attic box

All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface.

I often feel like I’m accumulating insight when I’m doing, but it doesn’t translate into changes in my action and perception unless I take a pause from doing. When acting on the world, I am like a dam filling with potential energy, but it is only in silence and stillness the dam can open up, and the insights I have accumulated can transform into kinetic energy, washing me away to more interesting regions.

But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasure and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am my own mistake.

For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.

If you want to understand who you are or could become, it is helpful to learn more things and be active: improve your craft, put yourself in new situations, push yourself. How else are you going to have a sample of reactions to study? 

The path of non-dualism, risk-taking, playful, irresponsibly adventurous and counter-cultural, is obviously at odds with our societal needs for a continuing work ethic and a life lived as independently of State support as possible. No room for non-dual mystics in a highly-pressured society where people, clergy included, are subjected to regular assessment. How would you assess a Christian’s achievement level of mystical status?

In the novelist’s profession, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no such thing as winning or losing. Maybe numbers of copies sold, awards won, and critics’ praise serve as outward standards for accomplishment in literature, but none of them really matter. What’s crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you’ve set for yourself. Failure to reach that bar is not something you can easily explain away. When it comes to other people, you can always come up with a reasonable explanation, but you can’t fool yourself. In this sense, writing novels and running full marathons are very much alike. Basically a writer has a quiet, inner motivation, and doesn’t seek validation in the outwardly visible.

We often learn to self-flagellate because at some point we had lived amongst people who demanded remorse, or worse, were outright punitive.

As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve gradually come to the realization that…pain and hurt is a necessary part of life. If you think about it, it’s precisely because people are different from others that they’re able to create their own independent selves. Take me as an example. It’s precisely my ability to detect some aspects of a scene that other people can’t, to feel differently than others and choose words that differ from theirs, that’s allowed me to write stories that are mine alone. And because of this we have the extraordinary situation in which quite a few people read what I’ve written. So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.

Something Sasha Chapin said in a seminar he recently hosted about building a service business is that there are typically two major internal blocks when it comes to self-permission-ing (that is: giving yourself permission to do something that only you can give yourself permission to do). Most people are either: (1) afraid to do a new thing wrong, or (2) afraid to look weird.

A man asks about how to write from the depths of his being. Rupert suggests that he write each day, even if he writes about nothing. Also, feel that he is writing to his most intimate companion who is about to go on a long journey, as if it is the last thing you will ever say to them.

‘We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow.’

@visakanv Possible ways to get at what you edge is:

What is play to you that's work for others?

What do you actually do when you're procrastinating from what you're supposed to do?

What seems obvious to you that you're always surprised others aren't able to "get" easily?

The feeling we get around a crush, or when a crush is starting to form, is actually quite similar to the feeling we get when we define a new goal or set a new aim that really excites us.

When you learn something new for the first time you flail miserably at it, but eventually you identify your weaknesses and over time the process toward solution becomes almost instinctual. Things get better and easier, and somehow you’ve developed into this whole new person who could do the hard things you once dreaded, now effortlessly. I find this deeply resonant across work, love, life.

How to describe the music? Avant-garde, ambient/downtempo, experimental dance music with unusual instruments and sounds drawn from traditional Chinese music. This is a useful description, but it also feels a bit keyword-y, like I’m describing the album for a search engine and recommendations system.  Let me try again. It’s music you can dance to or simply sit and encounter with deep attention. There’s exuberant instrumentation, ethereal vocals. A beat is always present, but sometimes it submerges itself underneath more fluid, stretched sounds. To listen closely, with your full attention, is intensely rewarding because it’s so layered, with an eclectic variety of sounds moving in and out—light percussive beats that seem to catch on the air; deeper, more resonant beats that feel more grounded; the warmth and tactility of piano keys; and then a shimmering, lighthearted synth…  I’m particularly intrigued by “Klein”, which opens with a very quiet, unsettling buildup of industrial sounds—but they feel beautiful; they’re laced through with these high, sharp sounds that sound like cyborg birdchirps—and then vocals that feels a bit like a slow, reverent chant from a Buddhist nun are pulled into the track—and then a slow, deliberative beat with an almost chopped and screwed quality.

In her new book, Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times, Oldfield talks about long having had “a hunch” that the notion of the nuclear family is “a weird building material for a society”. She doesn’t think it’s “sufficiently load-bearing for the weight placed on it, leaving lots of other options lying around, unloved”. And, she writes, “Anyone who has been single while everyone else is settling down, or trying to raise kids far from support, may have had the same intuition.”

