SK:
I would think that there’d be have to be SOME personal satisfaction, right? Some feeling that what one is doing is “right” or whatever, just from the feelings inside their gut that drive them. I mean, if you’re engaged in a committed quest, with your entire life from day to day, to perfect your understanding of beauty and truth, you have to take into your findings everything from your day to day life - how aesthetically beautiful (viscerally pleasing, comforting), and true (mentally pleasing, affirming) it was. Your creative drive would be worth nothing to you OR to the world if the sum of pleasure (beauty + truth) you derived from your life experience was negative. You have to work at it, yeah, obviously. But you have to be kind to yourself too, or else all you’d turn out would be worthless garbage (if “you” is fundamentally the drive to understand the beauty and truth of this world etc. to its fullest).
And…I guess while theoretically, the singular drive to better ourselves and the world should be the only affecting thing in our lives, that’s simply not the case. Like it or not, everything else around us affects us too - I guess that’s what personal “strength” is, to be able to not be affected by anything else but what we’re doing, to keep our eye on the prize, as it were - or is it the ability to fool ourselves into thinking we’re not actually deeply affected? I don’t know. We need to be mindful, too. It’s why I’m so reluctant to shut up about this, because allowing all that “other stuff” like mood swings, surroundings, friendships, our personal situation…to affect us might in fact be important to furthering our and the world’s understanding of beauty and truth as we know it.
I’m thinking of the movie, A Beautiful Mind, where the mathematician’s (his name escapes me…) economic theory came to him in a flash while he was out drinking with his buddies and having a good time; yeah, it was Hollywood, it was a movie…but there’s some import to be found in that. I think.
Sin:
“While I do agree it takes strength to take on something new, it doesn’t take strength to mindlessly take something new just for taking something new. If you do that, you have a certain amount of strength to realize that you want to get rid of the shit but you have no idea what you’re getting into, what the challenges are going to be, and its surviving those challenges that will be the real test of strength.”
I agree completely. Mindlessly doing ANYTHING is usually a recipe for disaster. But minds are tricky, complicated things, too, as anybody who studies psychology can tell you. You can have the most devotion and strength in the world, but it’s worth nothing if you don’t focus it toward the right place, you know? And minds, often reciting mantras like “no pain, no gain,” can convince a person to commit to courses of action full of pain, full of hardship that’ll crush them to pieces and not be helpful to the world at ALL. That’s why I think SK’s post was really awesome, because he reversed the order of that common platitude - “You don’t need draining moments for creative force to emerge. It’s the other way around. Creative force, in and of itself, drains one.” No gain, no pain. Thinking about it this way makes people direct their mindfulness (and thus actions) toward things helpful to the world and beneficial to their drive to help the world FIRST, rather than throwing themselves into pain and hope that the “character” they might derive from it will be at all helpful to anything. And then, yeah, as you said, surviving those challenges is the real test of strength. But I sincerely believe that every person alive has within them hidden reserves of strength and drive that are simply incompatible with the lives they’ve lead - they crushed themselves into mediocrity, they weren’t born mediocre. So yes, mindfulness is very important, but we must be careful about what we’re mindful of. And if we’re being mindful, and we see ourselves in a situation in which we know we’ll crush ourselves into mediocrity IF WE STAY ANOTHER MOMENT LONGER, then the only mindful thing to do is get the fuck out of there, even if we have no idea what we’re getting ourselves into.
"Strength is a rebellion against complacency…Those people are weak and those people don’t have accomplishments because they don’t try to achieve anything because they don’t care about differentiating themselves from everyone else. "
I can’t argue this point at all. However, I think it’s not entirely their fault. Well yes, it is entirely their fault, but if we truly care about accomplishing things to further the collective human knowledge, for ALL people, and not just for accomplishing things to make ourselves look good, then isn’t it only fair to humanity that we help them out? Help them put themselves in a place in their minds where they DO try to achieve things, where they do care about differentiating themselves from everyone else? And then, taking that one step further, isn’t it only fair to humanity to help ourselves put ourselves in a place in our minds where we can try to achieve things? I mean, it’s much easier to tell other people (and ourselves!) that if we repeatedly fail to accomplish what we want, that we’re worthless and can never succeed because we don’t have the drive; but all that’d do is drive them and ourselves even further into the dust of mediocrity. Everybody can become strong - but we also have to be mindful of where we are now, before we can do that. That’s what I meant with my whole ahimsa spiel.
