Friday August 23
Everyone of you is clueless, why do you go on pretending. Your questions will never be over and you will always wonder, You will always cry. These are the best time of your life. Which times are these, lovers? These times are the times you have no time to think, the time you believe without thinking all your actions mean something to someone, and you are with the people you mean something to, the people who mean something to you.
These people are the people who will be with you while you are alive and who can share in your concerns. My parents are out, they will die, and they are often so distant. They are no different then most people. They could be more intimate and more crazy but then I doubt they would have created me realizing what foolishness it is to bring a person in to this meaningless world.
--
I am left with nothing and this is what we must realize, we have only ourselves, now and until we die, or if we live forever. Some wonderful people focus their lives on becoming one with all the world, what it really is is becoming one with all the world, sounds exciting, I don't loving buy it. Yeah, become one with all people, meditate your ass off. Go.
Well, here I am and there you are, I hope that somehow you are able to entertain yourself, with other people, believing that what you do is somehow significant, because I am having so much trouble.
It is a pity he said that you idiots can no longer write. It is a pity the other [day] he said that kids used to learn so much more. Oh the old days are always better. Back when there were small towns and we did see the woman we loved every day. Right that never happens. Why write when you can get the meaningless ness some other way, why learn when you know you will never learn it all. The Indians are such wonderful people, and so is my friend James. He believes, like the indians in reincarnation. Why? Hell, I don't know. My good friend zach is a mormon, he believes in the love of Jesus who is not our lord. Why? Hell, I don't know. Meet my good friend Sam, he, my friends believes in heaven. And meet jackson. Who, I am told, believes that there is nothing, and so what is there?
And me, meet the person who has nothing to believe in except what he percieves, and he percieves that there is fun time when he is with other people and there is interesting time when he is with self thinking of other people, and there is time when he is with self, looking at a pretty spider web, and these things are nice. There is not much there though, there is nothing you can tell me exept that you do not know. There is nothing you can tell me, except that you have a better question. There is nothing you can tellme,
I am so beaten. I cannot get significance from any institution. Many people work along time for this. I cannot get significance from any competition, because what are we competing for.
It does not get any worse than this, if you come along, You are comeing along for insanity, and what good will I do you why will you make me different. What is it I get from another person I cannot get from myself? I can give you something. Why does this make me feel better? Why is it important fo feel needed? I want it and yet everything prevents it.
Tell me it is only myself. Tell me it is only my perceptions tell me I am making some terrible mistake. IT is not me who is wrong it is you. Is it impossible to live in this world without illusion? That is so much of what we have, everyone creates it. Why can't you live as you really mean to
live, what is the most meaningful state of the mind which has no physical needs?
----
p66
freedom and risk are coterminous. Rather than face the real and terrifying risks of becoming, many human beings prefer not to develop beyond the structures, rules, and patterns that society gives them. In our society in particular, young people do not dare speak about many of the tensions, impulses, desires, and terrors of their inner life. To reveal their "underground life" would be to appear to others-- and even to themselves -- a trifle mad.
Kubie writes:
Kubie, in Richard M. Jones, An application of psychoanalysis to education (1960) p. viii quoted in Feeling and Fantasy in Education, op. cit.
The child has the right to know what she feels.... This will require a new mores for our schools, one which will enable young people from early years to understand and feel and put into words all the hidden things which go on inside of them, thus ending the conspiracy of silence with which the development of the child is now distorted both at home and at school. If the conspiracy of silence is to be replaced ... children must be encouraged and helped to attend to their forbidden thoughts, and to put them into words, i.e., to talk out loud about love and hate and jealousy and fear, about what goes in and what comes out; about what happens inside and what happens outside; about their dim and confused feelings about sex itself; about the strained and stressful relationships within families which are transplanted into schools...
--
p60
Images of nothingness, insanity, dread, and insecurity come together. His experience arose from a sudden glimpse "beneath the surface of life."
What seems real is not real. The pragmatic, reasonable certainties are symbols by which we keep away the feeling of darkness and keep ourselves occupied and "sane."
James gives a further account of his long ten-year experience of nothingness. In the pit of his depression he soon faced an overwhelming need- to choose. On February 1, 1870, he wrote:
Today I about touched bottom, and percieve plainly that I must face the choice with open eyes: shall I frankly throw the moral business overboard, as one unsuited to my innate aptitudes, or shall I follow it, and it alone, making everything else merely stuff for it? I will give the latter
alternative a fair trial. Who knows but the moral interest may become developed.
the writings of william james
And on April 30, 1870, he added:
I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second "Essais" and see no reason why his definition of Free Will -- "the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts" -- need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present--until next year-- that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will....
