In the perspective of geological time, the concept of personal becomes relegated to bones. In the imaginary realm, our life stories become echos. As Freud-freaks battle it out with Lacanian devotees, and the Jung hummers, the notion of self, in my experience and perspective of spirituality, can be ascribed as a notion of a memory body. The memory body performs as the soma animation, a kind of ghost-like connection with the way the realm of bodies, mental imprints, and objective reality appears to be. I’ve long wondered about the motivations that make me remain committed to making art, and always think long and hard (though not always correctly) about each decision I make.
The challenge of life is that we really do not know in advance, until something is done. If I press myself for an intuitive answer, sometimes I am correct, and sometimes incorrect. The process of coming to answers from within, without becoming wholly solipsistic or having a horrific god-complex is one that has me wrangling with the present day Identity issues.
Identity per the definition of the word exists within the realm of math as the quality after transformation that is left unchanged, “the equality of two expressions for all values of the quantities expressed by letters, or an equation expressing this, e.g. ( x + 1)2 = x 2 + 2 x + 1” , the fact of being who or what a person or thing is, has risen in use since the 1950’s from “mid 16th century (in the sense ‘quality of being identical’): via French from late Latin identitas, from Latin idem ‘same’.” This equation typically presents itself through false equivalences, often known as rhetoric. The fact the use of this ideological tactic has risen can be traced back through time, and I do not mean in a conspiracy theory kind of way, but rather in a sort of Fischli David and Weiss way of how one thing can lead to another…understanding how a politic came to be is a way of applying philosophy to freeing oneself, to making informed choices about forming the future.
What someone is…and who someone was a relational introductory course when I studied social psychology in Japan. That study got pretty heavy fast. I was floored, or bombarded with the information I was learning about what makes people do things. Many of those behaviors seemed shallow or superficial, and therefore seemed obviously related to the prevalence of depression.
Having experienced a great deal of heavy things, I cannot say sadness and depression are the same thing, and having witnessed a fluidity in the misuse of certain terms, largely in part thanks to the internet, and what I have witnessed the agitation from being too digitally connected and distracted can inspire.
Conflate all that to the notion of the cosmos and suddenly we have a concept of aliens being as real as another imaginary entity responsible for the way life goes. That word has become quite taboo: God. In place of the word God, the more popular use of the word, Universe. I get it, a lot, having long wanted to name a pair of dogs Higgs and Boson, the word God or any grand organizing energy such as entropy may want to be avoided due to ascribed associations with religions, persecutions, and war.
The thing with taboos though, is the concept is there, hiding out as another term. Of course people just want to do what they want, live free and so on. Yet to loads of curious minds, understanding the big questions about life sometimes comes for the sake of the delight of understanding, and others, use in particular aims.
The state of suspended curiosity is the only way I came to be able to live with no knowing, and as Rilke described the necessity to live with the questions.
In the delusion of human controlled energy, which we have made great advances in channeling thanks to technology, these big questions I find often best addressed through objective reality. Theory, after all can disorient and warp the realm of the mind so far as to start believing or imaging seeing fairies and aliens, when the proof of the ability to generate flying cars (Joby) and harness nuclear energy exists.
All to be said, the strange thing about being human is the identification with ones vocation and how much that identity is healthy or unhealthy, and what is involved contextually with social groups and the self. A delicate balance in moving from culture to culture carries different weight for designers, teachers, architects, sellers, antiquities dealers, engineers, musicians, and artists….each of these labels bearing some kind of ghostlike archetypal signature, when in reality (the objective one, not just the imaginary) there are all kinds.
In being human, perception of what someone is really like can get complicated based on expectation, ability to have difficult conversations, explore projection, aspiration and continually changing data.
Some people live with reality believing it’s a virtual simulation, that belief is born out of minds who often believe there is no God, and they are intellectually superior for understanding the belief in the Universe. I like to think of these as physics fundamentalists that would have failed the basic course in physics itself. Because one needs a nuanced understanding of chemistry, math, and variables in controlled and uncontrolled environments to make such conflations between theory and reality.
Regardless of the validity of each persons individual beliefs, there are patterns of thought and behavior that can be reliably predictable, and there are other times, when open, complete surprise can occur.
