deprecation

Another day of rain came to the local Starbucks coffee shop to write about self-deprecation.

To be able to write about the self, it is needed to be able to visualize it so it becomes an imaginable 

object that can be looked at from different angles. Self, alone is the story write of daily life. 

It is paradoxical that the eye of the mind can look through the self to the world to act in a certain way by making decisions and also it is able to look into the self to find out about the self. The lens that looks outward can hardly study itself. That is why it is more sensible to understand the self by looking outwards and seeing different pieces of it reflected in the outside world.

In a daily scene of life, the mind looks outwards looking for things to do. Things that resemble a need that can be satisfied through the outer world objects. Now the question is what would a healthy mind look for? is the goal of the mind to survive? to grow? to experience hardship? or to kill itself?

Maybe a nihilistic point of view would say all these are equally valuable and their value is none. That point of view results in this derivation of results but will not get anything done. It is an untruthful way of thinking if the person is spending time in this form of living and using the outer world to satisfy their need to be. One can say the need for survival is coming out of desperation and the resulting pain but that does not mean it is valueless. The point of desperation is an alarming point that the thinking mind and body are asking for some answer because the need was not answered for such a long time. 

A reasonable way of looking at the outer world is by finding a balance to stay away from extreme actions. A healthy self is trying to find its way of being by sculpting itself based on the understanding of needs and the spectrum of feelings. The extremes are marker points and after checking the boundaries of extremities, the best way for the self to survive is to deprecate itself and operate in a healthy zone.

Easy to say but the self is such a complex object and there are many dimensions to explore. In each interaction and therefore reflection, there are multiple directions and actions that can be taken. This makes the process of finding the balance harder. Finding different variables and balancing them may at first look like an easy task to do and finding the first few may look like finding the absolute answer. Especially when the findings are through a refined source like a distilled book. Sooner or later, the teacher of life finds the self drifting, one more time, to explore another dimension of being and hit the extreme of it.

Life becomes easier when one finds the hardships of life are a natural process of growth and by paying enough attention to them, the recurrent dysfunctional loops of self-deprecation can be resolved and healthier ones can be replaced. Healthy ones take away the unusable habits and ways of thinking and make room for new pieces of the self to grow. New pieces which will need more polishing later but their overall efficiency is better than the ways of the desperate self.

birthday

 Hi

Today is almost my birthday. It is a birthday celebration of being born once more on this planet. A different place and different culture but almost exactly the same feeling. The deaf feeling of needing to communicate. It manifested itself in finding its way of gaining value by making my roommates feel distant from me. I remember how lovely they were but the fact that there was a language barrier between us stopped us from getting closer than a certain distance. Funny that language is what fills up the empty space between us humans. It can initiate itself but whether or not it wants to land is its own business. It can make a spark between two and end up becoming a brick wall between them. No matter how hard they try, the darn language knows its way of making us feel truly distant from each other. 

It all seems beautiful to me. The way life finds its way in teaching us more and more by taking away from us what we thought we had and letting us focus on the details to realize how much of it was missing. It's the way the master wants to teach. None of us know what is our role and position and it wants to teach us. Teach us by making us feel small. By breaking the selfish ego that we built by control. By the fear of losing. It wants us to lose so many times that we understand the probability of losing and winning is not a random function. It's a function that is driven by many events and not only summarized in a causal way. It is made in a way to paint a picture. The picture is made out of many elements that unfold and find their way to blossom. 

Sometimes I can feel its electric taste. The taste burns the mouth and makes the mind wander. A reason, a way to justify being without feeling too guilty. I celebrate tonight with many things. Went swimming after work. Talked to a gentleman at the pool and talked to a lovely lady in the store. Made myself dinner and bought me a gift. A gift that I call it Cupcake. Spending this night thinking about all the names of the people who found their way into my life in the past five years.

Invisible

What would the world be if there was no money involved in the transactions?

I am talking about a world that has gone through that change and has gotten stabilized. Of course, in the transition from a world that operates with money to everything for free, there will be a lot of gluttony and greed involved for the ones who were feeling oppressed by the barriers. But then for how long one can sustain the pain and suffering caused by excessive indulgences? 

The regulating factor to make sure society behaves right is to make sure suffering towards the formation of something with a higher goal is present. This will adjust the judgments of the selves in an angle to think for working towards a goal. Money is the materialized form of value that is assigned to people to gain freedom. In a society where money is removed, personal feelings would take over the values of each one. On the bright side, it will be more even to have people making decisions based on what they really want rather than what money allows them or dictates to them, but on the other hand, the social structure will be dissolved and not everyone is able to make the best decisions for themselves. There will still be a form of group identity that dictates what is good and what is bad. What is desirable and what is undesired. It also will allow more extremes of emotions to be experienced. To feel is not an easy thing to do especially when faced with the transparency of no social structure. Reality tastes bitter and bitterness is one of the tastes that demands to be felt when one starts feeling. 

