A Mental Cleanup: Looking for Life Outside Restricting Forms.

The incredible gift of time! Time that has passed! Time that is about to come! The time that is moving right now, as I type! This precious, wonderfully short phenomenon, the movement of time, the tick-tocking of life controlled by two hands, (now controlled digitally in an alarm clock) unfolds the day in such a stark way. Think about it…hours are really minutes, minutes are really just seconds, seconds are milliseconds, and milliseconds are simply a bunch of nanoseconds…But of course we would never say to another, “I will meet you for dinner in 24,000 nanoseconds.” This is absurd. And so how absurd it is to measure the events or occurrences in your life through the form of time? I don’t mean that time is functionless in our society; rather, I argue that time is starkly limiting by its very nature.

So how should we measure our lives day by day? Should it be measured by what is about to come? The future? What is to be expected? If I were to do that today I would say to myself, “Krystal gets off at 5 so I will see her then. Let me start filling up the remainder of my time with things that I want to do before then. I would also say to myself, “I don’t work until Saturday at 5pm”, so naturally this would prompt me to find things to fill up the next few days that I have off—today and tomorrow. They are my days. Consequentially, these days are then festooned on the “significance hierarchy” all the way up at the very top because they are the days that I can exercise my utmost autonomy—I am able to act in accordance with my true nature since I am not wearing a blue or white collar shirt and following a mandated script of “smiling, greeting, and encouraging sales.” But what really is my natural self? Is it the self that is “this” and not “that”? Is it really impossible to act myself in a store/business setting? As stated before, does one’s uniform and rules of engagement denote a downshift in one’s individuality?

To me, if one is to getting upset at the reality of having a job where one is unable to act the way he or she would naturally act out of a work environment, he or she is thinking unilaterally. In point of fact, they have a hindering attachment to a certain “shade” of the self—a one-sided view of the self—that impedes the possibilities of optimizing one’s full potential. We are not just one self, and one should never understand the nature of the self as I am “this” and I am definitely not “that”. In reality, we are beings who are constantly shifting and reallocating our desires, goals and thoughts on a daily basis, changing how and when to act in the manifold contexts we find ourselves. Thus, the self is always and inevitably circumstantial.

We are constantly assigning ourselves the title of the great “puzzle solver” in our lives. But it is when we finally learn and understand that there is no puzzle before us, we can go on living a peaceful, happy life where we can be fortunate to have life–and in it, we are able to enjoy all things.

However, if I was under the form of measuring my life in terms of my past, I would most likely live and walk a narrow-minded road all through my life. I would see things through the lens of the past, thus freezing the chance of really being surprised by the unfolding and cascadence of life’s every passing moment. By experiencing life through the lens of the past, understanding everything that occurs by utilizing preconceived knowledge, is to drive a car with dirty windows where only the front windshield is your only source for vision–in other words, you create a severe case of “tunnel vision”. And all the while you are fixated on the smooth road ahead, the line of sight before you, the image of things in front of you, you are sadly unaware of the beautiful mountain ranges with snow-white tips, the eagle soaring across the canvas of a blue sky, maybe the clouds that take the form of pirate ships. Your view from the dirtied side windows is very limiting because it seals of the chance of seeing everything from a 360 degree perspective—the way life is supposed to be experienced.

To use the past as a guide and not as truth or reality is perhaps the greater skill in all of this. But perhaps even better is to live this life without fixation or attachment to any single lens of perception, whether that lens be the past, future, or by the seconds that tick by. If we are always calculating our experiences in such terms–time, event, significance, past, future, etc.–we work counter-productively against a sense of freedom and spontaneity to transpire. Further, we weaken our abilities to see things as they truly are; and rather, we see things, in effect, as something relative to an already pre-existing notion that has been long since exhausted. This is not to say that we should not learn valuable lessons from our pasts, from the mistakes that we make; moreover, it is to realize the importance of being cognizant of each passing moment without attachments so one can live more freely.

