This is a self-inquiry, not a lecture, although I attempt to organize what I am discovering so that you can understand what is otherwise – without this form-finding work – an interior chaos. I share this so that you and I will know we’re not alone. We are fellow prisoners, cutting free our chained minds.
We don’t trust our children to unfold as they will. The society wants consistent shapes that can serve as cogs in the inorganic machine. We are trained to serve the machine, not vice versa.
Education at its best teaches us self-knowledge, while education at its worst teaches us who we are.
Instead of focusing solely on building technologies to save us from disease, couldn’t we have primarily focused on altering our poisoned way of living so that disease was less common?
I hear in my own brain (and from what I derive from others’ brains) something similar to government propaganda in the way it defends and justifies itself by referencing selectively edited memories (or fake news), in order to preserve the illusion of a stable and presidential “me” who does no wrong.
I need an image of myself. I have to be aware of whether or not my behavior is suited to the moment. And this naturally inspires the brain to summarize how I’m behaving (or other people are behaving) in some short-hand form. But these images perform coherently only when they remain provisional mirrors of behavior – lighting up along the periphery of attention as proprioceptive reflections and refractions, which keep the organism tethered to some portion of reality. Even Buddha had a self-image of that sort.
The “small” self (or “me” sensation) is an estimation of how “I” look in someone else’s eyes. Other people serve mainly as mirrors for perceiving this self. This self can’t exist if it’s not imagined from the perspective of an Other.
The “I” is merely a rehearsal of how others should see me. It’s chained to others’ opinions. So, this “I” is always a social construct, and is not “who we really are.” We always exceed our own expectations if given half a chance.
In focusing too much on trying to unfold a new identity, all we end up doing is shifting from one combination of socially imposed definitions to another, and then calling that shift from the old prison to the new prison, freedom.
Where I expect to find a real character within (or within another person), I find only a stream of language describing one.
We’d like the other people in our social web to stop trying so desperately to free themselves. Our own entangled stability depends on it.
This sense of “self” is not a soul but only the body’s imaginations of itself as if from the outside. It is a secular conception of soul, minus the traditional soul’s connection to a nested hierarchy.
Everywhere in this culture, the small Self and its waking dreams have been given permission to supersede the reality of earthly life (biology and planet). It’s a general permission slip to discount reality in favor of a pretense of soul.
A “soul” was not originally conceived as the atomic essence of a separate self, but as an idiosyncratic expression of a universal being that can’t be identified in any positive sense, except through metaphor and myth. This humbling sense of a soul is lost when it’s converted into a separate Self, who doesn’t have to answer to anything but its own imagination.
This capacity to imagine ourselves outside our bodies is less real than the body, because imagination is only a derivation of the body and is in no position to tell the body who or what it is.
I wonder if bad eyesight is caused by a disinclination to see the look on other people’s faces. We blur sight and retreat to senses which are less susceptible to duplicitous signals. So, the eyes atrophy or wear out with misuse.
When I take off my glasses, I end up listening more closely. Then the Other listens more closely too. And all they can see in my own blissfully blurred face is a good-natured ignoramus, which tends to awaken a spirit of charity, if not downright pity. Thus, we both become transfigured so long as at least one of us remains blurry.
The centrality of myself remains stubbornly pre-Galilean. *
What I “know” of another person is only my story of the story they tell about themselves.
Our personalities are merely characters in imaginary dramas. When the drama shifts, the personality shifts. If the drama ends, “we” end. Hence, we cling to dramas.
The imaginary voice is speaking to an imaginary person. The “I” and the “self” that are being addressed are both part of the imaginary performance.
Yes, it’s an inquiry into myself, but it’s not about “me”, as in my personal history or problems. It’s about the common momentum of thought that runs “me.”
If we make this conscious distinction between thought and being, then we are able to move in and out of the shapes imposed on perception by thought and language. This allows us to remain somewhat aloof from who we think we are.
Whatever we are, we’re not found in passing thoughts. They are merely the traces of our passing.
I learn from everything that goes wrong, and everything is always going wrong. *
I don’t write because I know something. I write because I don’t. *
But it’s not like I’m trying to do something. It’s more like something else is trying to do something and “I” keep getting in the way. And all this tripping over myself to avoid what it wants looks like “effort.” It’s a seductive pretense.
Writing happens when effort fails.
The only light the “I” produces is the light of its own combustive friction. This friction is produced by trying to avoid the revealing light of awareness. This friction is the cause of Hellfire. Hellfire is the light of heaven burning away.
Self-discovery is the discovery of nothing.
Self-discovery is the exploration of the cosmos, because the discovery of my absence is the discovery of everything else. But we turn our backs on this larger Being merely because it disturbs the small image of who we thought we were.
Writing is neither a means to an end, nor an end in itself. There is a third possibility. Writing is merely what happens when I’m learning. It’s a necessary corollary of the process, but neither a means nor an end.
If a necessary corollary to something larger is repressed, then the larger thing also can’t form. But we still can’t focus on the corollary as a means towards the larger thing.
I say things after I already know them. I know things silently prior to speaking. I speak in order to hold the surface image steady against a barrage of anomalous information.
I’m a little embarrassed to title something “Aphorisms”, because it seems a little too pretentious and presumptuous. But I recently overheard 30 seconds of a book review of some philosopher’s book of aphorisms as I was walking past a radio. And the reviewer noted that aphorisms tend towards concision (obviously) and humor. And that’s the combination I need.
And when I started scanning through what I already wrote, I realized that I might be able to distill the essence of all these words to a nub, or many little nubs. And when I started throwing them in a list, I noticed that there’s a natural ebb and flow to the nubs. And with a little rough tweaking here and there, and the addition of a few new nubs, the ebbs and flows take on a certain rhythm and direction, without the need for a unifying voice or any tiresomely self-conscious Self, such as the one who is speaking now.
Admittedly, these nubs, ebbs and flows still came out to 37 pages, which doesn’t seem too concise after all. But that’s 6,129 fewer pages than the essays in total. So, count yourselves lucky.
I broke them into three “volumes” (so far). And I’ll post one every few days. I allowed some similar observations to sneak into each volume, because the different contexts add enough nuance to justify the repetition.
So, the whole thing ends up forming something in between an essay and a disjointed list of one-liners. They were fun to compile, tweak and expand. So, I hope they are fun to read.
I’m not sure this ends up “better” or “worse”, but it’s different. And as a different “approach” (an almost headless approach, trusting the connective tissue to form on its own, trusting it to make more sense than the sum of individual observations) it cuts out the middleman (“me”), and hones in on some of the essential insights that might otherwise get lost in the verbose flow of narrative. (I mean, I can’t picture too many people who actually read all this stuff. So, this is like digging up a few of the potatoes that probably got lost in the bed).
So, maybe it’s both better and worse, because these “nubs” also miss more subtle narrative themes that are only possible within the more long-winded essays (which includes this preface).
And now there’s the possibility of a hybrid form of essay, which I might try later.
I should note that any hyperlinked asterisks lead to the essay where the aphorism (or something similar) can be found in its natural habitat.
