Really, what this amounts to, is finding and learning more about the boundaries of your experience, how far you go, how, and how that feels. Where are the lines? Can you feel why? Can you extend them?
And it is an interesting question what the relationship is between experience and thoughts. Are thoughts a form of experience? Or are they a sort of distancing from experience, the experience of not feeling, the experience of rejecting experience?
How are these thoughts related? What is similar, what different? Your answer not only can but should differ from mine.
Nineveh was the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
Life is basically fair.
Life is basically unfair.
The Moonlight Sonata is in C Sharp Minor.
It’s hard to think a thought without experience, without feelings of one sort or another intruding, isn’t it? Some thoughts are more evocative than others, and of course for all of us it will depend on our associations.
For me, the first thought conjures a vague memory of D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance”, although I think it portrayed a sack of a different city, I think of Babylon.
Life is fair/unfair. This is emotively laden for nearly everyone, isn’t it?
Moonlight Sonata, if you know it, how can you not hear it in your mind, and then feel something? But if you are a musician, the C Sharp Minor is bound to pull up all sorts of other things.
Thoughts tug emotions out of us. So if you want to live in abstraction, if you want to live outside of experience, you have to be careful what sorts of thoughts you allow. You have to find thoughts denuded of emotional content, and you have to KEEP THEM THERE. New thoughts risk new feelings, and new feelings can lead to old feelings, and the whole balance can vanish in a moment.
This is how you build rigidity. Rigidity is a prison you build to keep the world out, where you can slowly die in a linear way. It is a suicide. That is the line. That is the thought and intent. A slow desiccation and then a cessation of everything.
Bouncing. That is unpredictable. It is often painful. But that is where the orchestra is.
I cry sometimes. It is deeply, deeply painful being me sometimes. But I am blessed with a constitution that somehow doesn’t break. I don’t know why, but I have faith in it.
I feel sure the path to knowledge is sustained confusion. You have to allow it free reign. Allow it to travel in you. You have to learn to live in it, never knowing what is next. It is a green which can eventually carry you to new places.
And what I am writing here is incomprehensible to those who have already chosen, most likely long ago, to die in prisons. To them, it is irrational not to live behind bars. I see this. To them, I appear a lunatic. So be it. I cannot rescue anyone who is desperate for captivity.