Work in process

The objective value of acts.

As time passes away from the cult one of the realizations that begins to become more pronounced is the understanding that ACTS determine our inner life as much as our external life and that is why the way people relate to each other, act towards each other and do things in definite contexts, matters.

What I’m finding is very new to me so this is more of an exploration than a finished work.

To take an example I would like to think about music.

There is an objective value to playing an instrument for the player. In regular society we do not quantify the value of an act like playing a piano in terms of the quality of energy that that action will give the player but in relation to understanding the octave of impressions, we would necessarily have to understand that there is an specific quality to the act that could be quantified if we had an instrument to measure the state of people’s soul! And don’t we measure that by the “state of being” of the individual? We do not have numbers to that yet but we should surely be able to add numbers to such states and say without doubt that a person who has just tried to commit suicide is in a “cero state of being” and what I mean by a “cero state of being” is that the individual in question has reached the lowest level that the “I” can reach.  Yes, this is something I’ve been trying to express for the past four years. Clarifying these different spheres should surely help in psychoanalysis because what we don’t seem to have understood until recently (or was it only I?) is that what conditions our “states” is our I. It conditions them so precisely that one could almost affirm that the “I” of the individual is not really an objective object that can be measured and pointed at but that in itself it is a “state” and that that “state” is what is in a permanent process. This is beautiful! Beautiful because the urge of the rational mind to encapsulate the I into a definite form is an impossibility and the malleability of the I is it’s true mystery. The urge of the mind to reduce the idea of “being” to a fixed entity is what keeps it from understanding the wholeness of life. The fact that we are psychologically fixed in the objects we see keeps us from perceiving the movement they are in.

So if we are clear about the “I” as a “fluctuating state” and activity as an “actor” on such states, we can begin to view the objective quality of actions. Acts act on the individual as much as on the external world. It seems to me that we’ve been concentrating on the individuals to understand our lives but the individual is only an aspect of our lives while other individuals and what we do is an equally relevant aspect of our lives. We are ourselves only one of the many ingredients of our own life! I’m particularly interested in this analysis in relation to healing processes because as time passes away from the cult, I am convinced that we can significantly change not only our societies in the long run but our tactics of healing our selves and our communities. I might be discovering that “water is warm” as we say, for what I am saying is that for an individual to become “normal” he has to be “normal” and normality as viewed by traditional society as an individual that is able to perform “socially healthily”. The standardized concept of “normality” is that of a person able to “work”, “make money”, “have friends”, “participate”… but what these words mean for people in the different social classes and nationalities is very different. We seem to be generalizing what things are for all people but things are very different for people in different social classes to begin with. For people in the upper middle classes and above, to be normal means to work, to be creative, make money and have friends, all of which make you socially acceptable while for people in lower classes, to work means to work for others and accept the conditions of labour. To submit your life force to the production objects that will place the owners in a position of privilege that allows them to be “creative” in their lives even if they rarely do become such creative beings. Creativity is not necessary when you’re supposed to do a totally uncreative job. But being unable to “create” and to be “creative” is the most pervasive condition against the “I” for the “I” is in itself a “creative” entity. This is the main cause of suicide in companies like the Telecom of Paris today. “Being productive”, “earning a living” is not enough to keep the human being of today alive.

To be “normal and healthy” in the lower classes means to submit to conditions of repression of the individual necessity to create and accept the role of servant to other people’s creations and interests all your life. If you do not accept those conditions you will certainly be sacked or not get the job. In every single activity there is the potential for creativity but that potential is appropriated by the people in power and THAT is what makes us unequal as human beings today, THAT is what needs to change.) The other aspect of today’s suicide’s in companies is that people are moved from one place to another as if they were machines without connections and those radical “displacements” affect them so profoundly that they not only loose their social connections but their contact with their own self enough to take their own lives.

Going back to the activity of music, the way the activity fortifies the player’s inner self is significant. Do people think about this or is it just taken for granted? Is it simply obvious? That is, that playing an instrument has a particular quality of it’s own and reverts into the player’s being in a particular way?

A second sphere is the act of playing music in public. The Public ads a dimension to the experience that makes it of value not only for the player but for the listeners. There is a “community” element in the experience. The question with public experiences that I’m interested in exploring more deeply as I go along is the difference between a “mass” experience and a “community” experience to call it some how.