Transforming the unconscious into awareness can be aided by yoga and meditation, but usually requires a great deal of life experience and quiet time to real-eyes. Yoga, reminds me of a psychic globe, which is to say something upright, becomes upside down depending on which vantage point you are to the crystal ball. Somehow yoga became the air stoking fires of narcissism it claimed to ameliorate. This was something I experience while attempting to unself, myself…which supremely backfired in the most eloquently destructive ways. This is one of the many reasons adding to the becoming allergic to self-help culture.
Furthermore, any kind of Identity project is carried out in a social context. That is to say self-actualization comes through social settings and culture. Culture is as much as what is permitted as it is also not permitted. The lines as to permissible and impermissible involve dynamics and dialogues, also known as realms of the mind to contend with…and to that, independent thought a rarified experience.
I cannot say I have ever had a truly original thought. I cannot think of one time that is true. Therefore the process of discovery is nearly impossible and has led me down some pretty deep rabbit holes, as the Internet has become excellent at providing, and the library too! I Heart Huckabees, is one of my all time favorite existential films because it playfully makes fun of self-obsession, any one of us can joke ourselves into believing as freedom, but is really a mental trap that also entraps the muscular-skeletal system of the body.
This is where the notion of personal gets used as a performative construct or archetype for story telling, and in that, a person lives a life that becomes a story. Self authorship as it has been written about by the likes of Jordan Peterson and discussed in podcasts tends to have a certain intonation willing a kind of assertion of self and identity that performs in today’s context as a reaction. Prior to today’s 25 various gender identities (maybe exaggerating here) may be understood in the sense that before individualism, there was a type of collectivism that was so normal, everyone had the same name. The notion of the spirit and soul, did not have the same distinguishing factors that is presumed today. This kind of cultural variation, has long made me wonder which notion of spirit produces a healthier, happier, safer, and generally more suitable condition for life in harmony with, and not dominance of earth’s resources? Not only ideologically but in reality. This is a tricky question because we want to so much to identify with advancements at all cost to biodiversity of the planet. Yet we know now, the concern for the environment is actually a concern for ourselves: the future of the human species.
Every now and then, I am pretty sure we all meet the selfless animal and plant lover, and many times people have told me they wonder what is wrong with that person. This is to say this behavior people have of making someone wrong, to make what the other is doing right. Or vice versa, to do the right thing, which is usually the harder, more humbling thing, versus the quick route…but not always. As aforementioned, it’s hard to tell at first. I’ve always struggled with what is right or wrong to do, but was long aware that giving all I can to every situation was better than holding back, playing games, or trying to act tough even if I was not because that also backfires.
I appreciate the rigor to which my teacher’s told me an artist has be rigorous to the truth. This runs contrary to the idea that artists are conartists….and that those who make the most success in their lifetimes must be conartists…the art of stealing ideas. I laugh about this because it has proven to be the furthest thing from the truth. And while I had thought truth telling would be more popular, I understand now why it’s not: the worst in people makes being vulnerable a difficult choice to make. In a Brave New World sort of context, the risk to love and be motivated by the desire to create life becomes a cultural taboo.
So then if someone enters or touches your mind such as what the internet makes available through your palm, so many people have access to the one area of decision making. To be informed or uninformed is not the question: the question is how much of that information can be useful and where to find one’s inner voice to discern between useful and valuable information (that is real and not purely of ego) and that which will serve creating in reality.
Since everyone I meet seems to agree the rise of lack of awareness in people seems to be increasing despite the volumes of ways we can deepen awareness, I am reminded of the error of problem-solution mentality and how it differs so vastly from a creative mentality. Creative mentality is adaptable, whereas problem-solution mentality is rigid and often creates more problems, instead of trusting in a natural resolution born out of creating.
Within any day, losing track of time or flowstate, may or may not indicate the animation of creating versus problem-solving; these are determined from intuition…and intuition versus suspicion are difficult distinctions to make. Intuition is not something we just have and can be expert at: trust your gut and instincts, people say, means what? what is the condition of your gut? is it even healthy or is your body full of poo and toxicity? And knowing the difference is something no one else can really decide for you. This is one of the reasons why I cannot and really do not want to ever give advice to anyone, because no one really needs more vices do they? So what do people want but to find a way toward a form of autonomy? collective thought? these are rhetorical since the subject of intuition is really up to what kind of depth ones instincts go toward.
