The Most Basic Vocabulary

The simple reoccurring momentum: what am I to do?

This momentum is noticeable when a break in ‘responsibility’ occurs, such as when there is a completion of a required task, or when there is seemingly excessive ‘responsibility’, such as when there is direct engagement –and thus conflict – in an unwanted task. Here, responsibility is referring to that sensation of resistance or unease chiefly elicited do to an unconsidered disagreement or repulsion to the situation in play. Responsibility is seen as a burden of some kind – perhaps a ‘social’ pressure requiring conformity (and as such, is a dependency: an unconsidered crutch). It is unwanted because of its requirements; its requirements are unwanted for to be responsible is to act without significant ground: it is to be fragmented, to act without understanding or agreement to that which is in play. To be responsible is not, as its most prominent attribute, to do the right thing; it is most prominently to react to the momentum. To act in accordance with one’s ground is to do the right thing; to act in such a way is to understand the effect the ‘requirement’ has on awareness, how the particular requirement dominates and filters the world in accordance with its particular ‘values’, and how to counteract or act beyond the filtering process.

The ground of awareness is not a permanent or innate set of values that may be called the self. It is rather something of an experiential databank of attempted and in-play life projects. It is the most basic vocabulary. To experiment experientially with this ground is to be a yogi – it is to investigate with completeness, not holding anything back – it is to investigate into both what the ground is and why it is the way it is.

What I have just described is a Technique of Self. It is a way to ‘remember’ the ground – to be in touch with both the various momentums in play and the most basic vocabulary in play. It is a technique of mindfulness, toward awareness and beyond unconsciousness or insensitive reactivity. As such, the most prominent feature is radical self-honesty: to see first hand the momentums and their filtering processes.

Emotion, desire, thought, and impulse – all of these movements are taken to be fundamentally the same. These processes are potential actions or potential momentums: they pull and dominantly filter or shape the world in its light, thereby attempting to elicit action. As such, the movement toward ‘freedom’ or toward action with ‘ground’ is itself a potential momentum, a project.

All potential momentums have a source, a story that puts form into its energy. The task of this Technique of Self is to notice the separation of momentum and awareness, to move beyond reactive fragmentation and into experimentation with the most basic vocabulary.