Recent Unfinished, Unpublished Fragments

It would be helpful to begin a story or to start a film with dialogue going: But, I mean, don’t you get the impression that… And from here that which is to be examined will be stated. This will relieve the narrative of having to set up a whole bunch of superficial crap. A film that starts out in a similar manner, though instead of employing dialog employs a monologue, is the film ‘I Heart Huckabee’s.’

Here is what you wish to relay of the last few days - some parts in fragments, others narrated:

12/20/10 (typed, never finished, never published)

The rain prevents you from jogging in the morning. You get dressed, prepare some food for later, and drive to the Café around noon. Since preparing for and delivering your presentation on Wednesday, you have been exposed to the possibility of engaged-care. Previously you had surmised that ‘commitment’ to a meaningful project would allow for flourishing. Now you genuinely follow this line of thought. Perhaps this is what Gurdjieff refers to when he submits that only when there is conscious suffering is suffering of value.

You are still on the fence about what to do regarding Vanessa. It doesn’t help that the weather has denied you jogging to clear your head. You will probably go to the gym tonight if the rain doesn’t let up by then. Maybe when Shane gets in town you’ll talk it over with him. Maybe you’ll text her, sort of flirt with her. What you want is to talk softly. Disclose self and invite the other to disclose self.

What do you see in this movement that draws you in?

Yesterday you go shopping with Mom – a planned trip to San Luis Obispo to purchase something that she can wrap up and give to you on Christmas. You go to four clothing stores; you try on jeans, long sleeve, collared shirts, and sweaters. At noon you both decide to drive out to Morro Bay to eat lunch at a favorite spot on the marina. There arises talk about her Grandmother – Elma – who happens to be you’re great grandmother, addiction, your childhood experiences with Dad’s alcoholism, and the notion that responsibility and action are abilities that must be developed, and that are not given at birth. You’re interested in Mom’s relationship with Elma. You get her to talk about her personality, why she talks so fondly of her.

12/22/10 (written in brown notebook, never published, night)

In the back of the mind you are still concerned with the notion of right conditions for growth. That is, are extreme conditions needed for awakening? You read a memoir about a women’s life in socialist china, working hard labor, strong willed, supportive, doubtful, etc. The Self of history experiments. The conditions will be hard now – will the self awaken? And now the conditions are soft, the distraction possibilities high, easy, no pushing from outside really – will the self awaken? Or maybe rhythms, when school starts back up, then rest, week – weekends. Night, day.

12/27/10 (typed, never published)

Meeting with Nick at 6:30pm. You eat early and drive to the library an hour before normal. You buy a coffee and sit in the lobby sipping. You read a bit of ‘The Transparent Self’. You take off the lid of the coffee so that it will cool down. Nick shows up and asks if you want anything. You two sit at a table and talk for an hour before going up stairs to a study room. He says that when he orders a coffee he knows that by the next day he’ll be able to drink it.

As usual you cover many things. After chitter chatter about Christmas he brings up the tendency for our culture to justify its movements statistically, that is, through an average level of measurement. Happiness is quantifiable. You express your confusion regarding the source of this tendency. You wonder about the fear that channels people into adopting the mores of the culture, its etiquettes and life-projects.

You both discuss ‘diffusion’. You wonder if the word is too complex – that it stands for you to mean out of touchness with oneself. He likes the word, though. Later he defines it as ‘to dilute one’s focus, leading to misdirection and the inability to set priorities for self.’ You spend most of the time talking about the causes of diffusion. You notice that some of your dullness of the last few days may be attributed to your lack of anxiety.

The source of diffusion is largely the culture. It is increased when the culture is broadly defined as in a democracy or in cultures that are in transition. Such conditions omit in their narrative any meaningful advice as to what to go about doing with one’s life. This is necessary for diffusion: the omitting of a sense of meaning from the culture. We locate a few movements in the culture that trigger diffusion, the sense that one is out of touch with one’s own self and drives. There is for instance, the ‘tight schedule’ of our culture. College ought to be 4 years, in out. There is the three stages of life. Everyone in a hurry. Olympic sprinting.

