A huge essay, I know – don’t worry, I know none of you will read it! Yet when something overwhelms me as much as these ideas do, I have to cast them off, throw them away – they will come back! I live in a world of ideas, there is nothing but concepts before me at all times.
Focus of I
Introductory metaphors
To study the Focus of I, the ego, the awareness, is to study the most immediate thing known to man, and yet, it is also to study the greatest mysterious and most unknown profundity felt by mankind. The self is the needs of a man, the I his conscious awareness of them and the world, the Owned everything in the control of these two.
Let’s start again. Sometimes a worker must empty his entire tool box, and reorder from scratch.
The I of each man is the experiencer of his world and self. Those experiences, the desires that halo them, and their relations to each other in a field of focus, are the complete mind of the person, his own and only reality. The I is the name for all the focuses of a field; the name “I” binds them all, and the binding of them all is called “ownership.”
The mind is like six strings of a guitar. We think this on this line of thought, then we switch paths and think that on a that line of thought, and so pick up the tune on a different string. Even when the idea is slipped out of our direct focus, it keeps humming in the background, coloring all we now directly think, so that we can easily transition back to it in the melodic flow of thought. Each idea, once set aside, curls up like a circle and hums to itself as it slowly drifts off and under into the underconsciousness.
Such metaphors as these will help us see what is most difficult for us to see, the moment by moment experience of our daily life. How we think, feel, act, and move, how we will, select, and focus ideas, is part of every moment of our life, and yet when asked to speak of what consciousness itself is, of what an idea in itself is, we have little to say. Therefore, let’s knit a quilt of metaphors, to warm us as we scale the heights of consciousness.
If the passions are the fire, thinking is a river, the “stream of consciousness,” a great circular river through the earth of body, filling into the under-ocean of subconsciousness, which is enlivened beneath by the fires of passion and the fuel of necessity. This surging stream of mind, which exists at the head of the stream as it strives through the world, picks up the objects of senses like flotsam and debris, and as a living water, dissolves them in solution and crystallizes them in the bed of further thinking habits, such that, if a mood colors our river like a dye, it also has the ability to pull ideas into pure experience by the acid of analysis, or pull from experience new ideas, a precipitate of creativity. The desires heat the river and fill it with solvents; talk is the wind the river sends into the world; and deeds are the river banks that keep us on our life course.
Now conside a third metaphor. The awareness is a blanket of energy, such so that whereever a sensation, a memory, or an assumption touches the blanket, that puts a dimple on it, and the shape of that dimple is felt as an experience. The focus yet has the inner square of importance: everything within that border is immediate, everything outside it is blurred and merely felt. What ideas we are not directly seeing within our conceptual or sensual field are somatized and merely felt in generalized “over-feels,” and more so the farther from the center of focus. The pull in and down is the force of concentration on the idea, and the concentration of the focus into a point pushes the idea into action. To pull the focus wide in order to blur it gives pleasure, and gives an overfeel of all the ideas: it is passive: no work is done. Like a cone, the inward downward moves the circumference of the circle with effort towards execution. It requires will power, and if the object at the center resists execution, or other objects toggle for its place, then you must press with more power upon it. However, if an object obsesses the center and will not be dislodged, you can either force nonfocus, or distract yourself with depressing energizers such as alcohol, busy work, distractions, or entertainment.
Or for another metaphor, the mind can be likened to a garden, at the center of which is the reflecting pool for peering into the underground ocean, and underconsious with the fish of unconscious thinking. The froglike river dragons are those sometimes unconscious sometimes conscious amphibious habits called “engines” – automatic habits which can yet be made manual if we put our hands of thinking on them, as breathing is unconscous and automatic, yet by willing it, we can breath as we choose. Birds are conscious abstractions, which yet perch on earth-bound sensual experience.
My favorite scene in the movie the Matrix is when Neo dies and then comes back to life. When he comes back, he no longer sees details and sensations, but sees only the conceptual field, the “math” of the matrix, and is thereby easily defeats the programs against him, having seen their conceptual basis. With enough sharpening of the conceptual field, which is right under the visual field – or rather, behind it – one can readily see reality in this immediacy of symbolic short hand, the abstracted world of forms and directives. Such a man is considered an “enlightened” one, a wise man, a seer, perhaps even a blind seer.
Desire is the force which moves ideal objects into the focus, for the focus is not an object, but a placeholder. The focus is the I’s pathway of energy, which pours that energy into the objects he selects. But the desire can by no means force the will. Even a long practiced habit, the most routine and matter of fact, is silently willed at ever moment, but so naturally and easily willed that we believe her to be autonomous.
Desires are many, but will is one.
What is focus?
“The eye is not part of the visual field” (Wittgenstein).
When I look in your eyes, the eye is part of my visual field. And when I look upon my mirror, both my eyes are part of my visual field. The eye is directly seen as a position above the shoulders and aside the nose—and seeing that the eye is perspectival shows you more of the eye’s nature than merely peeking at a pupil. You must “see” yourself looking at the objects of your interest, the object that is a percept overlayed with a concept. The mind’s eye can also be seen (that is, conceptualized) and even given a name “I myself.”
For man is his needs. Need is simultaneously man’s ethical, epistemological, and ontological center—but it is not his whole self. What is the cogito sum? What is the ego? What is the I?
Set aside your ontological considerations (“I am a spirit,” “I am a brain in a body,” “I am a mind”) for those are always secondary, after-the-fact addendums. Look specifically at your looking: “I” am essentially an experiencing. I am awareness. I am also personality, habit, memory, and all those other things—but those are secondary I, those are things I own not what I am. “I is experiencing”—that states it best; and whatever I experiences is other than I, is the object or the subject – it is I, but it is not the same I that moves to the next object. Whatever the objects of awareness, they belong to the same I.
Therefore, I is focus, and focus is the experiencing of objects. Since we are focused on many things at once, there are two simultaneous I’s: full focus and specific focus: stage and spotlight. We have the focus on the whole, which is context, and we have focus on the particular, which is detail. To put it in a familiar register, we have the computer screen (the full focus) and we have the cursor (the detailed focus). Or to return to our first metaphor, full focus is the blanket, and specific focus is the concetrated crystal ball over its surface.
The mind, the person, the I, is nothing more nor less than a selecting focus, a focus which focuses, and this focusing is the only activity the mind does and needs to do. By focusing on an object, the focus takes on the shape of the object. By the wide focus, we sense all of our immediate objects; thus we have a sense of what to focus on. The specific square of focus identifies an object by focusing on it. If the object is a desire, then the focus enacts that desire by “clicking” on it—by intensely focusing for a moment, till the desire executes into action.
Experience is a shape of focus. In this way, all mental attributes can be summed under one heading: selective focus. The simplicity of this view requires explication.
Focus based vocab
The mind mediates between two realities: the inner need system and the external world. The mind is a tool for fulfilling needs. This is clear to anybody who lists and categorizes the uses he makes of his mind: they all relate directly or indirectly to needs. But if the mind focuses on needs (pleasures and pains), and the world (sensations), how is it able to simultaneosly focus its “lens” on two distinct entities? By a sort of glass that receives projections from two sides at once, and by bending it shapes, puts each in a new focus.
What essentially is a sensation? What essentially is a need? We require a focus-based vocabulary.
First, consider the dimensions of focus. There is focus that is willed by itself, and there is focus that is willed despite itself by a desire. There is also focus and nonfocus (blur). There is also movement between focused objects, and there is pause in movement. Between these three: will/forced, focus/blur, movement/pause, we have our dimensions.
The forcing of focus quicker than it can will is pain. For there are two movements of need: reactionary and proactive. Pain and pleasure are reactions to fulfillments or demands of need by objects or objectives. Pain is a forced focus on an erratic object. The object insists itself into the center, and forces the mind to rapidly focus and unfocus. Pain arrests focus on itself. Focus requires effort; therefore the intense focus of pain hurts; the erratic texture of pain—its shocks of changing shape—cause its “No” shape. Pain essentially is the impulse to discontinue a focus by ceasing an action. Pleasure is forced blur, a feeling of release, reacting to a need fulfilled. While focus is effort is pain, pleasure is a rhythmic releasing of focus. Consider touching a flame compared to nuzzling a kitty.
Pain and pleasure reside in the flow of focus around an object. If you focus on a painful idea, the idea itself is your focus, but the pain becomes the activity of the focus around that, like a hand shaking as it touches a hot iron. Pain is made out of the effort of focus.
Pain is focus, pleasure is release. But let us call the pain of focus, “effort,” because it is also joyful to will an object that subjugates itself to us, for when we will an object, we take its desire from it and convert that into will power. The feeling of being filled is the basis of positive feelings, the feeling of ache to be filled is the basis of negative feelings.
Pain is a species of pleasure. It is painful not merely because it focuses and unfocuses quickly, but because it does so quicker than we can will it. We cannot will pain. Or if we will pain, it is the large movement of accepting pain as a pleasure, but not the smaller movement of focusing on the texture of it. Indeed, when pain can be willed in the broad sense, as a man who accepts discipline and punishment, it is joy to be willed, and pride of passion.
Though the emotions of pain and pleasure are reactionary, when they combine they become actionary. Pain and pleasure form into desire, a dynamo: the nonwilled movement of the object towards the center of the will. Thus an object must first be assumed into a concept with a name or symbol to identify it, and that object is given a charge, a system of a push or pull in relation to the central focus and in relation to other objects. The simultaneous pleasure and pain of desire is clear to anybody waiting a delicious dinner.
Let us clarify our terms.
Desire tugs the objects towards the focus, and so makes the willing mind passive.
Happiness is actively seeking a desire.
Passion is extreme happiness.
And all these are made of pleasures and pains. Focus is of pleasure and pain: release and concentration. Energy is of interest and boredom, towards that, away from this—or in other words, love towards and fear away. Energy can only occur when the focus releases, and like a finger lifted off from the table, is able to hover to the next object, but if pressed to the table, not energetic at all. Energy is like the spinning point on the circumference of a circle. That one point can reach up like a pseudopod and intuit to grab a nonfocused object and draw it into the focus. This creates a memory of focusing on this then that, pulling different objects together into one frame of focus.
Boredome and curiosity destroy focus and concentration. The energy wants to ever flit and fiddle, and requires power to hold down. Once that energy swells, it burst forth in complete ADD glory, and destroys a focus. Yet some math problems take 10 hours of continual study to penetrate. That energy must be controlled, and turned into a form of focus power.
The energy of the flitting focus gains a bonus from every idea it grasps because every idea has a valance, a direction regarding both all ideas, and a direction towards the center of awareness. When the focus touches this idea, it gains the energy of it. And by gaining this energy, it changes the charge of the idea. By thinking of ten objects in your mind, you set an invisible thread through them, so that they start moving together, in accordance with each other. You have now focused them together in a fused new object: that requires much work. But you have made them satellites of the basic gap in the center of focus, the question you wish to answer, the judgment you must make, in order to finally enact a judgment and execute it in a creative action.
All this talk of the mind’s awareness deemphasizes the roles of habits and routines, which fill most of every day; the mind floats above these automated machines, to select objects, while the mental energy of habit does most of the work.
Taoism’s Westernized Slogan is to “go with the flow,” for the patterns set into motion by the masters and the great thinkers move us all unconsciously in a great way towards the future. You must be a follower of logos and fire, not water and way, if you are to be the genius who makes a new way. As Emerson said, “You will have found your way when you leave the path.”
It takes ten years to put a complicated and definite schema into somebody’s head, and another ten to set it into the motion of system. Or if you wish to do something autonomous and from your center, you must first daydream a long time, to carve out slowly the possibility for independence. Alchemy was a daydream what lasted for centuries before chemistry emerged from it. And Chemistry too is merely a long daydream compared to what is coming next. I myself spent years daydreaming of writing a book, a great book, an ultimate book, before it finally clicked that I could write a book.
The pleasure of work is not only the willing of an object, but to let oneself release afterwards, from pride at having willed it. The pleasure of release is a great pleasure, because there is no second-guessing the release: it is an earned release. Earned wines taste sweeter. The joy of willing is to be able to will into being what is weaker than the will to enact, and weaker only when the will oversteps itself, stretches beyond its normal ability.
