in a time magazine article the most significant thing i found was a single line saying, “america’s unofficial religion of personal self transformation”
this is true, i feel. and nowhere can it be better exemplified than on the internet where people write about things they are doing and going through.
also, our commercials are so terrible. so wonderful at being terrible. the marketing for any product becomes a hermenuetics exercise to deploy it so it’s central to whatever it we are doing. products are angling that way too; not just like children’s cereal where it’s coco for coco puffs, or trix — not even fantasy nonsense, like lowes wants you to catalog everything your house is made of so you can plan your improvements on there. the deployment is to centralize everything. facebook or microsoft’s the cloud, whatever, my phone (the android one, i have two cell phones) is in some sense more important than my wallet! (although more secure..)
so the connection is that products can transform you too. make you a better person. re-center you. like religion or jesus or a good song… transformative. everything is transformative. embrace the mysticism. those pictures and text ppl are posting on fb now, an extension of lolcats and those inspirational posters — they are so misleading. those universal statements dont mean anything. they are quick bits that may or may not be applied as one likes. but reading it can make you feel good. it’s hypocritical CRAP that can be as a quick justification for any kind of good or bad behavior.
are we so lost that we can’t think for ourselves? we need random one-liners to let us feel like we are making progress?
the whole stupidity of the self transformation junk is that we aren’t transforming anywhere. we dont have a goal, or even a path to find anything. its like some bad acid trip that doesn’t lead anywhere or do anything. it’s not even enough to say this: Report: it all some kind of sick joke because to say the universe cares or not cares, or that it is playing a joke already says too much. anthromorphozie anything you like but it doesn’t lead to any real relationships. lacan was somewhat right — there are no real relationships, only shared fantasies that match up incidentally. if we can’t even see eye to eye with each other what chance is there for us to comprehend what goes on around us?
i suppose the easiest thing to do would be to narrow the scope. fuck the rest of the world, this is about America. or this is about my Family. Or our small group of friends, or even Los Angeles… in our post-cold war environment we still live with the spectre of the apocalypse, and in that sense, we already live in the post-apocalyptic world. we live it daily, pondering disaster scenarios; who we would try to band with, what matters to us when the clock resets… even if it’s only in genre zombie films… so we narrow it to the small band of strangers we are with on a multi-player game on the internet, or whatever — and so meaning has its place in tiny day to day movements, such as get this loan funded, or drive to this place and get a meal with a friend. you could live your life in vietnam so to speak, only worry about yourself day to day and all your past life is so far away.
after 9/11 happened some of us found out or whatever and didnt think much of it. i still drove to school even after my mom told me the 1st tower had been hit (i was in bed). traffic was horrible. i heard about the 2nd tower on my way to school on the radio. i got really good parking. the class was taoism, the first time i was taking it. the professor, a really old woman from montana with bright blue eyes, stood as straight as a rail and was a pedagogical nazi said a few worlds that we needed to hear. our class was there at 1030, mostly because we didn’t know what else to do… and she dismissed us for 2 weeks saying that everyday there is pain around us, all around the world. we just dont always know it because it’s not always in our face. but to be one with the world is to understand that pain is there, and to deal with it daily on a moment to moment basis. and not just pain, but happiness and joy and suffering — all of it at once. not about the things we are limited to in our immediate surrounding but also the whole spectrum of possible feeling. this is something that a sage gets and can deal with, not more easily, but is more prepared for because the spectrum is always open.
transformation is a stupid word. because only when we have a script in a movie, the clever ending is one in which we find we have the answer already. the clever loop gives us back our ability to deal with our depression because we had the answer all along — or we are the answer (like 5th element). and of course, yes, a movie is manufactured, with scripting and acting and takes 1 2 3 and writers and sets… but that’s just one possible narrative of all the narratives that happen simultaneously all the time. its just that the space and time continuum selects for just one narrow band at a time. the virtual unity is omnipresent and is not peaceful, or happy or blissful or accepting. it’s got everything all at once. like when krnsa revealed to arjuna his ‘real face’ in the bhagavad gita and arjuna (who is the avatar for the god indra but does not know it) is scared shitless seeing the naked face of a god…but only able in his mortal form to see just a part of that sublime texture. and that’s not ironic or anything. it’s just that our language based metaphysics which only abstractly supports intuitive concepts like “ontology” is unable to grasp situations that originate out of context, out of the humanity which is the foundation for language.
ive been watching alot of tv lately as my mind has been unable to function. i think i am not inspired by a task i see so clearly in the abstract but when writing it out becomes garbled…
steven colbert told a joke to a minister it went something like this.. an atheist committed suicide. he went to heaven and met god and he was like omg! i was wrong, all this, i was so wrong. there is a heaven! and a god! and why aren’t i in hell? don’t ppl who commit suicide go to hell? and god said yes, but it’s complicated. after all, everyone who has ever been has contemplated suicide at one point. in fact, i thought of doing it once. and the atheist said, well, why didn’t you? what stopped you? well, god said, i thought, what if this is all there is?
you know, the language that surrounds the thesis statement makes the difference. in phrases like “i always sit up straight because i am worried someone will see me” are always ambiguous to me. even if i agree with the first part, the reason for it may not be something i agree with. so do i agree with the conclusion because it’s the conclusion (sitting up straight) even though the reason for it may be completely off? do i vote for a candidate who will effect the changes i want even if he is a complete loon? do actions speak louder than words? and if they do, if actions is all that matters, then actually, there is no such thing as a lie and the entire edifice of language is only for its perlocutionary acts… and i guess, this means that truth is really only the lie — the ultimate lie — that is there is truth… there must be truth, so that we can do what we need to do.
eg, it doesnt matter if nature dies, or if humankind exists, only that the last human alive has a “happy life”. and for all intents and purposes you are the last human alive.
whatever “happy life” means.
so there you go. there’s the clever line. it returns us back to what we knew before, another selected potential in the virtual narrative web of all realities. living life in that abstract, is a dance — select the appropriate form of all possible* forms you have at your disposal.
*possible or potential is wrong here, because when i say virtual i mean that it’s real, just as real as what is reality, the difference is that the virtual is not-selected. while i use potential and virtual near-interchangably, strictly speaking, possible means that it is only different from reality in that it lacks reality. virtual is real in that the relationships are real, just not expressed.
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