wrong. My body is telling me so. My very corporal reality is suddenly shoved, full force, into my face and I am made to inhale its noxious stink. The biggest bummer about being a human is, after all, our physical presence: the life of the body versus the life of the mind.
It’s very early morning now. I went to bed a scant couple of hours ago, but my body—as a result of illness—has awakened me. I tend to get more work done in the quiet hours of morning than any other time of the day, and I would venture to guess that this is because mornings are always reflective for me. It is at once rejuvenation and decay. Wherever the idea came from that “a new day is here” is a positive thing, I can’t say; however, the way I understand it: the sun awakens life, life happens every day, and every day has its own life. It is a birth in a way, but it is also (and at arguably a more personal level), we are all taking one tiny step closer to the end.
Where does that leave us? It’s a question in my mind that goes back to the question of what is innate in humanity. Are the good of humanity and the continuation of the species more important than the continuation of the individual? Is that built in? Can we say that it really all goes back to the biological necessity of growth happening as a result of decay? Topsoil is millions and millions of years of decay, and rot, and…fertilizer. The decay of the past feeds the present that grows to decay for the future.
Somewhere along the line, though, I think we figured this out. We figured out that one thing we absolutely can do nothing about is the ending of our personal existence. This basically split the camp into two distinct factions. First, the group saying, “Well, it’s clear that everybody dies, and that’s not good enough. Surely there’s more. We enjoy living so much that we’ll sacrifice the life we know for a life we are going to hope into existence.” Let’s call them the eternity team. How this works is that we are beings with a soul that we can know exists, and that we can use to talk to the higher being that is in control of our souls and what happens to them in the end. Free will aside, your god of choice is in control because he (or she) laid down the rules for you to live by. If you don’t live by his or her rules, then you lose the game. That’s control. At any rate, if you do play by the rules, your soul (which is apparently connected to your singular conscious self) will be moved to a place where time does not exist—at least in an earthly, logical, rational sense.
The other group would be saying, “Well, it’s clear that everybody dies, and that’s not good enough. I guess we’ll have to take the time we can be aware of and attempt to truly do something with it. Let’s call them the present team. It is an active acceptance of our present reality as the one we can choose to know completely about. Our bodies are holding us down. They are a constant reminder to us that one day we will not be able to actively accept the present reality, but the mind can make it’s mark. It’s the only way to ensure that your time on this world was not ill spent: actively engage in life. Enjoy the physical pleasures of the body while you can. You won’t be able to in a little while. Question daily why you are doing what you’re doing. You won’t be able to question soon. Invent the wildest adventures to go on. You won’t be capable of adventure soon. Make your mind your mark that sparks decay for growth. Break down with questions, and suddenly we’re back to the Greeks.
Which brings up another question: is our decay also our growth? Or, alternatively, is our growth our decay? We clearly haven’t gotten much past the questions of the ancients. Socrates, Plato, Lao Tzu, Socrates. These men were all asking similar, if not more difficult, questions over two thousand years ago. It is almost as if we were locked in a considerable struggle to retain the life of the mind. Some would say that based on how we still study these seminal texts in quest of questions that we are only trying to keep pace with the Greeks, but that their understanding of existence was far advanced from ours. Yet, we look around at ourselves, our fifty-six inch flat panel high definition television sets, our iPhones, our word processing programs, our music, our art, our buildings, our telecommunication networks, our indestructible materials, our destructive materials, our stand-up MRI chambers, our Green automobiles, our organic food, our food production techniques, our war making techniques, our Vitamin Water, our Emergen-C, and we call it progress.
We are simultaneously growing and decaying?
I think I’ve managed to confuse myself.
Maybe the best we can do is manage to confuse ourselves every day, develop the mind a little bit, and balance out the decay that happens in that day. Balance, and we’re back to the way of the Tao.
Since the world points up beauty as such,
There is ugliness too,
If goodness is taken as goodness,
Wickedness enters as well.
