A Letter

Dear Christmas~

I guess I officially don’t understand you. I mean, I think I understand, but I understand the sentiment holding you up even more.
Sometimes, aren’t you a giant excuse to remember the loved ones you forget about all year long? That’s actually sad, but what if you weren’t there?
No, I think we’re definitely better off with Christmas in our lives; however, I also think that the manner of Christmas ought to be redefined.
In Korea, Christmas amounts to a bank holiday, a day off from school, and little more than a nice lunch with the family feeling good about life.
In America, Christmas lasts almost two months (sometimes more), costs a crap load, and has become the time of year that businesses rely on to pull them out of the red.
Okay, seriously, there has to be some kind of balance we can reach—Chanukah seems like a nice balance: one week, candles, remembrance, a few gifts, okay.
But why does religion have to get all mixed up with you?
So many people go to church one day a year.
Oh, and, um, Jesus probably wasn’t born on December 25th, but it’s tradition isn’t it?
This is just something that I’m throwing out into the winds of possibility and might eventually regret: could you ever be about simple celebration of the beauty of being there and alive? Santa being the cartoonish representation of the giver of the free gift of existence?
You know, the more I think about it, you probably started as precisely that: a simple celebration in the heart of winter to remind humanity of the warmth that perpetually burns in the breast of all who are alive.
But Pagans and Christians all wish to have to their stamp on things and we wind up with the mind-bending reality of seeing the juxtaposition of a magic cartoon octogenarian master of breaking and entering and the birth of the son of god.
In what world would these two things normally be allowed to be together?
Or…
is it just me or do those two things suddenly make perfect sense?
Ah, there’s my cynicism coming back through again and I apologize because this was meant to be a serious epistle of thankfulness for your existence.
Once, a while ago, I went through a period of serious appreciation for everything around me, and I do mean everything: the pencil I was writing with, the couch I was sitting on, the door I walked through, everything and everybody received a certain amount of love energy from me.
I have since stopped this practice (although I’m not sure why), and what I want to say right now is that I appreciate the reality of you.
The fact that you are instead of aren’t is enough to win you some appreciation from the mind of this thought wondering wandering Ulysses of ideas.
I’m not sure if you’re meant to be celebrated with lights and presents or simple dinners or nothing or fruitcakes or family or friends or lovers, but I do know (from somewhere in my spiritual existence) that you are meant to be celebrated.
What would happen in a world where you were celebrated with everybody everywhere doing a rhythmic rock riot fist to Metallica’s Battery?
What would happenin a world where you were celebrated by everybody picking up the nearest text of intense philosophical inquiry and quietly searching into their existence?
Ah, you’ll once again have to excuse me, but I have this penchant for unanswerable questions.
There is beauty in you. I can see it. I think it’s hiding beneath the layers of meaning that various groups are attempting to ascribe to you, but you are a day like any other.
On any other day you could give gifts to your loved ones (and they might even mean more for their unexpectedness).
On any other day you could get the whole family together and have a loving family meal where you genuinely appreciate each other.
But this is what holidays are for, and what does that illustrate?
At some level I’m almost certain that, for the most part, we don’t want to spend time and money on our family and friends, but there is this one day every so often that tells us we ought to, and so we do.
The human character is essentially a super-selfish character with walls built up around itself to deflect the pulsing arrows of those who would call it out.
--No, I’m not. See what I give when I’m supposed to give?
There is none holy, no not one.
Do you know why I think that there is not one holy person in the world?
Because people aren’t holy, days are, and that’s why you are special: humans are spiritual, but they exist inside the holiness of days.
What’s unique about you is that almost every group of humans all over the planet has decided that you are an especially holy day.
Let me restate that in different words: every single day we can exist our spirituality is a holy day (making every single day of our life special and important and real), but some days are holier than others by virtue of… something-or-other.
A personal day is a personal holiday, a personal holy day in which something is more special than other days, and there is great beauty in that.
What’s in a day?
Only everything, by which I mean nothingness, by which I mean the foundation for building whatever you want it to be.
O, Holy Christmas, I hereby thank you for your existence and make a pact with you that I will celebrate my existence and the existence of the human characters around me and the existence of the planet and the existence of every pine needle that has fallen to the ground with a little bit more fervor than on other days.
You win.
I will probably not decorate a tree or my room or my house until I have children whose cries of “Daddy, why?!” need placating, but know that inside my heart there will be great joy in your holiness.
If there is indeed magic in you, and let’s just assume for the sake of argument that there is, could you send a little of it to all those I would say I love, all those I would say I like, and all those others I don’t know.
That’s a tall order, for sure, but let’s just say I believe in you.

