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The more we attempt to assert ourselves, the more we tend to fight for the same things. dominance through conquest.
This is odd: to declare ourselves “different” is a means of attaining uniqueness through capturing the same flag everyone else is chasing. This is not different, merely successful.
To be unique want something else. Otherwise you measure yourself against others fickle, negotiable, shallow desires
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Being smart is hard. Feeling is easy.
We like to read books that offer an illusion of understanding: clever detective-esque inquiries with a tidy revelation.
Between our repetitious “A-to-B” obligations, we don’t have to think: we consume the book/podcast’s form of thought without doing the act of critical thinking.
And yet, this escapist distraction away from emotion allows productivity in the sense of pacified inner turmoil: existing between thinking and feeling.
This placebo intelligence is often preferable to the chaos of continually existing in your heart or head.
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How do you know what to fight against until it appears and is defined?
The isolated tribe cannot defend against the capitalist hegemonic state until it grasps the model of destabilization and desire introduced from the contact. (How could you imagine this in advance?)
While you can target all outsiders (strangers) as enemies in preemptive defense, the more subversive model is a subliminal natural desire.
For instance: The oedipal complex names your unconscious desires, allowing you to defend and socialize against them.
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The therapist helps you uncover your subconscious drives. The fetishist knows their drives and bypasses social normalization (productive socialization) to scratch their itch.
The fetishist embraces libido over societal mores, which champions excessive difference without needing to understand the motivation.
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Like a video game, you must conquer the level you are in to transcend.
Sometimes it takes a change of venue and a long-term release of tension to see your level clearly: take a sabbatical from the game to understand it.
your subconscious continues to work in the background, but you need to remove the repetitive challenges that block the pattern recognition from bubbling up.
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Choosing the passive role, remaining open to life’s flows, or the active position, imprinting your will upon situations, are not the only ways to engage with the world.
Simone Weil offers a middle road of “negative effort”: Rather than action or passivity, it is a stance of engaged receptivity devoid of your internal noise.
This is an attentive focus to the present without slipping into becoming a zombified observer.
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Cognitive behavioral therapy and cannabidiol treat symptoms.
In this sense they are topical and situational, thwarting outbursts of pain and soothing the aggravated soul.
While both recognize the site of inflammation, neither resolves the source of vexation.
Both become mediating behaviors you rely on but, for a brief window of time, can offer a space for insight and awareness into your condition.
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We are all experts at seeing other people’s problems, yet children when seeing our own.
We need community for reciprocal insight.
No matter how gifted and aware you are, somebody else will see more clearly than you, and they will be pained watching you stumble about.
In reverse, when you see someone flounder, remember you are doing the same in another facet of your life.
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The things designed to help us get in the way.
Concepts, tutorials, or punishment: they are the thing that keeps us from perceiving reality.
They are programs that train us not to see clearly but to align and obey, most often for someone else’s benefit, and this normalization destroys clear perception, and we must work hard late in life to dissolve them.
