Lost in my own Thoughts @pensivethinker - Tumblr Blog

The murder and rebirth of the self

I have to kill who I am. I have to kill him in order for who I need to be to show himself; in order for me to get out of my own way. Sometimes in our early adult life, if we have the guts, we go through these periods of death and rebirth out of necessity, and sometimes out of intense motivation. Then we get to a comfortable point in life and then stop. This is the error in what I call the age of disenchantment. Intrapersonal development doesn't stop at 30, you don't drop your ambition and motivation, you don't drop your nerve to dream, you don't rest on your laurels. I have achieved some things in my life so far that I am blessed to be proud of, but until now I have also developed a lot of dead wood that needs to burn: developing bad habits and dropping good habits that came with the temptation of relaxing in different aspects of my life. However, what people may view as relaxing is no different than inviting dips in the quality of your life via accepting complacency. When you invite something suboptimal in multiple domains thinking you can afford it, time will be the one to give you the ultimate smackdown, the slap of regret in a spontaneous moment of insight during the most inopportune time. Discipline should be employed in all things.

It's likely harder to do this when you're older, when you're trying to revamp yourself on the backdrop of an assortment of already given-up dead souls crying out for the need to be "realistic" about things.

Although my ego feels more resistant to change this time around, I am also markedly more insightful than I was a decade ago. No need to re-invent the wheel here, play to your newly developed strengths. Some guidelines:

Randomness/serendipity is your friend, it pulls, loosens, and breaks away the sinew formed from the habitual stranglehold under which you've placed yourself.

Cut the fat of distraction. Distractions inhibit conscious thinking. Active change necessitates raw conscious thinking.

Meditation is your most powerful mental tool. Practicing the art of mindfulness, or conscious thinking, is crucial to properly being able to observe the large waves of intense resistance you will inevitably feel. Beware the return to autopilot mode.

Prepare for the mourning that comes with killing your old sense of self. That old self will exit your mind kicking and screaming. Feel the emotional power of that and then accept it without giving in to its pleas.

When the doubt hits you, ignore it and keep going. Self-limiting beliefs are exactly that, self-limiting. The point is that your current self got you so far, but in order to unlock new levels of living you thought were beyond reach or consideration, you need someone new to take charge. Part of it is slowly hacking away at the beliefs of self-imposed limitations.

We are story-driven creatures: Continually author the narrative of your self-transformation in the context of your previous growth and bouts of adversity.

Your chance of failure is greater than your chance of success. The only thing you can do is maximize your chances of success despite this and re-start the process in the instance that you may fail.

Those mired in their own comfort will ask why. Why do this? After all, there's nothing particularly wrong in their life: their social life is satisfactory, they don't have financial troubles, they're not depressed, there are no health issues or problems at work, everything is going just fine. People think that because there's nothing jarringly wrong with their life that there is no need for self-transformation. The spell of contentment and comfort will have you thinking this way. To those I ask, what else are you on this planet for? Do you really want to live a sheepish comfortable life merely being okay with everything? New direction doesn't excite you? Although outright adversity illuminates the importance for self-transformation, it's not just about overcoming glaring deficits that need restructuring, it's about unlocking new levels of living. It's about exploring experience and seeing how far you can go in something. Wouldn't you want to know the answer to that question? "How far can I possibly go in life?" In pursuit of that answer, a whole array of quests and challenges makes itself readily visible to you, ready for you to engage with. Honestly, again I ask as I always do, do you have anything else better to do?