Cheers
e

What a Week

I have been thinking a lot, lately, about how the mind can manipulate itself, and, knowing this, if it is then possible to turn the mind into a tool the likes of which has never been seen. There was a conversation in a Bundang bar last Wednesday about Sartre’s concept of Bad Faith. Well, I haven’t thought much about Bad Faith since reading Being and Nothingness, but given my current life plans, it seems surprisingly relevant.
The principles of Bad Faith I have been using to reprogram my brain have been working. My upbringing caused me to believe certain things that weren’t true. Perhaps they existed as facts somewhere, but as nuggets of truth, there was certainly no experience with them that told me these facts were truth, and, as of late, I have been lying to myself about certain skills I have in order to make them a reality.
The principle of bad faith is pretty simple and pretty obvious: you habitually, subconsciously or consciously lie to yourself in order to accomplish a goal. Somewhere inside, the self is perfectly aware that this is not currently a fact, but we start acting like something long before we actually are that thing. If you think about the world of business, most big businesses in the modern age want you to start acting like the role you want to take on long before you actually step into the role. It’s like you’re always a little bit ahead of yourself, when you’re actually a little bit behind yourself. The only difference between bad faith and actual faith is the fact that you know you are lying to yourself in bad faith; whereas, in faith (such as religious faith) you are either not aware that you’re lying to yourself or you have had some kind of experience that has made the facts into a truth—so that you ACTUALLY believe.
Religious faith and I have not gotten along in some time, and it’s only because I have had no experience with religion that smacked of truth. The world is a spiritual entity, but I’ll leave the religion for other people.
I have experienced the truth of bad faith. I am not a guitarist. Why, then, do I play guitar every day? I am not a writer. Why, then, do I write ever day? Because I am continually lying to myself and telling myself that I am exactly not the thing I am is because my sub-conscious knows that if I knew full well that I was a writer and everything was fine or that I am a very accomplished guitarist, then there would be no drive and no desire. Bad faith is essentially the key to the ignition of desire. What do you want? What do you really want? I mean to ask: what does your soul want? What does your being want more than anything.
Here’s something I’ve discovered, if you focus on something long enough, and work at something long enough, that thing perpetually gets closer and closer. Even if you never actually achieve it, the journey toward it is impossible with the bad faith necessary to drive your desire.
A conveyor belt comes to mind. That’s what I want. I want a conveyor belt. That’s essentially a metaphor, but that’s what I want. Constant motion, constant newness, and the feeling that things are impermanent, that’s what I’ve been telling myself for a week. It has been sitting in the back of my brain for years, but the fact is that I have never possessed the focus to work through all my layers of programming to make it so. Now, I have focused my entire being on achieving this goal.
