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.

You drive to the Café on Main so that you can untangle and center. Its rainy dark - the lights are needed inside to read a book properly. Last night you went to the city movie theater and watched the midnight release of part one of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Garrett and a friend of his also come along. When you arrive the theater management is just allowing the lines of people to take their seats. There is an hour to wait until the film actually starts but finding three seats next to each other forces us to sit in the front row along the right side.

You are tired and the view is awful but the naturalness of the trio’s on screen relationship is worthy of the discomfort. The rest of the night you think of what it would feel like to be intimate with a particular girl from class: touching, holding, feeling warm, relaxed, not having to talk or entertain, someone to share concern with, someone to feel with, to talk softly with.

The splitting of the book into two parts makes way for a slowing down. From a trot those subtle things that suit film so well come through. The image is perhaps more powerful than text because it is more instantly recognizable, relatable. You in fact read stacks of papers and really come away with just one maybe two sentences that stores the point of the book for you – sometimes its just a word. Those sentences, though, are priceless images. They are yours, created from an internal dialog between you and the ‘author’. Sometimes they take the form of allowances, like you are allowed now to do certain things that you weren’t before hand (my first reading of The Catcher and the Rye did this for me: I was allowed, even urged to be suspicious of the phoniness of adults and to trust my feeling that something vital is missing in such modes of living). Film, going by in a fraction of the time often doesn’t allow for what the reading of stacks of papers do: provides the conditions for solitude. But what it does do when a skillful hand is behind it is encourage intuitive empathizing, that is, the feeling out of the character way of being. When the one to three hours or so are up you may be suddenly in-touch with yourself, more easily able to notice what is needed and what is hogwash.

The unconventionally platonic friendship of Harry and Hermione, a friendship of genuine concern and commitment divorced from the usual latent flirty romantic undertones – you have never observed anything like it in popular art, nor has such a warmth been as unforced by any art you have absorbed. The trust is profound and healthy. You like this. For you the appeal is twofold. Firstly, you do no feel allergic or sense any off notes. The relationship is one of care or I-Thou: the attachment to self springing from a compulsion to protect the self is sidestepped. Beyond shyness, it is able to be growth centered: the other speaks without worry that the friend will reject or judge; the other co-exists and mutually addresses the Self in the other. Harry and Hermione meet as their whole selves on the platform of their relationship.

Secondly, seeing this, the moviegoers may notice the superficiality and confusion in other narratives that do not profess the wholeness of the self to exist in platonic relationships and romantic relationships. What this will allow for is a suspicion of the public reality – or at least a specific part.

A lot of confusion in culture comes from immature artistic endeavors. You absorb ways of doing things, motivations, and so on, from artists even when the characters internal movements are insincerely imagined, are crafted for stylistic or plot ends, or for some other reason. And so due to poor deliverance, underdeveloped insight, and unskillful technique the artist may enact a great disservice on the public. The authenticity and worth of the Harry/Hermione type of friendship works as a medicine against the conventional reality, breaking down the expectations gleaned from bad art - those expectations, for instance that make one feel inferior, as if they have in their stupidity missed some secret and that they are alone in this mistake. For art is in its essence both the expression of the artists’ most-basic-vocabulary, and a pointing out of the ‘way’ to the admirer. Clumsy art points out the wrong thing at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, providing no therapeutic devices, no meaningful ‘images’.

Lately, you have been in a brewing process in regard to how to go about waking up in the morning and going to bed at night.

Day Dream

You walk up the steps behind her and say, “I’ve been having these conversations in my head. They sometimes go like this: You should talk to her. You should read the rest of that book she mentioned the first time we spoke and say you read it. You would bring it up and say something like: I thought it was warm. Like when the father tells the daughter that if you take a book with you while traveling that the book begins collecting your memories of the time and place within its very story arc. You will say this. Then you will say that you are interested in why it is that people write, what it is that they are trying to do, what it is that they think they are doing. What is your trajectory? You will then say that we ought to get together and talk. And you will add: I am attracted to you.”

You let yourself breathe and then look right at her. You’d been talking as people do when they are articulating: off in the distance. Your awareness comes to this – that to focus on what you mean is to be what you mean. You feel your body in its excitement and trepidation. Anticipatory anxiety.

She turns all the way around to you.

Stepping Back - Washington 1

For a while I have used writing as a tool. Although I did not get the idea from Anne Frank, the platitude she justifies the starting of her diary with is similar to what it is that is being attempted with a majority of the writing I undertake: 'Paper is more patient than man.' Behind the phrase is a concern I also deeply resonate with - that what is called normal is, in fact, mechanical living - an unconsidered existence in reaction rather than of action. The movement of writing, here, is a technique of self - a way to address felt needs and felt problems. Writing, in this way, is meant to narrow down what conflicts are in play, how it is the case that there is conflict, and how one is to proceed.

Normative life is disorder, it is fragmented, broken up, filled with silent and not so silent dis-ease. Techniques of self are ways of clarification. They are slaps in the face: they bring up the dis-ease within and invite a narrowing down of experience - a tasting of the raw/red hot hurt. But at the crucial point of the raw feeling, at the moment of reactivity, there is a suggestion to use the reactive energy in an alternative way. The suggestion may be at self-examination (what is uncomfortable? why? what is taking place?); the suggestion may be to observe and get in the shoes of, embody the other (to turn the outside into oneself, to examine the trajectories present in the other, to see you the way the other sees you, to be the other).

Whatever the technique that is in play there is a conversion of energy, a manipulation of mechanical reactivity, of momentum and raw feeling. What transpires is a stepping-back. In every technique of self there is a stepping-back so as to observe 'self' as a process. Only when there is a stepping back from the trajectory/momentum, when there is a starting over, a beginner awareness, is there understanding of what it is that is occurring in consciousness: filtering.


Reading: To Have or to Be? - Erich Fromm; On Heidegger - Patricia Altenbernd Johnson.