The third sphere of the act itself is that of it’s intention, its “aim”.  In the cult there is a concert practically every week. The music is beautiful like it is in any other concert hall in the world but the EVENT is used to “legitimize the cult”.  Understanding this is what I’m after: the way things are used to legitimize particular status quos that people are wishing to impose on other people. Art is used in cults to manipulate people but then when it’s not art it’s some other “ideal” what is used to legitimize it.

What were the aims of the cult?

“Awakening” was supposed to be the main aim. That was used to justify every renunciation members had to do to accomplish it. So what did people actually renounce to?

Their freedom to act from their own understanding?

Their own understanding in relation to their life and the world around them?

What were people actually escaping from?

Was it not the fact that we were equally submitted and powerless in regular society, no matter what class we belong to?

Don’t most cult members join cults because they are trying to take hold of their lives that in regular society has gotten out of their hands? That basically the dimensions of regular society are such that people preferred to let it aside and disconnect themselves from its processes and make up their own smaller version of a “community” that they thought they could handle? And wasn’t trying to avoid the “human national and international community” a trap of its own?

My hypothesis is that human beings need the community and that that is a legitimate need. That that NEED is being lived out unconsciously and therefore it is used and manipulated by people in different spheres of power to take advantage of other people but that if we become conscious and therefore absolutely clear about that NEED as a reality we will stop making up cults to live it out and rather address the real issues that being a community of human beings implies; That the problems of distribution can be more conscientiously solved if we are clear that the aim is to “help” each other out. When we look at history and the division of people in clans, nationalities, religions, etc, it’s clear that if we are going to talk about equality it can only be an equality in terms of our humaneness not in terms of our particular differences; That as human beings it is our responsibility with each other to guarantee the minimum conditions for life to develop.

The breach between beliefs and practical life becomes ever so clear when groups of people pretend to apply those ideals only to the people within their clan, nationality or race, academic status or social class and not to everyone. This inability to act with the same integrity towards all human beings and justify every atrocity when it is committed against others who do not belong to it, is the greatest aberration of our condition as human beings today. This equally happens on the scale of the individual. The supra efforts an individual is willing to make for the “loved” one are particularly interesting when that same individual is able to perform without the slightest care towards those that are not the “loved” one.

What is so difficult about this subject is that what is being questioned is how people “love” and nothing is more precious to people than what they “love” and what we need to come to realize is that our “love” is too biased to be “love” that what we’ve been calling “love” are simply our very personal identifications and that our “identifications” are just another aspect of our immaturity as human beings. That the emotional imbalance of people, when for example we fall in love and see no other aim than the loved one and deploy all our “arms” and selves towards the realization of that love, is basically that: emotional imbalance when it is followed by extreme carelessness in other areas. The ego thinks it is a great ego because it has a huge capacity to love THAT one individual above everything and everyone but LOVE is not in that uniqueness, that is just egoness out on “the ramp”. All those of us who “love” like that are mere beginners in the Art of Love, we are being trained to tackle our own energy and all the suffering that we go through is necessary to learn the lesson that love is not an arrow directed at an object but an “air” in which everyone is able to breathe with equal guarantees.

The same process can be observed in relation to our ideals. While for women, the main identification might be related to their “love”, for men the tendency to behave likewise but in relation to ideas in social contexts seems equally imbalanced. The analysis is tricky because if we were to take the case of “the real thing” the behaviour involved is equally unidirectional only that it is unidirectionally omnidirectional and THAT is the difference. In a state of integrity, a human being will maintain a unidirectional behaviour in everything he or she does but that “directionality” will be embedded in an “omnidirectionality” that maintains the balance within it. It is like a line born from within the sphere of the circle going or coming in and out of itself forming another circle at each step from the line. Circle, line, circle…  like a child come out of the womb, like a human being embedded in his or her humaneness.

It is not easy to be such being. What is interesting about our struggles is that what reveals the state we are in is not what we are struggling for but how we are struggling for it. The words matter some but it is not the words but the acts what reveals our self.

And harsh words are in themselves harsh acts. It’s a very great lesson to understand the pervasiveness of one’s egoness. 

The subject is wide open still. An exploration is just that and it is normal to explore the whole region before one actually gets to the point. It doesn’t make the treasure any less valuable.