Have you ever noticed that we usually get what we really, really want? This is because when our soul wants something, it will move time and space to do it. Clock time doesn’t exist, but time has reality in the form of a construct—we’ll leave the question of time’s actual existence for another post—and it’s reality is in the life of the mind. When we want, time does not matter, and changes to whatever we want it to be.
A long time ago I watched a movie that unexpectedly changed my life. The Butterfly Effect is about a man who can change time, but every time he does, his entire brain re-wires itself—which hurts. That is a logical metaphor for the reality of what Bad Faith does to the brain. When we wrap ourselves in layers of sub-conscious padding in order to accomplish some goal we’ve got in mind, we wind up uprooting the whole system that’s already in place, because when you deal with the consciousness, every slight change changes everything because the consciousness and the spirit are related.
So, here we are. It’s been probably one of the most difficult weeks of my life, in terms of spiritual/consciousness upheaval, which has also taken its toll on my body—funny how those two are always related. When the spirit and the body are exhausted, man can sleep his deepest sleep: most restlessness and insomnia are caused by the mind or the body not being sufficiently exhausted; however, when man has exhausted both the physical and mental/spiritual aspects of his existence, there is really no way not to sleep. That is something I have had to learn from experience.
What we do now is keep up the lie. The way forward for me lies in wrapping myself up in layers and layers of cushy subconsciousness in order to accomplish my deepest desire. It is actually pretty strange to watch myself making decisions and focusing on things that I have never focused on before, and finding that when I turn the power of being toward a desire, all thoughts flow toward it, and with flow comes change. Where are you sending your flow? I guess that’s the big question, isn’t it? What are you looking at constantly? Where do you find your mind wandering to all the time?
That is actually the how of change: simple focus. Focus implies inside itself that this is a fairly constantly thing, and the only difference between change that happens quickly and change that happens at the level of the soul is time. When we focus on something for a little while, we get a little bit accomplished. When we focus on things with the radiance of the being for a long time, we get a lot accomplished. Here we encounter an area that perhaps Hegel never considered in his considerations about quantity, because the fact of the matter is that how much you invest in something does affect that thing. The more time you invest, the more you get returned.
For one week I have been focused at a soul level. For one week I have, basically, managed to lay the groundwork for what will be habitual over time.
I have wandered down many, many paths in my lifetime, and I’m about to wander down another one.
Sun Tzu says in the Art of War (and I am at war with my consciousness): “There are five essentials for victory…know when to fight… know how to handle both superior and inferior forces… ensure your army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks… wait to take the enemy unprepared… and have military capacity (i.e. not interfered with by the sovereign). If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”
Wandering onto the battlefield, I have done enough research to know myself, I have done enough research to know the enemy, and I have my eyes trained on what is necessary for victory. Will I win? Yes. Yes I will. There is not a “No” in my world now, and no “Maybe” about it. Victory.

