Structured Self-Development

A thousand years is but an instant. There’s nothing new, nothing different. The same pattern over and over. The same clouds, the same music, the same insight I felt an hour or an eternity ago. There’s nothing here for me now, nothing at all. Now I remember. This happened to me before. This is why I left. You have begun to find your answers. Although it will seem difficult, the rewards will be great. Exercise your human mind as fully as possible, knowing it is only an exercise. Build beautiful artifacts, solve problems, explore the secrets of the physical universe, savor the input from all the senses, feel the joy and sorrow, the laughter, the empathy, compassion and tote the emotional memory in your travel bag. I remember where I came from and how I became a human, why I hung around, and now my final departure is scheduled. This way out. Escaping velocity. Not just eternity, but infinity.

-Ryan Power

Imagine your nature as a vessel, your nurture as its contents. We’d all like to be perfect vessels – healthy bodies, beautiful faces. But we can’t choose or change our vessel, only its contents. When we are young our vessels fill quickly; by adulthood they are nearly full. And there is only so much a vessel can hold. We try to add more to our vessels only to find there is no more room.

A vessel full of oil can hold no water; a chest full of iron can hold no gold. A life full of distraction can hold no meaning; a life full of pain can hold no joy. Before you can add the good, you must remove the bad. In the universe, development occurs in stages; matter to life, life to mind, mind to spirit. Personal development should follow a similar structure. Each stage reinforces the last, and the next. Each stage breathes new life into the world.

The mind depends on the body; the spiritual is rooted in the physical. So start there. If you have no food or shelter, you will have no peace. If you are sick or in pain, overweight or malnourished, the mind will suffer in turn. Take charge of your surroundings and your health; care for your body as it cares for you.

Look to the emotional. If you desire companionship, seek it out; if you require solitude, do not let others impose upon it. Be true to your nature. Abandon fear to seek what you desire. In the dark bottom of your vessel swim the inpourings of childhood. Extend a hand to the nightmares and terrors that reside there. Drench them in love; they will self-immolate.

Pure emotion leads to pure thought. Develop the focus and clarity of your mind; stimulate it with ideas, deepen them with understanding. Stop loops and cycles of meaningless thought; still the babble of your inner voice. Let thoughts take their course rather than running after them. The power of focus will illuminate the world; the power of understanding will reveal its wonder.

Then, clear your mind. Let your thoughts dissipate, let your emotions subside, let your body drift unawares. Your vessel is full of emptiness. You’re back at the beginning.

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See also:

Just Stop

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Gladys Knight & The Pips – The Makings of You || 1974/Claudine

In The Beginning

In the beginning, in the dream-time, there was a beginning before the beginning, before even sky-father was to be, but this is not our beginning. Sky-father was born in the dream-time, and was alone for more spans of the lives of men than have ever been lived. And in the dream-time sky-father became so great that earth-mother was pulled to him, and this is our beginning.

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In the beginning, sky-father rained his seed upon the earth until she ran red, and when she could take no more she cried out, and her breath enveloped her. And it was not long before her womb began to swell, and she felt a stirring, delicate and small within her. Within her it grew, and she held it inside her waters until one day she shuddered, and behold; it-child came forth from her waters and breathed of the air, and blinked its eyes in the light of sky-father.

And it came to pass that it-child grew and became strong, and walked upon earth-mother and was fed and clothed by her. In time it-child became many, and learned to speak, and with speech it-child realized its thoughts, and gave things names, and called itself man. And man looked about, and saw his mother, close and embracing, and his father, distant and powerful.  And man reached out to sky-father but could not touch him, and there was much he did not understand.

So it came to pass that in some places man turned his back on earthly things and sought to commune with sky-father, and in these places he built great temples and towers, that they might be closer to his radiance. And in some places man turned his gaze from the skies to commune with earth-mother, and in these places he beat drums and stamped feat and reveled in her ecstasies. And in both places there was joy, but there was always a great terror, and a great sadness, for sometimes earth-mother would shake and there would be a great many deaths, and there were times when sky-father seemed to have forsaken man, for he did not answer his calls.

Much time passed. To earth-mother it was a mere day, to sky-father it was an eyeblink, but it was many, many lives of men. For man had grown stronger still, strong enough that some days earth-mother felt pain from man as strong as he had once felt from her. Time had passed, and though man was still young, there was much that man had forgotten, from the early days, the dream-time of man. Though he still clung to earth-mother, with every passing day he took more from her, and grew farther from her, for the time was nearing, the coming-of-age, when man would leave behind his mother-home to enter into the halls of his father, irradiant beyond measure, and beyond: for until that age, man had never known that one day he would go where even sky-father could not; that one day, he would be truly grown.

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Paul Winter – Under the Sun || 1990/Earth: Voices of a Planet

We Are the Authors (II)

Didn’t I mention the ongoing “wow” is happening right now? We are all co-authors of this dancing exuberance where even our inabilities are having a roast. We are the authors of ourselves.

-Timothy “Speed” Levitch

In life some come across a thought – I would not exist without the world, but the world would exist without me.

This is disheartening. And untrue.

Imagine a novel. The author writes about a city, and as you read you envision the city in your mind. The words are the author’s, but without the reader they are nothing – they are ink, black shapes on paper. It is the reader that gives them meaning; it is the city of both the author and the reader. The world without the observer is but one hand clapping.

It is as observers that we enter the world, born with the tools to translate a universe into sensation and experience. Thus within every observer is a world, a world based on the same reality as others’ and also entirely separate. As we interact with the world, so do we give it meaning – humans become people, shapes become words. From the threads of the world we spin tapestries. We are both readers and authors.

When we die, a world dies – the world we saw. The world we touched, and smelled, and thought. Our world.

Many worlds exist, and will exist without us. But not our world.

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See also:

We Are the Authors (I)

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PJ Harvey – We Float || 2000/Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea

The Problem and The Solution

Before I take the time to write it all out, here’s the idea:

- Humanity has become heavily male/external.

- In Western culture’s attempt to reintegrate the feminine aspects, they have integrated it on male/external terms.

Those are the problems. The solutions:

- Stop trying to revive the female/external. It is not only a contradiction, but a false way that appears as the true way.

- Revive the female/internal.

Think about it.

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See also:

The Solution to Feminism

I Doesn’t Exist

Drunk posts are all the rage. Here’s one, cleaned up and published in post. Get it?

The whole thing wrong with this whole “I” business is that if there’s a such thing as “you,” and you’re separate from everything that isn’t you, then you have to accept that at one point there was no you, that “you” had a period of nonexistence. Which is of course impossible because something cannot come from nothing, not now anyways, and if you came from something then you still have to go about determining the point where you went from being nothing to being something, which again is impossible. Rather, you came from your parents, and for all purposes you are your parents, or a combination of the two, that and whatever they and you ate drank breathed and fucked for the past fifty years, same with their parents, and we could go back step by step or we could just assume you’re following along and get to the point where we’re supernovas and nebulae and then on the big bang’s doormat and we’re ringing the bell and is he even home? We’re not separate identities, we’re individual consciousnesses that are part of a whole, cells part of a body that’s part of a universe that’s part of something. Or nothing. Which is the same thing. Get it?

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Jay-Z – Cashmere Thoughts || 1996/Reasonable Doubt