The comfort of routine is that it is slow enough to be willed, and also that it is made of impulses (habits) that have their own built in push of will. They will themselves. Thus, to will a habit is as easy as a release. The habitual is the comfortable.The stronger the habit, the less will required for it, and therefore, the more excess will one has to seek other things.
A weak will is painful. An understimulated mind also is painful. If the brain is understimulated, as when you sit down and meditate, or in more extreme cases, when you endure major depression, the mind will pain itself in order to stimulate itself. A deepest depressions are usually bipolar, and seek to releave themselves by overcharging the brain with mania to stimulate it out of its major depression.
The method for controlling pain I learned while practicing the guitar is to increase the pain till it numbs. If practicing hurts, practice harder. Force the injury to hurt more, hurt it in the right way, and it will relent. A stinging fingernail can be assuaged by pinching it painfully.
Pain is pleasure. Both are music of the soul, either tonal or atonal. Pain is erratic pleasure, pleasure is structured pain. And the great excstasies are oscillations between the two.
We have a suffering quotient, we have a pleasure quotient. We suffer a certain amount, we are pleased a certain amount, and the mind wisely finds the objects that best work with these emotions for our growth and creativity. Its not a matter of being more happy or less sad in your life, but of being happy in the right way about the right things, and sad about the right things in the right way.
Pain gets pushed into the unconscious, where it is enjoyed. Pleasure gets pushed into the conscious, where it is enjoyed. Both pleasure and pain are the same thing, but shaped differently. This is why we feed our unconscious question marks, and it gives birth to pleasing ideas.
**
At a perceptual level, disgust and desire have an instinctual basis; good and evil, as conceptual overlays on memories, imaginations, percepts, and other concepts, are partially determined by cultural mores, and again one’s unique choices.
One may seek his desires in two ways: play and work. Work is focused movement, play unfocused being moved. Creativity then is play and work combined, a melody of dissonance and release, as in music. Logic is a habitual (forced but fully allowed) intense focus, which feels easy because it moves by identities (Socrates is a man, man is mortal, socrates is mortal). It is thus nonfree, but powerful.
Willing concepts is joyful. Passive sensual experience is painful (as “passive” means pathetic). Imagining and fantasizing, though sensual, is pleasurable because it feeds off the fulfilled need the fantasy is made to represent. The fantasized object fulfills us a little because it looks like what we need. Willing, then, is essentially joyful, and the freer the will, the happier. Nevertheless, comfort is pleasurable. Comfort is the passive pulled by a desire. Thus a follower is comfortable to follow whom he trusts. He is the slave of habit. The more completely unconscious a life is, the more comfortable, and as for the need for stimulation, genre-entertainment, and also easy fixes of pleasure, make life the easiest and most peaceful life possible.
The opposite is true bliss. Bliss is the feeling of achieving a passionate goal.
****
Pain and Pleasure are the same thing seen twice. Pleasure is the easing of the will, for will is effort, and effort is pain. But to will and to exert is the pain called joy, and is an act of fear and power, for to conquer a feared or revered thing gives the feeling of growth and victory. Love is passive pleasure, and power (enacted fear) is active pleasure. Yet if fear is unacted it is painful, and if love is acted it is painful (to will another to love is is to feel frustration). Fear as pain wishes to freeze, but is pleased to act – and so is a struggle and so is power. Love wishes to act and cease, which would negate what it needs, and so love must wait, one must beautiful himself (indirectly to charm to other).
The needs create energy, when erratic it is consciously felt as pain because it controls the will against the will, forces it to focus in and out beyond what it could do on its own – and thus it exhausts the power of the will. Pain depresses.
Anxiety is a strategy for freezing all ideas that would distract or overcome the will. The habits of desire and impulse are effectively caught up into balls of tension, and the will is left naked, clumsy as it is, without the grace of the body’s automatic habits to make it flow – and this is the only way to great power, to bend the bow, to feel great anxiety, which is also suffering, for the reserves of the will power are fully expended, and thus the will power becomes depressed.
The only ideas “visible” to the “I” of awarness – visible, spatially oriented, more or less literally seen – are already haloed in desire, to give them a dance with regard to whatever is in the center of focus, able to come nearer to focus, to overcome focus, for to concentrate the focus on one thing, for just a moment, discharges it into the muscles.
Anxiety is painful as it requires incredible effort in order to accomplish anything, nor is one free to simply relax, which is also a habitual state, but one must decide and will by effort all things. A great place to be, a wonderful pain, the means to power, and yet so often avoided by depressents in order to so exhaust will power that it no longer can make an effort, to depress also the anxious ideas, and let them roam free, to become impulsive again. Choice and will leak away.
The continual flow of all energy upwards, from heart to thoughts, from thoughts to words, from words to action, cuts the knot of anxiety and lets the energy flow. But this must be done slowly and painfully before grace is won.
Anxiety freezes up desired ideas (all desires surround ideas), and frees the will walk among them. Without the ability to take in a desire and be moved by it, to take its energy and turn it into power, in agreement to using it for the desired thing, the will is able to analyze the objects of anxiety, the strengths of the ideas. In the strains of intense anxiety, I would lay back, breath, and use my tightened chest as a sounding board for dreadful ideas. What a gift! What better way to untie microscopic knots?
Depression drains two things. To depress the will power is to catch it in a loop of bleed. Like a microphone to the speakers, the depressant is a great stimulant which exhausts the system. Or the will is poured into worries, which are thinking loops that drain the will-power (we call such will power as our “care”). Insofar as the will does not power up, to move a feeling to a thought, a thought to a word, and a word to a deed, the emotion is wasted, and exhausts the power it meant to channel into a deed. Anxieties if they capture the focus of will exhaust its power.
The I holds power, but insofar as the I-power uses its fear to avoid rather than to dominate, it will itself be dominated, and usually by a WE that gives it a rigid and specific set of energies that act as a surrugate will, the group will.
The hypnotism of the I comes through knots of energy. “No” means “not yet,” but we will face all the “noes.”
The depressing of all desires, but not will power, is called obsession, when that will increases around the one object, or boredom, and boredom is different from depression in that one still seeks, for if all the objects of interest are gone, the one object of desire remains that seeks more objects, the habit to seek habits.
Stimulants increase sensetivity, the reception of energy and interest from the outside world, to inspire and magnify desire by triggering habits and granting conscious objects. If the nerves are dull, the mind lives in its autistic world of mathematical objects.
Worries depress by catching the I in a loop in which it can never conclude into an action or goal, for the anxiety blocks execution.
A youth is anxious, but slowly defines his own habits, slowly by the power of free autonomous will.
A man contradicts others insofar as he is too weak to transfigure them.
Each selected desire feeds new strength, but along the suggested route. One who is weak in will-power is impulsive, and must obey to be motivated. Energy resides in objects of desire. Great energy is to be aware of many things, but willing none of them, for will negates all things in order to will the one. Focus requires few desires, since to concentrate the consciousness in a point, it must drop conscious interest in most things, like a circle that pulls in, and can only pull in utterly if holding few objects.
If you would be original, you must be conscious. Most people get along well wherever you put them, fit in with the crowd, find comfort and popularity – happiness is the norm everywhere, despite the reports otherwisee. The autistic great men are not good apes, don’t get the rules, never fit in, are cast out, for they are conscious about all things, and therefore doubt and question all things, even the taboo things, expose the binding guilt of the people, and so they should be cast out like goats, into hell, by the moral monsters. The moral are the zombies, they lack minds, and so they attack those who have them, they are dead, and yet they rule the world.
The individual better find the habit of obsession, that loop of continual practice, if he is going to build a soul for itself, an underconscious great enough to force away the WE. We is the great suicide.
To be aware of a lot at once is to choose nothing, to merely know. Only one thing can be willed, and so we must choose NO to all the others.
**
The profound is found within the illusion, not behind it. Without illusions we are blind. We need to interpret surfaces. Illusions play with reality because they are made of it, the obscure nothing, they replace nothing.
Consciousness is a fluid sphere, and the center is concentration, focused will, the forcing out of energy.
Intoxicants, manias, enthusiasms, furies, and frenzies increase energy, the desires of objects show great relationships and connections, and this in part by decreasing focus power, by making a man impulsive, delusional, playing with the illusions of reality rather than obeying them like normals – but what hilarious pranksters are all insane people!
Irritability, hypersensitivity, are openness to inflow of energy. Power is overwhelmed, and feels the pleasure of release, of submission to great energy.
Therefore, anxiety is to freeze the oversensetivity of a system which would reflexively react to everything Anxiety and depression are positive experiences, there is no negative beyond the positive. Nothingness is an anticoncept.
All negatives are merely the skin of something. God is the skin of man, nothing and everything are skin of the world.
“No – thing,” means only “thing, with disappears to black.” But black is positive, all is positive. All concepts come from positive experiences, NO is a knotted thing.
Nothing is the thing, looked at from a different angle, infinity is the finite looked at from a different lens. All things are matter, all things are formed, all things are shaped, all things are real, everywhere always positive exists, negative, nothing, not, is all those same things, looked at differently.
That thing has limits, it is also limitless.
Not is the knot of bending a thing.
Interpretation is infintie.
Selection
Let us return to focus.
The focus itself is a field of intensity. All the familiar words we use for consciousness applies to this field of awareness: intentions, attention, retension, extension, tension, tending, which means, stretching of the consciousness itself. But what stretches, what tends? The focus of the consciousness. The consciousness of mind is the shape of all the objects in the mind, and the space of relationships between them, of the two realities adjacent to the mind: sensations and needs (objects and subjects). Focus itself is the rigidity of shape the mind takes. Again, consciousness is a blanket.
Thus, while we are conscious of everything even in the preconscious, by an indirect tendril of it, while we are conscious also of the recently forgotten, we are most conscious of the circle of awarness. This circle may be wide or narrow. To narrow all the focus to a point (and thus to meanwhile unfocus all the rest) in a moment of power enacts the object.
The energy of selection is to move the center of awareness from object to object. The center itself can become large, thus uniting all the objects together. The center we call “concentration,” and to concentrate on many objects at once takes much power; or we can also draw objects together by moving the center apart into two, and this requires energy, not power, to draw a line from one object to the next, and draw them into the center to become one—and this is only possible of mental objects, not sensual ones, which require manipulation of the eye, ears, and body in general, to achieve the same effect. For them, we must underly a percept with a conceptual “highlighter” of interest, and thus draw our eyes and body to contemplate and touch it.
The focus, when it takes a shape, holds that shape for a moment before it takes another shape. The feel of the change of shape determines whethere these objects are at identity or at variety. The memory of two cats will feel the same when focused on and then the other. They have the feel of cat. This identity exists whether a concept of cat is developed or not, or whether a word for cat is known or not. It is primitive.
The shape decays quickly. When a sensation forces a focus shape, it is easy to hold it. But when an imagination forces a focus shape, is is harder to hold. Between two focused objects, the shape might relax, so that no comparison is made between the shapes. In this, the only way to slow down the decay of a shape is to use a word as a musical effect to hold the feel of the shape. Music is emotional, and the emotional feel of the shape will allow the focus to hold a shape past immediate decay.
Typically, when the mind selects a new object, it unfocuses as it moves between old and new, and this allows easy movement. Thus our mind flits from object to object with little effort, like a finger on a guitar string which lifts to refret the string five frets down. But to focus in while selecting from one object to the next charges both objects with focus, thus making them one object combined.
To hold a bunch of ideas charged with energy and yet unfocused, that is, all selected, but not focused in concentration, is to focus on their general feel, and not their concrete cut. A woman generally has more energy but less focus power than a man, so she can blur focus on many things at once with her energy, and thus is more widely aware than man, like the four corners of the pyramid on earth, if not highly aware, like the height of the cornerstone in heaven, and so cannot will any one thing as strongly as a man, since a man has more powerful focus, more will power, but she can will more things than a man.
All objects when evaluated and judged, are given energy of desire, to dance among themselves or pull themselves into our focus. It requires will-energy to push them back out, to release them.
