. Get more creative.

I suffer from activation failure. I fail to activate on time, and fail to deactivate too late.

Uncertainty.

Serpentine coils. Fuzzy incandescent rays. Never go back. Always forward. Collections of accessories; troves of personals; gatherings of signs; identity of me, me, me.

Plastic puke.

Sometimes I like being skeptical. Mad. Angry. Resentful. Being disposed in these states feels more anchored than not being disposed. I suppose I should practice wearing more positive states. Anyway. Being skeptical. I like objectifying the world around me, fellow subjects, their ideas and opinions. It throws uncertainty in the face of their flimsy, unchecked conclusions. Eh. I’m not the one who needs to pass that around. I’m about as uncertain as they get. And even thats debatable. There are certainties, I just struggle at arriving at what they are. Are they universals? Particulars? Pah. Whatever.

I need to finish this essay. Instead I regurgitate meaningless impressions onto these keys, solemn fingers stroking away, like mindless doldrums.

If someone asked me what my biggest weakness was, I would answer with ‘inconsistency’. I struggle with applied consistency, routine repeatability. Heterolaterally, inconsistency can be said true as my biggest strength. I am forever anew.

I awake every day with little or no clue of the person I was yesterday. I never cease to surprise myself with new revelations I later find to be old discoveries of a prior me. I. Me. Myself. Subjective. Objective. Possessive. Funny how I can refer and perform utterances as if I contain multiple personalities. I am fungible.

I wish I had something to say. I have nothing. I hope I can look back on this and glean some meaning from it all. Or do I? I suppose that’s how I sell myself on writing, but the truth is it’s a therapy mechanism for exhausting an aimless overactive mind.

I really need to get to bed. Colors. Hues. Shades. The rictus of the horizon swallows the setting sun. My mind is an eye. Colorblind. Obscured by the scudding haze of doubt.

What does it all mean? Labor. Until you close your eyes, and sleep, soundly, forever, into the abyss of eternity.

Niet.

I need to get a bit more positive. A renewed feeling in my bones, in my breath, in my step. Something that springs me back instead of weighing me down. No significant revelations as of late. Procrastination seems to be at an all time high. Self esteem, conversely so. I’m battling between these oscillating feelings of meaning, worth, and value. I can’t seem to find anything that sticks.

I thought for sure I had it figured out, that I could will myself hard enough to believe anything that served my ends. Actually, I think I know what happened. I have slowly grown comfortable, too comfortable, with the demands, pressures, purposes that I set for myself. Instead of embracing them with an exuberant determination, I have bastardized them, leaving them to atrophy and wither and rot until I look at them as if never knew them. Then I wake up and find myself in a place totally foreign to me and ask myself “what is this life?”, “have I chosen this life?”, “is this life worth living?”. Perhaps. I’m not sure.

Back to the positivity. I noticed that my mental attitude has been crummy lately. I need a sense of wonder and awe that inspires an optimistic foresight that breeds hope for better times. This is the positivity I am lacking. My mind is entirely too neurotic. Too paranoid. Too sheltered by sensitive judication to protect itself from who knows what.

It’s too damn cold.

People only want to hear themselves.

When evidence for doubt is presented to people, they almost always entrench themselves deeper in their beliefs rather than pulling themselves into question. Funny huh? You think that evidence would open people’s minds but the fact is no, people are not interested in hearing anyones conclusions but their own, and they will fight for those conclusions until they convince themselves, and anyone that will listen, that their beliefs are justifiably real.

A passive populous needs a proactive leader. A proactive populous needs a passive leader.

Human contact facilitates trust and a greater level of understanding and agreement.

Laundry has become a chore. My dryer is located in the basement garage. This requires a roundabout walk outside and into the basement each time I need to load the washer, transfer clothes to the dryer, and retrieve clothes for folding. bah. It’s cold now, so no fun.

I want to draw more. Do art. Get more creative.

I suffer from activation failure. I fail to activate on time, and fail to deactivate too late.

Uncertainty.

Serpentine coils. Fuzzy incandescent rays. Never go back. Always forward. Collections of accessories; troves of personals; gatherings of signs; identity of me, me, me.

Plastic puke.

Sometimes I like being skeptical. Mad. Angry. Resentful. Being disposed in these states feels more anchored than not being disposed. I suppose I should practice wearing more positive states. Anyway. Being skeptical. I like objectifying the world around me, fellow subjects, their ideas and opinions. It throws uncertainty in the face of their flimsy, unchecked conclusions. Eh. I’m not the one who needs to pass that around. I’m about as uncertain as they get. And even thats debatable. There are certainties, I just struggle at arriving at what they are. Are they universals? Particulars? Pah. Whatever.

I need to finish this essay. Instead I regurgitate meaningless impressions onto these keys, solemn fingers stroking away, like mindless doldrums.

If someone asked me what my biggest weakness was, I would answer with ‘inconsistency’. I struggle with applied consistency, routine repeatability. Heterolaterally, inconsistency can be said true as my biggest strength. I am forever anew.

I awake every day with little or no clue of the person I was yesterday. I never cease to surprise myself with new revelations I later find to be old discoveries of a prior me. I. Me. Myself. Subjective. Objective. Possessive. Funny how I can refer and perform utterances as if I contain multiple personalities. I am fungible.

I wish I had something to say. I have nothing. I hope I can look back on this and glean some meaning from it all. Or do I? I suppose that’s how I sell myself on writing, but the truth is it’s a therapy mechanism for exhausting an aimless overactive mind.

I really need to get to bed. Colors. Hues. Shades. The rictus of the horizon swallows the setting sun. My mind is an eye. Colorblind. Obscured by the scudding haze of doubt.

What does it all mean? Labor. Until you close your eyes, and sleep, soundly, forever, into the abyss of eternity.

 

Matrix

Where is the purpose?

Instead of a population residing within rows of gelatinous vats filled with a pink nutritional serum that sustains the corporeal well-being, we have a population that resides in the pacific confines of more personalized mausoleums adorned with plush material luxury and sealed with empty figments of desire.

The matrix is already here. It is the media. The newspapers. The magazines. The TV. The computer. The internet. The smartphones. All routinely bombarding our attention with messages. All programs of thought. All robbing us of a critical consciousness. Our ability to be for and of our being.

Slowly, surely, we have lost ourselves.