The higher realms can dry out, burn out, become mystical, or wear out quickly, whereas depths can accept and take up even the worst of pain. I liken this difference to geology, caves and soil. Precious minerals, gems, and chemistry takes place in particular conditions, sometimes darkness, and fortified soil feeds longer and tastier life experience.
In my world view, people did not have to focus so much on themselves as I am told is necessary, so narcissism wasn’t needed because society and family structures were created to look out after each other. Yet as so many people have experienced otherwise, I do wonder if the pursuit of pleasure has made men and women alike avoid the fermentation and fortifying processes that come in enduring difficult situations.
In my short life (though long before we had the amenities of heated housing and clean water), I have witnessed the erosion of such liberty being voted away. Jonas Goldberg’s book Suicide of the West, and writings by Hayek and Thomas Sowell should have been part of my liberal arts education, and yet they weren’t. I say they should have been included because it is their difference that helps me understand folly and reason better. A slanted, or biased education might be just as dangerous, if not more dangerous than ignorance. I say this because ignorance can almost always be a root to violence and trespass, but ignorance plus conviction seems like a far more dangerous combination.
My education in utopian visions needed balance with contrasting views. Meanwhile the consensus seems to be: all of our minds are being confronted with the fact that history is repeating itself. The burrow of Le Lapin references ideas and sources not as a means to support one or the other, but to offer various perspectives. Le Lapin cannot become anti something, and encourages foregoing such reactive thought processes for one, it is often those who are so deeply sure of anything that are cheering for the most wicked, and two creation that lasts comes from a combination of the heart and mind, that which persists within. This is also why I could never become a journalist, because I am too speculative, unsure, curious and while somewhat neutral, make a bad case for the propaganda used to separate and divide people into false oppositions.
I make art not because I am convinced I should be an artist, but because I aspire to find out what art can be in service to showing two seemingly opposing perspectives, or a pluralist view of subjects within an installation itself leaving viewers without conclusions or answers but with experiences that can be considered, interpreted and referred to as examples of considered thought, meaning and signifiers later-in other words an object of concept in material realm to contend with…lest things just be words. Conceptual art is considered to be word art per The Painted Word, but a concept is not a word alone, for if that was true, then word prompts would generate the same kind of artificial creation as we see with computer prompts.
If time and mental labor are not longer valued from humans then to what kind of cultural martyrdom is humanity paying to machines? and by the destructive influence on attention to social media spreading the diatribes of contemporary discourse. As my mentors have said: beauty is taboo, so apparently it seems in the oft-called century of the self…so is love.
According to this podcast about the decline of empathy and rise of narcissism: https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/empathy-narcissism one did not have to focus on the self so much as what they were working on creating or contributing because the very fabric of society was structured in such a way, people could both take care of themselves and others. The social policies established in the 1800s, and enacted, as Ann Crittendom wrote in the NY Times bestselling: The Price of Motherhood, a great deal of social policy went into where we are today. Kinship shifting from the nuclear family post WWII toward individualism resulted in cults, forms of tribalism and the reemergence of nationalism or neoliberal communities which are usually forms of support groups for those whose choices were not supported by their tribe, country, or culture of origin. Mind you, descriptions are not intended as criticisms but to mark distinctions shared across continental, country and cultural divides.
This term: empathist came up today as I checked to see whether or not it is a real word, and apparently it is, such as the science fiction we are living in. Having ones life put in danger is often imagined as being in a faraway, war-torn country. The reality is people much nearer (to you) are likely facing things they dare not speak about, usually for a number of social reasons around fear. Fear of judgement, fear of being misunderstood, fear of facing the internal judgements that go along with subconsciously making bad choices for oneself based on limited information. In this way, I have found the public spaces as more private than the illusion of private spaces indoors or in technology. In this way, privacy differs so much from the sacred.
