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Originality

It continues to be a source of amazement to me how even groups existing in radical discontinuity with “mainstream” society can become profoundly conservative.  You have thousands of Buddhists out there saying regularly “if you see the Buddha on the road kill him”, who punish those who take this idea seriously.  Ayn Rand preached radical individualism, but exiled all those who thought differently from her.

The theoretical need for innovation and dramatically personal experience, radical honesty, is subsumed within a larger emotional need for conformity.  Courage is swallowed whole, digested, and dies in the process.  No one sees or says a word.  This happens every day.

We exist in fields.  I believe these fields are certainly psycho-social, and reach into the realms of evolution and biology.  In my view, they also exist in a much more “spooky” ways spoken of by Jung, Sheldrake and others.  We need these fields on a very primitive level.

But fields have levels too.  In order to reach higher, you must leave something behind. You cannot bring the bottom of the hill with you for comfort.  You must understand the need for the Middle, the “having begun, but not arrived”.  And this takes courage.  Very few have the ability to resist the siren songs of being sucked from one field into another.  You might trade one for another better one, but very few have the meta-skill of avoiding these entanglements.  First and foremost, it requires a capacity for solitude, for walking alone, with no reasonable prospect of being truly seen or understood, because in many cases I (changing voice) cannot yet see where I am going, or why I am doing what I am doing.  I trust, only. I have faith, only.  I feel a sense of duty.  I have the soul of a soldier, and this is my job, even though I cannot know what its cost may be.

Another meme one sees is that you should go where there are no footprints, and leave them.  This is a theoretical ideal.  But how many people merely mouth this truism, and consider saying it–repeating it–to be the same as having set out alone?

Radically original people are misfits because they cannot be categorized.  You are not an Is, but a Becoming, and most people fear beginnings whose ends they cannot see.

I would say this, though: virtually every large accomplishment in human history was accomplished one step at a time by people who had no way of knowing where their beginning would truly lead.  They simply saw a need, and set out to find an answer.