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.