Self-Refractions - 45

Turning to oneself, glancing at the movement of thoughts in your mind, just ask yourself in a rather casual manner, "to whom(/what) are these particular thoughts flashing in my awareness right now, addressed, even & esp when there seems to be no known active participation from my part in that stream of thinking?" - that is, (try to) feel the addressee of these thoughts which come so spontaneously one after the other irrespective of your intervention in their flow...

Self-Refractions - 44

Thought is always (about) one thought late (as if there is 'a' thought). Maybe thinking is its process of trying to catch up with itself?

revolution not against but of: what/who?

It is the System of which we are the subjects, some are masters, some are slaves... What separates one from the other is a matter of varying degrees, fundamentally they all speak the language of the System (of hierarchy), so even if a slave strikes off a master, it then goes on (eventually) to be a master itself with the master-that-was taking the place of the slave... the System feeds itself that ways...

In a revolution, more than “who am I revolting against?” it’s important, “what am I revolting against (for which that particular 'who' stands)?” and even more than that, is important, “who is revolting?” or better, “what is revolting for which I stand? And does that ‘what’ get co-opted to the language of the System (of hierarchy) such that am just a pawn in the game that the System is playing against itself, just so the System could survive using these petty revolts as an excuse such that part of it (the rebels) remain satisfied somewhat with the temporary results of relative betterment?”

And if you did not speak the language of the System (of hierarchy), would any aspect of the System bother you or, wouldn’t the System then be beyond the scope of your intelligibility for its language be foreign to you? Isn’t all revolution a lost-case then and yet will inevitably keep recurring time & again in the long run just so the System at large could survive? And aren't these inevitably recurring lost cases of revolutions, central to the survival of the System at large for without it the System would be suicidal all too soon?

In the sphere of the Spirituality, this case of the "inevitably recurring lost cases of revolutions" are approached thru the question of Grace in regards to one's individual revolution. I wonder if there has been any such approach similar to Grace, say Collective Grace in regards to Social Revolutions (if Society can be considered as an Organism at large)...

Well J. Krishnamurti opines, "Unlike what the Communists says, Freedom must be at the beginning of a revolution, not at the end of it." And at another place, he remarks, "The first step is the last step."

Just saw this in a webpage, "resistance against power operates as a part of power, and that the purpose (or rather, the consequence) of this resistance against power is the reinforcement of power. [...] Modern and postmodern power has completely saturated its domain down to the grass-root level and now uses the technique of oblique reinforcement at this level -- produces (fake) "resistance," categorizes deviancies, or otherwise fear-mongers about some imaginary opposite of reality -- to grow itself."

Also of consequence here is Nietzsche's warning to all revolutionary free spirits, "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster."

PS. A brilliant explication of the above case of "inevitably recurring lost cases of revolutions," can be found in Foucault's writings on the Sexual Revolution.

haha! no one else, not even you?

What we call our social identity is what we have curved out of the Social Order wherever we are, based on our various encounters & their inane interactions as filtered thru the dialogical language of “isolation vs. integration” as per the spheres of influence, namely some group-of-people, some ideology, some trauma, and mostly just plain unrecognized habits... And thus, we remain ambivalent within this movement of the seeming-duality of “isolation vs. integration” in respect to the "Other vs. Same" game that is the scene of Society... hence the deep seething discomfort when you are asked to stand by your social identity, for you do feel from time to time that there is some deception going on somewhere, esp when you notice that in this movement of “isolation vs. integration,” you seem to be going in circles when seen from the varying phases of your life so far, and so the crisis in consciousness, when then asks "who am I?"... but then again, if there is none playing the "you", none beyond of the play of the socio-political game, then who is deceiving who? LOL!

The Comedy of Censoring Certain Aspects of Human Existence...

Adultery: is pursuing what is not ours...

Fascism: is ensuring the survival of a part, even be it to the utter dismay of the extinction of similar others... (like when a part gets itself appropriated as the whole almost to the exclusion of the others)

Then isn't the very operative motif behind desire-out-of-lack this thing of adultery? And can’t the same thing be said about thinking in relation to fascism?