Energy is a change in direction of the focus, or a splitting and attenuation of the focus, but concentration is a willing, which raises the importance of an idea towards the center of focus, a heirarchizing of importance.
A mood is a halo around the center of focus that calls a set of objects—according to the particular mood—to itself. In a depressed mood, the I calls forth depressing memories. Using these objects to reinforce the mood of the focus is essential to amassing will power. Thus, the right atmosphere, the right music, magnetizing our friends to share our mood, builds the will power.
All objects tend towards the focus, when it is in a mood, or towards or away from other objects, according to the desire upon each. Thus a thinker may be unable to solve his creative problem with XYZ, because X is mutually repellent to YZ; therefore, he must focus on YZ to hold them down, and use the energy to reach out from the center, power focus on X, and use the energy to pull them back to the center, and finally, to power concentrate them together until they fuse together.
Note, though, that in the unconscious, these same ideas have the same general charges, per the habits we have put on them, and that sometimes creative ideas must happen away from the focus, which is too moody to let them come together. This creative “gestation” is the halmark of all great thinkers, to let the womb do what the hands cannot, to forget about his creative challenge till the idea falls into his hands.
The sources of energy are work and play, logic and creativity, stay and change, pain and pleasure. The mind is sometimes ripe for obsession, and sometimes ripe for novelty. There may be no stronger source of energy then a new romance. The heart explodes with joy, the heart leaps with inexhaustable inventiveness. It is the mania of the healthy man.
Novelty invigorates. Novelty is the basis of good sex, curiosity, enamoration, passion. Traditionalists are defensive. They don’t have the energy to change, and so they cling to what they do have energy for, to criticize and defend against the new, from the power of long-established habits, traditions for centuries and for the centuries of their own lives. They are strongest when they bow to habit. As is right and necessary. There is no end to the novel, and wanting every newness resolves itself into a tradition of chaos, a boring shock-loving culture, artless and dull. Surely, novelty when that is ripe; and when the heart is ripe for a lifelong focus, then devotion. These are the energies that empower the focus; to focus on either one exclusively is to deny its antagonistic muscle. You cannot inhale forever.
The freeworker might find certain projects awe-inspiring at a glance, and daunting in application. How many years the perfectionists waste in imagining glorious ideals to which they are unequal. In fact, they are inventing curses on themselves. A goal must be acheivable. Therefore, learn a lesson from the thawing ice:
You turn on the stove to melt it, and the higher you turn it up, the quicker it melts. But not quick enough. Soon the surface is boiling, but the center remains stubborn. But look: fissures in the ice. Pry open these inlets, and force the ice into pieces. Like a dandelion breaking the cement, or like frost busting the mountain, you attack the ice at its weakness, putting full force where it is easiest, working hardest where there is highest return. In this way, you manage to break the ice down into two large chunks. Now its surface area is wider, and the steam is working in more places. Bath the problem in the pride of your success, pour the steaming water into the fissures, continue to subdue the ice: divide and conquer. Do not waste your focus by aiming at too many problems: put your full focus at one weakness at a time, and change that focus often. When one aspect of the problem remains insolulable, try something else: if at first you don’t succeed, try something else. This is not giving up. This is improving one’s plan to the same goal. Eventually, the entire block of ice will be melted into steam.
This analogy represents the way to handle any project. A lifelong project, for instance, cannot survive on one stay of energy. It must implant many stays, and so, many problems into the unconscious habits, and live off their ripening. If you want to write a Summa Theologica, for instance, you do not do this all at once. You unite a range of passions and interests under one overgoal.
Other lessons to learn from this: 1) The farther from the center, the easier it is to conquer something, but 2) the closer to the center the more damage you do. 3) Pour 100% of your strength into the 1% of his weakness. If you are aiming for a core attack, then you must aim as narrowly as possible, and put all of yourself into a success there.
War is the Father of all things. And again, Peace is the Mother of all things. It takes a true bipolar to understand this—that you must oscillate between opposites to achieve your goal. I speak not of greys or compromises, but immediate leaps in opposite directions.
In this way, your full life is one project. And the more you unify this project, the more you tie in your interests into one movement, and magnetize every scap of habit in your life to one goal, the more effective you will be.
Power
Novelty invigorates, but obsession empowers. For a new idea has valence, and therefore will give you a boost, but an old idea focused on intently unlocks the power of habit, to build will upon will, to grow strong and more terrifying. Be artful. Power is force, and gains in momentum, but vigor is energy, and explodes in fits and starts. Both are required, as suits individual style. There is a time to hit a goal with all the power you have, using every mode of energy you can summon. But when that energy is gone, the power itself cannot sustain you—you become bored and boring. You must renounce obsession for at least a time.
Power is focus, energy, change in direction. A Zen monk, for instance, might use power of mind to force a koan into the shape of enlightenment. I recently heard a professor speak about how he tried this with the Mu question (“Does the dog have Buddha nature?” answer: mu (has not!)). The proffesor gave up on the question, being more of an energetic type. Yoga is not about energy, in fact characterizes the energy of the mind to a drunken monkey.
Mere prejudice. The whimsical artist loves this energy, invests her life to planting little obsessions into her life. They are two types, two extremes, for one function: thinking.
ADD means having lots of energy, but little force. OCD means having lots of force, but little energy. These opposite tendencies are mere exaggerations of the two activities of focus (movement and concentration).
The more objects you can focus on simultaneosly, without dismissing any of them, determines your flexability. That is, to have a rigid and wide focus, this takes strength and flexability. These too are in the realm of force. Energy is in the selecting, the speed of selecting an object. The faster you can select between objects, the more their focus remains to tie them together. Be a supple dancer. For there can only be one central focus at a time, but to change directions, to move from one focus to the other, requires energy. To hold them all down at once, so that you can skip to them like stones in a river, takes power.
And if your primary focus is with an energy, the center of your focus will eventually pull you back when you are done.
In establishing a new habit, you will need to use energy until force builds. This is why you need very small, but increasingly larger, goals, so that you will be invigorated by constant feedback, until you have momentum. “Praise lavishly the smallest improvements.”
Thus we have focus versus movement. What of the will versus willed? To use religious terms, Taoism is a religion of comfort. One gains insight into the way of the world, and ceases to act. Everything is flow. The Tao is a comfortable flow with the way of the world.
This sentiment is repeated exactly in Confucianism. Rather than seeking the Way of the universe, here you seek the Way of our ancestors. In both cases you internalize an external form, and then comfortably follow the precedent of the other.
But for invigoration, you must deny flow. What is it about novelty that invigorates? Why does the new taste interesting, gets raves, but if it becomes a favorite over time, it is less interesting, but loved for familiarity? Or in the romantic terms: why is novelty so helpful towards orgasm? Why is falling in love so invigorating?
Novelty is pain. Excitement is, after all, a form of pain, but pain in a direction (hence, it is part desire). Taken to its extreme, the tension of excitement becomes an anxiety. Pain and pleasure and their expression in will determine this: good willing is joy, good being willed is comfort, bad willing is work, bad being willed is weakness.
Novelty is pain because it forces the the shape of focus outside of its previous shape. This requires effort of focus. Imagine trying to focus on a television screen while the images flip many times per second. Your eyes would strain. Since it requires effort to grasp, it should deplete your energy. Yet novelty can increase energy. How?
The energy comes from need for experience. The energy comes in bursts. You cannot get a sustain from novelty. It is in sharp packets of vigor. Moreover, each object has a charge, which if you focus on it and comprehend it, can give a boost of energy to the next object.
Novelty seeks new direction, is the verb of the mental grammar; obsession seeks same focus, is the noun of the mental grammar; or, to put it in other ways, it is violence and peace, direction and devience, line and circle, growth and maintanance.
Boredom is force with no energy.
The virtues of a mind include the strength to will, the endurance to keep willing, the flexability to focus on multiple things at once, and the speed to move between objects while a shape is still fresh. These correspond in turn to the three movements of focus: move/pause, focus/nonfocus, will/willed.
Where does the power of strength and the power of endurace come from? Why is it we may have high enegy but low focus, or high focus but low energy? This derives from the needs being tapped. Newness and novelty are low levels of pain (called tension, or interest, being pulled tense between two things); and thus your needs gives you energy in response. A force, however, builds momentum over time, being a habit, and thus a nonfocusing of the mind, a form of comfort, and develops its desire from the pleasure. Familiarity breeds content. The newness, then, has bursts of energy, as pain is a burst; it is to take the shape of a new invader. The shape of force requires less pain, but more endurance, because the “muscle” of the mind tires from repetition.
Two persons who must live together, work together, or fight together, quickly see who is of the greater will. Yet perhaps each man’s pride focuses his vision only on himself, and he is unable to see the real powers he is up against – a pride blinded by arrogance. In such a moment, the battle of wills begins. The wiser will sees the moment of uncertainty, when the other first realizes he is about to fight, and must steel himself against the first flirt of terror – attack NOW. But if not, than each man – perhaps even a man and his wife, if they are still so blind to each other – perhaps a man and his son, even a toddler! – face each other, and their wills grow above them, tall as giants, though they appear at a distance to be mere mortals at a mere mortal height. Rarely do we resort to violence, and violence is not always the willful act, but sometimes the coward’s resort, the will powerful and also wise would not resort to such a crude method unless the other demanded it, but perhaps the hold of a gaze, the stare of the eyes, the flicker of the lip – or a sustained tone, an insistence, the moral certainty and virtuous music of one courageous and certain, twist the other’s giant up like a hurricane makes a pretzel of a tree.
The struggling of wills, the wrestling of will, is the great ranking of men, nor is Will merely a matter of Zeus and Wotan, the great Wills over mankind, but even Hermes the trickster is above all willful – as we would expect from the inventor of wrestling, and with Apollo, the approver of the Olympic games, which amount above all to the glorification of the will, and the glorification of the body’s beauty and strength only as correlates and effects of the will which masters them.
Grace is the mastery of an overbearing violence and atlantean strength which so controls its strength that it falls gentle and even. Beauty is the final form of power. At the heights, truth and beauty meet in marriage.
Will power is only a relationship to painful truths. If you judge an idea to be true but painful, the whole of your will power, and all that will power is and does, resides in holding that painful idea at the center of your focus, until your mind makes habit with it, and slowly let’s you acknowledge and accept the actions this true pain wishes you to practice. Whether a person has a strong will or a weak will, he may do the same action, so long as he takes stock of the ability of his will, and plans around its limitations in deference to the final goal. If I reason to myself “my will is weak, so how can I use what I have to gain my goal?” I speak truthfully of my weakness, and yet hold fast to my goal. The strong willed man, who is born with a stronger will, or has built his habits in such a way to reinforce what will he has, will achieve the same goals quicker, being able to endure the painful idea immediately, and for longer bouts at a time.
Endurance
Intentions always must convert into extensions, and thus extentions become retentions. All desire become deed and memory.
Focus is focus on something—whether in focus or blurred. This is called “intentionality.”
Focus is a shape of effort. Taking shape requires effort, and in shaping, it forms a memory. Thus, focus focuses by energy, moves by energy, is in fact a focus flow.
Energy is a problem. To fight desire, or to force a new thought, or to instate a new habit, requires focus, requires energy and power. Will is exhausting. Try a rigorous exercise program: you will soon exhaust your will.
Consider the procrastinator. He is given class assignments, but waits until the last moment to complete them. He might believe that he is enjoying his time, expressing his autonomy, and still getting the assignments done in less time than other students. If he were truly in control of his situation, he would spend the equivelent amount of time on the assignment at the very first day it was assigned, and then relax that it is over. But he lacks the mental energy to attack the assignment, and relies on last minute panic to motivate him. He is too weak to do it without. This atrophy of will serves him poorly in life.
The procrastinator is a victim of energy. The virtues are energy, skill, constancy—to have the fuel, the direction, and the carry-through. Consider another energy system: the artist. The artist is given to whim. She calls it “the muse.” She might drink nothing but strawberry dackery’s for a month, or read the complete works of Shakespeare all the way through. She decides to learn the guitar, and plays for seven hours a day, eventually setting it back down. And of course, she gets bursts of “muse-song” by which to paint her pictures. How do we understand the artist?
