When people like myself have idle time, nothing to do necessary for survival, they begin to search for meaning. This search is always creating new results. These are some of mine from the last year:
1. “No rules.” Influenced by “Harold and Maude” and Cat Stevens, “no rules” is the idea that humans have tons of freedom and choice -- as Cat says, “You can make it all true And you can make it undo.”
2. "The machine.” One might consider this the countermovement to “no rules;” it is the idea that we have no free will. The machine was my reaction to psychology: thoughts arise as a result of neural connections, and there is no “one" making these connections happen. The machine is about understanding people’s complexity and validity, but it does this by objectifying the human experience. It says that our conception of self is valid because there is a logical set of experiences that lead us to believe in it.
3. "The sunflower.” The sunflower emerged one night as a reaction to “machine” thought; a turn from mechanism to beauty. The stem of the sunflower is similar to the machine, but the beautiful aspect of the machine that takes into account all of the complexity behind every thought and feeling we have; the many layers of the subconscious mind. Still though, no free will in that stem. So why do we have this overwhelming feeling that we really are in control of our lives?
Because we are! This sense of self-control and freedom live in the blossom of the sunflower. It exists within the truth of our complexity -- within a greater objectivity, there is this subjective sunshine. Standing on the blossom of the sunflower is being present in your life. The sunflower implies a freedom similar to that of “no rules,” but with a greater context, more awareness of what creates “self.
The machine and sunflower both encourage one to analyze themselves, to understand themselves. Recently, I’ve been questioning all of the analyses I have come to believe about my personality. Things like “I don’t believe in plans” or “I never know how I am going to feel about something” or “I like to organize my internal world.” I don’t understand the truth about any of us, in part because the truth is always changing.* These thoughts feed into my most recent life philosophy.
4. “Taking things out of boxes.” This one is about deconstructing what we think we know because what we really know is that things are changing and our perspectives are, by nature, biased. I find it impossible to stop analyzing things. But to me, taking things out of boxes does not mean no longer putting them in boxes. It means three things: unsealing old closed boxes, not sealing new boxes when you put things in them, and (when necessary) removing things from the unsealed boxes. That is, staying open to new perspectives and allowing your ideas to shift.
Life philosophies one and four are about being open and free in your internal world. Two and three deal with a challenge to this idea of freedom. Maybe these aren’t life philosophies, but philosophies of internal freedom. And perhaps the trend of these four is a trend that can be applied to other things: one, a resting place, two, a challenge, three, a resolution, and four, return to the place of rest.
*That’s where the Fear of Human Completion comes into play again (that is, the fear that releasing a physical manifestation of yourself at any moment will create the illusion that some part of yourself is complete, unchanging).