Hitherto, when I have felt like taking a free initiative, like daring to act originally, without carefully waiting for contemplation of the external world to determine all for me, suicide seemed the most manly form to put my daring into; now, I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individuial reality and creative power. My belief, to be sure, can't be optimistic-- but I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world. Life shall [be built in] doing and suffering and creating.
--
between
9.8.96 sUN
and 9.10.96 tues:
Dear people, many people,
On September 9, 1996, I finally ended the period of exploration and questioning, which first began, probably after I was in third grade, probably. I try to imagine why, as a kid I was so able to express love and write love notes, and love, when for so long I had so many hang ups about it. ...
For years, for years, through many theories of what the right way of life is, I finally am here, I think at the bottom at the point where I can see all other flailings as an expression of the basic human need. The need for need. ...
So it is, the need for need. The most meaningful communication is that which allows those communicating to interact in a way that meets their greatest needs. This is love. But all needs are percieved? Why do we live? Why do I need a telephone? Why do I need human interaction? In the end I end up dead. In the end it all ends any ways. We are all each of us insignificant, even the most notorious of individuals are trivial to time.
So. The basic human interaction we call life is, when we call it living, is when we love, when we love what we do, when we love another person, when we love ourselves. When we have a need and we work to fill it.
How exciting, Yeah, I don't feel like writing this so much any more,
I mean, it is so basic, but to vocalize it is to be aware of it. Vis.
--
interesting, found this after the first survey I handed out:
from Maslow's "toward a psychology of being" (1968)
p71
Chapter 6
Cognition of Being in the Peak Experiences
The conclusions in this and in the following chapter are a first approximation, an impressionistic, ideal, "composite photograph" or organization of personal interviews with about eighty individuals, and of written responses by 190 college students to the following instructions:
I would like you to think of the most wonderful experience or experiences of your life; happiest moments, ecstatic moments, moments of rapture, perhaps from being in love, or from listening to music, or suddenly "being hit" by a book or a painting, or from some great creative moment. First
list these. And then try to tell me how you feel in such acute moments, how you feel differently from the way you feel at other times, how you are at the moment a different person in some ways. [With other subjects the questioning asked rather about the ways in which the world looked
different.]
No one subject reported the full syndrome. I have added together all the partial responses to make a "perfect" composite syndrome. In addition, about fifty people wrote me unsolicited letters after reading my previously published papers, giving me personal reports of peak experiences. Finally, I have tapped the immense literatures of mysticism, religion, art, creativeness, love, etc.
--
csikszentmihalyi, mihaly
--
5/28/93
the strangest thing happend the other day.
I was driving - and there was a beautiful girl behind me - driving another car.
we were at a stop light and I was staring at her, well, glancing up from the rearview mirror to the stoplight every few seconds. I wish we could have stayed there forever- just me looking at her face and she looking beautiful. She had straight blond hair - she's white, no freckles or moles- to her shoulders and a nice face. Oval and the rest, I'm not sure- her face was all I could see. The light turned green and as I carefully maintained a generous following distance from the car in front, I watched her in the rearview mirror. Then she made a furtive wave-
I tried to wave back, barely succeeded-
but I did because her expression of uncertainty turned to a - beautiful small smile.
I was in mild shock- as I find myself often when glimpsing a beautiful thing.
I feel happy-sad.
Why did she do it- could she see two eyes in the rearview mirror of the car in front - eyes that belonged to that spiky blond head? Probably - or she knew she is beautiful and that guys liked to watch her in their rearview mirrors. I imagine unfortunately that this was probably not the first
time.
She passed me by to make a right turn and I could not see her side
-she left me wondering.
--
about nothing:
6/21/93 (I was 17)
essential lonliness
it is my attempt to explain to myself the actions of others and my own feelings
for me I define it as the fear of never being loved or being able to be loved
it is really, though, the fear of life, the fear of being lonely when you die, the fear for some of not being missed.
it is really the realization that you are different, your mind is separate from everyone else. you are separate from everyone else.
The lonliness is felt when you are alone.
you are home an everyone else has left
you don't turn on the tv
you don't read the newspaper
you just sit.
you start to think about your future or your past. What am I going to do with my life, what have I done
why did I, will I do it?
why am I here?
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more about meaning:
it happens with literature, movies, art, just about anything
--
melville’s bartleby the scrivener @
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