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.

The Point?

The plot to a horror movie bugs you, sets you in motion to want to watch a movie that will take away the bad unpleasant destructive vibes, or read a mystery book or something. Perhaps you’ll write a story. You don’t know how, though. Perhaps you’ll talk about your day, journal, etc. You really didn’t do anything. You get up too late. You are in a haze. You have plans to organize yourself, prepare for school, get in the right mindset. Mostly you sleep late, much too long, then you try to get vital, then you try to wind down.

Perhaps you’ll blog. You’ll publish this on the internet. Perhaps not. Maybe just get some more white wine.

You play music with some friends today. About two hours. You want to play drums but you play guitar – one of the guys only plays drums. The first song you play is wonderful, alive. Most everything after is stillborn. Kelly walks you out and talks to you briefly about this girl he was attempting to share his feelings with. You are drained. You find that you are never growth-centered with him You are very hungry afterwards. You eat then take a bath. You go on the internet for a few hours, aimless, enveloped. You watch Parenthood at 10. Unfortunately Trish comes out and watches it with you. Garrett is outside with a friend; she waits for him. You dislike watching things with her, she comments too much, sticks your relationship on the screen. You lose touch with your feelings and the narratives feelings. You’re not silent enough in such a situation.

What’s the point of a thing like this? Writing something like this, that is. You have some ideas. You like the idea of caring for yourself in the Foucaultvian way by recalling the day. You also find that there is a stillness and an inspiriting energy culled after from such work. Perhaps with this in mind it may be to the point.