The sacred is a place where souls join beyond the earthly plane. Rumi referred to it as the field beyond right and wrong doing. Whatever you decide to relate to the notion as, whenever you become truly near to someone, vulnerability is there, and that is where love heals and exists whether or not someone is physically there. The immense beauty in that, of course becomes mentally taboo because the mind is where things are divined or decided in concert with the soul.
Within the realm of mind, with distinctions for use of psyche and spirituality, what we are dealing with are the intangibles of life, a view, a mind’s eye, a perception and on the positive (in my little opinion) the increased tolerance for the internal world of an individual to be animated through the notion of self expression, which is a socially accepted way to say soul manifestation.
In this way, the truth and reality of life often exposed in the dream world is often dismissed, making fiction more permitted. The notion of science as born out of a religious construct is often denied because science is supposed to be the proof of facts and truth. Not so long ago, religion performed as the same apparatus through a shared belief of rationalizations.
Diving back into the earlier mention of psychosomatics, that is the way the soma or body manifests what happens to the mind, is not a new practice either: it’s simply not yet validated within the world profiting on subjugation, and that means a plurality of things…suppression breeds obsession in the least ideal and is transmuted into healthy expression to become the experienced lesson for yourself and others.
You do not have to have a victim mentality to experience pain at the hands of another. This experience becomes a lesson, and since we are here to experience, that pain, such as cupids arrow making the mind work, means that which comes to happen was desired to be learned. This is how I have also fallen for an illusion or failed in connection because of my unresolved traumas. Even the desire to understand nature and why things are the way they are, brought quite an experience down on my head. These experiences have taken years to resolve and be transmuted over time through daily life means, usually offered through grace and compassion. These two facets of life, grace and compassion, are totally intangible but have the most profoundly tangible results. This is how I’ve come to understand the virtue of art. Grace and compassion sometimes become tangible through objects, touch, words or sometimes people receive the messages telepathically through their minds.
So while self-care and pure independence reigns when we do not have to expose any vulnerability to each other, we are always connected. Being alone is simply not even possible, even if the space around us is more distanced from others, meaning that we do not even have to love each other, but realize as the hippy’s of the 70s wanted us to… be love. All made obvious the need for healthy boundaries by discerning the difference between feeling hunted or being a hunter, and feeling totally safe even in a chaotic environment can be possible, or even if simply not preferred.
With the cacophony of lifestyle propaganda and memes floating around in people’s minds, means we have even more of a task to dial inward to find an inner compass to navigating this life of science fiction.
This is our reality, we create with people across timezones and faultlines, all the time, with actions and inactions. The motives in choices are governed by all kinds of variables- each person much find out their true values versus postures or positions in society to experience fulfillment and purpose.
The vocation of artist maybe conceived as a difficult route through the world, but it is a way that forces me to grow, as other vocations encourage different people to grow. I think every field has its unique and shared set of challenges, so it serves very little good to proselytize on the virtues or follies of a particular field over another.
I giggle at those who believe eternal life resides in uploaded consciousness which has little to do with that feeling of having met someone in another lifetime, or how a stranger can feel familiar to be explained away as a manifestation of desires or traumas. The seemingly most logical explanation to being alive today can be attributed not to good luck, but instead to dumb luck of following the heart, genetics and circumstances.
Anecdotally, I began to see myself in everyone. The more I allow all feeling and emotion be present, I saw within each human their condition having experienced some form of it before. I noticed almost everyone was willing to smile, make eye contact- the very things people say never happen in Norway. This seems to be how we create our own truth, by what we do…and for that, my follies are evident, and we are very much human and more than all the same.
I thought about this a lot:what CoVid or any virus is over the last years. I wonder if sometime in the not too distant future, lifeforms may understand a virus as an idea. If ideas and words can trigger biological responses in cells, the notion a virus has a resonance means the host can only be infected through some kind of vulnerability…so then a virus sends a body into a state of destruction and repair (presuming the larger organism…your body, survives). The idea that love can kill you, seemed contrary to my world view, as I believed love could and would always heal you. This dark concept that love could harm helped create a discernment which led me to think CoVid made a social pressure, to force a choice, to attune to more group consensus or personal responsibility for immunity. To explore “immunity,” let’s look at the meaning:
To be immune, by the etymological definition:
late 14c., "exemption from service or obligation," from Old French immunité "privilege; immunity from attack, inviolability" (14c.) and directly from Latin immunitatem (nominative immunitas) "exemption from performing public service or charge, privilege," from immunis "exempt, free, not paying a share" (see immune (adj.)). Medical sense of "protection from disease" is from 1879, from French or German.