You mention to what an excessive level entertainment plays in modernity (or postmodernity). This directly leads to the underdevelopment of the ability to deal with pain, with one’s own pain. You just go watch tv when the problems set in. The ‘last man’ tendency is the tendency to always strive for comfort. You mention that bad art, art without heart, without a way out, and with teenage logic leads to unnourished and enriched individuals.

12/28/10 (written in brown notebook, never published)

Talk with Trish about Garrett at lunch. You get up to help transport a t.v. from the store to Nana’s house. When you walk out there is a lady who is having some kind of temper tantrum. The security guard says in a calm voice, Mam you are out of control. Nana hands you a $20 when you’ve finished unloading the stuff out of the back of your truck. You make plans to come back tomorrow to work on some gardening. You make plans to go to lunch with Trish at the Bistro in the mall.

After initial detailing about her parents checking out, turning off, becoming dull, some talk about the memoir you just read, and so on, there comes about a discussion of Garrett: his internet indulgences, his weight, and related things. You advise her to look at her fundamental intentions in regard to limiting or eradicating his Internet gaming time, to write them down, and to articulate her concerns to Garrett only after further evaluation of his likely reaction to the disclosure. If you are in-touch with the source of your trajectory you will not weaken your resolve when adversary applies pressure.

You talk about the major role that ‘entertainment’ has in our culture, how it results in our inability as selves to deal with our own pain; how we always seek out the comfortable. You mention the need for ‘care’ or passion to balance the self. There is discussion of college. You reiterate that you are only concerned to go so that you may interact with people who are interested in similar matters you are interested in. She says that you are probably the only person that she can discuss these matters with.

12/30/10 (written in brown notebook, night, never published)

Yes, a lot of time in spent in reactive, stress-relieving, intentive, distraction-centered-movements. ‘Constant Movement’, means that there is without the quality of ‘trajectory awareness’, which is stillness, the skill of watching ‘thought’ as opposed to being possessed by ‘thought’.

The way of warmth – the warm way, the golden path. Also, that time spent in the cycle of ‘what to do?’

To practice dealing with your pain. The important question is: And why are you on the project really? The purposive-movement way.

You don’t say to Shane that you think that his present to Autumn is nice when you think it is nice. Also: ‘And this is perhaps that side of me I don’t let out often. I value the inappropriateness of your act – that it would seem to require a good deal of ‘care’ to enact.

And what is the ‘after’ness of which is drawing you in – that is, what is the ‘now’ project that the instant impression justifies itself with? What is wanted?

Red Azalea and Experimentation

You feel cut-off and cloudy. You write down some points. For instance, you want to eat better. Less beer. Today you felt so dull. Maybe just two times a week have a beer. Maybe eat less red meat. You’ll get up before 9am. You’ll be ready by 11am. You’ll intend to be to bed by midnight. You want to bring back meditation and at-hand awareness. You want to cap your Internet time.

You have a month to work on yourself before school starts up again. You’ve been over this a few times. You have not addressed yourself. You have not committed to an experiment.

Being around the familiar, around home, induces a deadened tone. You must be in-touch with yourself in order to spot this. It will take over.

You leave the house around 1:30pm. You realize while a few streets down that it is Sunday, that things are not open. You stumble around until buying a café latte from McDonald’s and sitting in the park. You walk across water filled grass to use the restroom. You read ‘Red Azalea’ on a park table in the shade. You get cold and move to sit in the sunlight up against a large pine tree. After some time further coldness persuades you to walk across the water filled grass back to your truck.

You make some tea. You watch a bad movie on the Internet about a small town, a casino, and when to move on. You heat up some noodles and spend the rest of the evening reading the rest of ‘Red Azalea’.

The book is a memoir logging the early life of a Chinese woman during the Cultural Revolution. It is about commitment, the longing for intimate, growth-centered relationships, entrapment, disillusionment, and passionate life-projects. It is written in simple prose, remarkably simple prose. You recognize the quality of in-touchness that would be necessary to write such a thing. There is much that you can smell here. It is well beyond vulgar bullshit. The style focuses your attention: it says shhhh, can you hear it? The Cultural Revolution is displayed not for political commentary. Your life is not yours, it is ours, and it is forced upon you. You will do this and this. It is for the people. You find yourself hating yourself. There are tigers in the room at all times. You fashion yourself silent, fluid, compromising, complimenting. You do things to people that you start to hate, but you feel paralyzed. In fact, everything is a war. No way out. It’s a show. History is the emperor telling the people, the working, shuffling, corpses what to do. The people follow along, blaming who they are suppose to blame, praising who they are suppose to praise. So it goes. Revolutionaries are reactive. Reactionaries reactive.

