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Showing posts with label Taoism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Taoism. Show all posts

2014/05/15

Finding the light in the darkness

I said that line in a previous post and it surprised me.  I don't really know why I said it, it really wasn't related to what I was saying, but it happened and it has been tumbling through my thoughts ever since.  Get ready to go on a journey, dear reader.  This thought spreads its arms across the vastness of human experience.  I will start this tale in a place you'd never expect and lead you into the unknown and then back to the humblest yet most quintessential aspect of our soul.  I have a lot to live up to in my own introduction...  So it is time to start.

In economics, there is a term called marginal cost.  For you calculus minded individuals, this term defines the integral of the producer's cost to produce an additional unit, q, with respect to q.  For those of you non calculus people, I will have to use more words to describe the same thing:  When producing an item, there are some initial costs like building a factory to make it, wages for labor to produce it, and the price of raw material for it to exist in.  All those costs divided by the number of units that can be produced with those costs is one way of thinking of the marginal cost.  According to a lot of market theory, the marginal cost of increasing my productivity by one unit is the price we should sell our good at; ie if I still have loans on the factory floor and my CEO has a huge salary, then my marginal cost will be pretty high, but once I have paid off the price of land and fired my CEO, the cost of increasing my output by one reduces drastically, and so should my marginal cost, the price my customers pay.  

Technology has driven real marginal cost down on an exponential curve the last hundred years.  The industrial revolution was but one step on this path.  We broke the task of making a shirt across the world, cloth coming from here, dye coming from there, labor coming from here, distribution going there.  Institutionalized slavery still exists today, but the mechanization of labor could reduce the cost and time of production further.  With all these drops, why hasn't the price of creating dropped?  Because the marginal cost remains the same in the balance books of these companies.  As marginal cost has exponentiated downwards, upper management pay has exponentiated upward which holds our marginal cost at 20 dollars even when it costs 13c to make a shirt.  

People say often that this greed is the ultimate evil of our time.  It is the darkness, the yin, the masculine energy flourishing to dominating power that has subjugated our world to the state we see today.  Yet the light is rising, my dear reader.  You know it.  You feel it as I do.  But how?  It is in the nature of masculinity and femininity that our story travels next.

Masculinity is a blanket of earth or a swathe of fire.  It extends and covers, it smothers with its exuberance and desire.  Femininity is the wind or the water.  It flows and it yields eternally.  Masculinity reaches indefinitely and femininity is never truly grasped.  If masculine energy has reached so far as it has in our economic model, how is that feminine energy to return the masculine back into balance if it only yields?  Let's talk the housing market to answer that, shall we?

College debt has exploded over the past fifty years to the point that fewer and fewer homes are being purchased and that market is slowly dying.  As this cycle begins to wane, the young are not reaching for new homes, they are being inherited, traded, and communally built.  Why?  Because economic oppression from our economic model forces people to be more efficient and use less and something just clicks.  Some personal transformation occurs and them to become as humble as the dirt.  After being shoved into the dirt, they become the dirt and economic shackles no longer hold them.  Homes get passed down and no longer have any value aside from becoming places of life shared as a community of man.  This is how femininity triumphs.  Please remember, I am not talking about man and woman, I am talking about a state of being.  It is not to say that all women are like this and all men are like that.  The correlation exists, but we all have both in us at a certain balance that changes every passing moment.

An arguably better example is Napster.  Someone took it upon themselves to use the free building tools provided on the internet to build a sharing house for media.  Once media springs out of the mind and into the physical realm, it is replicated and shared on these platforms with very small marginal cost compared to running a company that crafts and ships disks.  The cost of housing and replicating 90kb is negligible, why pay a distribution company with thirty offices of stooges who isn't really paying the artist for their profits anyway?  Fast forward ten years and media is being produced and shared on YouTube professionally on nothing but advertisement revenue.  Marginal cost is so small, it can be absorbed by someone who wants to steal a bit of your airwave to sell someone detergent.  So many free platforms now exist and the amount of wallet saved from this free exchange encourages donations to what someone knows is worth their investment.  A freer market emerges.

This feminine motion is intoxicating, it draws you into it like all sacredly feminine motions do.  Once the Napster market was tasted, it was too sweet.  Once soaked in this masculine darkness as we have, these feminine motions draw us back out into the light BECAUSE OF the darkness before.  Without being forced to pay an absurdly imbalanced marginal cost, freer models of being would not be so seductive.  Ironically, the darker the shadow, the brighter the light needed to create it.  We have been in the dark so long that it can be hard to see how far this light will take us.  Fifty years from now, I imagine a brightness that looks like this:

I imagine a young person building a set for a movie.  She has a device attached to her arm.  It is a deeply interconnected device that links her to like minded individuals.  With it, she finds or creates the schematics for a piece of her set for free.  The rendering technology exists because someone desired to make it.  The energy exists because our star still shines and our wind still blows.  She grabs some recycled material and feeds it into this device and it prints her imagination into reality.  She crafts her whole scene this way, creating the illusion of being in a wake-walking lucid dream of her imagination and she spills forth this story into reality without a single dime.  She is housed wherever she may go because no one owns land anymore and the world is beautified with communal architecture that incorporates natural cycles into its designs that eat waste and regurgitate food-- like an edible architecture birthed in the minds of the local artists.  She is making her movie because it has meaning for her.  With no marginal cost, she gives her movie to the sharers.  The money donated to her by the fans of her imagination goes towards treating herself beyond the basic needs provided for her by the sacred environment she lives in.  Man lives in rhapsodic abundance and life is lived to the point of tears in every waking moment.  

