Toward an Omni-method of Inner Adventure #1
The truth becomes more apparent when nothing is said.
I'd prefer to say nothing for the most part. Talking is how they get you.
It's how you're defined, how you relate to other people, how you trade, how you build the world.
And yet it breeds one thousand abstractions every few seconds.
A good journalist gets you to talk by asking open-ended questions that flatter your self conception, and then they use whatever you say to chop up and spin however they want.
The nihilist wants to rob all words of meaning but this is ultimately because he's been disappointed by meaning. It's understandable.
Imagine entering the Holy of Holies and then being told you have to accurately represent it in theological language or attune your internal rhetoric in terms of it correctly or you're not saved/enlightened.
The internal monitor, a perversion of the maieutic dialogue, is quick to suppress true desire where thought is concerned. Often, a thing is thought because another thing is inconvenient to think. A thing is inconvenient to think because if thought honestly, it makes regulation of self conception more difficult.
Sometimes it's actually better to see a 32 year old guy with long hair and aviator sunglasses walking by and, instead of suspending judgment like a good zen master, go ahead and very consciously think what you were going to think about him without that inner filter telling you not to judge people and that you should be more agreeable. Consciously perform to a maximum degree and with inner language a heightened, ecstatic version of what you were going to think. Say to yourself, ‘Man what a dork!’ almost so that it feels like an exorcism, or like you're getting it out of your system.
The thinking behind this is that an inner censor may serve to form a self conception based solely around an opposition to tendencies lying dormant within you, like the denial of a sickness.
Giving conscious, dramatic inner expression to thoughts you might hesitate to think allows you to objectify disagreeable things about you so as to properly situate them.
Often this provides one the opportunity to examine a whole host of inner and self behavioural phenomena and one's relationship with the world in a way that then gives rise to a true moral interaction with reality based on understanding rather than being a series of affects and moral postures.
Inner truth is a habit which breeds honest speech, or even no speech. Abstractions are eliminated and reduced only to serve the expression of concepts which are meant to represent certain timeless phenomena on a cosmic scale. Even that last sentence betrays itself, in that it speaks to an authority that must be earned and is too easily spoken about. Neverheless, I must mention it without endeavoring to prove it's use value (or necessity) at this particular point in time.
If looked at one way, I've just described what some might call ‘shadow work,’ but it could also be easily mistaken for a form of mindfulness.
But there're no steps and no method because there is no goal. I can't create a goal or desire for you.
Even this language of prescription, which the expository and essay forms have become completely infected by in internet writing, exist in an economy of desire in which seduction plays a large part. Ideas are not simply shared for their use value, but because their wider appropriation grants their creator a dominion over a small part of reality.
Shameless prescription giving is worse than shameless logorrhea in personal matters. This is why philosophical diary is preferable to expressing ideas than the standard idea blog form, which wants to give unsolicited advice to a reader it has already seduced somehow into clicking on the title in the first place.
In truth, I can't pretend to have greater understanding than the reader, which all writers must posture to have, and yet, I have briefly hinted above at something which has been of recent interest in my own practice (practice of what? I don't know; boredom-ending? suffering-enduring?). It interests me because I seek a speculative communication of creativity beyond the mere production of art, even to the point of entertaining that old romantic notion that one might become a work of art oneself.