Robert Pirsig from his famous book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance writes, “When you are no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself.” Ever notice that what we often times expect to happen in life is completely opposite of what truly happens. You think you have found the perfect job, only to discover later after a few years that the people or the tasks you perform day in and day out seem more and more each day a complete waste of your time. This is because no matter how hard we attempt to label, fixate, and attach a logical, analytical assessment to a particular situation, life precludes this expectation by the spontaneity that continuously surfaces. This is because, in life, the world does not live for anything, for anyone–it provides a bounty of wealth and inspiration despite the fact that it is completely agenda-less and perception-less.

Nature is measured by each exacting moment. It does not keep an internal hard drive of what has happened, and because of this, it is able to thrive and flourish. Thus, it is perhaps beneficial for us to mimic the sequences of the universe, of nature, to forget about all of our hang-ups that haunt us from our pasts, and cause us anxiety when we feebly attempt to peer into our futures. It is important to now empty your hard drives of past occurrences along with your analytic assessments that accompany them. Simply put, it is worth effort to white-out all the “red pen markings” that you have made in your life and to let things flow with the caress and ease that spring water exudes as it trickles down a mountain side. Welcome the changes in your life instead of acting inhospitable to the foreign encounters you experience. Any anxiety experienced with assimilating into new changes in your life is partly due to the fact that you are lacking the accommodating spaces for a new change. To approach these changes with better dexterity and without anxiety, one must work to dump the pre-existing thoughts, dreams, occurrences and the assessments that parallel them, in order to fully welcome something new.

Thus, when we are able to clean off the dirty side windows of our car, and we are able to look at the wealth of experiences through new eyes—eyes that are more open to the reality of “reality”, the truth of the “truth”—it is a way to disengage from delimited forms and prepare one more adequately to rise to the occasion, to seize the moment in life. It prompts us to be more adventurous and intrigued by the mysterious and wondrous nature of the world. By melting the icebergs of previous hang-ups and anxieties of the future, we open our minds, bodies, and souls, to reflect the smooth, cascadance of water flowing down the stream, always changing, always adaptable to new surroundings. It is always the greatest mystery to my why some people seem to be, or view their lives as so limited in a world that is anything but. In contrast, the world is inexhuastibly unlimited and complex.

- Brandon

just thoughts again

Without a lens through which we perceive, who can say that “this” is bad and “that” is good.  Without constructed conventions, who can say we are living wrongly?  Without a rule or law, who is able to make a transgression?  Without an ideal of beauty, who is able to call something ugly?  Without a guage procuring a sense of higher intelligence, who can call someone stupid?  Without seeing value in one thing more than another, we are free from having a biased opinion, we are free from passing judgement–we are free to live more harmoniously without prejudices because we transcend limited forms.  We are not compartmentalized within delimited forms; rather, we reside within the fecundity of a synergistic relationship with our friends, family, and neighbors.       

-Brandon 

The essence of truth

For truth (“reality” as we would like to understand it) in this world is no more than the simple images one can find within nature. For instance, the beach; the way the tide looms up over the sun-baked sand, dampening it to a darker shade, only to return again to its natural lighter shade moments later, is analogous to the reality of truth. For those few seconds when the sand is wet from the tide’s arrival, symbolizes a reality for a moment which is subsequently, and inevitably, lost once more. This is not to be misunderstood, then, that reality is, in fact, the lighter sand, the sand without the impression the ocean’s tide places upon it; rather, reality can be viewed and understood by the fleeting impermance of this dynamic found in this image—-in a word, this “exchanging of fluctuating shades”. The fact that the sand is neither dry nor is it damp for any extended period of time, characterizes the essence of a certain “truth” (I use the word truth here with the most extreme looseness possible) in this world; instead of seeing truth as “this” and not “that”, truth is, insofar as we understand the natural processes of the world, a balance of both mutually entailing demarcations of “this” and that”. Thus, truth, though it may seem, often times, well-concealed from the average eye, is able to find elucidation by this image found in the natural world itself. Or, taken from a solipsist’s perspective, truth is one’s own—-made, formulated, and solely consructed by the perception of the person perceiving.