On one hand one can argue being a part of a big system that allows for certain forms of freedom and constraints people to give them a fake but just form of reality can be desirable and on the other hand, it must be asked what is the meaning of being if we prefer pretending over experiencing the whole spectrum of reality.

The reality of being a human being can be described as living in an art machine that can entrap us from experiencing certain parts of reality by taking part in the work of other artists which allowed themselves to experience darker colors of reality. Or a choice to make to become one of those artists. To allow ourselves to experience devalued feelings that were taken away from us by putting frightening labels. Feelings like being looked down, ugly, poor, etc. that we tend to overcompensate for them.

Tribute

 There's a big obstacle in front of every artist and writer. Or in a more broad term creator. Anyone who can initiate something and wait for it to grow would fit under this umbrella term.

Usually, we have tasted other similar things that were created by other people and that made us think maybe we can also create. Even if it wasn't a direct influence, at the time of creation what comes to mind is a comparison with the most similar thing in our mind. Our perfectionist mind assigns value based on the highest value in the market to something that maybe has not even been created yet. That causes self-judgment which may even stop the flow of creativity for a while. 'For a while', only if one can successfully understand that the process of growth takes a long way to accomplish. And what happens, does not receive much attention and value till time passes and gives meaning to the work. 

Even sometimes, the meaning behind a piece of art is to show the struggle of the artist on the path of personal growth. It's ugly. It is valuable and beautiful in its own way but it may not pass the standards of the artist anymore.

That's when we realize everything we want to own, demands payment. The payment is a tribute to ugliness to gain something valuable. Then, this payment becomes easier to fulfill. It becomes a way of being. Like paying the rent or a loan to have some privilege. A fine brush of ugliness to cover up for what reality demands. 

The machine of the economy is supposed to provide a way of making these transactions happen. It is the value that is assigned to the people of each economy that tells how much ugliness they have to tolerate to gain a unit of value.

Money is a way we can create moments of time, commodities, knowledge, etc. by using a machine that is created in the outside world. A way of demanding, organizing, and planning in a reasonable way to be independent but at the same time in some sense, connected to rest of the society.

Differences

 It's a funny part of human nature to be selfish. It comes with a ton of nuances and consequences and it takes many years to understand this blessing/damnation. One of the consequences of selfishness which is mentioned in the story of Narcis is humans end up liking only what seems to be the most similar to themselves. The extreme of it is unhealthy and ends up with narcissism which comes with self-centeredness and takes us away from having productive social interactions. The result of it is putting something forward more than it has to be and interestingly enough it is not the opposite of sacrifice. Too much sacrifice can also be carrying certain notes of narcissism. I want to skip this and get to what I feel is one of the more pronounced and costly consequences of selfishness. Dealing with other people is a collision of two different worlds of values, history, and ideologies. 

Time does not allow this understanding of differences to happen immediately. It takes a lot of interactions to pass through the surface and reach to the core differences and because of that, the first naive assumption is to think of others exactly as us. To project our own way of thinking into them and think they are the same as us. What comes with this way of thinking is our unresolved issues come to the surface when someone starts mirroring us. A self-initiated problem that is rooted in our own problems and is projected to the outer world through our mind and perceived by our eyes and felt through our own emotions. Maybe it is a corrective action for life to make us deal with ourselves and polish us. We are the highest detailed works of matter we have ever encountered and we are always evolving. 

The brushes of the creator paint the painting of being with different brushes. On the largest scale, the evolution of matter takes billions of years, and then millions of years are spent on the evolution of species to reach us. The finer brushes happen to paint our behavior and language and it is all an evolving process the perfect the work of Art. 

The differences between humans and their inherent self-centeredness due to their outward projected perspective causes friction between the different characters of the story of life. These collisions continue until they become smooth like the surface of the rocks that come to the shore by the waves of water.

Today I was listening to the song Suzzane by Leonard Cohen and a line of its lyrics goes:

He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them

The way it is looking at social interactions as sailing in the sea to me is beautifully accurate. A way of being captured and imprisoned by a goddess who is demanding the sailors feel humiliated against the waves and fear of feeling drowned in the water or losing the way in the place where no one is around for the longest distance. Until they understand what it means to be. Until they find out what was missing from their life and it is the experience.

Values

Some say the economy is governed by a master equation that is in the control of the government. It is easy to dismiss the chaotic and non-linear behavior of the outside world and neglectfully assume that the value of objects can be assigned through a formula. To understand the economy it is needed to step back and take a look at the world through a fish-eye lens that can cover a massive picture of many agents and thinking minds who assign values to certain desires of themselves. Business owners at the base, are the ones who are the closest to using a mathematically descriptive formula to assign values. 

