awareness, personality and illuminating our individual nature

an experiment in looping comments with posts

I posted yesterday about behaviour: acceptance vs justification, and in response to this comment from Egi-RaZoRZ, i wrote:

I like how this reply loops around and around itself … ellipses itself? Because of course neither justification nor acceptance could or should precede or succeed the other, and one is not more important or right or wrong than the other. I guess i just feel a tendency to justify sometimes, and i feel this gets in the way of acceptance — when a tendency develops, the way we respond to our own behaviour can become unbalanced, and therefore unhealthy and unprogressive. Acceptance and awareness can shed light on such a tendency and help us to move on.

Conscious behaviour — that is a whole other thing, if by conscious you mean wilful or intentional. I guess i was referring to unconscious behaviour — to tendencies. I have long wondered about the meaning of “behaviour”: is it an expression of personality, and therefore not representative of an individual’s real nature? Can the light of awareness dispel personality and allow us to act from our individual nature?

Egi-RaZoRZ had commented:

But I think that conscious behavior is (or should be, anyway) in a way a psychological mirror of your own self… Also, justifying something in a sane way would give it a logical meaning, which is nothing wrong, I guess, in addition to the final stage which is the acceptance of it. Maybe I got it all wrong. Oh well, maybe. ^^

If you have trouble justifying something, it does not mean it is wrong. Maybe it is simply beyond the necessity to do so! Which is also a good thing, I’d guess. 🙂

Something else about yesterday’s post, in which i wrote “I’m not sure why i keep thinking and talking in terms of dichotomies lately (this vs that)”:

during an exchange with a friend on Facebook i was directed to consider theosophy after i expressed an interest in gnosis (direct experience of “god”), and through reading about theosophy i found some stuff about non-dualism, which i have always valued in a latent sort of way — i suspect that i have been wondering about dichotomies so much lately because in my spiritual practice i am increasingly sensing an absence of Separation, whereas dualism asserts and informs a belief in Separation.

So yeah, that happened.

Day Four, The Return of Vision

Tuesday 27 January
Renmark, South Australian

Day Four of my Adventures in Sobriety series, in which I make an oxymoron of myself by applauding “vision” in a post where i “accidentally” conduct a tirade against time.

Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory”, which I had hung in my room as a teenager and only just now realised is entirely appropriate for this post. At the time I just thought it was cool because I was a stoner, but maybe it came into my life at that time for a reason.

I can’t sleep. I haven’t tried, but i know. I’m in that state where my body is exhausted but my mind is inexplicably energised.

For the last two days i’ve been wracked by hangover symptoms (headache, nausea, mysterious aches and pains) and i joked with someone about how it doesn’t seem fair that i should suffer thus for not taking drugs.

But obviously i’m detoxing. And these are the consequences of a heavy month-long binge, and actually i’m more interested in seeing this suffering through than i am in seeing (as an experiment, of course) whether a small joint would alleviate the symptoms—thereby confirming that these are withdrawals. Now there’s an addict’s reasoning par excellence.

But it’s not the symptoms alone that are keeping me awake: it’s also the sudden influx of motivation, mental activity, hope, pride, self-respect and vision. 

The Thing About John Updike

The thing about John Updike is, I found yet another inspiring post on Brain Pickings recently, about John Updike and some ideas of his about writing and death, and how various things we do (addictions, writing) are merely ways of avoiding accepting the reality of nothingness, of our imminent demise and the likelihood our death will be our extermination.

Happy stuff.

It was inspiring because I really like to think of a guy who’s dedicated himself to writing and contemplation,

and contemplation is a key qualifier to writing here, because lots of people write, but there is a way of writing purposefully and meaningfully that I think adds an extra dimension of importance to writing,

and that is to use writing as a tool for contemplation.