Stories of Overcoming and Transcendence

Hello my fellow philosopher-squires,

I know that I struggle with many aspects of life development, but I know that sometimes we can find paths that prove rewarding. I am just curious about what others have done to find paths that seem rewarding.

What has excited and propelled you the most throughout your life development?

What circumstance seems to allow you to interact with the rest of the world with the greatest amount of rapport?

Can you describe a point in your life struggles that proved to be a breakthrough in your life development?

Leave your stories in the comments below.

“Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes” is a Plot against You

I was thinking, well not so much thinking as having a gut feeling, that playing the stimulating video game on my iPhone would give me some insight into life somehow. We might not think these days that video games provide any benefits other than entertainment or certain cognitive training, but it actually did something for me. It clued me into an insight into why we are so lost in our present world.

We crave stimulation in our lives. That we know. A craving might represent a lack of something, as in a street urchin wolfing down a charity dinner, but it might also represent an overabundance of something, as in our insatiable appetite for more junk food as Americans. Thus we must discern which one presents us today.When we think of how we were raised in the West, it was always a matter of course that we were presented with option after option in our lives. Commercial after commercial. Quiz after quiz. Career after career. It did not seem that the possibilities had an end, and so we had no ground from which to project ourselves. We were pulled and pulled by the sights and sounds, as though we were in a candy shop. We learned to love the empty calories of the empty promises of modern life.

Empty calories are dangerous. They are dangerous not so much because of their negative effects, but because of their positive effects. They bring us stimulation and mental sedation, a rest from the trials that present themselves to us. We like them because they stop us from feeling real feelings. They bring us a cloudy composure to obscure what we really feel.

We know that the empty calories of modern life are problematic. But is it their mere overabundance that brings us mediocrity? What alternative do we have?

Just asking that question reveals the spiritual barrenness of modern life. What options do we have other than buying the newest product, studying for the upcoming test, or applying for a job that we will probably hate? Is there more to life than that?

We may say that we want love, but our modern world tells us again and again how loved we are. From participation awards to diversity festivals to helicopter parenting, it seems as though we are loved more than ever. But what foundation does that provide? When we are unconditionally loved, that implies that each choice of ours is worth just as much as any other choice. So we hop from one stimulating thing to the next, hoping for guidance, but no guidance comes.

Where do we find true satisfaction? We used to find it in taking up our parents’ legacy and building upon it. But our parents told us we could do whatever we wanted. They didn’t tell us that we had a land to cultivate. They didn’t tell us we had a home to maintain. They didn’t tell us that we had a vocation to continue. Most importantly, they didn’t tell us that we had a long lineage to uphold, nor that that lineage was part of a greater part of a community or ethnic group, or indeed a race.

We thereby have nothing to protect, nothing to uphold, and no sense of direction. The ground upon which we stand can be taken from us, so we do not cultivate anything of nutritional value, of a value that can be measured by the gravity with which it is presented. It was presented to us, instead, with a value implicitly equal to anything else. Thus our inheritance became wastelands while we danced from whimsy to whimsy. Squatters came and turned the wastelands into slums.

And now I will dance back to my video game. Maybe I will get around to cleaning the slums tomorrow.

Emotional Resilience in the Face of Recurring Turbulence

It is quite difficult to move on when so many things have turned against you and you haven’t been prepared to act in a healthy manner towards turbulence, but it is something that must be done. It is something that we all encounter, and something that will bring us more development as human beings if we are able to learn from them. But it does drive you to hopelessness if it seems to recur over and over again. That is when true despair sets in.

Hopefully we can find memories of things going in our favor to tell us that better circumstances are possible. It will prove heartbreaking if we can’t find it. We have to keep going. The only thing that disables a heart is paralyzation, and that cannot be true. There is often a part of a beating heart pumping life back into us if we are just able to hear its beat.