Note: This is simply a way of viewing truth. I am, in the process of publishing this blog, demarcating truth into a categorization that is, of course, easily broken apart with a simple, antogonistic argrument. To be sure, in keeping within the sand metaphor, I am coloring the sand with my own impression here in the blog, and this impression cannot be subsumed as “truth”, which is why I always like to think of the word “truth” very loosely. To demarcate is to bring about its opposer. And to prescribe a demarcation as superior to another is to impede the journey towards enlightenment. Said another way, to value one perspective as superior to another’s is to value unilateralism, which is, in turn, symptomatic of a biased dispositon. And this dispostion of shortsightedness will never excel one towards an enlightened perspective in respect to an understandable reality.

-Brandon

Cold and Catatonic

Think about nothing. Naturally, thoughts will come to your head and they will attempt to maneuver their way in. The trick is to eliminate these thoughts or stop thinking about them right away before you begin to dwell on them or succumb to them. Try and just sit and think about nothing. Be aware of nothing. Though it is generally considered impossible to rid all thoughts from your head, it is possible to eliminate them before you become fully cognizant of them. Achieve this state of mind, or lack thereof.

Why are we the only species to contemplate suicide? Why are we given these greater minds to even think about ending the natural path of life? Food, shelter, safety…these are things that other species do not begin to even think about but just act upon, by instinct, in order to survive. We have these greater minds that enable us to think and act out of our instincts, so perhaps those same great minds are infamous for acting upon suicide. We analyze our life outside of the necessities. We determine what we have and what we don’t have, what we want and what we don’t want. Always measuring ourselves against our friends and our families. Who has the most money, who is the most popular, who is the most “successful”. These are the things that depress us. It’s bullshit.

-zach

thought of the day

In the process of altering one’s physical features through means of plastic surgery, we thus impart and add to the problem of perpetuating a skewed aesthetic value that permeates our culture. Surgical enhancements are representations which, as a result of, facilitate the continuing fascination with an aesthetic standard that tricks men and women into measuring themselves against a human constructed ideal. Because of this process of surgical reformation that continues in our culture, many men and women choose to measure themselves against this standard of ‘artificiality’. And how burdensome can this be in respect to one’s image of self? Quite.

-Brandon

Deep thinkers…what are they?

Deep thinkers…we know them; we hear what they have to say sometimes. And I was just considering an alternative to this “deep thinker” label that is often times cast on people who supposedly have “deep thoughts”. Firstly, I want to understand what essentially constitutes a deep thought. What is meant when we say, “Whoah man, that was deep.” Does deep, here, imply that a person is going beyond what an average person would generally think about a subject? I would have to argue that a person is not actually deep, but, in fact, persistent with his or her ideas. A persistent thinker seems more appropriate. We all have deep thoughts from time to time, but true deep thinkers are, by and large, persistent thinkers more than anything else. Isn’t a deep thinker simply probing a topic a little further than the average–where an average person would stop thinking about a subject, a persistent thinker (or a dweller) would journey further; he or she would start associating his or her content with other valuable ideas to guide him or her along the way. To be deep, one must embark upon an inquistive trajectory. And possibly, one might be called a deep thinker when he or she has traveled to many different places pertaining to various complex issues.

But how deep can one really probe? And could one not be incessant to the point of absurdity? “Don’t dwell” is often a friendly suggestion we provide for the someone suffering with a life question that seems irreducibly complex. A healthy balance to these questions is perhaps the best method to practice, i.e., too much dwelling can lead to obssesion and not enough introspection can lead to obtuseness.

-Brandon

Impossibility of Creativity in a God-created Universe

“In the presence of the perfection that is God, nothing can be added or taken away. There can be no novelty or spontaneity. Thus, all subsequent acts of “creativity” are in fact secondary and derivative exercises of power.” (Daodejing, Ames, p. 17)

If God created the universe and made all things, decided upon all the things that came into the universe, then man has no genuine creative force behind him. If one assumes, as many do, that God created everything, then man will always be secondary in the creative hierarchy. In the power to create, we are in fact not really creating; rather, we are merely organizing the pieces or ideas that were already given to us by a putative higher intelligence. This act is not creation. We are thus organizers and not creators, puzzle solvers and not inventors. In point of fact, God robs us of the possibility for creative autonomy if everything we create is something that God already predetermined.