You will probably re-read this book. It does small, heavy things. Its not concerned with directly talking about the destructiveness of other-determinedness on the ‘individual’. There’s no need to talk about it: its there. Author Anchee Min discloses herself as a Self. The Self is caught in gears, is tide down – rows and rows of knots bury the warmth. It is spirit. The Self notices the Aliveness in others. It is not bullshit. The Self feels passion and injustice like the sting the body feels when burnt with a red-hot iron. But there are authentic pulses, nevertheless, in this maze and confusion. The public self wishes to dissolve itself so that both itself and the private are no more, so that there is only one. The ‘Supervisor’ is a master of illusion and yet wields passion, recourses to the bare pulse. Fear and inferiority do not weigh him down.

You notice the need right now for you to commit to an experiment. To work on self in a special way. Perhaps you will study the way of knowledge for a month. You will see if it will sharpen and vitalize. There has been a tendency toward spontaneity that has prevented full movement in the way of knowledge. You will structure a month of reading, writing, and meditation. You will journal daily. You will test this path.

Finals Class Presentation

Yesterday you presented your final project to the class, nervous, shaking, resolute. The past few days you had been thinking that you would, so to speak, initiate an experiment with the status quo, engaging in a conflict with yourself and the environment. While it was natural for you to avoid the class presentation, thought- anxious and erratic, you repeatedly came back to a purposive narrative, motivating sources that helped you through. Throughout the week you held on to a rather fantastical thread of thought: 1. That if you went through with it, you would be usurping from the ground up a great deal of those destructive habits of social approach/avoidance and 2. That after the presentation you would disclose your attraction to Vanessa, saying that you want her to know you and that you want to know her. This image gave you a kind of overcoming feeling, a resolve of warmth – you would soon be able to hold, feel, touch, and talk softly.

Another aspect of the narrative emphasized your grade situation. You have just been accepted into Humboldt’s philosophy program for fall 2011. You may have not passed your Statistics class. You are, as it is, on the first degree of academic probation for failing the majority of your courses at the college last time you attended (about a year and a half ago). If you do not pass half of your classes this time around you will only be allowed to take nine credits for spring 2011, as a result of the second degree of academic probation. If you are to attend Humboldt in spring 2012, deferring your position a semester as you have planned, you will need to have completed 10 more units not including the classes that are in progress now. (You wish to get a job and work from next summer until you attend Humboldt next spring so that you will have some money and not have to get a job right away in Arcata or a nearby town.) So from this you have determined that passing your life management class is necessary – that is, completing the final assignment and presenting it to the class would allow you to make possible the project that you have set in motion.

Another motivating factor not mentioned thus far was the desire to get across your ideas about Hyrum Smith and about the helpfulness of at-hand trajectory awareness. Its curious to you that Smith does not criticize a culture in which the self is so easily foreign to itself. Does he not find that the socializing processes encourage diffusion? Does he not observe the ‘invisible communities’ role in the individuals floundering? You get the impression that he is aware of this type of stuff. Smith talks about how in developing his time management company how he was at the receiving end of a lot of confused looks from his friends, having turned down a respectable executive job and attempting to begin what became Franklin Quest Company. Throughout the book he makes references to people who go against the ‘tide’ and follow, trustingly, their ‘dreams’. He mentions Ben Franklin as an example – even goes so far as to name his company after him. He distributes anecdotes about Franklin throughout his book, pointing out Franklin’s project to practice a morality, and so on. For Smith, Franklin is the role model for ‘individuals’; and it is ‘individuals’ that Smith wishes to cultivate. From this vantage, it is clear that there is no need to deride the culture for the culture is not responsible, cannot be responsible – really it is always the ‘individual’ that is responsible. At the end of the day you agree with this. It is something Krishnamurti and Gurdjieff would also agree with. They would only wish to add that real individuals are very few and far between, and that most are so conditioned or asleep that their movements are not really theirs but that of their cultures.