That beat sends us messages if we are able to listen, and reminds us of the things that have brought us life. We need to feel those things, if we are to be anything approaching beautiful. People don’t like looking at ugly things, and we are no exception. Only our rotten hearts, trodden in the mud, often pump our face full of the blackness of death. But that cannot last if we are to tend to the part of our hearts that still has vitality.

So I lie here, writing this rambling text, finding myself touched by the innocent (?) memories of my childhood, humbling me in their simplicity. I have a platform to stand on, if only I just remember that something is holding me up.

My Greatest Wound

A deep wound is something to behold. It will be covered by a scab. It might get infected. But I don’t know what will happen when I intervene in its healing.

That is a predicament that faces me right now. There is something to which I want to return my mental energy, but I dare not. The minute I begin my journey backwards into this memory of traumatic landmines, the worst of me comes to the fore. I become angry and wrathful, something that has limited my vitality. I must not return to such thoughts.

The memory that grips me with such passion involves my confrontations with my dad while he was deplorably absent while drinking. It was the beginning of my quick temper, but not the end.

I reacted to his behavior with both blood and tears, but they went unheeded for a very long time, time enough for me to become profoundly detached from affection for my dad.

Now I am being asked to help him quit drinking, something he says he wants to do. He has declared this before–many, many times–which means my hope in this area has been tempered by the strike of hammer after hammer over the years. Just thinking about it dampens my general sense of hope for the world. That is something that has hampered my progress throughout the years, and so I must not pursue the trains of thought of the past but must reach towards a better future attitude. Thus I must learn to expose myself to trauma again and reach for an understanding of my past in a new light, a light of greater hope.

But I don’t want my hope to be dashed again. That is why I fear picking at my wound healing from an infection. I have it relatively under control, and I don’t want gangrene to spread. I don’t want to lose hope forever. I will not pick at the scab.

Gratitude as a Force Multiplier

How many times have you been told to say thank you? So many, many times, in all likelihood. I will not try to scold you into saying those magic words, but there are good reasons for having an attitude of gratitude. Many times, the most peremptory notions are discarded as being old-fashioned or empty, but I consider these notions to hold more than their literal meaning.

When you have a sense of gratitude, you see more things coming your way than going against you. You are able to see the many ways the universe is working in your favor, and this can’t but help give your personality fuel to go to work for others, paying forward all of the benefits that have accrued. Karma and statistics say that more things would come your way the more you give sincerely to others.

And the more people give back to you, the more you will be able to give back to them, as well as invest in others. You can see how this would mean a cascading effect of rewards going in all directions. The sense of support will grow and grow within you, and your place in the world will feel evermore secure in the face of many challenges, challenges that used to seem daunting when you lacked a sense of abundant support but that now seem less risky and more likely to succeed. The possibilities open up since your discovery of gratitude in your life.

That is not the only extent of the possibilities, however. You might see connections between you and other people that you’ve never seen before. You will see their positive qualities and how they have impacted your life in positive ways. You will see fewer and fewer divisions and less and less distance between you and other people. Those connections will begin to feel like strings that when plucked will seem like harmonious chords of bonding.

Perhaps when you get to the point at which these chords begin to resonate with you, that is the moment you fall in love. Then your life will carry a much deeper meaning, a meaning that has more real impact upon your life than any intellectual fancy, any material object, or any accolades from the public. You know you have come to meet the companion with whom you can experience life itself, in its totality and without compartmentalization.

Renegade Manifesto

As a misfit, I have the skills of a renegade. It is time I put those skills to good use to help my fellow renegades fight their way through life and make a society fit for them and those around them. Nothing will stop us but ourselves. Let’s learn to clear the path in our minds.

Uncle TBerg wants you!

Enlist to fight in the renegade army today.

Don’t let them kill you.

Don’t let them kill you.

“They” want you to die.

They give you drugs and alcohol to distract you from their plots.

They want to humiliate you by making you beg instead of rob them.

They claim to love you, yet give you food that makes you content with growing weaker.

They say they give you information, yet the media is bursting at the seams with marketing and public relations.
They want to give you free stuff, yet this leads you to beg instead of rob them.