If we keep lumping these two together and think that aversion obviously is discomfort and discomfort obviously is aversion, then we never get a good understanding of this very basic issue. It is as though a part of us thought that the function of pleasant things is to generate attachment and the function of unpleasant things is to generate aversion. This is distorted thinking. The pleasant is pleasant; the unpleasant is unpleasant. Attachment and aversion are conditioned reactions that we have.

in most men, The Lover is unwelcome and has to disguise himself as a Magician, Warrior, or King

When it’s finally safe for him to take off the mask, you’ll be shocked how many of your actions have been disguised attempts for intimacy, romance, love

“When we are fiercely independent and self-sufficient, our disappointments loom large because we have nothing else to focus on.”

So, our crushes often exist to tell us what we are looking for within ourselves. They tell us where our ambition is pointing. And that's quite useful. Because if you don't think you know what you want, or where you want to go, or what you want to do, or what you want to be more of, just look at your crushes:  What do they all have in common that makes you want them?

Oyler then gave us the following exercise: “Think about something that you've read or watched recently, and try to describe it objectively to someone who's never heard of it.” We did it twice: first with something we loved, and then with something we hated. The point of the exercise, Oyler stressed, was to not reveal our subjective impression of it—if possible.

Time and time again, it is when the rubber of ambition meets the road of practicality that things get tough.

I feel like I say this to a lot of people, especially aspiring fiction writers. In my experience, it is really important to do two things.  One: You have to train yourself to notice things. It's not 100% natural at first – it certainly wasn’t for me – but raising those antennae is a very worthwhile thing to do. And it snowballs: once I got started taking notes, I ended up taking more and more of them.  Two: Be very liberal about what you keep. If you're going through your notes, cross out one thing out of ten, rather than nine out of ten. Don't be too quick to dismiss ideas: you have no idea how material might be useful in the future. Something that may not seem like a great idea now may really bear fruit down the road – even years and years later.

There’s some recent evidence that what makes conversations pop off is indeed the social equivalent of doorknobs.

But once we leave the world of institutions, permissioning shifts dramatically. Our life becomes a series of checkpoints demanding self-permission-ing—that is: allowing yourself to do the thing. Or: telling yourself that you are ready. If you keep waiting for permission from some external source long after anyone is responsible for giving it to you, your ideas and ambitions will whither while you become bitter that no one is letting you do what you wanted to do. But in the end: it’s your responsibility to give yourself permission. This doesn’t need to be daunting. It can be the most liberating epiphany of all to realize that you can start now. That you can just decide that you are ready.

Putting the idealism and pragmatism together is forever uncomfortable. Frequently the direction set by ideals means not taking the clearest practical path. More subtly, often as you go to put principles into practice, you realize that the ideal is not quite as simple as you thought when you started.

If you are not successfully engaging with people’s feelings and desires, with their anxieties, their loves, and their pain, then you are just playing a game with Christian words; you are not doing ministry.

History is the vast store of human consciousness adrift in the gulf of time, the present living in the past and the past living in the present. So when I read Shakespeare, Jefferson, Twain, or Machiavelli, I’m with them in time present. It’s why we still read Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, and Flaubert—what survives the wreck of time is the force of the imagination and the power of expression. And that is as alive and well today as it was two hundred or two thousand years ago.

One thing that almost always compels us towards action, or at least deeper reflection, is pain. When we begin to suffer, we start looking for the lesson that will lessen our suffering. This ‘hunger’ for an antidote helps us learn quickly. This is fairly well-understood: when pain gets sufficiently intense that it demands most of our conscious awareness, we finally crack and say: okay, what’s wrong and what do I need to do to heal?

too silly for a serious relationship, too serious for a situationship, justttt right for intense online flirtation that could potentially go somewhere but likely never will

The audience reaction is out of your control.

Jaeggi analyzes the forces at play when it comes to alienation and our inability to meaningfully ask how we want to live. She identifies "conformism" and "instrumentalization" as two fundamental forces separating us from ourselves, from others, and from the world.  Conformism is the force that translates our own desires through others' desires. We learn to play a role. We become so good at playing the role that we become 'inaccessible' to ourselves; our own desires and truth are 'impenetrable.'  What does it mean to be a parent? An entrepreneur? An early adopter of the latest technology? Our roles are bound up in social expectations, career choices, and product purchases that constrain our ability to imagine otherwise.  Instrumentalization is the force that shapes our identities into tools. We identify with what we do, how we're used, and how we're valued more. We lack a sense of agency and feel beholden to those individuals or institutions that would use us as tools.

It is said that traditions are answers to enduring questions, and so dispensing with them because we do not understand them (or "see the point of them") is an unfortunate way to squander this inheritance.