For is and is-not come together;
Hard and easy are complementary;
Long and short are relative;
High and low are comparative;
Pitch and sound make harmony;
Before and after are a sequence. -- The Way of Life, Lao-tzu
Growth and decay are married. The principle of non-action has nothing to do with not doing anything. It’s more about not making mental decision pre-emptively and developing the mind to be capable of making the right decision. The way of the Tao is active non-action. That’s what’s wrong I guess: I don’t get it, but I get it. I’m not supposed to get it am I? That’s good because I don’t get it. But it sucks because I don’t get it.
In the quiet hours of the morning a great violence is being done to my head. It is growing and decaying simultaneously. It is confused and learning to study its confusion.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Friday, February 8, 2008
What's It Mean To Be
Free? Damn I hate questions. The questions answered with a simple “Yes” or “No,” unfortunately, do me absolutely no good—those are the questions we tend to gloss over anyway. There is very little to be gained from a question with a dichotomous answer. Even if one were to think in terms of mathematics, it is not so much that x=y, but WHY x=y that matters. Qualifications, I think it is, that drive a good question. Think of them as proofs, reasons, the becauses, the whatevers, and it is still all of these things that help us understand what a questions means.
To live as we please, pursuit of happiness and whatnot, is that freedom? Is freedom the same as being free? Can an absolute price be placed on freedom? Can freedom be determined by how much sass and backtalk we give to the authorities? Is he who’s free, he who can unfalteringly, unwaveringly stand behind his principles? Does freedom come at a price, or is the price already paid? Why is it that the people who oftentimes claim to be most free, most often fall into line with their pre-labeled identities? What is determined by freedom?
It frustrates me sometimes to ponder the intricacies of questions like these, if only because my head gets locked into abstractions and endless chains of referendums that send me spiraling into unconscionable depths of human pondering. We all have minds of imbalance, ranging from the hyper sexual nature of some to the hyper violent of others and the hyper narcissistic of most others. Perhaps it is precisely the thing we think allows this kind of thing that most hampers its most intense expressions.
Even the Beatles weren’t free. For all their wealth and money and fame, they were locked into a mode wherein they were only allowed to produce sometimes incomprehensible music for the masses. That kind of pressure produces results, it is true; however, it is not the kind of results that come from complete freedom. It is the results of adrenaline and the expectation to produce. One of the greatest things that ever happened was the break-up of the Beatles. Some of the greatest acts of freedom are the unfathomable acts of superhuman beings imposing their free will on the unwilling.
Do you see how difficult it can get? When a great act of freedom is also a great act of evil, it does not cease to be a great act, it only has that qualifier “evil”—I guess the same could go for a great act of selfishness. It is in this equation that we see how greatness is not altogether equivalent to good and bad, and thus all other associated with a generally determined qualifier of “good” or “bad” are called into question.
Is freedom really preferable to having somebody’s will imposed upon us? When we allow the human mind to sink to the depths of it’s depravity—which is at some level sanctioned by the term freedom—then we are asking to have the most heinous acts occur. Think of television. The most heinous acts are perpetrated on the minds of your average American by exposing it to the imposed will of some television executive trying to make his (or her) mark on the world. And it is by the same token that the imposed will of one is also their illustration of their better handle on freedom than you. They can do whatever the hell they want, and throw explosions at your face until you understand explosions, before you realize that the will you think of as your own is, in fact, not.
What are you doing? Are you actively involved in imposing your will, or are you passively accepting the will of others? We wind up doing a little bit of giving and taking I suppose. We accept the will of some—most often our parents I think—and impose our will on others, but even that seems to be an incredible cop out. “Yeah, I impossible my will on that SOB the other day,” but the next day there’s nothing to do but cry at my unwilling but unconditional surrender to some other’s will. The moment you lose everything, is the moment you gain something?
There is no such thing as passive freedom. One cannot sit idly on the sidelines of the freedom game and wait passively for the coach to give him the nod. When you have no friends you are free to do what you will with your time. When you have friends you are free to do what you will with their time. It seems slightly incongruous, doesn’t it, that freedom is possible in any situation. It is occurring to me that freedom is a complete farce and possible in any situation one can imagine—yes, even in captivity, incarceration, or all other forms of detention. Freedom is malleable, you see.
