February 2009
97 posts
D'oh
Just realised I can view small versions of posts in my Tumblr dashboard. Only took me a year!
Re-blogging
Wow. I can so relate to this. Thank you.
Nature produced one form of evolution (biological life) which produced a species (Homo sapiens) whose organisms possess the ability to evolve within their own lifetimes (!).
A human which never subtracts anything — which never lets go of certain convictions or ceases certain behaviors — cannot evolve. It gets ‘clogged up’ and stuck, unable to adapt. As its environment changes, it remains the same, executing the same directives and steadily losing the ability to be happy, like a toy robot trying to walk through a wall.
When the human finds itself deeply unhappy, a good strategy is to remove as many elements from its life as possible — to ‘take it easy for a while’. This reduction of activity lowers the overall noise levels of the nervous system, so it easier to ‘hear oneself think’. The calm brain can now spend its precious calories on analysis of its own operation, instead of on outward-facing behavior and the feedback it produces. A near-silent nervous system will eventually discover forgotten truths and strangled emotions which had been buried under the chaos.
If the mind welcomes these elements into its awareness — if it chooses to allow them into consciousness — the resulting integration will produce a more complete and correct model of itself. The organism’s understanding of the organism will have evolved, at the cost of a little temporary discomfort. Its range of potential behavior will have expanded, because it can now choose to do (or not do) the things it was previously doing automatically. In terms of self, consciousness is freedom. A human which never accepts its own fears, will never face them.
The organism writing these words spent a stretch of many months taking naps and baths, writing, and quietly working, watching movies, and traveling. It embraced every frightening truth about itself, shedding reams of psychic debris. It spend hours crying and unwinding, collapsing into pillows, talking to itself. It is now ready for another phase of existence, one with a renewed clarity and purpose, standing somewhere inside a universe, feeling not fear but love.
Jakob Lodwick stopped blogging; Jake Lodwick just started.