The reason for your pause here on this ‘individual’ business is because this is the type of self-fashioning that time management programs have as their goal. Perhaps morality is impossible without a goal at its source. What you think is off in Smith, however, is not pointing out the complexity that exists between the person and the attractiveness of the ‘invisible community’, which is Smith’s name for the social narrative in your mind. You like that he stands for the trusting of the self and its authentic potential, you don’t so much like that he doesn’t address the difficulty of sifting through the layers and layers of the self, discarding what is not self, that is, what is put in there by convention, and keeping what is self, that which is beyond convention.

You spend most of the week leading up to the final in distraction, that mode in which stress is sucked away by attempting to forget the project that seems to be producing the stress. You are stressed not only by the life management presentation but also by your statistics class: you have to make up homework and then take a test that will decide if you pass or fail the course. You end up not completing the homework even though you had plenty of time. When you sit down to do it you don’t care about any of what is being taught and subsequently can’t follow it. On Monday evening you take the final – perhaps getting a ‘C’ on it. You go up to the teacher and ask what your grade in the class was before you took the final. He thinks a ‘D’ and says that you should hope for the best.

On Tuesday you shuffle about and don’t really begin working on the final until around 7pm. You meticulously write down a hierarchy of your value system, begin an analysis of why you value what you do, and to garner a few extra points you begin an assignment on goals that you never turned in. You work hard for several hours. In fact, you come to realize that you are not even forcing yourself to do the work. Completing it is meaningful to you. Although you occasionally felt anxious about the presentation coming up, tranquility filled the background. You go to sleep around 4am and set an alarm for 8am – you’ve got to finish some of the essay on the origin of your value system as well as the goals assignment. You feel pretty awful in the morning, however, when you awaken. You eat and shower and sit down to write. You decide to sleep for another hour because you don’t seem to be able to say anything meaningful. You lie down for a bit but that doesn’t work – too much anxiety. So you go on a jog. This wakes you up a bit, gives you a slight control. You re-shower and finish up the work as far as possible. You sit in meditation for about ten minutes before you print out what you have completed and drive to school.

You end up going next to last – the teacher goes alphabetically. There were periods when you would shift about in your seat while thought and feeling were quick and biting. You rewrote, added to, and amended your script notes while the other students delivered their presentations. You would sometimes feel paralyzed: veins running with adrenalin, stomach clenched tight, breath shallow, cold. Sometimes you would feel comforted with an impression that would occasionally arise: that those to whom you would soon speak were in fact only wishing you the best. You would attempt to feel out and feel with this image. You would come back to it when the velocity and momentum of thought-anxiety would get away from you. Some of the presenters’ dealt solace while others accelerated thought-anxiety.

After doubt and escape thinking had ran its course a few times over and you had noticed its tide eating away your grounded resolution, you initiated an attempt at showing yourself the purpose of sticking it out. Why suffer through it? Really you just didn’t want to feel incompetent anymore, withdrawing, pushing the self away. Not going through with it seemed destructive to the self. This quote surfaces: ‘If you wish to improve yourself you must be content to look stupid.’

You write this on the top of your paper along with the praise ‘keep presence’. Stay with that healthful movement that remains uncorrupted by thought-anxiety, that knows that its okay to look stupid, knows it’s meaningful to be you and fail. You write that you will start the presentation with two self-disclosures. The first is a disclosure that standing up in class and presenting your work scares the hell out of you but that you are trying and please bear with me. The second is a disclosure that you had planned on saying already; that initially you had selected the time management project but had not managed your time effectively, and, lacking time, you completed the value-programming project. You hope people with laugh at this part – that you did not manage your time effectively to do the time management project. You imagine this will break some of the tension.