- Brandon

How to conduct oneself?

This idea came to me this morning, and it is one that has constantly stirred around in my consciousness for years now. In a world where the “self” is seen as a insignificant element in respect to a enourmous collective population which is consistently growing exponentially each year, feelings of hopelessness and apathy are truly representative of this obscuring force that hides the uniqueness of the self. In this loss of “self” that permeates our culture, i.e., the idea that we are not integeral to the development and prosperity of our socio-economic environment, that we do not, to a certain degree, “matter” within a general conglomerative whole, individuals seem to generate feelings of alienation from their cultural surroundings, thus further leading them to view their world introspectively rather than with a cosmopolitan ideology. These feelings of alienation one gathers from a culture that is pernicious in the regard to the “self” (when I speak of self, I mean to describe the uniqueness and quality each individual contains), are the cause for the disintegration of an altruistic agenda, or perhaps a spiritual trajectory one can take to see the world more collectively than introspectively. Do I mean to say we must embark upon a certain degree of spirituality to obtain a sense of interconnectiveness with our counterparts, with our friends? To an extent, I would have to say yes. However, this is not to suggest a need for an all-knowing being to dictate to us what is righteous and what is not by a telecommunicable transference. This is absurd, and will not get into that because I think it is too off-topic for this discussion. What I mean to say is that we must have a belief in a higher ideology in our lives, one that tests our self-cultivation in our lives, one that is governing the development of our lives. In a word, it is a path to take, a way for one to embark upon. I admit, this seems to have a teleological edge to it, but it seems that the human experience has a certain innate “teleological” paradigm present. This is, of course, my own opinion. One could consequently argue against an “agenda” in life, more specifically, people who resolutely rely on the existential argument.

I cannot write anymore right now, but will continue this blog soon.

-Brandon

Yeeeaaaa boooyyy!!

So, the weather is warming up. Awesome. I’m ready to be out on the lake with my friends.
The grind sucks. School, work, school, work. I guess that’s what you have to do.
Currently listening to: ben harper – burn one down. I think I listened to this song like 50 times over Spring Break.

Being in the gym, listenin’ to music, makes me happy. Among other things.

later.

-z

The Art of Becoming Beefless

This is not a new concept, however I think it should be thought about in greater detail. To begin, it is imperative to say that everyone has the potential of becoming a “beefless” human being. And more importantly to note, one should concentrate more on becoming “beefless”, rather than questioning if one has ever reached the superior state of “beeflessness”. Beeflessness is a task that can be apprehended only through the practice of becoming a beefless person. And how do we practice becoming beefless? At the outset, one should never say to another, “I am a beefless person”. On the contrary, it is more important for others to notice your “beeflessness” at the work place, at home, and in your interpersonal relationships. In other words, when it comes to the art of beeflessness, “actions speak louder than words.” Beeflessness is a new philosophy, so the groundbreaking elements have presented themselves; however, the complete ingredients to become a beefless person are still unrecognized. But, I assure you: they are on their way! These will come in time.

Note: This “Beeflessness” arrived in the hands of Zach and I one night on the way to our place of “muscle building”. We had pulled up next to a co-worker at a traffic light, and I said to Zach, “Man, that Robin is beefless.” Zach said he undoubtedly concurred, and knew exactly what I meant when I said Robin was, in fact, a beefless co-worker. Maybe beeflessness has to do with drama in people’s lives. Even though drama is inescapable for most people in the work place, (and Robin probably has encountered some circumstances that has caused her to act with “beef” instead of without) the beeflessness of a person should be able to diffuse this drama at a faster rate because the beefless person abhors drama more than anything else. When speaking of this “beef” that we have been discussing you might automatically decide to equate this word with drama. I would say this is a fair translation, but ask you to look deeper into the word beef and everything in connotes–just think about it. Still more to come on “beeflessness” in the future.