Ultimately there are entities (concepts, signs, drives and people) who need you more than you need them. They have a tendency to focus, selfishly, on short term objectives that are aligned to their meaning. Don’t let emotional attachment to their regime on reality keep you from progressing.
Y’all on the central line platform with your painted southern cross egalitarian faceology … But I’m celebrating a different victory of the antipodes. Not the 99% Fosters: Shiraz, elite financing one percenter baby. High Australian dialect, dig? Rarified blend of Saparavi-Tropical cocktail success and victory over martyrdom, dig? Calibrating the cube, someone whispered.
Social systems gain ubiquity by virtue of their reflecting the inner workings of the human psyche. This reflection arises as part of an unconscious process within a system’s evolution. Man organizes himself in his own image. For better or worse.
A real lesson is possible. Its precondition is that identity – like belief – should be suspended prior to entering the classroom. This precondition is intrinsic to all lessons – in fact, it IS the lesson, the suspension of identity is what was being taught — the teacher wasn’t saying anything else of importance.
This is why the lesson always appears to the student like a fruit, wrapped in prickly skin. With the difference that, to get to the fruit of communication, identity itself is what is peeled away.
You therefore have to passionately desire fruit to participate in the lesson. Obviously if you think the fruit’s not worth it, you get to keep your skin intact.
Sometimes the lesson will offer some kind of initial bait (a batted eyelash, a show of leg) to seduce you into taking the plunge and attempting to tackle the fruit. But that incentive is a kind of platonic reflection of a reward that transcends reward.
There are different fruits, different skins, different lessons — as many as there are different identities. And like identity, they are difference itself, not exchangeable nor comparable. Their properties cannot be generalized.
Everything I have just written constitutes a lesson, for a certain kind of person.
Everyone knows that the pursuit of approval is not a good driver for effective work. Irrespective of whether the approval is met from superiors or peers — you feel great when they smile upon you and lousy when they frown. And inter-/intra-personal environments are such that you’ll always get both pats on the back and snide grumbles: it’s no one’s fault, just the emotional ebbs and flows of the human collective.
By working for approval, your own emotional state will be a micro, condensed reflection of this macro mood machine. And you will be like a slave to its essentially unpredictable ebbs and flows. You’ll ultimately become unproductive and miserable.
But it’s not that simple.
Ignoring approval and striving only for perfection in work, divorced from the valuation of others — this inevitably leads to inferior product. I had a terrible postdoc who failed to produce anything of merit because he insisted on doing math for math’s sake and wasn’t interested in impressing his boss. In contrast, Van Gough cut off his ear in misery, driven mad by failing to achieve recognition he craved.
We don’t need dilettantes.
The solution is to ensure you are always in control. Determine who is worth working for/with. Play the emotional approval game: but never forget that it is a game. It’s a game of chance but it is still a GAME of chance. Strategize, plan, be tactical, hedge your bets and strive for maximum impact. Eliminate your competition: without anger. Fight: delete obstruction, without malice. Befriend only those who you trust. Don’t be consumed by the dragon: ride it.
The dragon is chance, it is ebb and flow, it is the ups and downs. It’s the Face: a godface, your face, god’s face. And while random, through the contemplation of its nature, you will find success.
But first of all, ensure you are working in the right environment. There are some irredeemable warzones out there — volatile situations — you can spot them a mile away. And there are also places that are simply no longer productive — where there is, for you, only ebb and no flow. These are still part of the game, a wider game, a bigger game. Still part of the dragon, its bigger fractal image, the bigger machine: a bigger trough, devoid of all opportunity for progress — but leading to a bigger crest elsewhere, with greater bounty and reward.
Stay for as long as necessary but immigrate when you get the chance.
Sometimes you become upset with other people who occupy a particular role in an organisation. Colleagues, consultants, doctors, politicians, priests, thieves, friends, enemies, wives and lovers.
The objective cause of the upset — the reason you give for it — is either specific to the person or general to the role. The impression that either a) the other person is not living up to their role, or b) that the role itself is objectionable in some way.
What is the resolution to the upset? Complaining and remaining upset doesn’t help. It is cowardly and damaging to your self to complain and remain frustrated.
There are several short term solutions:
1) addresses a), while 2) and 3) address b). Deletion takes many forms: but is necessarily a form of activism (revolutionary or reactionary, capitalist or Marxist, it doesn’t matter). This makes these solutions short term: they last one cycle.
Short term solutions are necessary: we recommend their application. But they are effective only when combined with a longer term resolution — an attitudinal shift.
The shift is to delete your relationship to the objectionable person/role under question. Do this before running through 1)-3). Deleting relationships doesn’t mean cessation of empathy — in fact it is the key to empathy. Instead, it’s all about removing identification from the equation.
When deletion is done effectively and systematically, you’ll find there is not a lot left of “you”, constructed, as it is, mainly out of such relationships. Stop finding yourself in the gaze of this other person. Before acting in any other way, stop identifying yourself in relation to this other role or that other role.
Because it is identification itself that is the subjective cause for the upset. Identity itself, existence as an identity, is made from this crisis of self-definedness by relational proxy, this continual upset. You are not merely upset — “you” are upset.
Does deletion of relationships mean withdrawing from all organisation? No: it is the key to gaining control of the organisation itself. You do not exist as a cell in relation to another cell, instead you flow as blood, giving life, being life. The focus is not on one neurone in relation to another, but on the electricity that is conducted through, from which emerges mind, intellect, thought organised.
Dear diary,
From this day forth, I dedicate myself to reinterpreting my culture’s God: so that when he writes “Women are inferior”, he really means “The Divine Intellect is brighter on the inceptive surface of the orb of transmission, and dark against its receptive connection.”
And when the men of the village rise in anger against me and my sisters, we will fight, and occupy the temple. We will, if necessary, prosecute then, under the European Human Rights code.
And if we are martyred, we are martyred for the cause of the women, in reclaiming the night … and reclaiming the God … of our culture.
For what other solution is there?
Stress, like a drug, is not necessarily a bad thing in cultivating a desirable attitude to life. Stress promotes a level of detachment from pride in the current state of one’s work, and pushes the individual to exceed in the next cycle: to keep pushing the boundary, irrespective of prior accumulated achievement.
Stress is detrimental when the soul of thought is self-denied, but useful when embodying the impetus of the soul to victory, for victory’s sake alone.
- Do you get frustrated when people don’t understand you?
- Sure, that’s one of my more negative traits.
- Don’t beat yourself up over it — you’re only human.
- I get frustrated and snarky, and that manifests in my revelation, outwardly as a language of frustration and snakiness, but inwardly as a colour or tone to the very thing I had hoped people would understand in the first place.
My frustration at failure to communicate appears to be just that in my revelation, but is laid down to embody a code of success. A way out.
- Don’t you think you’d have greater success if you ditched the encoding in a veil of frustration – and simply stated what you meant in the first place?
- I’m not going to apologise for the Truth. I’m only a human, as you say.
Question: “I’ve been in a relationship a man for three years. We’re in love and now we are discussing marriage. The thing is that we come from different groups – and my group follows a book, authored by the God of my group, that says it is illegal for me, as a woman, to marry into his group. Are there any solutions?”
