In looking

In looking, even shallowly, at the course and story of the lives of interesting and
influential people, it is interesting to take cogniscence and reflect and map
relations to ones own life and the way it has and is unfolding. The influences on
people who have influenced, and how oftentimes great disappointments and
unfair trials which cannot be won have plundered, and yet have had important
reconfiguratione and energising to cause great and lasting work of the human
kind.
I find it interesting to note that despite the ravenous will toward understanding,
breathing life to endless hours of pursuit and bloodied brow; perhaps how
endeavour in a sense seeks to add theory and control via an understanding and
ever-refined and accepted expression of the phenomena of our existence and the
mechanisms of our environment: how in spite of this control, there are patterns
of matched certainty in the lack of control evident in much of our lives, both in a
continuous stochastic undercurrent, as well as in more explosive expressions
such as the failing of a relationship, the infidelity of ones trusted other, though it
is not implied that it is only in the realm -of interpersonal relationship - where we
are quite without control: perhaps it is just one of the highlights of this
phenomenon that of our failure.
The biggest failure of the human being is to not accept things which reasonably
ought to be accepted. Which if not reasonably accepted are self-defeating and
deleterious. A few prominences come to mind: the failure to accept ones
nature in the facets which are seen to be undesirable. The failure to accept
ones limitations, in favour of an overdeveloped belief in the ability to strengthen
weaknesses or acquire foreign talents. The failure to accept that something
cannot completely revert to the way it was before, or be corrected to an
acceptable degree. The idea of entropy comes to mind, where a return to a state
of order equal to or greater than one achieved in the past is impossible. In this,
two analogies representing two possibilities come to mind; via vague analogy:
the first idea, is likened to natural processes, where the probability of an ordered
state becoming more ordered without the influence of an external will, is zero.
Thus the sand castle, if assumed to exist of autonomous origin, will tend to a
random arrangement of shifting sands to re-integrate with the desert dunes, as
subject to the mechanisms of nature. In this first idea, suppose that the
presence of an external will, such as a human builder of sand castles, is able to
intervene and introduce ordered structures, which if left to their own devices,
will break down to simpler and simpler states with time. The second idea is that
even if an external will were to introduce an ordered construct such as a sand
castle, that like a drunk given a wetted paintbrush and asked to produce a
desirable work with his brush, no matter what he did, whether well-intentioned
and motivated, each and every action would have an element of destruction
which would worsen the state towards chaos. Another example would be
touching a pristine cave crystal: no matter how clean ones hands are, they
would mark the object to its irreversible tainting.
The return to a state of greater comfort is a part of everyday striving which is
rendered unremarkable due to its frequency of occurrence. I am able to enter
into pockets of sleep which satisfy my mental malaise. It is surely not that I am
genuinely tired, but that I have not the measure of control which my mind has
over me. If left to myself, I would venture towards a mythical stream in an

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undiscovered tropical riverine paradise, feeding cascading waterfalls, oerveiled
by rich, verdant lifeforms to the edge of every horizon. Something within my
constituency is completely in-tune with the sight of the water in this glorious
scene, with the sound as it passes on its way to the next collection of molecules;
perhaps a small dammed turquoise wonderland, the ancient ferns peering into
the magical sun-laced ripples, a scene of unending beauty. My senses as
conduits of the information, but how the information is absorbed into my being,
being particular to me suite of predisposition and environmental accumulation,
to reduce this complexity unsatisfactorily to express it lazily at any rate.
What is interesting is the return-journey to these scenes, with the visual
perfection of the human mind and limitless memory in the visual realm enabling
the phenomenon. This is surely an escape mechanism, with time spent in these
preserving states, these fantastic lands of perfection the re-created land of
the tropical paradise being proportional to our lack of coming to grips with our
unfolding reality. It is a slipping into a more pleasant time and place, but
moreso, because the anaesthesia is self-induced. These can be seen as a sugar
addiction: known (and increasingly so) to be harmful, causing of pleasant
physiological reaction during the dosing, with shortness of effect; and hence
altogether well-understood in its holistic danger and regress to the individual.
The knowledge of which of course does little, in most cases, to effect change in
the informed individual, who continues the self-destruction.
It could be argued that returning to a place of safety is creating of a starting
point of positivity or even a kind of purity, from which powerful mechanisms
could be built for the improvement of the individual. The problem with this
theory is in the lack of discipline of the use of this tool in the hands of most, who
prove to be unable to continue a useful course of action as rightfully proposed
and formulated and proved to have some useful effect. The power of
visualisation toward an objective is no doubt hugely powerful as a general
technique for mental preparation and activity without the constraints of actually
enacting the event.
Because without realising, or if discovered soon forgotten, one finds that one is
no longer only deliberately or in the manner of a daydream slipping into these
worlds of comfort, pleasure and safety; to these places representing a perfection
of all the factors making up the individual from birth in terms of a tangible
instantiation of the worries and fears, of all the failings and harm and deep
wounds suffered, only inverted and packaged into the idyllic river paradise of
glittering pools, the mesmerising language of the streams moving from one
system to the other, as perfectly conceived as it is received. Ones reality has
been laid atop this ultimate fairytale of streams and waterfalls, and to expect
escape from the fairytale, which hence is our real and underlying state to dwell
in the everyday illusion of conscious effort, is really not possible once the insight
has been reached. Daily, deliberate exertion represents oases floating within the
land of the waterfalls.
The above discussion leads toward the conclusion that people with more control
over their daily activities, in the sense that they have purpose toward goals
thrusted by ambitions fuelled by whatever may be their energy source, spend
longer within their oases of directed consciousness. This is in contrast to
individuals who by circumstance, laziness or succumbing to misfortunes along

