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

Priorities, Love (II)

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I began Priorities, Love I’d set out to write something fairly concrete, but as the piece took shape it became more prosaic. While the ideas are abstract, this is day-to-day stuff. As I move into a new phase of my life it’s become important to look at my life in terms of priorities. As such, they’re as follows - my mission before my self, my self before my friends, and my friends before my lovers.

We’ve seen what happens when people put their priorities in the wrong order. When people put their lovers before their friends, they sacrifice deeper bonds for fleeting emotions.When people put their lovers before their selves, they sacrifice their power and self-respect. When people put their friends before their selves, they find themselves dragged around by the actions of others. When people put their friends and lovers before their mission, they sacrifice their potential and purpose. When people put their selves before their mission, they fall into hedonism, narcissism and nihilism.

You must always be willing to sacrifice that which is lesser for that which is greater. People tend to do this in levels. Most people in time come to value friendship over romance. Many will realize that no person is worth giving up their own self-respect. But people tend to stop at the final level - putting their mission before their selves. By the millions, we choose lives of comfortable mediocrity over risk. We lean against the wall instead of approaching her. We stay in the cubicle rather than start our own business. Our mission is to fulfill our highest potential; it is the core of life, the highest expression of evolution, and daily, in droves, we deny it. We’re unable to sacrifice ourselves even as the risks grow lighter with every year. For a samurai the highest honor was to die in the virtue of Bushidō. For centuries men have sacrificed their lives for something greater, and yet often we find it unthinkable even to sacrifice our comfort.

Through love, we move upwards. We love through sex, friendship, and honesty; through wisdom, respect, and compassion. Extend that love to the world. Give to the world what the world has given you – everything.

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See also:

Priorities, Love (I)

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Floating Points – Faruxz || 2011/Faruxz

Priorities, Love (I)

Your lovers will infuse your life with Éros, with Kāma, passionate love. Éros is an ocean; there is no taming it. When you first set out into its depths it will overtake you, toss you on its waves like a toy. As you grow older you will come to know its currents, how to read its skies, how to sail its storms. Through Kāma you will learn of ecstasy and despair, beauty and sadness. It is a descending love. It will drench your memory with peaks and crashes of emotion. But the ocean will never be still. Éros is not steadfast, for it knows neither bond nor loyalty. Your lover will leave you, always, as you will leave your lover, always.

Your brothers and sisters, your friends, your comrades’ love is Mettā, Philia, the love of family. By blood or bond, their love will remain where Éros flees. It will ground your life in the lives of others; through it you will learn of trust, of loyalty and honor. Philia is a chain, and it will hold you up where you would fall as it will hold you still where you would run. It seeks neither to descend nor ascend, but to remain. In time, Éros succumbs to Philia; lovers become friends, friends become family. It is strong, but still conditional: your friends, your family will follow you as you follow them, always but only if.

Love of self must be Areté, not the thin vanity of Narzissismus but a love that seeks always to move forward. Through life we must seek to better ourselves; to nourish and strengthen our bodies through action, to nourish and strengthen our mind through experience. Through Areté we learn of truth, of power, of virtue and of life. Your self will never leave you. It is unconditional so long as you remain. When you reach the end of your days, your self, your love will be your sole possession; Philia beneath you, Éros a distant memory.

Your mission is all of these things; it encompasses them and transcends. It is not love of passion, or friendship, or power, or wisdom. It is Agape, Bhakti, Prema, Ishq; a love born not of self but of selflessness. It is the love of God. It is the love of life. It seeks not to move forward, but rather to move upward. Through it you will learn of death, and of purpose. When your self is gone your mission will remain, for it exists beyond the self, beyond the scope of a single person. It will remain for other selves to further, and when they pass it will remain still. For there is only one mission in life, and we all, ultimately, fulfill it.

In life we sacrifice that which is lesser for that which is greater; that which is fleeting for that which remains. Therefore put your friends before your lovers, your self before your friends, and your mission before your self.

-

See also:

Priorities, Love (II)

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Bat for Lashes – Daniel || 2009/Two Suns

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.

-

See also:

We Are the Authors (I)

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

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