You get up and deliver as best as you can. You speak up when asked. You try to say everything that your script covers. You find yourself filling in the gaps of the script occasionally, but you don’t think it comes out well. That’s okay, though. You look down at your script most of the time. At the end you’re asked a few questions by the class. You’re asked what some of your governing values are. You point out ‘self-directedness’, vitality, and to ‘care for yourself’. When asked you explain that caring for yourself is just a complicated way of saying that you will practice radical self-honesty. When you’re answering this last question you have difficulty figuring out how to summarize ‘care for self’. You mean liberating the self from destructive and ‘sleep’ or ‘conditioned’ oriented thinking. You mean practicing techniques that bring the self in touch with itself. You mean being mindful of your circumstance. But you don’t say any of this because when you pause to think you feel you’ve paused too long – you were losing concentration and presence and you didn’t breathe. This stuff takes practice. When someone asks if you noticed any connection to your values as they are and the conditions of your upbringing you point out how you are not a very assertive person, how you often come to the role of mediator in your family and that therefore your needs tend to go undressed. Candia says something about you being a good writer near the end. At some point she asks about motivation: you say you do not care about something if you’re not motivated. Candia worries about this. Later you say you’ve appreciated the helpfulness of goal-orientation when someone asks about what you will take away from the project. When you walk back to your seat, you don’t look at the people clapping. Afterward you wish you had, for it would have been good to look everyone in the eye. Vanessa says good job. You smile at her.

There is only one more presentation after yours. You notice that there is a thought that urges you to feel incompetent due to your obvious nervousness up in front of everyone. But you’re proud of yourself like you haven’t been in a long time.

You hand Candia your severely late goals assignment. She hopes that you commit to caring for yourself; only she says it in a sort of shy way, smiling like Nana does.

Outside you wait for Vanessa. There are autumn yellow leaves on the damp ground from nearby trees. You stand in the courtyard thinking that this is nice. She comes out after a while and asks whom your waiting for. You say, you.

You talk back and forth about class and if we are going to use any of the skills we’ve learned. You say you might plan your days and utilize goal-orientation. When you get to where you usually wait the bench is cold and wet. You remove your bag and wipe down it down to soak up the water and so we can sit down. She says you don’t have to do that. Now your bag doesn’t want to be your bag. You sit down but she doesn’t.

You talk about Christmas break, speaking Spanish, last time we talked, how nervous we were in front of the classroom. Some buses pull up and a bunch of high school kids come line up in front to go see a play inside the theater. She asks if we could go over where it’s quiet. You two sit down on a bench underneath a tree. You talk about movies, favorite comedians, westerns, Shakespeare, the Narnia series. She mentions how odd it is to become mentally unbalanced, how just a few absent chemicals and you lose it. You talk about how you used to think this way but not anymore. A lot of this type of stuff has to do with ‘gaining control’ of yourself. Her mom pulls up. You both say goodbye. You haven’t said anything about your attraction to her. When she gets in the car her mom waives to you.

She texts you as you drive to Nana and Papa’s house. She says, Thank you for keeping me company. You don’t respond right away because you want to think over what to say. Exhausted on less than 4 hours of sleep and without the anxiety to keep you up you make yourself a tuna sandwich, peel a orange, and pour yourself some grape juice. You put on your headphones and write out what to say to her – its easier to think this way. In the middle of your brainstorming Mom shows up to take Papa to the ear doctor – he has an eye patch on from a surgery the other day. He instructs you on what he wants you to do with all of the leaves once you’ve raked them all up – this being the reason you’ve come over. You don’t mention to Mom your sort of victory.

You send a message to Vanessa about keeping each other company sometime, that you’d like to see her even though you don’t have class anymore. You say you’re not free this Friday but otherwise you are. She texts back that she doesn’t think she’ll be able to hang out on Friday but that we could when school starts up again.

Unfortunately you’ve been getting these kind of mixed signals. You say, Alright, give me a call if you’ve got some free time over the break, take care. She says, okay bye bye merry Christmas.

You rake three bags of leaves up while listening to music. You push the rest into the curb of the street for the street sweepers to pick up later. You’re pretty tired. You feel accomplished, a bit let down, and sweaty.

