My preoccupation at the moment lies in trying to better understand the nature of the othered aspect of myself, the part which crafts the world/my experiences. The questions I’m working on at the moment are: is it self aware as I am self aware? Does it contemplate me as I contemplate it? Am I mysterious to it as it is mysterious to me - or does it “know” me? Is it emotional or indifferent? What is the nature of our current connection? Does it function as a series of algorithms might or is it more nuanced? If I managed to merge with it tomorrow - to what extent would “I” still be “me”? What would I care about if that occurred?
I’m not sure how much headway I’m making with these questions to be honest. Thinking about them, though, has made me realised that I have made assumptions about my othered self, and that these assumptions affect my capacity to manifest things.
One area where I have experienced occasional success lies in willing traffic to improve. When I examined my success in this area I realised two things that my success was always accompanied by:
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a deep conviction that bad traffic was valueless
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a sense that traffic, no traffic, the world wasn’t going to be ground-shakingly altered
So why was this important, why would these factors need to be satisfied in order for me to will things different?
And then it hit me - it’s because I lack trust in myself and my capacity to make a “good,” impressive world. I have accorded my othered self a privileged position, whereby I consider it a better crafter of worlds than myself. Basically, in my mind, I’m the kid drawing stick figures and it’s Van Gogh.
And the artist idea isn’t just a metaphor - I am quite literally fairly meh at drawing or any other artistic venture and I struggle to visualise in detail. Things I imagine have a fuzziness to them. Meanwhile, my othered self produces this world with its dizzying degree of detail, blades of grass, swirling dust motes, light and shadow, etc.
And since, visually and artistically, I can’t compete with that othered part of me - I guess I extrapolated from that that I can’t compete with it in any area. If it was better than me at the visual stuff, wouldn’t it be better than I at crafting every aspect of my experience? If I interfered - would it be like splattering a big red paint mark across The Starry Night?
Well, looking at it logically, I can see the potential flaws in my assumptions. Being good at one thing is never a guarantee that you’ll be good at another. And whatever unconscious awe I’ve been regarding my subconscious with, there clearly are situations where I have decided that it’s wrong - traffic being one of them. God I hate traffic.
So I suppose what I’ve taken from this is that as an awareness I’m currently saddled with an inferiority complex which hamstrings me when I try to change my experience. My success is usually accompanied by extreme irritation - something has to look really, really pointless and stupid in order for me to be able to magically alter it. And I have to feel like I’m not changing things too much, lest I’m making a big, clumsy mess. So perhaps achieving greater success, with less requisite-angst, lies in more critically querying the pedestal I’ve placed my othered self on.
Over the years my respect for the artists has only increased even though I don’t consider myself much of an artist.
This might sound lame, but here goes anyway, I also got a bit of a boost after taking an art history and appreciation class at a community college once. I forget the exact title of the class, but I remember the contents, not in terms of the specifics, but in terms of how they impressed me. What I realized is that all this stuff I previously thought was just mindless choosing between thicker and thinner arms and noses, was not at all mindless, and that behind many seemingly insignificant details of the art there lay a very deep and sustained thought, not just of one person, but often thought that embeds itself into art history of the world. For example, our teacher was explaining to us that just as there was a secret movement to study cadavers for medical purposes (it had to be secret because the society looked down on ‘desecrating’ the remains), the artists also got to study them, and as a result there was a progression toward more and more realistic muscle tone depiction in the art. I thought that was interesting. So something in the art was also connected to our history of medicine, and even religion.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2016-10-20 15:54:10 (d8zxgqf)