Birds fly because of their instinct to forage and gather food, a mate, and young. They are slaves to their desires. Extinguish desires may well be the route to a genuine experience of the world. Then again, to desire is perhaps the most natural thing on the planet. We desire to eat. We desire to love. We desire to copulate. We desire. Those who don’t desire spend their days desiring to not desire. Language has the ability to mean everything and nothing all at once.
Is it possible to say something and nothing?
To live as we please, pursuit of happiness and whatnot, is that freedom? Is freedom the same as being free? Can an absolute price be placed on freedom? Can freedom be determined by how much sass and backtalk we give to the authorities? Is he who’s free, he who can unfalteringly, unwaveringly stand behind his principles? Does freedom come at a price, or is the price already paid? Why is it that the people who oftentimes claim to be most free, most often fall into line with their pre-labeled identities? What is determined by freedom?
It frustrates me sometimes to ponder the intricacies of questions like these, if only because my head gets locked into abstractions and endless chains of referendums that send me spiraling into unconscionable depths of human pondering. We all have minds of imbalance, ranging from the hyper sexual nature of some to the hyper violent of others and the hyper narcissistic of most others. Perhaps it is precisely the thing we think allows this kind of thing that most hampers its most intense expressions.
Even the Beatles weren’t free. For all their wealth and money and fame, they were locked into a mode wherein they were only allowed to produce sometimes incomprehensible music for the masses. That kind of pressure produces results, it is true; however, it is not the kind of results that come from complete freedom. It is the results of adrenaline and the expectation to produce. One of the greatest things that ever happened was the break-up of the Beatles. Some of the greatest acts of freedom are the unfathomable acts of superhuman beings imposing their free will on the unwilling.
Do you see how difficult it can get? When a great act of freedom is also a great act of evil, it does not cease to be a great act, it only has that qualifier “evil”—I guess the same could go for a great act of selfishness. It is in this equation that we see how greatness is not altogether equivalent to good and bad, and thus all other associated with a generally determined qualifier of “good” or “bad” are called into question.
Is freedom really preferable to having somebody’s will imposed upon us? When we allow the human mind to sink to the depths of it’s depravity—which is at some level sanctioned by the term freedom—then we are asking to have the most heinous acts occur. Think of television. The most heinous acts are perpetrated on the minds of your average American by exposing it to the imposed will of some television executive trying to make his (or her) mark on the world. And it is by the same token that the imposed will of one is also their illustration of their better handle on freedom than you. They can do whatever the hell they want, and throw explosions at your face until you understand explosions, before you realize that the will you think of as your own is, in fact, not.
What are you doing? Are you actively involved in imposing your will, or are you passively accepting the will of others? We wind up doing a little bit of giving and taking I suppose. We accept the will of some—most often our parents I think—and impose our will on others, but even that seems to be an incredible cop out. “Yeah, I impossible my will on that SOB the other day,” but the next day there’s nothing to do but cry at my unwilling but unconditional surrender to some other’s will. The moment you lose everything, is the moment you gain something?
There is no such thing as passive freedom. One cannot sit idly on the sidelines of the freedom game and wait passively for the coach to give him the nod. When you have no friends you are free to do what you will with your time. When you have friends you are free to do what you will with their time. It seems slightly incongruous, doesn’t it, that freedom is possible in any situation. It is occurring to me that freedom is a complete farce and possible in any situation one can imagine—yes, even in captivity, incarceration, or all other forms of detention. Freedom is malleable, you see.
Birds fly because of their instinct to forage and gather food, a mate, and young. They are slaves to their desires. Extinguish desires may well be the route to a genuine experience of the world. Then again, to desire is perhaps the most natural thing on the planet. We desire to eat. We desire to love. We desire to copulate. We desire. Those who don’t desire spend their days desiring to not desire. Language has the ability to mean everything and nothing all at once.
Is it possible to say something and nothing?
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