So then why would people outsource their defense, their personal immunity, to a made up agency? Thinking about the way words are used was not a fun pass time, at first, but has certainly gotten my awareness to pay more attention to details. As some say, the devil and others say God is in the details…either way, the choice is yours.
I had become ill when I permitted behaviors by others that I did not find to be ok. This lack of boundary was my own deficiency to strengthen…having been outside of normal lifestyle means, I became ill when I tried to do things beyond my physiological limitations and personal truth. I had also become ill when I could pick up on something happening at the end of the street, asked about it and was misled, yet still suspected and found out later the truth…and yet I still wonder if that was a confirmation bias (per the notion of reality as being philosophy of mind) or if that was really truth…because it seems the only way to really find out anything is by being there. That poses a serious issue when it comes to the internet, and the way people can create even more fantasy realms, further from actually being there. Reality itself is already difficult to wrangle with, in that people can make false assumptions, choices based on lack of information, and perpetuate a solipsitic condition by not having difficult discussions that could otherwise healed.
This means one thing I do not like to admit is that fate is not only the unconscious made conscious because even when the unconscious became conscious…there was still a sense of the unknown about the future; it is yet to be made.
The sense I’ve had my whole life is there is no ego or self, there is something beyond this terrestrial plane, a place from where whatever I am came from is. Sent as a spark to animate cells and a body, something that can be called More Than Human. And I can’t explain it. Even with advanced particle physics…it’s so immense I get a headache.
The thing with names, such as words are names for things, the spirit is still a spirit all the same. There are those who know and those who don’t know. Simply because the social media experiment we participate with in varying degrees eats into our privacy and shares our mind to those exploiting the data for gains far beyond capital marketing ploys. There was no change in the purpose but rather in the ability to make choices and have a voice. Not a false voice, as so many women who have also had their mouths covered, throats choked, body’s suppressed by force by the men they loved who were being asked to be accountable for others’ actions and behaviors. Saying this is not to say men do not also experience horrific acts imposed by others….they do. The sharing is about healing the wounds of the heart and finding a new way through this science fiction.
This dark rabbit hole today is to bring taboo to light, in the most humble and neutral way, so the light can burn out all the grief and weight away.
This could be done in private, or it could be done in public. The choice - individual. And the vision of life I have is that it would not seem so courageous to share our truths with each other, as people say it is…that means the society is sophist and therefore weak. A weak society permits disingenuous and violent behavior, and to that we can all see invisible violence as more obvious and the change to become less violent isn’t so radical, even though it may be believed to be. Maybe it’s a bit softer as the spring blossoms peak…and eventually give way to the passing of such a season. Maybe the so called inevitable fall of the West can be pivoted, like a Fosse jazz maneuver…you thought things would go over that way, but with a flip of the hip and sashay, things cleverly saunter into a triumphant non-finale of humanity remembering humility, playfulness and well…a spirit can dream. After all, how else do you know when you’re awake or sleeping? And finally…while it is important we retain our inner child, I wonder how beautiful a world it would be full of mature adults…what do you think? That world is already here waiting, the question is to which God are you serving through the means of money, ideology, body, and creating?
I live and rest as Rilke suggested we must, with the question(s): is it ethical to change someone’s mind? or is it the final realm of violence, controlling the divine, also known as the ability to choose the fate of one’s own life and progeny. It is the realm of the mind, that is what men, women and the rest are fighting to determine. When people repeat nothing is true and everything is permitted, perhaps it is to consider there remains virtue in something being true and access to certain actions being limited. Understandable then the denial of God, for so long it has really meant the fulfillment of ones own libidinous aims, which if you were not previously aware, in turn costs and creates a great weight of grief, which waters the soil and rises through the fires of life to love yet again…if anyone can decipher how to Identify what love is.
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