What is Competition?

The very first rule in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is:

“War is of vital importance to the state.”

What is of vital importance to understand here is that, dealt with metaphorically, this is probably one of the most shockingly accurate statements about humanity that has ever been uttered. War as a metaphor for the competition that is existence has recently come to mind as an accurate way to explain things.
It is, after all, a fundamental question. Any time you can ask the question “What,” followed by an “is” or an “are” or an “am,” you are dealing with a fundamental question. Ontological investigation of existence has a way of encompassing things and forcing one to describe honestly that which defies explanation. What am I? What are you? What is love? What is truthfulness? What is truth? What is an orange?
Bearing all that in mind, “What is competition?” Well, competition is one of the most fundamental realities of the human experience. Adam Smith understood this concept. The Buddhists have a concept wherein the simple recognition of a thing changes it. Even this, in its way, is a competitive stance. By recognizing a thing, we are already attempting to control it, and what is an attempt to control but a competition? When two similar stores open up, the competition can begin. They will lie to themselves and say that it’s all about the customer, but the reality is that it is about being better than the other guy, because if they are better than the other guy, the customers will come. The underlying principle of Sartre’s gaze is the competition. When I look at you, we are locked in a competition of who will be the subject and who will be the object.
There are necessarily at least three variables in every competition, which is one more than you might at first imagine: two competitors and a prize. In your standard athletic competition, there are two athletes and the prize is a medal or the title “Champion.” When it comes to economics, the two competitors are the stores, and the prize is the dollar. It is important to understand that the prize is always a thing, and never a person. When two men are competing for the love of a woman it’s not actually the woman they’re competing over, it’s her body. There is no competition on the level of the soul. A soul mate is one in which there is no competition.
One of the most rational explanations for the soul that I have ever come across says that there is only one soul, and that people are simple different manifestations of this soul. In other words, there is a soul-goo that surrounds existence, and the human creature is simple a little piece of the soul that has raised up in the manner of a wave that will eventually swell and then break, returning to the level from whence it came. There is no competition in that which is one. Consciousness pulls people away from this understanding of the soul and rips us into three pieces: consciousness, sub-consciousness, and spirit. The spirit is that piece of our consciousness that reminds us where we came from, and the other two are the challenge.
It is our challenge to defeat the consciousnesses and stay focused on the spirit; however, in the world of humans, there are very few people who would willingly stay focused on the spirit because the universal soul is too huge to understand. It is much easier to deal with other human beings on a personal level. To all those who would say that dealing with other human beings is very difficult, this is true; however, the universal soul/spirit is infinite, and that is impossible to understand—comprehending the infinite is an exercise in insanity.
So, we do battle, on a daily basis. We wage war constantly with the consciousnesses of other human beings. It IS possible to come to some kind of understanding about another human being, and largely because you are asking the metaphysical question, “Why?” These kinds of questions might involve a shorter or longer list of variables, but the number will eventually be reached that creates a consensus, and concessions will be made. Why did you do that? Money. Why did you do that? Money. Power. Why did you do that? Well, you see, the fact of the matter is that I was dealing with some childhood issues of radical sub-conscious flavoring, and they made me think that money and power were the essential creatures in the world. Whatever. Why can usually be answered. Why questions end when the book ends. Why are we here? To die. That’s when we find out. It’s kind of a bummer, but would you have it any other way? Really? Why questions are a competition with somebody (or perhaps your own consciousness) to find an answer.
I have been dealing with the world of ontology lately and foregoing the world of metaphysics in order to deal with the reality of the infinite, but I recently been called back to the world of competition and metaphysics. I was once told that there is no morality in ontology. “What is this thing?” only asks that you observe it honestly. There is no morality in observation—just like there is no morality in pure science. Morality is imposed people by various people and places and institutions and this is a fact. Law and rules and morality are a competition between the state and you (which the state usually wins), your parents and you (which, up to a certain point, the parents usually win), and other people and you (which, up to a certain point, is quite a stalemate). Dominance, victory, and power hang in the balance. All of these things are illusions.
What kind of power do we have to stave off death? None. What kind of victory lasts forever? Not a single one. What kind of dominance is anything more than lived-for-a-while? None. They are not eternal and infinite because they live in the life of the mind.
In order to deal with human beings even more effectively, I will take it upon myself—i.e. I will begin a competition with myself wherein I will battle my intellect and other people to win the prize of understanding—to investigate this thing called competition. As a part of the normal human experience, it is important to understand. Most religions or spiritual sects would have to agree that the normal human experience is full of suffering and crushing defeat—otherwise there would be no need for them, and this is due largely to the fact that people are all clinging to the illusions they hold so dear. It wrecks the head. The consciousness is repelled at the fact that it has no existence without the body. The body is seemingly endowed with consciousness. From whence? To whence? Nobody knows for certain. So we live in our world of illusion, and it is more comfortable, by and large, than reality. Even the suffering we endure as a result of constant competition is nothing compared to the incomprehensible reality of infinite existence. Space goes on forever. Forever. Forever. What a word that is. Can you imagine forever? No. No, I’m afraid you can’t. That hurts. Bugger it. Moving on. Can you imagine what it would be like to get in her pants? Yes. Yes I can. Okay, let’s go with the second one. I hereby enter myself back into the human competition for the sake of inquiry and understanding. My textbook is Sun Tzu’s art of war. Let’s find some things out.