Every person has a limited focus. There is the focus, its seven spotlights, and the broad overall focus. The purpose of focus is to fulfill needs. However, since there are more needs than time in the day, we focus on a few at a time. By focusing on these few, we force the others out of sight. There, in the subterraneon dark, they grow hollow and wide, and slowly fill with energy (desire). After hours/days/months/years these energetic needs burst forth. They are stays. A stay is a reservoir of energy built on a denied need. This desire is differentiated in that it works only for that one need, and requires much work to be reinterpreted (sublimated) to another cause.
The artist, we are told, is more sensetive then the average person. She senses more. She can sense small vibrations, and becomes a prophet. She can sense subtle beauties, and becomes the poet. The less she is able to filter her nervous energy, the more it invades her focus. In response, she converts her sensations into art. This sensual energy also pours into the subterranean needs and builds powerful stays.
A stay, when acted upon, becomes a project. Usually, the average person will have, say, five stays, six subfocuses, three projects, and one focus.
The creative thinker also causes these eruptions of stays when he feeds his unconscious question marks. As has been well documented, a thinker seeking an answer to a problem will formulate it, fill his head with facts, but may never be able to consciously answer it. In fact, he has consciously answered it, only the answer had to dissolve into the unconscious and become a stay before he can access it.
If focus is a flow of energy/power, what if the energy is lacking? Depression and anxiety are forms of energy loss. Depression is a weak river. The mental energy is being used unconsciously. Anxiety is a conversion of energy into physical tension: energy with no movement, or pain proper. Energy staved into tension depresses the mind. What matters most in energy is that it flows to achievement. Emotion is crysallized into thought, thought is spoken, and words are acted upon. This is the basic direction of energy from its source in need. One anxietizes the will into a block in order to avoid sinning, to resist a desire stronger than the fluid will.
A violent idea is frozen with anxiety, and that anxiety is projected into the body. In this way, an idea becomes somatized and disabled. For the idea was too spontaneously violent. In this way, we insulate our impulses. For some objects have such strong charge, shaped into a powerful idea, that if we were able to focus directly on them, they would overwhelm the will. Thus we insulate them, first in boredom and disinterest, but in their deepest as high anxiety and fear. A burning coal of a desire may be wrapped in many layers, perhaps mutually contradictory.
My depressions have always been pregnancies. When I have no conscious energy, the under-anxiety indicates that stays are growing. Stays, those temporary obsessions, can grow past the project stage to a full fledged passion, especially if they are fed, willed, and habitualized.
Or again, all the energy of my mind is going into the work of my undermind to build a new idea: consciosly I feel depressed and unmotivated, maybe even lazy, and guilty for being lazy. Underneath, a new world is being made.
Pain has staying power. Once the pain is converted into a stay, it is a reinforcing force: an interest. This is why we find the mind to be a constant joy, whether life is difficult or easy, traumatic of tame.
The world of the full focus is limited. The focus is as wide as the center is active. The more we can actively integrate our reality, the wider we can reach.
We are not all artists who can lead rockstar lives of whim and whimsy. Some of us must elect one goal to devote our entire lives. To this, I recommend making a monolithic goal, something to which you can channel all your energies in one great forward. I, for instance, work a writing project, of which this is a part, which centers all the stays and whims of my life. A career man, however, would elect a career that allowed a face of his many needs. In his case, it is not stays, but escapes, that crop up, ways of escaping the job long enough to reinforce it, and prep him for more work.
Exercise a habit into existence to develop a well of energy. The habit will not pay for itself until you have tapped down to the spring of need. A habit is an impulse-desire that you may build through practice. By actualizing a habit, you create a new channel of energy. By continually building up a discipline, improving your habits, you habitualize your habitualizing, discipline your discipline—you gain a greater reservoir of energy. Exercise and diet, as always.
If you must depend on inspiration, you must wait for a stay to become ripe. On any given day, there is a food that will hit the spot. Even if your senses are weakened, and you hunger only for bare substinence—one of the blessings about being passionate is it makes fasts delightful—there is still a hit-the-spot moment. Creative spells numb the tongue. When creating, the artist wants only the simple foods. He drinks water because he is sensetive; eats bread, could barely touch cheese. Still, there is a best.
In every situation, there is an easy way, a hard way, and the trick. The easy way is to give up, to do the least, to escape. The hard way is to stick to principles, to endure all obstacles, to do your best. Doing your best is such a height and trembling potential, that I awe to see. Then there is the trick. Knowing the trick to a situation is easy once you know it, but extremely hard to know if nobody tells you. Every situation has a trick, the clever means of handling it.
Will power grows by being reinforced by habit. To begin with, will power is weak, and can do little. What is needed is powerful habits which can be applied and creatively reapplied to life’s challenges with a little steering by will.
What is practiced daily has the power of accumulation. The dripping faucet fills the sink. For those of low will, they have options:
Orient all activitiy towards one goal
Cut off all distractions.
When a desire becomes violent—that is, able to override the will—the only defense a man has is to freeze his will, and thus frustrate the violence—and this we call anxiety. Anxiety, therefore, is a means of regaining autonomy.
The metaphor, “vitality is fluid,” as blood, as rivers, streams, as libido, as crea, is central to our self understanding.
Need requires proper timing. When the timing is wrong, the need builds more powerful and also more repressed. It grows into a stay.
The energy of a stay grows greater, creates a space of concern, and when it finds its direct or metaphorical object, it both releases that enegy into the object, and takes the original energy of that object back into another space. There is no release of tension without the increase of another tension. The gained tension is comprehended and subsumed.
Sysiphus writes with boulder the fate of Gods.
Care
Thus there is the daily energy, which is gone by the end of the day. But projects build up slowly over weeks and months, and then, when they have burst, give us immediate and nonrefundable burst of energy, to expand our daily energy.
Energy is a shape of impulse: it wants us to seek or turn away from an object. These are two forms of the same energy, which is the creative energy. Creativity is the energy to build something else, which means, destroying its original materials, and destorying a space for it to exist within. Creativity, then, is a twofold energy, both eros and thanatos, both synthesizing and analyzing, both sex and violence. It is the shape of need that fulfills through spending.
And, because we are concious, this is a cycle. Consciousness is the mirror window that mediates between the impulses of need (shaped into habits), pours them into action, and then takes back that action as a memory.
The so-called Nietzschean “sublimation” is incorrect in that it assumes that the desires are specific. Rather, he is dead on, compared to Freud, in viewing the drives as branches from more general and less specific drives down to the one drive. But the energy of the needs (crea, and when poured into an object, care), is not so specific as to require one objective. In otherwords, the “repressible” desires are always habits, the habits that we have taught into ourselves, not the primitive instincts, which by nature are irrepressible.
The human instincts require, first, interpretation, and second, methodization, to be turned into a program for behavior. The I does both.
Therefore, if one is to sublimate a program of desire, something so close to the surface, then we must self-deceive or otherwise disavow it. My program is not sublimation, but actualization. Not that we must commit any crime that occurs to us, but we must get at its original energy and see what need that energy represents. We should not reinterpret a habit, but reshape it to get at the heart of the matter. Everything from the heart is good.
To care is to “invest emotion” into it, says Heidegger; or really, it is to create the object as a symbol in the mind, to be an outlet, which you use to plug into reality. You think about the object, you add the sensual screens on to its connector (its image) and when you converse with the external reality, your image plugs into the external original.
Buddha says that “all suffering comes from caring too much.” I respond that some suffering comes from caring too much. Too many people are loyal to their miseries. They should realize that they deserve their misery insofar as they care for it. Caring beyond reason comes from presuming an experience to be important, without fully analyzing the actual importance of it.
Own your history: optimize it. Do not be a victim in any sense. Your care for offence makes you victim to it.
An idea must be taken very seriously, believed in or hated, and each in turn, for it to be fully understood. Thus it is good that so many people believe such a wide variety of things, and have intellectual wars. In the end, humanity will only have intellectual wars. As it is, physical wars stem from intellectual wars.
Only rarely do we have experiences of pure contact. You are hungry for something you don’t know what, and you try a new food at a restaurant and it is glorious. But the next time you are hungry and eat it this food, it is not the same. You eat it often or you eat it on special occasions but the conact is nonrepeatable, nonpredictable, pure spontanaity.
An act of love, a moment of epiphany reading a book, the perfection of a symphony can not be repeated, or only in diminished form. Peak experiences are spontaneous. We can only open ourselves to their possibility.
Kaos the mother of reality, and Eros, her son, together strive and mingle to form Cosmos, or beauty. Indeed, Eros himself is beauty, but must mingle with his opposite to give the balance to beauty, striving forward from symmetry, to beauty, to grace, to style, to sublimity, to perfection.
“Care,” which we will derive from ka-os and er-os, actually derives etymologically from “a cry of distress,” is the combination of eros, putting together, and kaos pulling apart. Which is to say, the two directions of desire: towards and away, love and fear, and being pulled between the two, is interest. Focus is a centralizing on a point, selection is a moving a point. Thus, to will is to focus on one point and at the same time move it to another point, as when we press down on a pebble, and press it while we drag it to the other pebble, and then press on them both together, leaving a trail and an indent.
The word “creation” itself comes from “growing,” that we create by growing something, as in the crescent moon waxing into the full moon, or the farmer growing food, or the parent raising their children.
Crea is differentiated energy. The energy a need creates can only fulfill in a certain pattern, direct or metaphorically reinterpreted.
Crea in its vertical tendency is concentration of focus power; crea in its horizontal tendency is selection of focus energy: either it contracts into a solidarity, or it exands and flits.
Thus, a powerful mood-structure like bipolar allows a strong but alternating viewpoint. For this is rare in people. Most people see strongly only in a certain mood; see best in anger, see best in moral-skepticism, see best in happiness, but only in that. In their characteristic mood, in their default mood, they have the most power. But in bipolar, the power of the mood is sustained while the shape of the mood oscillates from high anxiety to high depression, from mania to despair. And to extend the idea beyond excitement/despair, the best pairs of eyes oscillate between opposite sorts of viewing. It is to maintain a strong focus while the affects change from guilt to pride, from fear to love, from ease to anxiety. For while most change unfocuses the mind, a strong eye will maintain strong focus even while the mood changes, even while the lens changes.
So the mind maintains the power to select and to focus, but the mood of the I will call forth certain objects, certain ways of moving. It is like a lens with a series of magnets on it, which call forth certain types of objects.
Interest is a desire to experience (see) something, care is a desire for the future of that something, meaning is the transformation of that experience into a repeatable concept.
Intentions become extentions. Every intension must be allowed, and always in the greatest way.
Both laugther and tears are pure releases. They exist in order to release a contradiction,;they are pressure valves. Unlike violence or sex, they do not achieve anything other than to communicate to oneself and others that you are releasing the contradiction.
Humor is a deflation of pretense. Sadness is releasing the dear. In humor, something pretense-important is laughed away, is put down, is made no more dangerous. Humor is based on fear. In sadness, we let go of the internalized part, when the externalized part has already left us. In humor, the shape of the laughable deflates in importance. In the sadness, the ownership of the sadness is removed.
The creativity behind power and energy is crea. Chaos pushes all objects away except the central force, whearse Eros moves from object to object drawing them together.
Crea in the pure sense, in the expressive creative sense, is orgasm, the basic energy of life, the energy of exciting nerves. The gasm of speaking, the jism of ejaculating words.
The less crystallized a habit, the more difficult it is to focus on it. To fully explore a depression is more difficult than to run around the block. Physical activity is the easiest to select, and requires simple focus without changing selection. For when the focus is scattered, physical activity is easiest. At that time, reading is difficult; meditating ardous.
Meditating is the habitualizing the feeling of alert relaxation. It takes decades of practice to perfect.
A scattered mind is one who has impulsive ideas in the periphery, impulsive unrelated ideas pulling consciousness wider, since they refuse to be centered upon, which thus diminishes focus power. The scattered mind not only has important but disconnected ideas, but it lacks the power to will them together. The power is in the shape of energy, of a compulsion to switch ideas, and thus to throw the ideas farther and farther apart.