But then again... maybe... everything has a place under the sun, even desire and thinking… and even adultery and fascism?

Self-Refractions - 43

Laugh and let laugh :-)

context can cure the crisis...

If done under the relevant circumstances, even the so-called evil acts can be of great benefit or even can come off as being of benevolence & beauty, - and herein lies the murky grounds of all conventional morality. Yin-Yang – remember?

One thing is needful: — to ‘give style’ to one’s character — a great and rare art! It is practiced by these who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until everyone of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye […] It is the weak characters without power over themselves who hate the constraint of style… [and] are always out to form or interpret themselves and their environment as free nature — wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, astonishing. […] For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry and art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight. For the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy.

- Nietzsche.

Don't kid me...

“To see color, the eye must be free of color.” – Meister Eckhart.

"Be a Joke unto yourself" - Osho.

Infinity being the only state of being, the finite lives on by recurring onto itself, and thus a thing and its immanent opposite feed off each other to play a dancing game of overlapping onto each other, interchanging one with the other - just so the infinite remains manifest thru their self-recurring relationship of negation…

And here’s the fun: As one seems to be observing all these while being itself involved in the game, it’ll never appear to one as a zero sum game, unless ofcourse one realizes this very fact! And this be the point of the cosmic joke… laughing at yourself, for you are scared of death coz you can't ignore the gnawing sensation that the purported event of your future death might reveal to you that "wait a minute! maybe I've never been born in the first place; all my running around all around the place, was all in vain, as if it was a damn hoax?" - and you can't stop laughing at the unbearable lightness of being non-being?

Yes, its really that silly... some days you find life's recurring mysteries so beautifully explicated in the lines of a Archies card, yes, there you go, I said it! Go figure...

PS. Haven't you noticed that the words, Humor and Human have the same origin?

Self-Refractions - 42

Being-in-love is an affirmation of love...

Being-loved is a confirmation of love...

But am not much of a romantic per se, am more of a devotional lover, and thus the best love affairs for me have always been the clandestine ones... Here one must clarify that am not much of a worshipper, am just the devotional kinds, as in I don’t worship, I devote myself unto love... and there the affirmation becomes an excuse for the ecstasy of the confirmation, and the confirmation acts as the fragrance of the flirtatious affirmation...

Devotion being so very intimate, so very scripted in one’s private language, that it carries with it the effervescence of the most secretive of the existential scene of life, and thus life's greatest passions are to be realized in and as clandestine love affair... And at most times, they skirt around the borders of absurdity, ambiguity and the arcane, - escaping all intelligibility & integrability even from oneself for such love affairs remain as of-itself as it is of oneself, if not more...

Had to learn the hard way, if at all I learnt...

"Unless a man first finds himself, finds his own essential nature and destiny, and begins from them, all his efforts and achievements will be built only on the sand of personality, and at the first serious shock the whole structure will crumble, perhaps destroying him in its fall."

- G.I.G.

Crisis, Consciousness, and Catharsis...

Do what you got to do, just don’t bother about the emotional states that are way beyond the demands of the present situation at hand! And in all this hullabaloo, if suddenly you happen to recognize that ever-elusive fragrance of joy intoxicating even this mundane moment with that hint of the sublime and the subtle, consider it as a bonus. Anyways, true happiness manifests in & as a bonus... mostly...

Consider what? The Joy or the Fragrance of it? Neither, for the fragrance-of-joy always already exists! But consider the "chance-event" of stumbling onto the fact of recognizing it as a bonus...

Ah damn :P

In A Pantheistic Existence: From Abstractions to Approximations

That which moves within and around itself, lives to die all too often, and outgrows itself over and over again, - can neither be concluded nor be repeated... for the Exactitude of theory doesnot apply in the context of the Living.

Thus when dealing with the Living, Scientific Inquiry moves closer to the Art of Approximating moment by moment... as with time, all such Scienticism keeps metamorphosing into a (somewhat) living practice under the spell of that which its inquiring upon, that is: under the spell of the living, the non-living stumbles upon its own movement of life underlying it supposed inanimate nature.

