As far as can be remembered, the Christmas tree got decorated right after Thanksgiving. Lights adorning eves and stockings arranged. These signified it was time for rest. In the learning year, in the daily schedule. There would be gatherings and treats and all manner of familiar novelty added to the living.
In adult life I’ve come to feel Christmas would do us best if it were an every 2 or or even 5 year celebration. Where every body got to rest from Thanksgiving to New Year. The whole world. Where only essential occupations and those who enjoyed producing, or providing a good and service at that time were ‘working’ and we all got to otherwise par take in holiday joy. That the thankful peace that fills the morning air on the last Thursday in November continue until the The Luner New Year. That there be rest and frivolity and meals and planning for the year to come. For all.
In just efforting to fix the logistical obstacles to such a global project we would likely find efficient solutions to some of our everyday wasteful practices. And be prepared when the robotics advance past what the average human can accomplish.
This year I contemplated changing residences on Thanksgiving. Though I decided otherwise I found my choices on the matter, being ever so influenced. An anxiety present, over my being able to, were I to feel inspired to, bring that festive feeling into my environment that day. Rushing to leave or rushing the journey to the next local. As though a plastic tree or string of lights would allow me rest from the concerns on my heart, let alone mind or resources.
To wait was likely the best decision. I have on my plate a litany of other forces and tasks vying for attention, or trying to waste it. This just the tip of the iceberg of concepts swirling in my language mind, and thus within my sub and unconscious at the moment.
Of which I am ever efforting towards consciously exploring. Letting rise to the inner surface, experience, concept, feeling. I’m a wash with past in present, at a precipice of a new future. Forming the boundaries and practices of a new cycle. All of this, and yet the option of nostalgia as priority, remained guilting my priorities, fighting against my best options. Those early experiences, refusing to give it a rest.
The word rest does the dance of most words in our dictionary eras, and finds its self as noun, verb, and adverb. From relaxation to a musical pause, it is also the turn in many phrases. Etymologically, it points toward a prehistoric germane measure of distance. After which covered, a break would happen while journeying. Rest is opposite activity and cease by activity.
Many have had the sensation of arriving somewhere having no recollection of the journey. This is because activity, doing, mostly of the unconscious state. The most active part of many systems from people to institutions is unconscious. Choices in isolation of such an energy are few and far between. Much of the time the ways our decisions turn out is due to factors way below are conscious attention.
The heart and lungs and all manner of organs, function without conscious input. More daily habits than we care to admit. Food choices, to brand choices to, partner choices. The connections that form with anything in our lives, are interwoven by energies little understood. Our organs, and our selves, I sense, last longer and preform better when given conscious attention. The same holds true for many tasks. Gurus call this process mindfulness.
Focus on free focus, the brains optimal state: the theta of just waking or during meditative practice. Sustained attention to what might be thought of as mundanities often argued to be too load bearing for the brain. And for some it might be. The truth more likely is to know where to begin.
Spinal posture is essential for sustained activity and alterness. Without addressing that and breathing to some extent, heightened conscious output likely difficult to sustain. Though regardless of where you begin, as anyone with a special interest with tell you, mundanities are actually, where it’s at. More likely, the spread of ideas about the brains capacity coincide with a suspected lack of pleasure in concerning yourself with the minutia of your posture or breathing or heart center, or the load put upon your elimination organs. Or paying conscious attention to anything really.
Joke again on the undisciplined hedonistic doing, because the brain, and the hormonally entwined nervous system find being conscious, pleasurable. Actually, the main chemical transmitters in the brain body associated with motivation, intermingle in the synapses of getting-having-getting. While focus is tied to getting, maintaining consciousness is tied to an autonomic response. The calm of flow.
It is as though the brain unconsciously attunes its peak pleasures right at the precipices of impatience between getting and having. Dopamine surges just as you achieve and then builds back up from a drop up as you strive to achieve again. This process hijacked in many economic systems. Short form contents taps into this internal pattern. I use this many ways through out my day, in accomplishing tasks and preparing for focus. Maximizing ultradian rhythms.