In such a state, we must learn to center ourselves, center our focus, and to list the anxious objects and unify them metaphorically or literally with the mundane necessity we are currently dealing with.
For with the important ideas in opposite ends of the periphery the only way we can face them is to zoom out our focus, and thus diminish or power of clarity, thus weakening our view and reducing the the objects into a subjective mood.
And thus the center circle or focus, the circle of clarity, is the power of focus put into the field. The wider the field, the less clarity. Everything outside the field is blurred, is “heart,” is heard as music rather than seen as indiviudals. Everything in the focus is seen, even if it is an abstraction, for the mind’s focus is wired into the eyes. Focus on an idea, and your eyes will involuntarily strain. Lose your place when speaking a sentence, and your eyes will search the room for the other half of the thread.
Let us return to our terms: An image is an sense impression of the eye, ear, touch, or taste as of a direct object, and this at the perceptual level. A perception is an underconscious automatic structuring of sensual data into units or objects. The image must be an image of something, and the of is of an object. Most objects are sensed at the perceptual level, but in all human communication we focus primarily on the conceptual level. We do not consciously focus on the soundiness of the voice of our friend, but we focus on the logical and emotional sense of the words.
All language is an exchange of desires as objects. I do not give you my desire, which is subject only to me, but I express it in order to impress you with it, as an object for you to receive. My desire is merely an object for you, an assumed meaning, until you reason it out, directly or unconsciously, and make a judgment upon it. The tools you use to measure the ratios of a statement, and how they fit together, and how they weigh against your own system of desires and beliefs, will determine the outcome of your judgment: I can by no means predict it. Add to this the irrational element, the free choice of your spontaneous will, and your judgment can only be dictable to me, but never fully predictable.
The ability to trick another person to judge against his natural inclinations is called manipulation. This is to predict how he thinks, and to set up the materials for consideration in such a way that unless he is especially critical, he will miss your intent. He will think it a free judgment. He does not know that evidence has been rigged.
Language is a means of threading together objects in such a way as to effect a judgment and execution. Why would I talk to you if I expected to make no impression on you? And what I impress is a change in the way you feel, think, say, and do. I present my case, I make you feel its importance, and I expect you to explain your judgment to me.
A machine cannot desire, cannot mirror a desire, and so, in a literal sense, it can only repeat the verbal triggers of a desire—sheer syntax. Thus we must conclude that since the computer is all that it can ever be – albeit in simplified form – a computer can never talk.
Art is that form of language that turns truth to beauty, and beauty to faciliate that truth, and that truth to change the way we view the world and ourselves. Aside from that, it is no art at all. Art, therefore, presents a typical experience, symbolized in a formula of percepts, overladen with an implied method of interpretation, through a conceptual framework. Art tells you how to interpret it.
A concept is an assumption, and is bound by a name. The name, put in the terms of a habit, can be termed “the desire of a set of experiences for each other.” If there were no language at all, there would still be names, some sign by which a conscious being evokes a concept. Concepts are part of most animal’s experience, only, in a human being they are made communicable. The name of an idea, in this special sense, is not the name of the word we speak, but the felt oneness of a set of abstractions. The felt oneness alone names it, and one can feel the unity of an idea without having a word for it.
Likewise, the commandeering of as assumption into a habit means giving it a desire, a set of movemetns with other words and towards the shape of the center. This is the verb, or the predicate of the name.
The “I” of sensations is really the I of focuses. The real Need for love is not the only need, for its complement and opposite is the need for power. We grasp rules not only to satisfy others to win their love, but also to control, manipulate, or at least trade with them.
Breadth of focus
A wide focus is the feminine mood tone. A narrow focus is the masculine passion. Metaphorical thinking is to blur the eyes till two unlikes look similar.
Awareness is shaped like a cone. In the center of our awareness is the circle of all. This reaches out to the fine point of the specific. The all is context of all that we have inherited alongside all that we have experienced; the older we get, the less it changes. The point of present perception is anchored to the all, and sees the present by the lever of the all.
We see with two eyes: the eye for the whole, and the eye for the part. In this, the eye on the part is always in the implicit backdrop of the whole, and we cannot see the part without seeing at least its tentative place in the whole.
Consider a symphony. Upon the first phrase of the symphony, one ear is on the notes, the other ear already hears the whole symphony, further up the cone. The guessed at whole of the symphony is constantly corrected and reshaped as the melody progresses, until the melody is finished, and the guessed symphony becomes the remembered symphony. This ever-sense of the whole is what allows us to be surprised or bored.
The sense of the whole, being based on everything, is like a painting in that we experience it all at once, but cannot express it all at once, since we cannot communicated it through temporal speaking. Once in a while, however, we say something sublime in that it evokes a ring closer to the All. Such sublime sayings are multivalent, polysemous, and make for great literature.
There are then two means of thinking: analyzing and integrating. They correspond to stomach and womb. The great integration is our system, felt all at once in our metaphor mind. It is akin to memory. The analyzer breaks the full experience down, so we can experience parts. It is akin to the assumptions.
Our minds have an ability to generalize from a few facts. After seeing a new person for only minutes, we could write an essay of predictions, and they would be mostly right. After hearing a word only twice, we can use it in an infinite amount of settings, and could write an essay on it. We can guess at a future for the newly met person, after knowing them for a moment. Any systematic structure is likewise known from a brief formulation.
The Easterners emphasize this internal All, and are so fascinated by the result of a sustained experience of it, that they deify it and call it “Atman.” The Buddhist call it “enlightenment.” In turn, they call temporal awarness, “Maya,” and “deception.” Thus they castrate the mind. The full cone is necessary. We think as we think because it is good for us to think as we think. Man needs not deny his nature.
However, a pure experience of the All does inform the way we see.
Sensing, for instance, is by nature, lovely. For the world is beautiful. But objective beauty is unequally distributed. To see the most sublime beauties, the most subtle beauties, we must practice seeing, and develop a new faculty of seeing. This faculty is called “taste” and allows us to taste what is by nature most nutritious.
The holistic experience is omniscience. Indeed, if we consider the mathematical capabilities of certain autistic persons, or the ability of Mozart to experience a symphony all at once, we must not suppose that their brains were different then ours, but that we experience the same things, do the same things, but only are not aware of these abilities.
The problems of our lives are the lumps in the dough of the whole. We have two forms of long term memory: episodic memory and problem memory. Problem memory recurs more often, because we have ideas, situations, and persons we cannot comprehend and make a part of the whole.
The I- mind, experiences by taking a shape to experience something else. The shape it takes is not the shape of the something else, but is consistently corelated to it so that to experience shape X is to have experienced external object X.
We focus in on an object, we focus out on a large set of objects, or we nonfocus -- we focus on all objects, or, we focus on blackness.
Some minds thrive on pun associations, basic shapes of ideas, relations, and objects, and verbal formulas in place of thick and textured music. Every mind has not only its intensity of light, but its level of focus. See life slightly unfocused, and you see concepts, everybody reminds you of your brother, mother, ex girlfriend, every name sounds like a pun of another, foods remind you of other foods; for you ar not so narrowly focused to miss the general sense of objects. Have a narrow focus, and your concepts are weaker, but your memory is meticulous.
The senses are vivid and passive. Thus movies appeal to a different sort of mind than novels. Each man has his “at rest” breadth of focus and detail of focus. The greater the detail, the less energy to have a wide circumference of focus. One may yet be a multitasker, and have floating bubbles of focus, energized bits away from the central power of concentration.
All ideas when outside our immediate focus, even the concepts, are somatized. We feel the general, we sense them, we do not touch them in our fingers.
Fields
The fields of awareness include the perceptual, the conceptual, and the imaginative/memory. Around the objects of each these, habits of desire words charge them to dance. These fields, seperare in themselves, are synesthetically one at the center of awareness, as an astrisk is.
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The objects of awareness are sensations; memories and imaginations built from these sensations, abstractions and concepts reworked from these memories and imagiantions; and the desires that we impose on them. There are many dimensions to consciousness, dimensions always present, flowing each from a set of needs. The need itself is dimensionless, as the say, in that it is atomistic, a complete center. The center of every life’s needs, the need to create, and thus the need for immortality, to grow, perpetuate, increase.
The sensual field is called “concrete.” We can change our sensual organs by looking in a different direction, unfocusing the eye, moving out of the room, but we cannot change the percieved object itself in the manner of imagining it differently. Such a person would who could forever see an object as drastically different from what it was before would be consistenlty hallucinating – this almost never happens, and is no good when it does.
In the same way, the sense of the needs, which materialize themselves specifically into desires, cannot be wished away, but require careful translating or suppressing to cover up, and even still, remain doggedly persistent. If a lonely man could simply feel content being alone, happy, blissful, fulfilled, wouldn’t he? But even if he befriends books and nature, seeking other outlets and ways to handle his need, rather then seeking the love he finds so difficult to receive, the more generalized need is not easily tricked, and finds other ways to insist on itself. For needs are insistence, and the world is existence. Between the two, we have the mind as negotiator. The mind defines all it is by taking a shadow of need, a shadow of sensation, that is, desires and abstractions, and uniting them into ideas, and using these as a bridge between need and the external, a playground of testing and debating. Most animals tend to instinctual impulse, but a human being may spend even years toying with ideas and daydreams before he acts. The mind, therefore, is possibility, a playground to attempt different things. In the mind and imagination, a man ought to have no rules, no such thing as evil thoughts or sinful fantasies: here at least we are free to think and do whatever we could possibly wish or desire. And yet, most people are unfree to think, are modest even when solitary before a mirror. What a loss of power! What a waste of strength! There could be no God or Being in all the worlds to make me ashamed before myself: I love most of all myself.
And so the will is the shadow of muscular violence, the imagination is the shadow of sensation, concepts are shadows of memories. We feel the shadows even while we are sensins and moving, and yet we still feel them with the same part of the brain and in the same parts of the body as the full actions take place. My muscles tingle when I imagine willing a new habit. For a man is a body, and if a soul survived after the body, it could not think nor be without some matter to exist within. Matter alone thinks. Spirit is always spirit of matter.
Most people do not will, but are willed by bosses, routines, habits, and a rigid prefabricated system of life. The majority of people are repeaters; everything they are and do is a repetition, a quotation of the world, and their only exercise of individuality comes when they choose between repeating this or repeating that. The original man is not the best-selling author who seems to teach original ideas. That man is an exploiter of the original. The utterly original is a subtle unicorn unconcenred about lauds and applause. Because he does not seek it, he does not get it, and nobody notices him except those who steal from him.
When a need is summoned forth into the hollow of a matter form—that is, when a body evokes a soul—that soul spreads out its Own, into its My. These become its mortal needs.
All beings are situated. That is, everything that exists stands in direct and indirect relationship to everything else that exists. This relatedness, this situatedness, is also called “mortality,” and the only being that is not mortal is the All herself, who is the situater, has no other to situate in relation to, can only self relate. She alone is uncontainable.
The dimensions of consciousness, then, are
the numerical,
the auxiliary,
the desirable,
the proprietary,
They are all illusions. That is, they are feelings and concepts imposed unto sensation, that change the experience of it, but aside from this, they lack reality. Which is to say, they are interpretations. The are the “names” that voice gives, in the shape of tone and meaning, to halo and magnatize the objects of our mind.
There are many modes of numerizing the world. We see apples and we say, “two apples,” thus putting an imaginary container around them, and putting the conceptual idea “two” to describe their relationship to reality. For the apples are percieved, and not merely sensed, and perception imposes math and identify on objects. There is and can be no “number two.” The idea of two is true insofar as it opens new experiences and allows us to create new things.
The experience we are made for is powerful creating. The act of creating is primary and the basking in the glory of what we created is secondary. All else is subsidiary.
To put these dimensions in familiar terms: everything has a cash value, everything has a sex value, everything has a risk value, everything has a pleasure value. Let’s focus on money and sex.
Every human being, and more or less indirectly, ever animal and object, upon being perceived, has sexual charge.