Smith and Bankrupt Meaning - From 12.10.10

After some procrastinating, some attempting to center, some laundry, some destructive thinking, and some despair, you sit down and read in preparation for an oral presentation next week. You re-read a few chapters of Hyrum Smith’s time management book. You plan to discuss the origin of the desire to manage one’s life - as well as what the assignment requires. You think that the impulse to manage one’s life springs from a sense of imprisonment, a sense that one is not really in control of one’s life, that one does not really know what is important. You observe that this type of thinking is also a characteristic of the culture you are a part of. You think that the American culture that you live in is bankrupt in meaning; that the roles it encourages do not provide the individual being with purpose nor with the possibility of flourishing. One feels confused, dragged along, diffused, as if one is not a part of anything, as if one is not worth anything. One is to get an ‘education’, a salaried job, take a loan out for a large house and a suitable car, and become a consumer.

You think that in a healthy culture the life-narrative is nurturing, that the individual’s authentic potential will be encouraged, that he will be given the conditions to be in touch with himself, and that he will not feel as if he is an outsider. Contrastingly, you observe that the individual today is from birth rushed along on a sort of highway and at no point is he encouraged to trust in what he values. He drives along on the path at top speed. He absorbs the terrain alongside as only a momentary blur before it disappears. He accelerates and leans into the turns. And yet from lack of physical use his body has atrophied. He has power steering and power breaks. His food is procured warm and regular from little boxes just off the highway. He sleeps by reclining his seat. When he has reached the end of the highway, when he must hike the rest of his way, he can only feel perplexed. He knows the subtle compartments and oddities of his car. He can determine when his gas tank needs filling. But what does he know about hiking out off the roads colored black, yellow, and white?

All you mean by the metaphor is that you do not sense that the culture has set a priority for its number to be in touch with themselves. Perhaps it is not possible for a society to do this. This is one possibility. You must consider this at some point. If it is so, then political configurations ought only to be involved in protection of its citizens from its own citizens and maintenance of its roadways.

You read while sitting on the ground in your room. As far as you can tell, Smith submits that inner peace is a natural result of actualizing your core values in your daily life. He has a model of personal fulfillment that has your core values on bottom, long-range goals, intermediate goals, and daily task above them. He maintains that flourishing or balance is the state of being in which your core values feed daily tasks. Planning your day, then, becomes a key to balance. In fact, planning or considering is everything. To understand your core values you must consider yourself. What is important to you? From here you are to ask: What could I do to infuse what is important into my life? Your day, then, is to be a breaking up of these goals into manageable bits. You will spend time each morning planning your day while keeping in mind the large and small goals as well as your most basic values that inform them. This is a world in which you have grown a paddle, and now you can row of your own accord, not having to wait for the tide to move you along.

To Do

Write up a paper that acknowledges the final project. That is, write an evaluation of Hyrum Smith’s Time Management techniques. Also, you wish to ground his techniques, if possible, in the narrative that gets one to Time Management books or classes to begin with. You sense that if one is to engage in the techniques, really engage in them, not forget them after a week, one must be able to appreciate why it is that one is going about doing them and be able to recall this whenever one doubts the experiment. You feel that Smith does not do justice to this narrative, the narrative that acts as an impulse to change oneself. You also notice that he does not critique the culture in which diffusion and the sense of entrapment are the pervasive norm – these being the major impulses to manage one’s time. Perhaps his view is like yours: that change can only happen if individuals sense the need to change, and from here, commit to enacting that change within themselves –that society is simply the interplay of relationships and that relations are only healthy when the individuals are, as far as possible, free to do as they see fit, free to care, free of Expectational living, free from entrapment. Does Smith think that finding out what you want to do is as simple as considering, planning, writing down your governing values? Granted there is value in this, but how much? How do you know they really are yours and not the social narrative or what your parents want or once wanted? You are suspicious of this idea – that you could easily understand yourself by writing down your most-basic values. A definition of ‘therapy’ could be that process of sorting out what you want for yourself from what others want for you. This suspicion, you think, must inform the whole project.

How to go about starting this paper? For one, you have not, as the prompt requires, used his method for one week. You’ve been a bit of a wreck, stressed, dull, dead, anxious. So you will not entirely be able to do the project as it is. Perhaps you could switch to ‘Value Programming’ the 2^nd option. Will Candia care? I suppose it doesn’t really matter. In fact it makes more sense to start with values as opposed to managing one’s time. Candia pointed out in one of your journals that you handed in that, “I am not sure you know what you want in all compartments of your life. What is necessary to ‘care for self’? The answer is so individual, but certainly basic needs must be met. Your question is all so human. I hope for your clarity and commitment to it.”