#pensivethinker

Stream of consciousness nonsense

The words vain and vanity come from the same etymological source, vānus, meaning "empty", or "void". To do something in vain produces its own small slice of hell. If it's at all anything that matters, you lose a degree of fortification from your soul the more you repeat the trying and the failing. A tiny fracture sits untidy on an imperfect canvas, like a fresh bend on a clean sheet of paper. The thing about these bends is that they cannot be re-flattened. They sit there showing their mark unceasingly to the world, and if they're the slightest bit perceptive, people know. People know you're broken. People know glaring deficits when they see them, flickering off their retinas. In a way the broken, flickering neon signs draws much more attention than the boring working ones; and "boring" is an interesting choice of word. It's as if to say that people find it more interesting, but only from afar. Brokenness at least shows there's conflict, and wherever there is conflict, there's a potential story to be made, a resolution to seek, and a direction to take. It's the direction that draws in excitement, because if everything is hunky-dory, then you have nothing upon which to improve, you have no direction, and all of a sudden life starts to feel stupid. Yet the paradox of this shows itself readily upon looking around, because from my side all of these boring working neon signs look so happy in the homeostasis of their lives. Sometimes every fiber of my being wishes to be a boring, working neon sign. Sometimes I envy those who already started at the top. Sometimes I envy those who just started at the starting line. Sometimes I wish I can be within a group of people and be a person without involuting into my own skull. Sometimes I wish I can know how to have fun like they do. Sometimes I wish I can have no shame. The cruel joke of life is that us flickerers find a way to keep trying and failing despite understanding its likely futility. We find MEANING in something knowing that it's done IN VAIN, or against an emptiness or void. We're walking, existentially aware contradictions. We stare at non-flickering beauty in awe that there are actual humans out there that can experience a rich life with beauty on their side until they leave the planet. It's surreal to even think about. It stabs you in the chest sometimes, when you feel so imperceptible you look up only to find yourself involuted inside yourself again, sinking against the feeling of pure stupefaction from the fact that men with much less can make it seem so easy. An understanding of beauty is something that can be made into its own set of books, Umberto Eco's History of Beauty being a massively influential one. A preoccupation with beauty also finds its way into the word "vanity" when directed inward. There's something deteriorating about holding up a mirror to the self and focusing the eye of consciousness to that alone. Oscar Wilde's A Picture of Dorian Gray is a fantastic study into this, and the character Narcissus from Ovid's Metamorphoses serves as an equally classic study, depicted masterfully in a painting by Caravaggio in the late 16th century. There have been studies of what people find beautiful in the faces of others, and this often changes culturally, but there are certain common denominators that stand out; a degree of facial symmetry helps enormously, the eyelids partially hooded, concealing the top whites of the eyes, and certain geometries and ratios of distance for the eyes, brows, zygomatic bones, lips, and chin approximating a certain value are perennially accounted for cross-culturally. -

- In this way, beauty is both objective and subjective simultaneously, as much of an oxymoron as that sounds. There is the world that is, and then there is the filter of consciousness that shapes and bends the rays of experience to the mind's eye, an idea echoed from Hellenistic Greece in the 3rd century B.C., to Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, and finally to Margaret Hungerford's 1878 novel Molly Bawn, consolidating the idea to the pithy "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". The oxymoron doesn't end there, because beauty is therefore both deep and extremely superficial as something to pay attention to, which further adds on to the confusion. My suspicion is that it's the classic battle between the brainstem and the cortex, and the more irritating realization is that they're both correct. I was about to naively write a piece a few weeks ago inquiring about what we should do with beauty: do we ignore it? appreciate it? aspire for it? worship it? subvert it? destroy it? satirize it? The truth is we should probably engage with several of these in different combinations at different times. We cannot render ourselves to one final solution while sitting as beings with two half-lobed hemispheres with differing interests housed on top of a brainstem with a different set of interests altogether; that would be ridiculous. There must be a balance within us that will just look like an indecisive see-sawing of positions on paper, and with that conclusive insight you get the age-old wisdom about beauty, or women: "you can't live with them, you can't live without them", which as far as we know stemmed from the Renaissance humanist Desiderius Erasmus, in his collection Adagia published at the turn of the 16th century. With this in mind I wonder to what degree beauty is a central running theme in other people's lives as it is in mine. The search for love, acceptance, and belonging by what you find perplexingly alluring may all be different words to describe the same idea. How nice it must be as a man to have this all fulfilled.

#pensivethinker

Sinking further in,

That deep tearing border

between worth and meaning.

A pink opalescence shines through the water,

calling my unworthy name,

calling forth that unnamable,

that unresurrectable thing.