Therefore whenever any man meets an other man, they have each wrestled the other man in his own unconscious, body-wrestled and wit-wrestled: the conclusion of the struggle is communicated subliminally to the other man. In the same way, ever woman a man meets he has attempted a seduction, made love to in his unconscious, and felt the results of this, and she of him, and they communicate this to each other as well, subliminally.
An excellent way to exhaust an inner desire in a man or woman is to nonflirt. That is, to make a sexual joke that exposes and unravels the hidden desires. By bringing the sexual tension to the consciousness, let it be mastered and overcome.
How often do men and women use each other to foster a fantasy in their mind, partly conscious, partly not, a great “what if?” that they do not really want, but they insist on believing in its possibility.
It is comforting to feel as if others desire us, and would accept our advance if we chose to make good on it. Some men and women envelope themselves in a web of could-be relationships such as this.
Such a scheme emphasizes sexual eroticism too much, rather then intellectual eroticism, or character eroticism, or honor eroticism. To be admired only because of sexual possibility is to knot up your worth only in sexuality. A man is more than sexuality, and therefore, this is a form of castration. One must concieve the full meaning of sexuality: to live with a partner, to create a child from the body and soul of your parnter through the act of sexual bliss, and in the long run, to manage a house together and create a new human being in your image. What a glorious thing is sex in its full meaning, even if that meaning is never fully realized.
The factors of consciousness, then, are clarity, range, selection, and speed.
The sphere of focus has a set diameter. To will inwards or outwards requires power, and to keep all the objects in focus while zooming out takes focus. To cycle between a small set of objects till they become one requires energy.
A scattered focus imports far ideas that, since they are not central, force the zoom outwards, and since they are unrelated and push each other away, do not resolve to become central all at once. Know, therefore how to collapse the absolute moment into a point, how to see all your problems as interrelated.
| FOCUS power | SELECTION energy |
| zoom in to enact the desire around an object zoom out to feel the relatedness of objects focus clearly to feel specifics and make definition focus blurly to feel generality and make metaphors | Make a sequence to make a chain Dance a sequence to trigger a habit Blur and then select for ease Zoom and then select to tie ideas together |
Walking next to a charismatic fills us with energy. We want to do more, we want to be part of his project. But of course, he did not literaly pour energy into our soul. That energy already existed there in an undifferentiated potentiality. It was innaccessible from the inside. It is like a looking at a mirror to see ourselves, which serves us better than touching our face with our hands.
I do not know what I am until I see in others what I am not. Comparisons may be odious, but compared to not comparing, they are lovely.
A great man, the allist, knows how to unlock every potentiality in his soul by resisting nothing of what they wish. Resist not evil, for evil is above you and you must let it do its work. See others for what they are. Open yourself up to their abuse. It always starts with abuse—do you think he will just come up and kiss you? Be therefore a soul-reaper. Take every man’s soul and make it your own. What you take from him, he gains more of in the loss, as in giving kindness that well received makes you kinder.
All discipline, skill talent, achievment – all a man is and does – reduces to control of focus.
Focus is two. While one object is focusing, the second focus reaches out as the selector. When focus focuses inwards, the other focus focuses outwards. If you seek inwards to your private soul, your other focus must focus on matters of the wide circumference, universal matters, in order to balance it. Thus, the closer to your true self you go, the more universal the truths you learn.
When the two focus are equal in relax, the focus of normal, you are an introvert if it is on inner matters, and an extrovert if on outer matters. If you can only go a few layers in, you lack flexabity and power. For it requires wu wei, relaxed labor, the ease of strain.
A sensual experience happens when a person experiences an object combined with a sense of its outwardness. An interpretive meaning is imposed on pure sense data, and we call that a perception, rather than pure sensation.
Experience is a shaping of the sensual and conceptual field into objects. Let’s simplify and talk about concepts and percepts. The perceptual field is experienced like a wide rectangular ribbon before the eyes, from left to right. The conceptual field is experienced like a wide rectangular ribbon before the eyes, from top to bottom, curling back onto the forehead. The entire field is like a blanket, and all the objects that we experience, folds and dimples in the blanket. We do not experience the rock, the book, the hand pushing into the blanket, but only the dimples and folds themselves, and we feel that something is external to them, but the feeling of externality is merely on more internal feelings, we do not touch anything beyond the tips of our nerves.
And so we assume that the world is out there, because we need to, because if we do not, we know we will die. Let what religions that wish, speak of maya, or doubt, or skepticism, but need is the ultimate reality, and no philosopher denies her.
Does the mind make experience possible? I do not know what it means “to make experience possible” only that it is and is needed. To know about possibilities would be to know what experience is, and the best we can do is metaphorize. Experience is knowledge, and the man who has experienced much, and can access it, is knowledgable. Utter ignorance would be not knowing that knowing was an option. Knowing that something could be known, that an object exists, but we don’t know how to approach it or what to call it, is a step towards seeking out the object, the dim agains that ignorant.
Reason is merely to dance with concepts in a way that makes us in the end feel certain. What counts as allowing this feeling is based on evolved logical requirements, learned ones, and willed ones.
Awareness is a blanket, like the thin blanket over the brain, one that is conscious of all it is, and conscious in its way because of the shapes it takes. The texture of focus, how much you can imagine a face for instance, speaks to the amount of energy your mind is able to use.
The objects of mind as assumptions are so abbreviated that they do not use up all this energy on distracting detail. An object becames a handle that upon lifting one feels the full weight of meaning underneath it. The meaning is felt in the body unless it is pulled up, and then it is seen in the conceptual field as a set of basic relationships.
The conceptual field is seen as subtle field before the eyes, easier to solidify into shapes at night behind blinked lids. A desire is felt in the muscles and gut.
We see outlines of objects when we close our eyes, or we see outlines of concepts when we close our eyes. To fully conceptual an idea or to imagine it, the eyes must be open, and blinking. The abstraction always refers to risidual substrate, but we do not consciously experience that substrate any longer.
Draw an image and blink. Or focus on an object and blink. The white after flash is the same, and that is the stuff of conceptual interest. The imagination is dimmer, more textured, a full memory process. It must be guided by conscious or unconscious subvocalizations. The conceptual field moves by autonomous habits, or by willfull hands on painting.
This finger imagination works without words, and thus is not bound by the threads and contracts of them. For the imagination is controlled by words, but the conceptual paint brush is controlled by will.
The strategy of selection, therefore, will be to take the energy from concentration and put it into manifesting a conception over and through a perception. This can be imagined as viewing, say, a book on that shelf. By selecting it, the selector puts a ghost double over the book, making it prominent. Between the two fields, therefore, a concentration can let go and grasp the new object.
The strategy of selection, therefore, will be to take the energy from concentration and put it into manifesting a conception over and through a perception. This can be imagined as viewing, say, a book on that shelf. By selecting it, the selector puts a ghost double over the book, making it prominent. Between the two fields, therefore, a concentration can let go and grasp the new object.
Images themselves have no associations. The image of X, Y, or Z, the image of an eye or a lamp, does not associate to other images, because an image is not a word. In sign language, such an association would exist.
An image evokes no other images. But a sound, when used as language, does evoke other images. For all desire is made out of voice, or language, which is the evocation, pulling towards of objects to objects, and objects to the center of awareness.
A memory is concrete. When two memories are compared, an identity may be abstracted. This abstracted quality, such as “redness” or “hardness” lacks the sensual immediacty of an external object. The abstracted object has identity because whenever it is evoked, it brings forth an abbreviation of all the referred senses at once. I imagine a cat, and all my experiences of cat are evoked at once, in abridged form, as a single simple THIS IS CAT.
Thus the imaginative field, which serves both of remembered exeriences, and fantasies of desired experiences, is separate from the conceptual field, for it is controlled by language, and each of its abbreviations stand for chains of temporal experience, whereas the conceptual field holds free-floating concepts which are not limited or defined by chronology.
The image of the killer terminator robot, therefore, is not as ridiculous as it seems, when it juxtoposes a live image of a woman with a database image in its memory, to verify the identity of the target it seeks. Rather then pulling up an exact image of her, we have the feel of the original image, and it will feel like the present one. This is how I know if I have seen the color red before, even if I do not remember an image of the color, nor know the name “red,” nor have heard anybody point out the color. The bare experience of the color red is abbrevited and turned into an abstracted feel. This abbreviate of red is no image itself, is not sensual, is conceptual. The concept, to be more easily handles, is given a sensual handle, such as a name or a picture, to sign the felt meaning.
To return to our fields, we have considered the visual field and the conceptual visual field, as two overlapping ovals. All the other sensual fields are superimposed over this. A certain amount of synesthesia is necessary to communicate across fields, and yet also a certain amount of divorce.
An audio field, for instance, insofar as the audio is language and not random noise or animal noises, is like the drops in a pond. A sentence when pronounced wraps into a ring, and spreads outwards like a ripple. Even after it is immediately heard, or subvocalized, it is still heard in part of the brain, continually heard in the memory, until after a day or a week it is forgotten. Like the visual field, temporal words last indefinately, and all words in a day are heard at once, with fading audibility.
The music of words, remember, is to hold the focus long enough to pin it in a shape and yet move away from the center of concentration. It is like a hand moving from the bullseye to a far object. Selecting always works by speed and vocal similarity. And the vocal is merely the label or handle for a stack of sensual objects. When the mind is in shape X, the voice of it will evoke other experiences X. Think of all the times you had ice-cream, and the experiences come quickly and without effort, by mere name. But if you focus on one image of that ice cream you can not imagine any other time you have it. The focus must be caught in a voice.
The subvocalization, therefore, is the ghost field for the audio. It speaks from the center (no voice is closer than the one in our head) but ripples out over and under words. To really focus on a distant and hardly audible voice, you can double it with a subvocalization.
The tactile field has a quicker decay rate, is shaped like three spheres: the skin, the muscles, and the organs. The ghost of the muscles is a stand in for will, for will feels muscular. All emotions are felt in the organs, especially the heart, stomach, and intestines.
With all ghost images and concepts, we only imagine them intently for a second, and they linger and haunt. To imagine the hero of your novel, you need only picture him for a moment, and he will stay with you when you look elsewhere.
The focus is the two hands upon the blanket, two hands to feel a focus of reality, and to enact it into world. El is the left hand, and Ra is the right hand, force and energy.
The mind, like a blanket, feels only the weight and shape of the external world on its senses, and that is sufficient. To feel that they are external is sufficient. Any other relationship to them would be unnecesary and damaging.
The mind must be flexible, powerful, speedy.
The underconscious may harbor an image we cannot fully see, and yet the charge on it moves and we feel its influence on the images we do see, and the charge they move by. It is like a cone whose point is under water.
Engines
Language binds. If we imagine a visual fantasy, the events of that fantasy will never be bound without words, labels, and a name to access it. A memory can be purely of concepts, of abstracted ideas, but is yet a memory insofar as it lacks a name, is not itself abstracted, is still bound to a feeling of priorness, and a recallable flow, and abbreviated sign of a chain of events. Until that full chain of abstractions is itself abstracted into a definite and meaningful feeling, and by “meaning” I mean as a combiner of ideas to bridge in powerful ways, then that is merely an experience but not a meaning, not a concept, not an idea.
The I is in two hands, and its willing is felt in all the muscles, as a shadow of actual muscular exercise. So too is all desire felt in the body, in the heart and guts, and there is no desire or love felt in the head or behind the eyes. Concepts and logic are seen on the conceptual screen in our field of vision, or they are seemingly unseen until the decisive moment of decision, but they are not felt in the heart and gut—only the desires we affix to them are felt in the soft of the body. The autistic may feel no social emotions at all, and yet calculate difficult numbers.
The greatest engines of thought must stream line and automatize into unconscious habits a series of mental operations, as the evaluator, filter, heirarcher, and builder. Such an engine must be able to swim with unconscious thoughts (the fish) and fly with the conscious thougths (birds); so must be amphibians, the frog prince who grabs the golden ball of consciousness from under the well, the demon at the gates, Hermes Christ, border-crosser.
