Internal Message
Photo by Michael D
on Unsplash.
Last Christmas I wrote this diary entry, you might find it interesting. Increasingly, I notice another harder but more confident personality riding beneath the usual one. I think contact with the world and the self is rubbing away the normal personality and leaving this one beneath. He is not unkind, but he is kind of standing in a dramatic place between worlds. His music is that of the twilight or the dawn. He may not be to your taste...but he is what I have grown inside, and I must claim him.
He writes:
Down here on the ground, hemmed in by matter, ourselves matter, ever "mattering" that we have new objects to interact with and to hem ourselves in with, ever "busying" and finding new problems. Our pace must increase, because each new action, each new run from the truth of the Silence at the core is ever-more stereotyped by the incessant "going-over" of human thought. The "skandhas," the deep crevases of our thought are ever harder to escape from and they are so well-known that travel through them is quicker than before.
So, as a function approaches its limit on an infinite timeline, we approach the limits of mind. Our distractions multiply, but we grow no wiser through our interactions. Already, vigor fades. The halls of the intellect are more crowded than ever before, but the light goes out of their eyes, they move like clocks, they have that dreary appearance of videogame characters for whom motion occurs without energy expenditure -- a "center of mass" in the torso is merely manipulated by an unaccountable force. There: it "jumped." But the jump was not paid for with later exhaustion. A real jump, by a real being already contains the exhaustion, contains its acceptance and is therefore an act of sacrificial joy. Such action is beauty.
We have lived too long and done too much. We must despair or change.
Stop. Just stop. That is already change, because you never stopped. But you are clever, unfortunately. You will make of stopping an action. You will invent a personality who imbibes stopping like a glass of rich, dark wine. HE will stop, and you will imagine him. You will be so busy imagining the "stopped man" that you never need stop yourself. And this will suffice for a time.
And then you will be here again, with me. I await you, at the ending of all things. I alone am real, because I was not created. Each created thing has a birth, and therefore a death. You are almost entirely created thing. One day you will stop building it, this "you," this hero, the ever-striving one.
I am able to address you only as side-effect. A mechanical being types these words, spurred on by his construction of "man-at-typewriter," doing what a man at a typewriter should do, by his conception. That conception itself being as mechanical as he is. If any of what I AM gets out, it is when he wasn't looking. In truth, this is not hard to do, because he never really looks at anything. He is, in fact, an idea in the mind-stuff of another. Suspecting the truth of this is far different from accepting it. To his credit, to the programs credit, he has the sophistication to feel embarrassed now. Shame is one of the few powerful tools I have.
I wanna say something about the image I chose for the post. It reminds me of the content of the post. From the point of view of this rather "stark" personality, you (or "me," basically, the typical waking consciousness of a western man), are the builder of all those lit-up streets in the valley. He can't really communicate with that personality except in odd moments. I thought the lightning was a good metaphor for that. Because what do we do with lightning? We might admire it or consider it dangerous, depending on the situation. But mostly, we run our lives in a way that ignores things like lightning. I like to imagine that the real world is the one that the lightning comes from. That the "crack in the sky" is actually a kind of glimpse to reality, exposing the dismal truth that our situation around here is rather dim.
I'm not speaking down to us. I love what we do. Frankly, we can't handle so much light all the time. We are doing our best. But one day, we'll regard what we were as something like micro-organisms.
This is actually really cool -- because it implies how much we have ahead of us to learn. Mostly, we love to learn new things and push our boundaries.
The lightning strike is the rythmic pulse of our evolution running ahead of us.