How menacing, and mocking

those fingers point. How jarring,

how piercing, how mortifying,

how painful and castrating,

this detention of my soul.

The tremendous sense of imbalance,

like throwing a rock to a void,

without repercussion.

Please let not my pain

immiserate me.

Please let not this halo

turn itself a noose.

#poetry

metamorphesque

"Don’t court Loneliness", Tathev Simonyan

pensivethinker

One of the best poems I've ever read

c0ssette

Auguste Ottin (Detail) Polyphemus Surprising Acis and Galatea,1866,the Fontaine Médicis.

utwo

Baroque Rococostyle

"The only way to behave respectably in love is to feel as though you don't need it—or at least that your selfhood wouldn't be destroyed without its influence. . . Here's love: an always-changing, untallied, uncompetitive exchange of power with the ultimate aim being to support one another in recreating the euphoria of childhood."

#Savannah Brown

It's often the case that the great irony in those who self-identify as empaths are the first ones to become repelled by those who actually diverge from the norm. Over time, those who are fundamentally different are compelled to spend a lot of time and energy molding themselves into the world of the typical so that the typical can treat them as humans of equal value, all so that those who call themselves empaths can feel comfortable with themselves.

Stop costuming as an empath and just be empathic, or at least drop the title.

#pensivethinker

prunelya

Apollo and Daphne (det.) by Gian Lorenzo Bernini

ancientorigins

This Incredible spiral staircase inside the Château de La Rochefoucauld Castle in France

kultofdeath

Claiming one has high emotional intelligence or EQ is a new and advanced way for stupid people to claim intellect without having the aptitude or commitment to complete the prerequisite work to formalize a crystallized expertise in anything.

#pensivethinker

Pathos

I have found you again, old friend.

Where have you gone?

Have you still the same story to tell?

Father time has molded you, I see.

I can still hear your unwaning reverberance

and feel your trying rumble

in the intervening silence.

I can still remember your color,

and recount your world of beauty

that captivated and terrified me.

#pensivethinker #poetry #poem #spilled ink

thoughtkick

“Sometimes, the strongest people in the morning are the people who cried all night.”

— Book of prosperity

Arise and Persist

In the haziness of conscious unclarity the old demons beckon, immediately, rising in nothing short of wearing dread from their indolent sleep. They gnaw away at what you've built enough at a time to overlook caution, when you have your guard down and find yourself naively thinking that the battle with pain now lives in a time past.

The sinking feeling in your chest feels like an apparition pulling you off from yourself in a psychic disturbance, and the feeling of listlessness, uneasiness, and low-level chronic emptiness manifests in your body as a deep disconnect, an unsettling imbalance like in the moments before the realization of a panic attack, where the processes of neurotic physiologic outburst still lives in the milieu of the unconscious, and before the awful hit of knowing that something is massively wrong.

This is your life. Your soul is fractured but unbroken, and what you're feeling is deep longing, which exists in the same space as the 4 or 5 different aspects of yourself that aim to avoid its resolution. And this will probably always be your life, stringed by the background tug of war happening behind the scenes at the intersection of trauma, pain, isolation, introverted reclusiveness, triumph, motivation, creative and intellectual fulfillment, and joy. You cannot live without the demons that wish you only exile and decline, but you must learn how to live with them. You must respect their power while simultaneously telling them to go fuck themselves, because they are ultimate in their perniciousness, lies, gas-lighting, and manipulation. You must become their tamer and hold the line lest you feel the bludgeon on your head the moment you foolishly turn your back on them.

So arise and persist in your building, and pick up the falling pieces again. You can build faster than they can destroy. You can tire them out in your irrational persistence. Will you ever be whole? The only way towards that answer is to storm the beaches. Taxis to Hell – and Back – Into the Jaws of Death.

#pensivethinker #my inner demons

Oh, the wisp

The reason men fight,

The plight of their torment,

With blood on their helmets,

Chucked on their half-written graves.

Unceasing energy,

Has its way with them all.

The reason men fight.

Their lungs are not sapped,

nor their hearts stone.

Their fruits not untapped,