:P

When doing something, what if we are always already in dialogue with the completion of that doing? Then doesn't that spawn a wholly different way of undoing underlying that doing, thus making us acutely aware of the problematics of the very choice behind that action...

Like: When in the grips of desire, if I suddenly turn to myself and ask, "What if I get exactly what I desire, what would I do with it? Would that really make me happy once I've gotten it? Do I desire it or the happiness that I project out of getting it? Or maybe its not happiness but some utilitarian goal I see fulfilling in that object of desire, irrespective of whether that fulfillment makes me happy or not?"

"Do I want it coz I have an idea on what to do with it when I have it, or do I want it coz I've never had it, or coz it may somehow act as some kind of an elixir to all my sufferings?"

"Do I see it as what it is, or do I make it more than what it is? Do I see it as the object of my desire for its utility or for its aesthetics?"

"If there weren't an iota of ignorance regarding my future state on the purported fulfillment of that desire, would I be still wanting it?"

"Am I in the grips of desire knowing fully well what exactly is it that am desiring?"

"Is desire out of the tendency in my seeing to correct itself of its distortions? What is prior, the desire or the distortion? Or do they co-arouse each other?"

"Is desire endangering itself when it is almost about to be fulfilled? Or does desire reduce in intensity as one moves closer to the fulfillment of it? Then what takes over once one is in the first moments of the completion of that desire?"

"Do I desire or am I made to desire? When in the grips of desire, am I the subject or the object of desire?"

The Word Is Not The Thing...

'The Peace which passeth understanding' is a feeble translation of the content of this word.

- T.S. Eliot.

limit-tends-to-zero?

By its very nature, death remains to be a second hand experience, - an approximation at best...

Further, like all problems wherein limit-tends-to-zero, how can there be definite point in time when "I" cease to be... the same is the problem for beginnings...

Death is always of the Other, never of the Same, and thus we suffer deeply when such approximations flirts around actualities, when our near and dear ones, those we identify as somewhat "same" (somewhat like us)...

Who dies? Not the Other person, more so the one we were in relation to the Other! Like if my friend dies, it is not for s/he am grieving but for the death of the-friend-that-was-me in relation to our relationship of friendship, that am grieving...

Death is always of "the Other that was played by Me" when that Role has to be cast off in absence of the missing context for the lack of that Other.

Yes, I know I should stop now :P

from itself to be itself...

There has to be the freedom of choice but only insofar as their always already exists deep within that freedom, a wholly different kind of freedom, that of the freedom from choice, that of the freedom from the very compulsive-need to choose and thus to expose the illusion of the very dependency on a compulsive-choosing as if Choice is the only way to bring about the freedom & goodness that chides in the very nature of this benevolent existence. And yes, there are other ways too, ways that open up when one frees oneself from the stranglehold of a compulsive-choosing.

And thus, without inquiring into the problematics of choice, when we talk about the freedom of choice as a necessity for "freedom", we end up making all such "struggles" for freedom as nothing but stylized (and might I even say, spiritualized) form/cover of our need for power... Infact Bondage is not so much an opposite of Freedom, as it is an opposite of Power!

Isn't it so that we fail to see how we recall our bondage in the very ways we try to "free" ourselves? And doesn't social-freedom (which is actually power) border on nihilism as does bondage border on conformity and (though much hated) stasis/fixity?

Unless freedom is free to be itself only insofar if it is first and foremost free from itself (and maybe vice versa), can it keep on balancing itself to be neither too much or too little, but "as-is" the situation so is its status... In that, there is free-ing, and no freedom or any free thing... or maybe not even that and not the free-ing too...

Was Job a Stoic?

Grant me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change;

The courage to change the things that I can;

And the wisdom to know the difference.

- Reinhold Niebuhr, Serenity Prayer.

that

If its everywhere, its gotta be here. And if its not here, then its not everywhere...