Time III

Instead of depending on these coincidences, we can come up with a method for at least becoming aware of whether we are acting through externally imposed systems. We must doubt all of our thoughts and actions until we come to a thought or action that is self-evident. That is, we must doubt while there is reason for doubting... And when we reach that unquestionable truth... It is the source, our voice. We usually substitute for this self-evident reason a fear of what society will think if we choose to question further; this fear is the foundation for most actions. It is the direct opposite of freedom. 

We must constantly ask for the sources of our thoughts/feelings/ideas. Many of them come from bad movies and TV shows, or the media in general. We emulate bad culture because it is the most constant influence in our lives; it has, for many, become the source. 

Some might think the path of doubting leads to an empty life; that there is some wisdom in the lives that external systems have previously decided upon; that one cannot live more fully by choosing to reinvent every path. But this rests on the assumption that we have no time to question what is ready-made and settled; that we have no time to start from scratch as though we were the first humans. And yet we do have time; all the time of a life should be devoted to this if one is to have any hope of living authentically. 

Life is this reinvention, not what happens around our settling for this or that external system. 

Maybe freedom is one more discourse, as true and fraudulent as any other. If this is so, all that is left is to live aesthetically, moving from one discourse to another according to our sympathy. And in this case, still, meditating on the many discourses would increase awareness and perhaps allow freedom from them, or at least the creation of new, more appropriate, discourses. The fact that we are amalgams of discourses does not entail that we are automatons, incapable of anything other than repetition. One still chooses one's discourses, one still lives in one's method for shifting between discourses, one is still original in that one's history is always an original collage of discourses. 

And new things can be done within a discourse. Discourses are constantly causing each other to change... 

2 comments