On 'Recoursing'

Wasted time is murder of sorts. You sense that in order to not commit this crime you must be able to ‘recourse.’ To recourse is to return to your highest purpose, to get in touch with the warmth and meaning of the endeavors of your circumstances. Such a movement, in order to be an effective tool, must be made available in a variety of habitats and moods. It must be utilized not just in moments of ease and deliberation, but also in moments of crisis, and in moments of near despair and pervasive dissatisfaction. More important still, this most-basic-vocabulary, this grounding project, will need to be sensed when distraction sets in or is about to occur – for movements of distraction and escape are far more prevalent than crisis in an environment of air conditioning, automobiles, Avon, and supermarkets.

So, the most-basic-vocabulary will need to be fleshed out, translated from experiential value to existential project. Trust in the project is essential. Deliberate projects, that is, goals that one makes a resolution to bring about do not often work. Sleep sets in. One forgets the ‘why’ of the project and so the effort to remain resolute loses its justification subjectively.

The problem of how to remain resolute has been with you for sometime – at least since you independently undertook to face your fears socially. Philosophically, you noticed Gurdjieff/Ouspensky and Krishnamurti to be talking about this problem: How to stay awake, they would say. Hyrum Smith in his book on Natural Laws of Success articulated many helpful things in this direction. Yet there is still the problem. There is still the submitting to sleep, the forgetting, the hopeless lost feeling of having no most-basic-vocabulary ‘at-hand’, for you often fall off, give in to pressures, to peers, you often indulge in entertainment and other releases, waking up out of their resultant hallucinations days later. As for meditation, you stopped looking at this direction because of its hurdle of boredom. Perhaps it is essential to get beyond this.

There is, though, the yearning for purity, for clean honesty, for a practice and a walking of the path at a stable speed.

If you blame a lot of this suffering from self-forgetting on environment, and you feel a lot of it is because of the ‘noise of thought’ of the familiar – from expectation and poor ways of living of family and community – then how do you live upright, stably, purely, in this environment until you move up to Arcata in January? How to prevent entanglement?

Discipline is necessary but not sufficient. For you will need to develop trust in the reason for the application of the discipline if you are not to develop resitance to it and so fall into entanglements. The search for Quiet will have to be subservient to the deliberate project. In the past Quiet was sought when it was not in play even if it was in conflict with what the high project necessitated. You have noticed the limitations of this. Quiet is essential. This is true. But it is not an end in itself. Or perhaps it is, perhaps the highest end is Quiet. You notice however, that such an end will not suit your circumstances, circumstances wherein action and decision are demanded. And so you will, for the moment, let the highest end shift and leave the evaluation of its meaning and assumptions for another time. This is where trust must come into play if ‘recourse’ will be a useful tool in times of distraction and crisis.

Hike, The Source of Cynicism, and The Mode of Resistance

A hike tomorrow afternoon to camp the night in Indian caves.

You wonder today about where to go philosophically. The day is spent comfortably – a sandwhich at Dino’s, a coffee at Café Noir, and the quiet of a library sofa.

Yes, the social narrative, the lifestyle, aims, and governing values of our people are ungrounded. They provide confusion and a source for cynicism to those seeking good, honesty, effortlessness, and self-knowledge. When we see one another in the ‘street’ we do not acknowledge each other. Perhaps this is a universal occurance in all societies that have grown large in number.

Man in this narrative is constituted by resistance. He resists almost everything he hears. Growth, as a person, is not possible when in the mode of resistance.

Peer/Friend and thoughts about The Memory of Earth

A warm day. Nice and blue with little, if any, wind. It was pretty awful. You felt dull and drained from a night of drinking with friends. Acquaintances, really. You’d call them friends in normal conversation but not to yourself. They were acquaintances because 1. at bottom you didn’t feel as if you could relate to them and 2. you didn’t sense as though it would be helpful to speak seriously with then to move things toward self-disclosure. They were peers, of course, but again only in normal conversation. To yourself a peer and a friend were nearly the same thing. The terms both implied similarities in lifestyle. For instance, a peer is someone who you can relate to because they share with you a role, a niche, in a society. A peer is someone who is at the same level of development as you and who is likewise endeavoring to move in the same subtle direction. In short to be a peer is to encounter similar problems and confusions. To contrast this, a friend is someone whose disclosure of the path is possible and who finds sharing enjoyable. So a friend is a little more than a peer and a peer is a little more than someone of similar date of birth.

You forget about flourishing sometimes.

Maybe it is lost in a sense of injustice: the conditions seem all wrong, they don’t let you grow, no one around here is of any value, has ever said anything worthy of the effort of speech. This rebellious Margo Roth Spegelman thing.

The curative imaginings: go off and ‘get it’; move in with her and intimately share.

The movement of the tao.

You occasionally grasp this insight that you have had in the past. The insight is: there is only the circumstance, and everything flows from it. From this perspective its perhaps impossible to get angry with oneself and other people because there is no other possibility of movement. Yet it is confusing.

Getting up early may be helpful. The social guilt or shame will not be a variable.

“I felt like is was something being done to me instead of something we were doing together.” (The Memory of Earth by Orson Scott Card, pg 20-21)

Thoughts on The Memory of Earth:

• The conflicts of movements of transitional-adults, the unease of relationships of those beyond who feel themselves being usurped in someway.
• The curative imaginings: go off and ‘get it’; move in with her and intimately share, quiet down, be well, figure out.
• It is necessary to move beyond instinct in order to develop. In fact nature is urging one not to.