On with the pragmatic use of emotions, of building up energy, in this case, and then releasing it. Being able to build up a series of energies and releasing each of them at the right time brings success. Most of pragmatism will be about emotional hygiene, beginning with this secion.
Daniel
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2. Build and Release
Creativity opens up the inspiration that alone can dissolve disease, but it is a bit jagged and impractical. Pragmatism rounds the edges of actions, makes daily life simple and predictable, gives a platform for the spiritual need for personal expression and transfiguration. What strategies can we use to play the game better, to maximize energy? Where is our common sense?
Pragmatism could be called ‘productivity,’ ‘efficiency,’ or better still, ‘cycling.’ It is about daily circuits, continually tightening our day, removing clutter, becoming wiser with our time, knowing how to abbreviate.
One strategy, most extreme in the bipolar, is the natural tendency for build and release. We naturally build a desire for a thing until it grows strong enough to motivate attainment: I wasn’t ready to get a new job then, but now that I’ve been hating this one for a while, the energy has built; I was lonely for months and finally the energy has built to inspire me to meet a new date; I didn’t pay the bills until the energy built to inpsire to beat the deadlines. Energy builds. But to hold off fulfillment, to fast, to wait, to play with abstinence, to focus intently on this until that is dammed and incredible, then I have the power of release, I can overwhelm others with the fury of my passion. My moods pour out like fate: after me comes the flood!
All ideas are made of abstracted experiences glued together by desire. Not only that, the overall structure of each idea is charged with a valence of desire. Ideas have tension and anxiety: information is never neutral. Each form must be expressed. With enough build up, one achieves exuberance. To put 95% of your power into your challenger's 5% of weakness, you overwhelm him. With low energy, you must know how to slowly build up. How to simultaneously accumulate many wells of power, to continually build your supply is the wisdom of all men, but especially the depressed.
Doing a thing hollows out a space within the ground of our experience which will fill with the right emotions to inspire us to repeat it. Every idea is like a labeled cup which admits only a given emotion, and finally is poured out when it is full. Have many projects going at once, not only your work and your family, which require much care, engagement, and moments of intimacy, but also continual creativity, with a streamlined regularity, but use also your passions, which must be strands of the same thread, as in a writer who draws, plays music, dances, and sings, all as supports and doublings of that same inner passion to write.
Build and flood, build and flood. When the flood is upon you, give yourself over to it. That is the divine dispensation, the moment of inspiration: submit to the power as it washes over you, like a swimmer swimming with the current.
Go with the flow of a mood. Find what work a mood is suited for and use it. If depressed, don’t worry, but ask yourself “what work is this depression cut out for?” Perhaps you are subtle to suffering and can therefore understand it better. When agitated, analyze your faults; you will be more sensitive to them. Don’t waste energy in the friction of fighting a mood. It is a fact: use it.
Heat dissolves the crystals of ideas and facts. If you have that inner heat, nobody can oppose you, no facts can trip you up: you take them up and subsume them. With exuberance, the circuits melt and set.
With both love and power, the more you exert, the more you can: gift is gain; we spend into our own bank accounts. Fighting the losing battle as if your life depended on it, never giving up even when defeat is inevitable, is the only way to deepen your will power, whatever the result. The game of life at its most basic is about how forms are used to gain pleasure. That’s the overall structure. Dying, going to the limits of death, teaches us life. Commitment to commitment is the leg we stand on, just as optimism is the leg we step upwards with.
A character is the structuring of one’s tensions. The muscles, their feel, their stance, our character, are our habits of action. The reward of every good deed, the punishment of every bad, is in the body which remembers them, and in the mind which is forever embodied: you cannot escape yourself, and no god’s blood can wash away who you choose to be. The soul, incarnate in your blood, incarnate in the energy of the self’s atom, repeats itself consistently to the edge of the universe. No goodness escapes its reward, no badness escapes its punishment, for what we do becomes us.
In this country, the capacity for work is the measure of worth. The first question we ask a man is how he gets his living. It doesn’t matter if he is rich or poor, but how he gets his money, what he does. Character is in our actions – what matter my thoughts or feelings if they profit neither myself nor the world? And yet flow is the essence of beauty and health. The feelings must flow into thoughts, thoughts into words, and words into deeds. Only then do we have a concordance of energy, a confluence of power, a congruence of being. Only then are we real. The Union must be integrated, the mind must preside. When some part accumulates more than it earns this upsets the economy, subverts the system. Beauty is in the flow, in the balance of part against part. Exaggeration is the essence of ugliness. Therefore, we should grow in ways that open more growth, and not grow in ways the cut off more growth. A plant should not sprout quickly if its roots haven’t taken hold. If you grow too specialized so that you are like a bird that can only eat one kind of nut, then you are bound by your beak, and cannot adapt. Flexibility is the nature of youth, the charm of youth; flow is power. What accumulates, what is bound in anxiety, is power wasted, trips up flow, seizes the system. Only when you can act without pause have you mastered life.
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Perfection
Is
Easy
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