You will be addressing then, this prompt: Identify your governing values. Create your own personal constitution by stating each as an affirmation with a brief explanation describing what each means. Write a 1-2 page essay identifying some of the factors that influenced your value system. Have you experienced a significant emotional event that has influenced your values?

Why are you concerned with articulating what is 'self'?

You are concerned, for starters, because you are disorderly. You feel entrapped by the environment. You feel contrasting pulls. You sense that you often do not maintain control over your movements. You are confused about what project to go with, to engage in, to trust. You get the impression that you are not true to yourself, that you are not in-touch with yourself. Distractions seem to lull you into a queer sleep, a sleep that you awaken from lost and anxious sometimes hours later. Some of your projects, you feel, have no business being yours: you notice that persons in your small subculture do the same sort of thing and you feel both doubtful and comfortable in regard to its system. There appears to be a mixture of truth and falsehood in the expected-path, yet you are often not centered or vital enough to sift it out. The result is ‘abrupt complexity’, you are not sure what to do with yourself or you go about doing what’s expected in a resigned manner – you suddenly feel foreign. When you encounter this ‘abrupt complexity’ you lose your in-touchness with self. Self is a whispered trajectory. Self is to be cared for because ‘abrupt complexity’, the force that fosters reactivity and mechanicalness, such is in the air, has seeped into the life-force of the public-narrative. You indulge in reactive fostering activities, yet setting limits and goals seems to prevent spontaneity.

So, it is taken as a starting assumption – and we must begin even if we begin on uneven soil – that in order to care for self that we are able to notice what self is and what it is not, that we must do this if we are to sort through the ‘abrupt complexity’ of the public distinction pointer and the public suppose-to-do-with-one’s-life-narrative, and if we are to notice when indulgences lull us to sleep consuming our vitality and in-touchness of self.

Self-inquiry, then, begins with a notation of diffusion, and from this awareness of diffusion sprouts a seeking to find a way out. Gurdjieff’s metaphor is helpful: Man is asleep, that is, in prison. Man must realize first and foremost that he is in this sleep-prison. From this urgency, he will attend to possible escape routes, perhaps attuning to the personality of the guards, the rituals of the prison as a whole and so on. But the walls are thick and high, the guards are unforgiving. How could he possibly escape? His direct sense of hopelessness is felt by the other prisoners; those that have sensed what he has sensed gravitate to him (or he gravitates to them). They form a group of sorts and in their mutual aim they do what one could not, they experiment with digging tunnels, checking weak areas in the walls, and acquiring various goods that may help them. In this process, they may receive word from those that have escaped already, that is, from those on the outside. Not everyone may escape, but with such works in motion, the possibility of a few locating the path out becomes feasible.

Does one need help from the outside or may one develop in-touchness with self by oneself?

You have assumed that to cultivate in-touchness with self and to care for self that you are to practice slowing down and stilling. In practicing thus, you can cut out the noise and possessive qualities of ‘abrupt confusion’: you can stop the car and get off the Expectational-living highway. Practicing stillness is to unchain yourself and walk out of the illusiveness of the cave, drawing fresh air from the sunlight. It stops the spinning, sends warm blood through the veins, and cuts the shit. Meditation, jogging, various journaling methods, these are self-centering activities.

But lately it occurs to you that something more is needed. The public-social-vocabulary has dealt much ‘abrupt confusion’. Perhaps a morality is needed in order to be able to remain awake. This will consist of actions that one is to recourse to when reactivity is noticed, when we wake up out of our dream and see that we are lying on a slim cot in a cold cell. The source-value is in understanding self and fostering right-action, that is, movement in which one is not mechanical but in active engaged care. It is assumed that active engaged care is a prerequisite for flourishing, that if one cannot will what they are doing they cannot flourish. To will is to be able and willing to get behind what on is doing. It is akin to the gage of eternal recurrence: to get behind the action, not holding anything back. It is thought that if such will is present that ‘abrupt confusion’ and the variety of reactivity will have no effect. Problems arising from diffusion will not take root.