As evaluator, the engine must change the intensity of desire, and thus rank it, rank what affinity the desire has for the center of focus, how much interest it is charged with to sink to the center of awareness.
The conceptual field is like a broad ribbon that curls out from the forehead, around before us, and back to the chin. To “see” a concept, paint with your minds finger the letter “L” as you look up before you. Now blink. The “L” will be a white letter burned as an after image upon your retina. In such a way, concepts are always open before us, as open and diverse as our visual field. The concepts are ghosts, dimmer, and are only seen when we activate them, when they are triggered and flash into attention, or when they double a seen object like a halo to give it a catch on our attention. You can easily conceptualize a triangle over this very page of print. But it is no longer in the conceptual field, but in the imagination field (memories, narrative) if you enact a dancing fairy flitting over these words. The fairy can be animated merely with a few word to trigger her and tell her what to do, but concepts cannot be told what to do, must be handled with hands and forced to do work by will power.
The engine, as amphibian, regulates what memories and concepts, once triggered, are allowed to be seen by conscioussness. Sometimes this filter is too strict and rigorous, so that we can no longer think wrongly, illegally, sinfully, by which I mean, creatively. Such a person needs a little trauma.
The assumptions themselves are piled upon each other by a Typing habit, which sees every image, and labels it under a type. This too becomes automatic and instinctual once you’ve learned and perfected its manner.
The memories also are piled and alined, and the overall structure of them and the structuring of them is habitualized and then automated – and this in the first five years – as the mythic, as your personal and ever repeating myth.
The engines are economical: they want your mind to focus on matters that need special attention, which cannot be solved “by the book” but require a fresh judgment over them.
Reading a book of philosophy sets the concepts dancing, so that your mind is atoned with the author, for part of the author’s consciousness is forever repeated in his book, and encoded in the material book in your hand. Perhaps you will not derive a single concept from the book other than the overall impression. Even if the book speaks only of abstract concepts, you may only have a set of memories about reading it, but have gained no new assumptions as tools to apply to your own thinking.
The concepts cannot work without a visual field to inermingle upon. And see how the environement influences them. Live in the cloudy north and you will think cloudier thoughts, more abstract, more philosophical, less fables, less sun-stories.
You can create new concepts only as well as you can draw on external paper. Concepts made by the fingers of thought, the white lines of concept you can see when you blink, use the same structuring art sense as drawing a picture. Learn to draw!
Learn also how to sing. For the heart and moods move by the inner music of our undersong. And this sings in our own singing voice, or upon the strings we play in our internal guitar. Whatever we have poured ourself externally defines the internal: as around us so within us.
Words are a sort of capitol. By putting your words (desire charges) into your speech, into you writings, into your memory, you have bought yourself a place in the world, and cotinually collect dividends upon it. Capitolism is money. Money is an abstraction and mobilization of value itself. And money must be mobile to be money. Communism and even socialism will forever be impossible unless money is outlawed. In the same way freedom of speech is necessary for the flow of powerful ideas, and without freedom of speech, there is no freedom of mind, no freedom to even think the things we would tell nobody. For we internalize the external. If adulterers in your country are killed for their sins, so is the part of you that would be capable of adultery, and that part of you is capable of many good things as well. It is like outlawing “hate speech” or “intolerant speech” by which they castrate their own minds.
Nietzche spoke of how forcing the engine (that is, the capability) for promising into men took generations of a persistent will upon them, with the artificial necessities of imposed torture and cruelty to “make the memory” of promise-making. This idea that we ought to make promises, and our word binds us was not natural, but it is second nature now, and nobody questions it. It required a persistent and long-lasting will, pressed over an imposed necessity. In other words, tyranny is merely the first step to normalcy. All that is needed is an artificial necessity made into a compulsion. “All religious are at the deepest level systems of cruelties.” And what is made normal for society will kill off the abnormal.
The ME engine is our generalized persona of ourselves primarily for ourselves, and secondarily for plugging in an image of another human being whom we now talk to, as as to gain a flow of conversation. The “plug” is the unique mask we put over the persona according to whom we are with. When I talk with Jeff, I approach him according to my image of Jeff, and my Me connects to this image thorugh the mask I have for him. The Me itself is an artificial habit constructed from the clay of instinct, made to represent a personality to others and especially to myself.
The intermixing of Visual and Audio fields
How do ear and eye combine in our experience of the world? The eye image is the concrete, the ear language is the conceptual transfer of desire. Ultimately, all language is a transferrence of desire, a way, in other words, of programming ourselves and others. The instrument of thirst and hunger is the instrument that expresses desire. For language is a force of combination – mythologically we say “eros” – for the name binds, the name summons, the name is god, for “god” means “the summoned.” As the Greeks said, “God is love”; “Theos Eros” for the first God was Eros, the joiner, amor, armer.
All music, and especially the flow of vowals in speech, poetry, and song, is meant to balance out the roughness of images, and above all to smooth the mind so as when passing a baby, or passing soil, we tense when tenseness empowers, and we smooth when smoothness empowers, so that the mind will see an image, but not criticize and analyze it into nothingness. Who doubts beauty? And again, who would watch a movie without a soundtrack? Who could suffer life without the continual inner music, which whether we consciously hear it or not, sets the rhythm of our moods? The essence of music is flow. The vowals of speech and writing must flow into each other, causing no choking when spoken, nothing as odd to say as “seahorse” to be the dominant gasp, but the feel of teeming movement. When you write, say your sentence aloud, and charicature the vowals.
The objects of the mind, “seen” within the perceptual world, are shadows of concrete images to stand for a series of experiences. The flow of focus over these objects requires the voice of music to ease and flow the mind so that sentences and paragraphs pour out. For instance, no matter how horrible and pathetic your mood, listening to music that is even more pathetic and worse makes you feel—better!—because the pain of the emotion is changed when the emotion is normalized and expanded. Music soothes the beast.
In the same way, the “name” of an idea, which binds the percepts and abstracted concepts into an idea, is the voice of it, and as a voice, puts a charge of behavior between it and other ideas and the center of focus.
Words about a concept express desire, but the concept itself is assumed and not yet habitualized, and so is emotively nuetral.
Voice is emotion. Bipolars and other emotional people do not sculpts and paint, they sing and poeticize. The voice is desire, and the mental objects in our head are surrounded by the desire of voice. An autistic person may have no clue what all this “emotional” talk even means, or any talk whatsoever. He comprehends instead the image.
The image, concepts, are associated with testosterone, which sharpens spatial reasoning, especially in the spring when testosterone is up.
Spatial dissection applies to music as well. When you listen to music, if you are educated, you may analyze. Or you can forego that, hang the left brain, and enjoy the music with your right brain, by synthesizing your musical response, adding to it your imagination, concepts, whatever is invoked and evoked; let the left brain silently analyze it and discover its structure. The peak experience of a song is after many difficult analyses of it, and then finally synthesizing with it.
The eyes, meanwhile, move back and forth when we are looking for the right word, for the right concept, because we are are looking over the conceptual field. Even blind men look around the room when they seek an elusive answer.
Once we have experienced the substance of an answer, we are not finished. We must make it beautiful. The truth is insufficient, for it is not fully “true” until it is restructured into beauty. Beauty suggests both mortality and immortality. Thus beauty is death is a couth youth. Beauty alone is loved, and where there is no beauty, there can never be anything but the pretense of love, for we can love not but the lovely.
Melody moves, but image is static. A moving image, as a memory, requires words to remember as a movement. An animal would recall a memory as an abbreviated symbol that evoked the full feel of the event, but the animal would not relive the event, having no need for reenacted memories. Each memory is reduced to a set of morals of the story, and those morals are simply images that flash into the animals mind when the appropriate trigger evokes them.
But we must analyze memories and construct hypothesis from them, that feel consistent with other assumptions and also produce fruitful thinking, acting, feeling, and moving habits. A truth itself feels correct, feels important, feels certain, but does not feel beautiful per se. Beauty is in the pleasure of sensing. Only the abbreviation of a truth in a condensed symbol is beauitful. Intellectual beauty refers to the mind when it flows its two hands of focus through the moving ideas and feels the stream of them, like cool river water in simple profundity. The simple profound alone is intellectual beauty. Assumptions therefore are not quite beautiful, because beauty is a desire, and only habits have desire. Beauty is the desire that flows into all things, a full relation. And of these, only the most meaningful of our assumptions become Eros.
Nothing choppy is beautiful. Even the greatest symphony is torture if your CD player skips.
Truth empowers; beauty is visual proof of power. Beauty is the desirable, and the ultimate desire is to make love with, consume, be one together. Beauty, like eros, draws beauty to beauty, so that beautiful concepts bind others to them, and what is memorable is most memorable if formed into beauty. For beauty is the promise of power as health and efficiency.
Beauty flows into the unknown, and gives us a feel for the complete unknown. Thus she is elusive, and bride to death. She is yet joyful. Beauty is no weeper. The virtuouso is happier than his audience. Even so, the reader’s mind is the work when he reads. For at that moment, his mind takes the shape of the beautiful words he sees. To be beautiful, to perform beautifully, to make others beautiful in our image…there is no higher or better experience than this.
Emerson said, after naming the highest rule of life that man shall maintain himself, that “above all, get health. No labor, pains, temperence, poverty, nor exercise, that can gain it, must be grudged.” This is what we mean by beauty.
Beauty is organic, it must be simple as it can be and yet fulfill all her purposes. She touches everything and yet is as centered and self-contained as middle-C. She is above all muscular, supple, ample, flexible, and healthy. Beauty flows beyond, and so she is both death and immortality. What greater promise of eternity is there than the adolescent girl naked? For beauty is the moment of transition. Beauty is a circle.
“The letter is dead”? No poet would believe such a thing. The sign lives. Even if it were dead to being with, the very way it is spoken, the way it is combined, the way it is thread together , and the way the mouth speaks the word when it says it, the tone and take on the word– no, theris no dead sign. More to the point, the sign as handle touches many defined meanings and evokes them immediately upon hearing them.
The world is trauma to the individual. Parents, necessarily, must traumatize their children, in the right manner, to preprare them for the world, to prepare them to master the world and love parts of it. Poetry is the first mastery, and all the art forms with it. Philosophy is a more spiritual mastery, and science a more practical. Poetry becomes philosophy, and philosophy science. Nor is science conceivale, desirable or possible without philosophy and poetry. It is merely a special mode of these, as a sphere within a sphere within a sphere.
Why do you ask of truth “how do I know the world is?” Trace all questions back to the basic sense perceptions they derive from. Sensations are simple disconnected data. The simplest perception is to unite, say, a series of photons from different angles into the outline of, say, a pen. The pen looks like distinct object, and if we view it over time we see it as one in nature. This is the most basic perception. The full perception is to unite all the senses, the memories, and even the concepts, back unto that one perceptual object. The pen also smells a certain way, sounds a certain way when tapped, feels a certain way when grasped, and we have the undoubtable sense that all these things refer to one object.
Sensations are the excitement of nerves, conceptions the associating of the excitments of nerves as presenting delimited objects, conceptions as the diffusing out of the immediate sensations again from the perceptions, and definitions as the meaningful chaining of conceptions into ideas.
All art, as beauty, is perceptual. Yet all art is conceptual art, meant to give a unique perceptual experience that both reorients our perceiving in general, and gives us a standard by which to judge perceptions. So called abstract art does not offend because it is too conceptual and not enough perceptual, but because it is ugly and unskillfully made. The souls of the artists are sick and passing. The type conceptual art itself is merely on more genre of art which could yet have her beautiful artist. Democratic art is an oxymoron. It is the nature of the people to follow, not to create.
Once a lexicon of such abstracted words exists, imagine a concept, therefore, as a chain of micro-experiences, of the most basic sensual sort, that feel contextual-less. They feel like they are floating, though they are grounded in reality, and in this free-floating form, they may be bound together in abstract chains to create definitions of abstracts. A definition is a definited, deliniated, repeatable, exact experience. It by no means refers to anything but itself, and is immediately real. A definition is not a verbal formula as in a dictionary, but those are meant to give you the feeling of the definition. A definition as its name suggest is the most definite experience possible.
