Ahead of Myself · 25 February 2008

Someone new and kindred in New York wrote to me, about the whole “becoming the disease in order to cure it” theme I worked over last week—both with the third series grit and with the drug withdrawal. He’d been reading a forgotten one of UG’s books on the subway, and ran across this:

Because will implies conflict, struggle, the contradiction: I am this and I must be that. And to become that, I must exercise will. We are asking if there is not a different way of acting altogether, without will?

Nice to know Krishnamurti asked the same question, given his ultimate teaching is to remove brute force from practice—and to transcend discipline (which it is said that I have in spades). Thanks for writing, J.

As for me, I’m not satisfied with my thoughts about the will. Not satisfied with my thoughts! (Laughing.)

And it dawns on me that I’m not going to find intellectual satisfaction about this topic, because this particular road is not one you travel by way of analysis.

I’m trying to telegraph a kind of understanding that I don’t have. Getting ahead of myself.

I’ve always used writing as a way to get to the nub of things, to become clean and conclusive. I really had to write in that mode for the first year of this writing practice just in order to get myself talking, but the past two months I’m finally letting go—a bit—of the narrative, analytical modality. Eased up on the drive for intellectual satisfaction, just to see if it makes things interesting… and if lightens up the habits in me.

What it’s revealing lately—and I think you will agree—is that the stream of my consciousness is fucking dense. I’m letting that happen—letting the blog be less well written and far less accessible—because it feels like good process. Interesting to see so many of you staying around for this. Who knows, even as the signs seem to indicate travail is coming—poetry may not be far away.

Which is not to say I get to rewrite the dissertation in free verse.

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: evolution , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Comment

1. I like it. It’s more you if it’s just written and not polished. Like you didn’t wear a suit to the meeting but rather turned up in old jeans and unbrushed hair, with sincerity rather than for show. Not that you write for show, but it’s nice that you’re feeling like you don’t have to do anything but write.

   cj x

   Posted by: CJ · Feb 25, 11:49 AM · #

2. whoops, screwed up the login. see, there’s the difference. you intellectuals can throw together an intellectual dissection of a deep and intriguing topic and have it still seem like something you spent a week composing. us homerheads, on the other hand, can’t even figure out the difference between our name and our e-mail address.

   i’m not even going to bother proofing this, because it wouldn’t fool anyone. just like there’s natural athletes, there’s clearly natural thinkers. and there’s those of us that ain’t.

   Posted by: okrgr · Feb 25, 12:51 PM · #

3. “Natural thinker” is such a nice way to put it. Thank you. On off days (which are common now), I experience it more as a mental form of ADHD.

   Login is different because I use textpattern— for comments you do “preview,” then “submit.”

   Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 25, 01:55 PM · #

4. And here is the moment when I admit that the whole preview thing tripped me when I first tried to comment. I kept trying and then logging back later on in the day and not find my comment. Started suspecting you were deleting my comments until the penny dropped. Because I’m bright like that.

   Posted by: V · Feb 25, 02:16 PM · #

5. You are not the only ones. :) Happens often enough.

   For better or for worse, I have never deleted a comment.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 25, 02:25 PM · #

6. Don’t tempt fate ;-)

   Yes, to the dissertation in free verse.

   Acting without will. Gosh, I wish…

   Posted by: karen · Feb 25, 07:01 PM · #

7. I maintain, for the record, my distinction between earth-body-will and ego-will (if you’d like to call it that). The earth-body-will needs become nothing. It is fully immanent (stop me now before I turn into a Deleuze and Guattari book). Anyway, this may have nothing to do with your/my/others’ actual experience; theory so rarely does.

   Posted by: patrick · Feb 25, 07:17 PM · #

8. And here I was thinking I’d IMAGINED a more relaxed writing style. Or maybe I mean to say “casual”.

   Posted by: Boodiba · Feb 26, 10:26 AM · #

9. I love this distinction, yes, but I am just aware that the latter is not actually descriptive of my experience most days of the week. Sometimes with either the yoga or the sociology I will wind up in a kind of flow state that is more intuitively guided, free, and less pointed or heady. Increasingly often, even. But there’s still so much of the day that any action I might muster comes from small-w will and moves in small-b being.

   You didn’t imagine it, Boo. For me blogging is like kapotasana… takes a good year or two, but eventually you can relax when you are in it.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 26, 10:46 AM · #

10. TAG!!!!! :)

    Posted by: LI Ashtangini · Feb 26, 01:07 PM · #

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