This image-- this light will grow not just from, but because of the darkness that envelops us today.  Without the ideas of mechanization, efficiency, the ever grasping for more that strangles the mighty into husks of Sin, we would not have these tools.  Now armed with the fruits of that mindset, we are free to take it and create with it.  Therefore I say that I am in love with masculinity-- in love with this evil darkness, because it's depths grow me.  When he envelops me, I become the light in his darkness and suddenly I am cradling him and we are one in the same.  

One day, like the breath of a divine being, the feminine light will be smothered again by darkness on a grander scale as it has from the birth of reality.  One day, that darkness will become light yet again, but I can only hope I will be long dead to see what darkness the next cycle will know.  I do not hate the dark that has swept over us as it now fades.  I anticipate it, so that I may flow around its advances and use its flame to burn brighter and longer than I ever knew possible.



2013/04/24

Crippling depression


Sometimes I just need to escape into complete solitude. Normal, living human beings spur inside me a jealousy and a sadness I simply cannot bear. I uncontrollably break out into tears. I am not exaggerating.

Mid conversation, I get up and leave for apparently no reason.
"Where are you going?" My roommate asks.
"Somewhere else," is all I can reply with the faintest hint of sobbing in my voice. My acting skills have become rusty.

What causes it? Is it the ease with which other people are able to simply be that I cannot grasp? Is it the utter regret that my entire life spurs into existence? Or is it nothing at all that causes the teardrops falling like rain onto my iPad screen as I sit alone in the bathroom? One may never know.

The same roommate spoke to me as we were buying tampons, milk, and other necessities at the store. She said, "I wish there were more people like you in the world. Just helpful for no reason." To which I could only reply, "I don't... To have a person like me, you have to have the events that forged me and I would not wish those or any similar events on any soul, no matter what good came of it-- to do so would be sadistic to the point of damnation."

The most tangible silence of my life followed those words.

I'd like to hope that I am being over dramatic, but when I realize that I am sitting in my bathroom because I am quite literally unable to stop the tears streaming down my face, when my roommate comes in to try to cheer me up and I have to send her away because her presence is making me claustrophobic to the point of hyperventilating tears, ... I realize that I am not. The pain that makes me who I am ... is fucking awful.

As a suicide prevention moderator, I have been able to help others back from that most precarious edge, but not without its own share of risks. The other night, I dealt with a young girl with much pain and a knife to relieve it. I have moderated hundreds of crises with no problem, but her situation awoke in me something that I had thought was long behind me. I became paralyzed with something I could not explain. I couldn't help her. I knew what to say, but I also knew she would not listen. The only advice I could give would go unheard and I knew it. Everything felt futile and lost. I was returned to the place with no hope. I called for help and was assisted by a superhero named Remus. He helped me resolve her struggles for the evening, but my wounds were open again. I cried myself to sleep that night, unable to control the volume of my sobs. Again I was saved by a loving friend's comforting arms.

Given a poll of random persons who have interacted with me, I think the consensus would be that the world would be a worse place without me and what pain I must have experienced is worth it for what I have become and the good I bring on a daily basis. However, in the deepest, blackest portion of my existence, I honestly think that they are all wrong.

But I am not alone.

And for that I continue, for I know I never will be alone. To help another is to help thyself. There is no 'you' and there is no 'me.' We are all one and in each one of us there is all.

2013/04/05

The Troubling Tao

There are many statements in the Tao that are sometimes ironically hard to live up to.

"Do your work and then step back.  That is the way of the Tao."

The philosophy here is straightforward.  First, know your work.  Know what it is you are here to do and do it.  Then know what isn't your work and avoid working too hard, for if it is YOUR work, it will exhaust you perfectly.  In the mornings, walk forward towards your work, start when you get there, work because you love what you give to the world.  Know what your work is and the pace will set itself.  A comic book artist knows they will need 10 years to create their masterpiece doing a full page every day, yet they do it because the joy of the art would leave if they did more.  At the end of the day, be like the comic artist and leave the story on your desk.  Come back tomorrow and tomorrow until it is done.  When it is done, don't hang around and stagnate over it.  It is done and you will find more work.  Step back.

But this can be very hard.  My problem is knowing where my work ends.  I know what my work is and I love it.  Yet I don't see any boundaries to it.  I don't see the boundaries of what I can and what I cannot do.  No.  I think I can see that much, but I don't see where I should stop.

I do my work... and then I go and do more work.  Sure, I never stagnate or dwell on my past work, that is good.  But it's still bad.  What I need to do is know where my work ends.

Go to work, let my work with people lead me simply to do and step back.  Go home, let my heart lead me.  Some days art, some days games, some days stories, some days more helping people.  Yet all with the caveat of knowing that my work will end today and begin tomorrow after rest.  True rest.  Restful in body AND in mind.  I must leave the work on the desk.

*breathes in*
*breathes out*

Let's try it today.