But I have another plan.

You eat and drink things that help you see more clearly the prison around you.

You scope out vulnerabilities in the system and plan your takeover.

You make fellow inmates eat their vegetables. Over time, their blood sugar will rebalance, and they will begin to see what you see.

You make them barter or pay for whatever they get. They will learn the value of work when they work for their survival.

And both you and they will feel more connected with the reality and energy of life than they ever felt.

The Journey of Desperation

I am feeling pretty desperate right now.  I can’t lie.  I am trying to ramshackle my life and soul together at the moment, and it is hard, really hard.  I can say for certain that I have made many mistakes, terrible, unspeakable mistakes that have led me to this position, but let’s see if I can turn this feeling into something productive to help me and anyone else in a similar situation.  I have to find a way to avoid compounding the problem with risky, desperate measures.

First, let’s examine the origin of the desperation.  I know that my desperation comes from a fundamentally insecure vision of my place in the world.  It is hard for me to feel like I have a whole lot of ground to stand on, because I feel a disconnection from the people who I am supposed to rely upon.  But I know that disconnection has an illusory element to it that makes it more my problem than theirs.  I know that if I hug and convey my deepest feelings to them, without engaging the spikes on my protective shell, that it will probably be a productive experience.  I just have to take the time to uncover feelings that were there all along.  Those feelings will pull me towards people rather than the opposite.

Since I know they would be on my side if I were able to open up to them, I know that they would respect my own journey in trying to walk step by step towards a stronger vantage point.  While opening myself up emotionally, I also become more open intellectually and practically.  Love seems to be the master category that allows us to do what we thought  we could never do.  If love is thought of as psychological attachment, then love of something could be considered the mental glue that makes things stick in the mind.

What should stick in the mind to give me hope?  Grand visions can do the job, but they can also encourage grandiose desperation.  When I am not in a healthy frame of mind instilled with the love of reality itself, then demonic dreams can easily take me away and make me feel as though  there really is a tug of war between the devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other.  It is quite bipolar.

Nietzsche put it this way:

The more he seeketh to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthward, downward, into the dark and deep—into the evil.”

“Yea, into the evil!” cried the youth. “How is it possible that thou hast discovered my soul?”

Zarathustra smiled, and said: “Many a soul one will never discover, unless one first invent it.”

“Yea, into the evil!” cried the youth once more. “Thou saidst the truth, Zarathustra. I trust myself no longer since I sought to rise into the height, and nobody trusteth me any longer; how doth that happen? I change too quickly: my to-day refuteth my yesterday. I often overleap the steps when I clamber; for so doing, none of the steps pardons me. When aloft, I find myself always alone. No one speaketh unto me; the frost of solitude maketh me tremble. What do I seek on the height? My contempt and my longing increase together; the higher I clamber, the more do I despise him who clambereth. What doth he seek on the height? How ashamed I am of my clambering and stumbling! How I mock at my violent panting! How I hate him who flieth! How tired I am on the height!”

Here the youth was silent. And Zarathustra contemplated the tree beside which they stood, and spake thus: “This tree standeth lonely here on the hills; it hath grown up high above man and beast. And if it wanted to speak, it would have none who could understand it: so high hath it grown. Now it waiteth and waiteth,—for what doth it wait? It dwelleth too close to the seat of the clouds; it waiteth perhaps for the first lightning?”

But there is something more than that.  There is the ability to see common beauty and decency everywhere I go.  It is possible for the world to open itself up to possibilities beyond the grandiose and the morbid.  The world is more than black and white, and I need to be able to see a greater spectrum of color.  With a deeper connection to reality itself, I know I can begin to notice them.  I will just have to look outside of my ramshackle shack.

Nietzsche Gives Marketing Advice

 

Do you understand human nature?  If you are interested in success in the world of entrepreneurship, then it is a necessity.  You can’t market product to people you don’t understand.  Some of the marketing books can give you a guide, but I find that you can find a lot of advice for the most cutting-edge products and masterpieces can be found in great works from long ago.

