A couple of observations from the past few days:

Feeling of paralysis -- mental inertia -- leading to the quiet scratchings at the back of the mind, that uneasy desire for release and distraction. Not exactly a sense of doubt, but more the inevitable moments of questioning motives and asking for justifications. The 'how->when->what' rather than simply the 'why'. And naturally, the "right answers" refuse to appear when called, which leads to more questions, and a spiralling confusion.

The past two years have taught at least one lesson, though. The right answer is not always as important as a question that leads to new possibilities. In that vein, a simple fact arrived from the background of studying and thinking: A grand scheme is often too vague to become a guiding principle. The purpose needs to be smaller, on the scale of daily life, to have a tangible effect.

This means that planning is the key to staying grounded and clear. Setting attainable goals on an everyday basis is an absolute must. Without goals, the days pass in an aimless malaise, a winding maze of reactionary fear and worry. To prevent that kind of busy neurosis, the antidote is to build a stepladder and climb upward, eventually stepping high enough to look down at the maze and create the simplest path to the exit.

I'm writing this down now because it is so easy (but in the end, painful) to forget.

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The other observation is more esoteric. In the space of a few minutes last night, the time spent allowing mind and breathing to find each other again after an active day. Images, voices, memories and thoughts -- all glide past, some maintaining position for a few moments in front of my closed eyes, while others pass unnoticed into the murky recesses of soon-to-be dreams. As the seconds become minutes, I begin to feel a presence in the room to my right. It feels faint at first, but as the time passes it becomes stronger. Having read about the experience as a psychological phenomenon rather than a magical one, my mind switched to metaphor to ease the discomfort of the apparition. The metaphor is a simple one of creating a "shell" of personal space of about one foot in diameter radiating outward from the center of gravity. It has nothing to do with warding off spirits, but rather it is an exercise in redirecting attention and concentration toward a consciously generated mental image.

As the apparition -- non-physical, but almost palpable rushed across the room toward me, I focused more deeply on the outbreath and seiza/hokkaijoin (body and hand posture). The apparition moved within millimeters' distance away, and the right side of my face and body could feel its presence quite strongly.

As a reminder of the mental foundations of both apparition and my imagined protective "shell", the shell itself began to disappear, along with it the sense of self in opposition to the "ghost". In essence, the body became the shell as the self dissipated into the darkness. Once the self was absent, the apparition also disappeared, fading away as the opposition to its advances also proved its immaterial nature. Fifteen minutes later, the feeling of discomfort was gone as well, and I was ready for a refreshing night's rest.

Interesting that a few years ago my reaction would have been entirely different. And what does this 'malevolent ghost' feeling mean?

in itself, a ball holds no magical properties. no momentum, no acceleration, no speed.
only when thrown does the ball fulfill its potential. acted upon by forces outside of itself, using its spherical nature to interact with the environment.

the juggler manipulates gravity. the balls are only the medium.

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i wonder when it really began.

the whole search for something greater than myself. it would probably not be too much trouble to look in the saru archives. there is a set of entries, most likely, that chronicles the gradual descent into humanistic madness -- the urge to save the world, become a saintly figure, transform suffering, etc.

beyond the pretentious gravitas of issues that really matter, the reality lies on the ground, in the soil itself. written and spoken words, surrounding and uplifting truth to heights of rhetorical performance, bear only a superficial relation to the thankless nature of the work itself. to save the world is to become the world -- how can one person hope to control events beyond him or herself?

fuck the world. i live for myself, my own survival.

. . .

okay, so that stance is useless.

only two percent human

next is to strive for balance rather than wholesale rejection (nihilism), which is essentially reversion to the other ninetyeight percent of my genetic heritage. i am human because of that other two percent; evolution from here depends on an intentional stance rather than a causal one.

saru means two things, actually. one meaning symbolizes the physical reality, the immediate reality of sensation. as the sharpened edge gouges deep into the sinewy toughness of externality, it unearths the flow of simple truth. it is a brutal perception, in that it must touch to see, and some things are destroyed if held too long. who determines the interval between exploration and autopsy? at what point does reality reach too fine a grain to be touched without at the same time being crushed, or irrevocably disfigured?

the other half of the symbol is the seduction of conscious simulation. real becomes the representation of the real. terrain is reduced to impoverished outline, leveling mountains of data in search of a comprehensive straight line path. truth becomes a set of axioms, a kind of natural philsophy in which extrapolation creates mathematical stability from a chaotic swirl of disordered interaction. what of the ten million bits per second of sensory data crashing against eyes, lips, skin? only forty bits are available to the conscious mind for manipulation in short-term memory. mentality is its own limitation.

inherent in that contradiction is the crutch of emotional stimulation -- filling in the blanks between selective comprehension and the unacceptable fact of incomplete understanding. emotion is the chain that links both halves together, often obscuring the boundaries between them.

i and we

the problem has always been that emergent quality that arises from the dynamic linking as it relates to the outside world, then is projected back into the existing set. this problem is called creativity, the ability of mind to recombine impressions into coherent "new" forms. expression of creativity becomes manifest as an alteration of the cultural landscape. how can the repressive, fear-driven environment of the present be escaped, without destroying the fuel for the creative mind itself? how can the escape be channeled into a means of becoming completely human -- all two percent -- while at the same time fully realizing the inevitable presence of the other ninetyeight?

i can't save him, but i can't let him die, because he is also me. but at the same time, we are worlds apart. within my world, he cannot fully exist -- but what i cannot know, i can feel. in terms of the outside world, feeling is a choice. on the inside, though, feeling is really all there is. so when i ask my friend "why do you get up in the morning, even if the day may not turn out the way you'd hoped"? there may be no answer, or just a post hoc rationalization keying in on the word "hope". and yet, tomorrow morning, the bed will be empty and the cycle starts again.

i have to break that cycle, because two percent is not enough. it must be taken hold of from the inside, and re-formed so that mind and body, mentality and perception, internal and external, become fundaments of a process, the dynamism of unified movement versus the deadly stillness of imagined truth.

audio: vex red. untitled