In the world of business, money which is rooted in numbers governs the decisions. Dealing with numbers allows optimization to happen. A process in which many factors come together to maximize a certain measurable benefit. A way of balancing the amount of time, energy, and resources spent to manufacture a product with a certain amount of equivalent gold. So that the people who are involved can benefit from the process of selling their time to gain the freedom to buy things that they would not be able to normally attain. For example, spending some time in the office to be able to buy a trip to a distant land. Or working in a retail place to be able to pay for education, which is a form of investment to be able to have a better hand of cards in the future with a safer possibility of attaining more value.

This happens to be counteracting sometimes. In an economy where the value of time and amount of stress given to the workers makes them spend money just to recover from the stress, the room for growth will be limited. Also, too much freedom, caused by too much compensation for the time and a lack of motivation or understanding of where are the areas that are supposed to be worked on, will cause stagnation and hedonistic behavior. A way of working to wash away the pain of problems temporarily. 

This is the critical point of balance for the thinking minds, the architects of massive systems that rule society. The goal is not to numb the pain of being, the goal is to always be moving forward as individuals and as a species. The economy and businesses that are made to be the social systems that are operating in the economy, are designed to align with human nature.

That is where different points of view come together to shape the multidimensional object of values. Different masters and thinkers have different sets of values for what they believe the stepping forward path for humanity is. That is what makes having an equation impossible because the object exists differently in different minds. And the beauty of money is the way it can be a flowing fluid between different islands of values. It is its elementary nature that makes it possible to surpass the labels and judgments of different minds. A facilitating tool for the growth of humanity, keeping peace and great objectives in control of the thinking minds.

Granted

 It's easy to forget or dismiss the value of life sometimes. There are days that a hurricane comes across and takes a lot with itself. We feel out of power and cold. It seems like the fragility of what we are loving comes to the surface and asks for being seen. It's hard to see it. It's hard to see that part of human condition where it's balanced at the tip of an inverted cone and is subjected to be thrown off the balance ever so easily. The amount of energy and thought that is put into keeping the infrastructure in a working condition is mind boggling and in reality, there are humans who are the arms and the backbones of the civilization by working in the hardest conditions. 

There are legs and feet of humanity. People who are responsible to spread the goods all over the place. Making it look simple to find anything we want anywhere in the minimum amount of time. The illusion of connectedness in a way that every thing on the planet is less than a few says apart from us. 

Of course there are protection wings to this entity of humanity that are always in charge of keeping the course of flight in control. Left and Right wings each in control of chaos and order to keep us from stagnation or falling into the darkness of chaos. It is hard to make decisions that will affect millions and billions of people in the course of tens and hundreds of years. The burden of responsibility that is put upon people who are in charge of thinking and making the right decisions in time is tremendous. 

Looking at the exterior we find how important it is for us to be able to trust. It is all making a body and each part is relying on the others to work. As Saadi Shirazi said in his poem(translated to English)

Human beings are members of a whole,

in creation of one essence and soul.

If one member is afflicted with pain,

other members uneasy will remain.

If you have no sympathy for human pain,

the name of human you cannot retain.

One way of trusting eachother is by making eachother responsible. Punishment by taking away power, position, media work, etc. are ways of forcing people to act in a certain way. But isn't it ridiculous to be forced into doing what we are made to do? The only reason for people not wanting to work in their job is them, not wanting to be under the power of certain authority. It is coming from a lack of respect and value regarding to whomever is in charge. 

But how, someone who has gained a certain amount of power would be rejected by what is below? the answer may be found in different issues but the first thing that comes to mind is asking people to conform to a certain rule or a certain role for a long time can make them start having friction with their true selves. Humans need to be free under a certain umbrella of safety. But cutting them into shapes and making gears out of them takes them away from their freedom and makes them slowly reject. The compensation for this can be resolved by money. 

Money is a good way of asking people for their time and using them in a structure in a way that can be efficient. They are allowed to join the structure for the benefit of gaining freedom through the use of money in their free time and be able to be a part of a bigger plan. A plan that gives them roles and support and community to spend their time and be productive.

Liberty

 Curious to see how I want it to be?

What kind of freedom do I want to purchase?

It is not like we are made to experience the absolute

what is enjoyable for us is swinging of the pendulum

not only enjoyable but critical to see different points of view

our perspective is from one point outwards

and our mind wants to see itself

so the point must do and move to another place

A beautiful swing to watch

it's own presence in the past, what is left,

a tragic flaw of life, or a feature

We are not made to see the absolute

Time is the illusion of movement 

in to the what is so called future

And runaway from the past

while all that is witnessed is now

Now that is always entangled 

with the unspeakable truth that is outside of our truthfulness

what that unfolds in time to show us the bitterness

the taste of what is the outcome of eating the fruit of knowledge

the reality and the all

something we were not supposed to witness

or maybe it was always a matter of

going through time to experience the freedom

that in the end, we were not supposed to abstain

We were only supposed to roll and play what comes next

the outcome of playing in the structure

An illusion of freedom