Let us take this passage in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, for instance:

No people could live without first valuing; if a people will maintain itself, however, it must not value as its neighbour valueth. Much that passed for good with one people was regarded with scorn and contempt by another: thus I found it. Much found I here called bad, which was there decked with purple honours. Never did the one neighbour understand the other: ever did his soul marvel at his neighbour’s delusion and wickedness.

A table of excellencies hangeth over every people. Lo! it is the table of their triumphs; lo! it is the voice of their Will to Power.

It is laudable, what they think hard; what is indispensable and hard they call good; and what relieveth in the direst distress, the unique and hardest of all,—they extol as holy.

This forcefully lays out one of the fundamental realities of entrepreneurship: Know your constituency.  After you know what your potential customers want, then you begin to have an idea of how to approach the development of your idea into something that will meet the demands of the people you have in mind.  You will know what they love, what they hate, what they wish they had m, and what they wish they didn’t have.  You need to understand your group of people before you will be able to persuade them to take any course of action, whether it be commercial or, indeed, political.  You must understand them before you can even begin to approach anyone about anything.  Thus you find your niche by finding understanding of a group of people.

Nietzsche warns against a kind of rejection of this reality, a reality that seems so distant and fearsome to so many who might have an idea but who might want to disregard the tastes and feelings of their chosen group.  Who ever wanted to listen to an emo kid or a cranky old man?  Anyway, getting back to Nietzsche’s words:

Older is the pleasure in the herd than the pleasure in the ego: and as long as the good conscience is for the herd, the bad conscience only saith: ego.

Verily, the crafty ego, the loveless one, that seeketh its advantage in the advantage of many—it is not the origin of the herd, but its ruin.

It therefore seems not only socially disastrous, but disturbing for the individual soul, to strike out against the group.  Think about it.  You think that your endeavor deserves to be respected on its own terms, but that attitude cannot help but turn the group away.  A healthy person does not put all of their worth into what people say about them but finds those to whom they can relate in a manner without opposition.  You should have a connection to you niche, and you should value that connection.

Women Control the Party Now…and They Play Dirty

Remember when feminists complained time after time about the existence of a glass ceiling that prevented them from assuming the very top positions? After the disclosure of Democratic National Committee emails, that paradigm can be tossed aside in many circumstances. What we saw was the effort by women to use their institutional power to push the candidacy of a man to the sidelines of public discourse.

Bernie Sanders did not threaten them at all as women. You can tell by the kind of woman that he chose as a wife that he is a quintessential beta, desirous to make his wife proud in the public eye. You can tell that he has never been the kind of man to be domineering and demanding of his prerogatives. You can tell that his heart bleeds for the suffering of the lowliest person and that he is prompted to take the lowly side in every issue.

But that was not good enough for the female Democratic Establishment. We now know of the general attitude of the office of Debbie Wasserman Schultz. We know that her institutional power was used to push the media against Bernie Sanders. And we know that she was not beneath playing a dirty game against him.

But that’s not all. Hillary Clinton began her campaign with the implication that you need to support her because she is a woman. That implied that anyone who stood in her way could be cast aside as a sexist. Women all over the media concurred, saying that a Clinton victory was an essential step in the advancement of women everywhere, without regard for the nonexistent nature of policy differences regarding women’s rights.

The Establishment decided to double-down, with Gloria Steinem condescending to supporters of Bernie Sanders as simple “bros” and ” fangirls.” Furthermore, Madaline Albright told female voters that there was a “special place in hell” for women who do not support the advancement of other women. The fucking voters just need to know their roles, goddamnit.

And so we come back the the Democratic National Committee. Donna Brazile returned to her job as Chairwoman on an interim basis. How many glass ceilings have women danced upon and have used as a position to fire pot shots and pour fiery oil upon their chosen victims? We will wait and see. Clearly there is a such thing as a New Girls Club.