Doing the Unstuck

[oneirophrenia]

Idaknow...I've been feeling pretty shitty for the past two days. Not horrible, mind you--I've often felt much, much worse--but I'm not at all happy right now. Luckily, I know the reasons behind this sophtware slump and I can now begin editing them permanently out of my programming, since (for once!) they are all well within my power to excise.\

Simplification is the order of the day: the Zen Buddhist ideal of shrugging off all wanting and not wanting, and becoming entirely pristine and clear as a mechanical switch, kinetic energy flowing in and out nonstop and unimpeded by any overly-convoluted logic gates, stimulus/response...not one stimulus out of place, nor any response. The Platonic Ideal of the mechanical cell.

I'm working hard to become, in Herbie Hancock's words, "the Perfect Machine"--but not some kind of incredibly complex, quantum-processing supercomputer that can multitask a billion things at once (which is what I sure as hell was for the past six months, and I can't even begin to tell you how tiring that is).

I'm thinking more along the lines of a simple Victorian automaton, a coin-operated boy if you will: for every denomination dropped in, you'll get a certain set reaction that involves no thinking, no wanting, no dreaming, no expectations, no hopes, no fretting, no wondering, no consideration, no thought at all.

I have found the Zen ideal I've striven for in the last months perfectly embodied in the concept of the clockwork man. Time to once and for all throw out the last of the messy organics and all their mindboggling, hormone-and-instinct-fueled bullshit and replace them all with beautiful, highly-polished gearwork...much as in that dream I had several months ago, in which the facade of the world peeled away to reveal all the gummed-up, rusted Babbage-works that make existence so damned incomprehensible. I, on the other hand, wrenched open my chest and found nothing but well-oiled motors and pendulums, ticking away pleasantly with a minimum of motion and no management whatsoever.

I think I'll go and listen to Doubting Thomas' "Clocks," now.

Comments

[ex-wolff493.livejournal.com]

I've been depressed too. And for some reason your post doesn't help :P
I think something is in the air.

[oneirophrenia.livejournal.com]

It could be....It's about this time of the year that the Seasonal Effective Disorder really takes hold. Though I'm pretty sure I know exactly what's been dragging my ass down of late, and I've already started cleaning it out of my gears, as it were. Nothing major, mind you: just some pointless emotional entanglements that need never have been made in the first place--annoying, temporary distractions on the road to a greater metallic purity, that's all!

[beeporama.livejournal.com]

I don't think that Zen means discarding emotions, although letting go of desire can seem that way. The important thing is mindfulness, being self-aware. Rather than shrugging off an emotion, you should be aware you have it, and aware of where it came from, and you should accept it being there. A good exercise is to, next time you feel an itch, don't scratch: just be mindful of the itch.

[oneirophrenia.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm definitely not dumping my emotional capacity--as much as sometimes I would friggin' LOVE to--because...well, it's hardwired into me *and* emotional response is, after all, one of the founding elements of artistic creativity...and I'll be damned if I'm gonna lose that! What I seek to become is, just like you put it, mindful and completely self-aware of my thought processes in order to simplify my reactions as much as is humanly possible. Even emotional reactions I despise I just accept for being what they are...but rather than let them cascade into an overly-complicated chainreaction of mysterious results, I'm striving to reduce all possible actions of Mind to a bare minimum of possible reaction states, each of which in its basic nature is completely pure, easy to understand by myself *and* others, and lacking in confusing gray areas. Not that gray areas ultimately can't exist as defined by the overlapping or interaction of basic forms, but ultimately I want to reach a point where I no longer have to question ANY of my actions or reactions for validity.

I've seriously been thinking of putting down my philosophy of life one day in a piece entitled "The Binary Life." Even when you ultimately squeeze everything down into a matter of 1s and 0s, there's still a surprising amount of room for very intricate, higher-order thoughts and emotions rising up out of a very pristine, mechanistic base via emergent order. I mean...with just 1s and 0s, humanity has built the wonder of LiveJournal *and* Final Fantasy X!