The reclusion of a seeker is always sought in order to eradicate the problems of diffusion. Diffusion may be defined as out of touchness with self; it is a circumstance in which one does not really know why one is doing what one is doing in leading their lives. There is no purposive care or trust. For instance, from diffusion other people are viewed as either vastly superior (in control) or automatons (weak sheep). Either way, the whole tumbling, whirring movement of society, the ‘government’, the game, is observed as destructive and untrustworthy. Diffused man is suspicious. He thinks in extremes and in escape routes. Often he’s a pessimist and an outsider; occasionally he resorts to the drug of romanticism, bohemianism, crime, and even to actual drugs. (Colin Wilson has written about the possibility that the criminal is seeking release from entrapment, and by say murdering or robbing that he glimpses the freedom sought, a world without the suppose-toes, pressures, expectations.) It can be seen, though, that the movements of all of these ‘types’ - the pessimist, the addict, and so on- are mechanical. Even the first steps of the seeker are so. But, again, there is always a starting point. Whoever has located the way has at some point been lost in the darkness of the forest. One notices that one does not know why one is doing what one is doing, is merely doing what is expected, and feels as if they do not have control. He may then feel betrayed by his parents. He may then desire to drown his troubles away. He may fantasize about utopias or good circumstances. He may distract away this impression by holding to the socially appropriate narrative tighter still. He may lash out at the ‘system’. He may actually lash out, rape, kill. He may blame himself and release the tension through psychological illness. He may and so on…

Cycles of imprisonment possess ‘thought’ and demand compulsive movement. We would do well to be in-touch with the cause of our search, to keep it ‘at-hand’ and near. For when we are asleep, possessed by thought, there cannot be care. And in not caring, we find that our circumstances or other people are deciding our movements. Naturally, then, there is the sense of diffusion, and when something or someone else controls our lives, we are neither happy nor productive - we do not experience inner piece.

Just The Day

A slow start in the morning. You’ve been getting the impression that if you do not get up before 9:30am you tend to have a hard time doing helpful things. You get out of bed today at around 10:30. You have written down that you will work on the time management project, to be able to start it by documenting Wednesday. When you go out to jog, you walk a ways and wonder about Nietzsche and Heidegger hiking.

After you shower you have to force yourself to do calisthenics. Actually the past two days you have forced yourself for all exercising. You justify it to yourself by the thinking that it’s a necessary thing to do if you want to do vital work. That later on in the day your energy level and focus will diminish much sooner if you don’t.

You debate going out to begin work or staying. You end up leaving around 2:30pm. You go to Café Noir and order green tea. The girl working there is very beautiful in the way that you most like. Graceful, soft, weightless in carriage. You work on reading Hyrum Smith. A question pops up from the reading: In order to do what is vital and important to oneself, does one’s situation need to be extreme? You think of asking the girl this. When you leave you wish to wave to her to establish some kind of relation but she is busy with something and does not see you.

You consider what to do next. You wish to eat so you drive to Nana’s and have a tuna sandwich and turkey soup. You wonder if the tv is kept on and so loud because Nana doesn’t hear it – it doesn’t bother her. You briefly watch ‘You’ve Got Mail’ to avoid the trifling small talk. Later, when you are about to leave, you ask her your question. She doesn’t really understand what you intend. She says that she lives for her family. That when she was young she had opportunities but that she never lived for her self, only for others, that this is one of her limitations. She then seeks to soothe you and says you’ll figure it out when you’re ready.

You drive to the public library and read a bit of the book you checked out yesterday, ‘Afterzen’. You leave after hoping to run into Nick to talk about the question but never end up seeing him.

When you arrive at home its about 6:45pm. You take a bath. You listen to Fratres on repeat. Then you shave. After you are cleaned up, you slip on the rug and twist your body weirdly trying to evaluate if you had shaved well. You kind of hurt and shake internally.

You dress and type up a journal entry from last week. You send Nick an email with it attached and write up your question from earlier to see what he has to say. In the email you try to show him why you’re asking the question. The context is important for emphasis. This ends up being taxing and you cut it short. You end up writing for a few hours.

You go on youtube and check subscriptions. You make tea to warm up and grab some cookies and sweets from the party that mom went to today. You type up a retrospective account of the day after masturbating.