Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Be what you want.

Extenuating circumstances have brought me to this. I've always been sort of blindly scared of this whole of stream of consciousness writing that is how most people "blog". The kind of fear that makes you not want to talk to someone you might not know, it can be a subtle fear, but at the same time it can be paralyzing. I have (when I say have, I mean 3 or 4 times) tried writing in the stream of consciousness style before and never found it to have any centralizing theme which is a huge problem for me. The moral has to be there, so I never really liked that style because I couldn't completely plan the creative act before I committed it. That being said, certain difficulties I had with my technologies forced me to turn the video games off and get some ideas out. I still think that stream of consciousness writing can allow you to get at certain information you have encoded in your mind that you normally don't think about or allow to be a part of your consciousness. Usually those things are what I would like in the forefront of my mind when trying to put myself in "the creative state".
The central theme that has become my life lately is the idea of ideologies and what makes up each person's unique ideology and how much does that affect the "normal" behaviors we see from people. Not all thoughts can be mapped onto words given the present state of language, there will always be those thoughts that you can only label as emotions, or instinct. Instinct is just a way of explaining the internal things we cannot truly explain. The way we use mythologies in the past and religions in the present to explain externalities we didn't understand, ideology is how we explicate our internalizations. Which sometimes makes it something a bit harder to pinpoint certain aspects of ideology. It asks us to dig to the core of ourself and divulge our inner most being and belief. From the tradition dualism of "right" and "wrong", to your thoughts on Western influence in the world, and back to whether or not you believe in capitalism. It's all-encompassing, your "unique" consciousness gives birth to the ideology of (Insert Name Here).
My old ideology was wrong for me. I was speaking to a friend of mine about this idea and I thought of an analogy that instantly became very poignant. It's like trying to put the proverbial circle block through the square hole, except in this case, if the block can't make it through, you'll never achieve that happiness. You must skim off the unnecessary parts of the ideologies that we are immersed in from birth. Me, I wanted to believe in all the wonderful ideas we are all fed as we are younger, I was skeptical at first. Usually skepticism comes with age, but I tried it out before trying out all the cliches. I should have followed that instinct because I ended up right back where I started with the cynicism. Satire was my first love, and I left it for the promise of a white picket fence and a decent living. So what does one do when after x years of believing in a candy coated, watered down ideology? It's impossible to completely revamp your belief systems in any short period of time... so where do you start? What is most important? Where do I fit in? What is it I want to do? Asking all these questions can be enough to rattle someone, the asking alone implies confusion. (Implications, implications... what happens when all implications disappear and we are left to draw ALL our own conclusions... interesting thought)
Without the question, where is personal growth? I have yet to come across someone who seemed to have it "figured out", or frankly, even remotely close to it. No one will ever get there, because the line is infinite on either end. It goes on forever and it never stops, such is the idea of time, one continuous collective consciousness that will continue beyond the life of our species and our planet. Or will it? There is no understanding, scientific or religious, that is going to bring you any better sense of how the universe works, or why gravity exists. Yet they are still questions that are asked and "answered". If we identify ourselves along that line of time, then we can see ourselves as one, simply travelling across the vector of time until our death. Ideology is what brings the line to a screeching halt. Ideas/creative thought/instincts/anything we internalize cannot be defined by time, because we are not subject to time.
The point is this: At any given moment, you can choose to be anyone you want to be. That opens up a universe of possibility.

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