To be clear, this is speaking no way to the mannor or way which the task or focus is accomplished nor to any success of the endeavor. In fact the dopamine pathways are often a double edge sword. It is merely saying that I am consciously aware that part of me, at the completion of any task knows that as something is about to be finished, it feels good. That is why meditation and mindfulness is so healthy for the system. It is a practice of suspending itself in this state. Just being. A tasking of getting yourself to watch your doings. And the brain body benefits in very measurable ways.
There was a thinker prior to the Socratic line of thought, Parmenides, who postulated that everything just is. Exisiting is. As a table just a table, a flame just a flame. Table and flame just are. All just is. “that reality is in some sense a unified and unchanging singular entity.”
Quite possible the profundity of all logos after, merely individuals yearning to be the discoverer over the discovered. This monistic idea has often been understood to mean there is just one thing in all of existence. Yet it is easier to understand the it is, as the encompassing middle of duality. It is, is. Or I, tis. Of which and from which and to which everything resonates.
Is-ing the optimized place of existence. Meditation a form of is-ing. Light is is-ing. Hizenberg talking about is-ing. Is-ing is all the options and none of them and some of them, because you’re is-ing. A vein-diaromic center. To understand is-ing is also doing, but doing is never is-ing, is to fully grasp the flow of is at all.
Consciousness a layered dimension, with sub and unconscious varieties of it self. In order to make fully conscious choices, one would have to be conscious of all parts. And a top down connection to the subconscious is the only way to do that. That is because the unconscious has a fully functional bottom up relationship with conscious activities through the subconscious.
For making entirely conscious choices, a relationship is required with the subconscious. The subconscious part of us is intrinsically correlated to sense. Sense in the broadest term, to include those sensations for which the five senses might be unable to convey. Our senses never stop working. They are available to sensation at all times and even while dreaming. They can tell us truths or truths through falsehoods. They correlate and regulate us. They locate us in spacial, mental and emotional time. Senses are perceptible to and perceiving the inexhaustible source, that tis is, in everything.
Sense is an ever ebbing and flowing landscape. Senses are gotten from somewhere. Whne dealing with the subconscious they are gotten from within. Senses can be feelings and vice versa, as to best be honed, they need validated in much the same way feelings do in early emotional life. Emotions (repetitive behaviorally linked feelings) are often born of unaddressed senses.
Our sense of the world and our sense of ourselves are often imbalanced. Much is taught and propagated about external life, and many of our tactile senses are affronted with the byproducts of our consumerisms. To build healthy connections to our inner working is a tall order. To find the mechanisms of our choices, undeniably important.
With the majority of doing and thus our daily lives and societal goals operating from the unconscious, it could be argued that what we stop doing is the greatest freedom of our will. That the most willful choice that any consciousness can likely make are those things we choose to cease.
At this point in our history, true willfulness existing in that which we can sense there is negative excess and to stop that. Everybody figuring out what we can do without. At the individual level, uncompromised. What must be aimed for is a fully actualized willfulness of mankind.
It is the choice of experience that gives humans, and thus any willfulness we posses, it’s uniqueness. We are an oddity in any evolutionary process. Might this be because we are our planets first full adaption of a cease-able will? Many mammals before us have experience with ceasing. Domestication a form of it. Sanctuary a form of it. Hibernations. Dormancy. It happens. But these changes are cyclic or happen as a result of instinctual needs being met, so that instinctual behavior no longer needed. Humans have the ability to change behaviors regardless of hunger, shelter or safety requirements being met. At any time of year.
It’s important to clarify that ceasing and changing are somewhat interchangeable. Energy never ends. It’s transmuted, transfigured, transformed into something else. Or it goes through stages of else-ness. It never stops. But certain forms and states cease to be. On this planet, Humans have more choice in these matters than any other individual entity before.
Free will as an idea of choice appears as a manifestation of a consciousness becoming aware of its self. All existence an essence in experience. With that being so, what could any source know of itself so far? Through behavior? Through our behaviors?
That it is an unrelenting shaping energy, unable to be created or destroyed. It splits and fractures, and fractals and bonds and swirls. It evokes and evolves itself from itself unyielding. Unending. Undying.
We are at best, of a planetary consciousness, which knows itself to be in a solar system, which knows itself to be in a galaxy, which knows itself to be among many galaxies. All uniformly moving away from each other for the cosmos knows endless as a surety. Only dinosaurs have ever capitalized on our planetary space with their abilities as vastly as ourselves.