A joke is like music, in that they must match the emotional temperament of the person. A sound is required to sustain an emotion. On the other hand a speedy selection can also beat the decay. Once two objects are chained together, one after the other, they are associated, and that association is an assumption, a meaning. When meanings are added up and compared, they each recommend a course of action, and action requires judgment, what meaning is most effective for needs. All these things exist for needs, to enact and fulfill them.
Words are glue between objects. Speaking is meant to bind ideas together, and ideas to judgments, and judgments to desires, and ultimatley, desires as habits.
Focus as whole
Intimacy is too much. Intimacy is the unbearable. And thus we come to understand that our greatest realities are unconscious, and that we are out of touch even with the external. We are so caught up in habits that we do not even realize what is standing before us. Not that anybody else around us can realize it better. Pay a psychologist thousands of dollars and years of sessions, and he might help you get to the real moments, to see things for just a second as they really are—indeed, for some of us, this is the only communion, the only touch of reality—but again, you cannot take the real from the mouth of another. “Be lanterns to yourself,” said Buddha. The self is the only lantern. He is also made to say “It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.” Yes, but let’s not lose track of the reality here. “Conquer yourself” is merely a metaphor, for what happens here is not a conquering, is not a struggle, is not something you try at or not try at. Let me not dazzle you with riddles, and say: think things through. That’s it. To touch the real you must become real enough to be touched by it.
Reality is experience, and only this. Whatever is yet to be discovered out there is of course external, but it is not real, because we have not realized it through experience.
The little men and women say, “I believe in God,” “I believe that Jesus came to earth,” “I believe in the republican principles.” Believe is belove, and you can only love what you have touched, felt, known, experienced. You believe in none of these things. You hope for them. And you hope for them because you do not have them. Hope is the disease, the bottom of the pandora’s jar, the one vice that lets all the others persist. Hope nothing. Have everything.
They say they believe, but it is not experienced, and therefore it is not real, since the only thing real to us is what we have, what we have experienced. Blessed the rich in spirit. The poor in spirit inherit only dirt.
When others insist that their superstitions and faiths are true, you must ask, instead, what is the real reference of these ideas? What are they experiencing and why do they regard this as important? If they believe in the absurd, why do they do so? Do not call them fools, because you then make humanity something capable of foolishness. If you believe yourself above others, you believe that mankind is low. Focus on the humanity of others, and do not let their silly mistakes fill you with the silly mistake of vanity, for it will distract you from your goals.
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Every action in life, every moment we live, every second of thought, is surrounded by our imagination of the immediate past, called “memory,” and our imagination of the immediate future, called “anticipation.” In fact, every action has an immediate set of fantasies as to possible consequences. Most of this is unconscious. We implicitly know a dozen possible responses to expect from the lips of our conversation partner; we are rarely shocked.
And so, most of life is a dream. We have the real facts of the senses, but we constantly fantasize, consciously and unconsciosly, about what to do with the facts, and what the world will do if we act in any particular way. We ever live in the absolute moment, and this moment includes an instant feeling of our full history, with the immediate contextual past as most real, and the full future of possiblities, with the anticipatin of the next few minutes as most real. This absolute now is integrated, solid, atomistic, nondissactable, absolute: NOW is inviolate and whole, and yet, ever flowing and moving. All hail NAO.
What we need when it moves into the conscious mind moves first into the metaphor of feeling thoughts. Metaphorical resonance calls us to our place. The stage that resonates to our words is our stage.
All memories are charged with emotion. The emotion is what makes them memorable. And indeed, each memory is constantly happening, is a river bed that when energy is spashed at it, gives a conscious or unconscious remembering. Memories eternally return.
Memories are a form of imagination solidified into repeatable patterns. Memory, imagination, experience, sensation, and anticipation are all essentually of the same faculty, which I call “memory.” The mind takes a symbol of the worlds and experiences it, both directly as sensation and experience, and constantly but indirectly as the ever present but usually suppressed memory, and as the ever constant but barely seen anticipation. We live in worlds of dreams and fantasies, with a little focus on the facts of now. There is no illusion at all in this, for the experienced is real, and the system fulfills us.
Memories are infinitely repeating loops. A sense of importance is the feeling of plugging a loop into an assumption, and then into a habit. Importance is meaning is a feeling of multi-usefulness.
We image the external, we imagine the internal. The “ego-screen” is the ego’s ability to take the shapes of both external and internal together, and will itself back outwards on them. The I is between two objects, world and needs. It is like a slightly tinted glass with a movie projector on each side shining upon it, and the glass itself take shapes to let the lights of each interact.
So the mind is situated between two realities: needs and world. Not only is it situated, but it constantly feels situated. We feel situated by our full focus, which always includes a memory setting. Our short term and long term memory set us up to feel constant continuity. Only in cases of mental breakdown does the world itself seem crazy and unpredictable. In fact, our brain is not giving us context like normal. The normal healthy experience of a human being is to feel a flow and order in all realities, that the world is predictable enough to feel comfortable, but suprising enough to feel interesting. The self is predictable enough to be known, but spontaneous enough to be loved.
The memory is like a dark room that expands outward from the center. Current ideas glow, but old ideas hum. The closer they are, the closer they happened, and the louder the sound. We can catch on to them easily. The farther ideas take a little grasping, but if we can still hear them, we can snatch them up too.
Whatever the context, a context itself is a concept that the I experiences at every given moment. The focus takes the two shapes of place: full focus and small focus. The full focus is the overall context of the mind. The inner reality of the needs (memories, assumptions, impulses) and the outer world of the senses (body, things) make a two-reality system, of which the mind is an autonomous screen.
QTR à [@] ßXYZ
The mind is a shape caused by the outer world and inner world, but different from them. An idea is the experiencing of realities. We are conscious of the realities through the shape of our awareness. The two activities of the mind, then, are internalization and externalization. Taken in their strickest sense, an internalization is to translate an external pattern into the assumptions and habits, and an externalization is to impose on the world our inner patterns.
“Truth” is an assumption that allows effective thinking: a bridge between the inner garden and the external city.
Health is by diet and exercise. One must eat the proper things, the right conversations, the right books, the right art, and one must digest them into energy for one’s own creativity: conversations, letters, work. Like a lung, you must take in, you must let out. This is the median nature of mind. The mind is a filter, a screen, a symbol. It experiences itself to represent the others.
Exercising the Focus
The widening of the soul requires much work. How much can you be conscious of at one time? The consciousness blanket only stretches so far. But how far can we knit it?
Nobility is judged according to the heirarchy of needs he has willed, and the primary need is to heirarchize many of the negotiable needs into a self-defined system. Once they solidify, they are absolute, and the structure a man wills for himself forever determines his rank among men.
As the outer so the inner. The world and everything in it repeats in the soul, and the most real of the world becomes the insistent of the soul.
The back of the tongue is a little more sensetive to bitter, and indeed, the deeper the experience, the more bitter it might seem.
Reread the same 3 pages ten times through, and then move onto the next three once through, and you will feel the power of the eyes, which were pent for a moment before release.
The I seperated from the Needs of Self in order to grow strong – and this seperation we call becoming mortal, being born into the world.
The I begins in the synesthesia of a bodybrain, at one and baubled; the preteen holds his pristine I, slowly force to take inside the monument of WE – that social sphere that becomes his world, for the underconscious is formed on the figure of our external equpiment – through the ME that grows like a skin with upon the touch of the world, for childhood is trauma, and to take in the great monument cathedral of world of WE, to surround the ME, and the ME to negotiate the world to the I, and the I to seek to fulfill the Needs of the Self, we must swallow the whole thing down, a long hard swallow, ten years of childhood, for which he must compensate him continually with play, lest he be overcome as the great Roman Empire was overcome and swallowed itself back up into the WE of Roman Holy Catholic, allowed and continued through hundreds of traditions, faked or real, and that’s the preteen and it suffices till the teenage years, 13-17, the clashing of the epics, or the break with the parent generation, the full acceptance and ambivalence of a WE this generation, and here at last the ME becomes thoroughly embedded in its own WE, and the adjectives weak and tough become the tell and value of the man, where emotions become words for the first time, where the child becomes the poetic youth – and poetry rightly belongs here, for the youth can no longer swallow the Althing, the Thing of the society, as the child did, must start to spit it back and rebel, come into head, finally, at the years 18-20, the dropping of the initial WE to test and and empower the ME in the world of work, and it is this decade when the character-as-worker is defined and grows, the window of oppurtunity for our work-character, our productive-character (here we internalize work), and again some long eating, but the mind is no synesthesia, now we can only consciously concentrate on four things—they must be beautiful and simple, rather than cluttered and sophisticated, as they are in the inner of the thing swallowed—and only when they are painted plausibly as a unity, for usually we can think only of one, till again, the I self-overcomes, and wants to shed again the ME now to make a stronger ME for this new WE, and that is the 30-36 age of apotheosis, when the youth becomes an individual, the great age of Buddha, Jesus, Emerson, Nietzche, when each championed his break with the former ME and became something better, and here again emotions become words, we have a new ME to imbed a freer I, till at last at the ages 37-40 we gain the height of our creative power, and the new ME chooses at last a strong WE, and here nouns become containers, a name a container of verbs, for nouns and names alone contain, and verbs and adjectives huddle within them, and at last language is controllable, the man is mature, and contains, as a worldman, till the ages of 50-60, the wisdoming of the man, he becomes a central nerve to the collective consciousness, that great onemind that thinks through the nerve that each man is, and communicates to itself through art, the thinking of a society and world as a single consciousness – and to see this we must make our friends into our professors, or work into our laboratory, each incident into a textbook to the whole.
Object – that which is “thrown before” the conscious ego, that sort of feeling for a definite object that can be directly seen, or through language transferred to another human being, who gets its sense by mere mere name and without recourse to poetry.
Subject – that which is “thrown under” the conscious ego. You could view it as the ground the ego stands on, or better still, as the “valence” or “desiring direction” that halos objects.
Understanding – that which one has assumed and can reexperience as an assumption.
Wisdom – that which one has understood and judged worthy of continual action, as habit.
Memory – a concrete sensual experience, structured as an episode of events, either sensual or conceptual, along with a sense of their priorness and their prior place.
Assumption – an abstracted conceptual experience, derived either from primary memories or interpreted from the language of others. Assumptions as abstractions are pulled from experience, and stand above a stack of the like a tripod, or a series of these abstractions shaped together into a defined idea, such as Justice or Truth or Work.
Habit – a structured set of impulses – “the rules of the game” which are no longer seen, but only felt. A habit is felt as an impulse only, and surrounds a mental object, either a sensually represented concept, or a sensation itself: what one is to do with it is felt inuitively, and need not be directly imagined: its meaning is felt.
Meaning – a chain of sensations atomized into concepts and restructured as an assumption, and so, abbreviated into what seems a simple and immediate feeling. One need not interpret a meaning, for it is direct.
Judgment – when two or more sets of meanings have been discovered and explored, and one needed to consciously decide into an action and ultimately a habit.
Language – a code meant to be communicated and received that evoke meanings already in the person receiving them in such a pattern that they create new meanings, as intended by the speaker or author. Language cannot transmit meanings, it can only tell you how unconsciously, or if interpretation is needed, consciously recreate a private meaning from the already existing stock meanings you have already assumed.
Reason – a habit of thinking, a sort of dance that compares the shape, size, and feel of different objects and find their ratio. Reason is necessary to judge between two meanings.
Doubt – the apprehension of a meaning, the juxtoposition of the meaning of its opposite, the seeking of implications and sensual evidence, and finally the judgment, which replaces the doubt with a feeling of “faith” or correctness in the decision.
Truth – a tested meaning that has been applied to habits and found fruitful. “Tried and true” is the clearest application of this term.
Fact – a direct sensual experience. We do not experience external objects, but objects felt to be external. As a blanket, the mind feels the shape of the blanket, and not the objects lying atop it.
Believe – to belove, to hold an assumption as important.
Interpretation – a breaking up of mental objects to see what sort of ideas hold them together.
Mood – the lens of focus by which we see the world at any given moment.
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Perfection Is Easy
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