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the path of life, including not accepting ones-self (in the manner discussed
above), or a combination of the two, are more likely to revert to their own unique
baseline of safety in the land of the waterfalls, which we all construct and are
increasingly able to make use of as the sequence of our lives unfolds.
A great source of folly is found in considering the endpoint or goal of an intended
action-sequence, without carrying out or even formulating the mechanism for its
acquisition. This sounds very straightforward logic, perhaps even insultingly so,
but one might consider how easily this trap is wandered into without even the
use of a bait. We would like the powerful car and all the layers of wonderful and
related consequence which would be gained when it was parked in our driveway
and labelled as ours. This is meaningless and dangerous behaviour when not
paired with an adequate means of obtaining the object, which is well known to
be quickly familiarised and downgraded in novelty and interest, no matter the
level of prestige which the object may hold. And yet this said, the car and its
glowing balls are able to mesmerise and waylay the unwary almost indefinitely.
It is an avoidance of reality which is equivalent to folly, and has direct kinship
with the individual who returns to sleep in the land of the waterfalls.
So is it that we are just innately lazy and more inclined to sit back after an
average-to-rough days exertions and indulge in whatever may take our fancy,
likely food or the television for many urbanised folk, as a means of patting
ourselves on the back for another long day at the office, where we might have
put aside real mental effort to advance our cause in increments of self-advancing
effort which will eventually lead to a quantised-leap out of our previous condition
to a higher state, leading to more yield for less energy yield? It seems that we
are content to fall back into patterns of self-affirmation after a day or similar unit
of hard (or less-hard) work, albeit non-advancing. For what can be said to be
advancing about repeating a cycle of behaviour? Surely one quickly reaches a
plateau in accumulating experiences, granted that new and unforeseen
circumstances are likely to result no matter how long one has been involved in
the mastery of a particular activity or discipline. So let us then say that it might
take one occasion for us to realise that we had fallen prey to a repetitive cycle of
activity which is not self-advancing: a comfort-zone, for some period of time.
And that after this first leaning experience, say, for example, a first job where the
skills required for the job were mastered to a large extent and the work became
largely repetitive as a result, including the phenomenon of reacting to unseen
circumstances and solving new problems resulting from the application of skills
to new scenarios, which humans have proved to be excellent at doing. It may
simply be that people are comfortable in imparting their knowledge and being
authorities in their field, which is well and good so long as there is continuously
deepening insight into their arts. I would argue that for many of us, the
regression into cycles of comfort is a very severe problem which should be
guarded against. A most valuable gift which we would be able to give ourselves
would be to realise that moving on when we have achieved a satisfactory level of
applying our trade once we have become masters, so that we can master
another subdiscipline and become exponentially more useful, is highly desirable.
I am not suggesting that we do not need specialists and experts who apply their
art for extended periods of time in the service of less knowledgeable individuals.
I would suggest that these individuals too, do not fall into a comfort zone of
application, and hence lack of application for what they might be truly able to

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achieve if they were to cross-pollinate into neighbouring arts or sub-arts. This
viewpoint may be of someone who advocates the mastery of all despite being a
mastery of none, but it is generated of the observations of others and myself
who put their feet up at a hard days work in a kind of self-glorification at the
application of an experienced practitioner plying his trade in a productive way
for a good cause, whatever the individual may have designated to be this good
cause. I would have that I no longer internally self-praise, but push the
advantage gained by hard work, not by not taking time for rewarding of the self,
but to realise that ones fantastic work is really only fantastic if it is leading to
someone increasingly fantastic, which can only be the case if it is somewhere
new.