To the point we risk destruction of ourselves often. Bore from the planets essentially youngest species, the idea that our will free for us to then become a threat to the planet, indicates our adaptations and their success likely being misused. Could we be best purposed perfecting that of which the cosmos is as of yet, unable?
The experience humans can have before many other beings is to choose what ceases to be transmuted into other. What we hold at limits, ramp up or or allow for continued bettering. Dynamically evolving, ourselves and our civilizations, is the task before us.
Our interaction in our living rooms and light years away depend on our developing a rigorously discernible cease. To traverse the chasms of societal loneliness, and the stars. For to travel faster than light would be to stop either time, and move space, or stop space and move time. Neither known as a willing participant.
I know the undying in myself, most intensely in impatience. A thing always present. I have a saying I invoke at times, ‘infinite patience brings immediate results,’ which is ironically of the same ceaseless idea. I empathize with tis often, for the buzz and hum when its ocean motions, palpable to my nervous system. I can quite literally feel the vibratory pressure between thens, let alone things. Any given now is a minute cacophony of minuscule interactions.
The idea of setting something to rest, dates back to Shakespearean times. Resolve conclude, finalize. This is the brain again, understanding pleasure at the crest of accomplishment. Enough to give it embodiment as an idea. That we lay to rest our dead, and celebrate the occasion, again a dopaminergic reconstruction woven in to societal structures. That we call it deceased, an irony in terminology.
Rest, that theta state between activity and the intricate workings of sub-and unconscious states. For the inexhaustible source, rest would be the first conception of cease possible. Would very possible sustain it toward conscious ceasing for millennia.
The research on free will is rudimentary, and for a long time relied on the reversed average of data around isolated instances, like moving a finger. More recently researchers are beginning to unearth the understanding that something like a readiness potential exists in the underlying energy of happenings. All happenings. The buzz and hum of existence just is. That place from which outcomes are pulled.
And so a cease can happen in a couple was. Ending the buzz of one shape to open a space for the hum of another or ending a buzz by occupying its space with the hum of something else. One more difficult, the other less efficient. The passive outcome and the active replacement. Either way a change of state.
Change can be as frightening as death for many. What can be accomplished in seeing will and choice and ceasing and change intertwined in this way is that it addresses the unconscious undertone many have around change. That fear of it. A latent representation of our predisposition to the negative. Out of safety.
By allowing choice of change to equate to the highest of our free will as opposed to desire seeking or accomplishment; we are empowered. A choice: our choice of change is far more palatable than any thrust upon us. In success or failure. Where someone has to have success thrust upon them, is it success? And if done so failure, is it failure?
The idea of replacing destructive, or unhealthy habits with better ones is very valid. Some things though, need end without replacement. That alone is the bettering. Like murder and war. Danger-less fear.. So learning how to mitigate the relentless aspect of the universal condition, is a must. For far more areas of our life than we yet comprehend.
To start I encourage prioritizing self-ceases and to other-cease none. To practice all types of rest and stops. Notice your dopaminergic rushes and valleys. Explore the internal motivators at the junctions of stopping and starting, in all manner of things in daily life. If your lucky with those you love. For the unity between perspectives we seek and moderation many already hold must become undeniable to ourselves, before we will ever see the split duality on our screens disappear.
As can be seen above of all on deck, plenty is in store for the future. I am also really aiming to add audio forms and guests in the future. Therefore, while I will be ever efforting towards ceases of other types, and using the full moon monthly to help me in those releases, there are no plans for any creativity rests.
I am, however in the process of relocating and deciding where exactly I’d like to be where I am. To dedicate adequate energy to securing all the things necessary to do that: home, access to transportation, and income, I have to have an unsolicited commitment. So until I have found my new home and incoming, what can rationally be expected from this spot on the Internet is a monthly guaranteed hot take.
With any hope, just being relieved of the self inflicted bi-monthly pressure will enable it to be surpassed. And the flow of ideas can become a flow of other types as well.
Until then, enjoy your dramas less and your peace’s more and thank you for taking the time to check in. 🤍