“Kemal, rule one. The Scheming never ends”
And Khalid Bey rolled his eyes, poured more milk in his coffee, and stired.
“Take a Celeron CPU, after all it’s a lobotomized Pentium. Can you believe it, it actually takes more money to make A Celeron, but it’s the cheaper CPU chip ! How much sense does that make?”
Kemal lazily tries to flag down the Barista, but her back is turned, idly picking at the peeling paint on the table, he notices the somewhat surreal, or rather hyper real in congruent assemblages of flea market tables, half broken chairs, frayed sofas, and cobwebs that made up the 40 year old presence of the Café.
No one ever dusts here, it’s probably last been cleaned in 1985.
“Yeah, I can see your point. Take flour, unbleached flour costs more than bleached flour, but they have to do something extra to bleach it, add to the process. It costs more to make bleached flour but bleached flour costs less than unbleached. Does this make sense?”
Khalid Bey frowned
“Do you realize how bad that stuff is? You might as well bake with sawdust….”
The girl sitting at the next table giggled “That’s rather spontaneous.”
Khalid Bey laughed “Spontaneous? Do you want spontaneity? If you want real spontaneity, go to a fricking war.”
On the benefits of spontaneity:
Often we yearn for things, that we think we should yearn for. We talk about them with each other, bouncing them back and forth. Some ideas of ideals we yearn for are things we’ve read in a novel, or heard in a movie, but don’t have the slightest clue what we are actually talking about sometimes.
We want things to be spontaneous, we want things to be natural. But what does this actually mean? We think we know, but do we?
The scheming never ends,
Consider the possibility that some things we think of as ideals are actually just a false bill of goods sold to us for monopoly money. A scam within a scam, inside of a scheme.
Who really wants to have to calculate everything out in life? Who wants to try to become more consciously aware of our ideas, what makes us tick, what our conditioning is… reflecting on the ideas and assumptions we have been taught since Kindergarten, things reinforced between our friends and peers, the shows we watch, the books or magazines we read, the things we hear forming a consensus view of the world, of your world, of our world…
A question to wonder about: can we ever escape thought? Can we escape Calculation and Planning?
Spontaneous flowing action and motion is often romanticized, seen as somehow more valid, and more real.
Is not being artful making the difficult and planned seem perfectly natural and easy?
Sometimes we yearn for spontaneity.
We yearn for just being, instead of planning and doing.
Sometimes we think of this like a Buddhist like state of nirvana, of pure spontaneous and natural action and being. Without discursive thought. Without agenda. To just be in the bliss of being.
To be – without schemes, or without plans, or without thought.
After all, why think man? Thought’s heavy man, why not simply be?
But can you just be?
Sometimes we may think that if we just ignore the voice in our head it will go away. I think this is a misconception. I’ve meditated for almost 2 decades, I know the difference between quieting thoughts and trying to shut off the mind. People aim for the wrong thing because of something they read that sounded good, but had little practical significance.
There is always a voice somewhere, even if that voice has paused speech. Are there moments of extinction, of fana, pure ineffable state of experiencing some peak state.
This is never permanent, nor should it be. To be permanently blissed out is to be a veggie.
In observing the voice that never goes away, you realize that enlightenment isn’t no thought, enlightenment and illumination is correct thought and correct perception.
Seeing things as they are, at least to our capacity.
You are free to disagree, but I don’t think you have a choice in the matter.
Ah, there he sits down, and closes his eyes, and tries to shut down all the services running in his head, all of the routines, all of the voices, all of the thoughts, to reach that point of stillness.
And yet does he ever truly?
It is possible, for a while. But of those few who do, is this a desirable goal? Is that actually bliss, or is that simply the sound and feeling of one bell clapper striking the side of an empty bell?
A head full of air, empty, in bliss, is by definition an airhead.
Inescapable conundrum – to have no plan is to have a plan. To have no agenda is to have an agenda. To aim at spontaneity is a form of artificiality. Because your are trying to be spontaneity, as soon as you try it’s artificial.
A computer operating system’s random number generator is a function, therefore it’s output is not completely random. There is a pattern, it simply looks like noise due to the immense variation involved.
We have no option to getting around our thoughts, unless we want to be thoughtless.
But if you aim for thoughtlessness, you are actually thinking. Just… very badly.
We yearn for natural spontaneity, we talk about it, but when we get sudden surprises something hit our pants.
He who wants spontaneity must expect the unexpected. This is a paradox. War is spontaneous. No one wants to be caught in a battle field, and yet total war is pure spontaneity and randomness.
Could it be that Spontaneity is oversold, in fact oversold by those people who talk about it the most.
Ah, behold ! The eternal monkey grins at us, and then turns to gazing at its face in a mirror. It sits, and watches for eternity, making faces, scratching, touching the mirror, not understanding that what it sees is a reflection.
Often times we are very much like a Monkey in front of a mirror, we see the reflection but do not understand it or know what to make of it.
Look. There is no way around thinking, you cannot get out of thinking without getting rid of your brain. This, obviously, is not a desirable state.
Can you escape exercising your brain, or is it that whoever said ignorance is bliss is a liar.
Ignorance sucks, we have all tried it, it sucks once it catches up with you. Childhood protection only lasts for so long, at a certain point ignorance takes a toll.
We have no choice in not considering certain things, and there is no life without thought. Extinction of perception and cognition, that’s death.
Think. it’s a good thing. Put the random monkey to rest for a moment, he’s not as random as you thought and you can always let him run around outside the cage for your amusement a little later.
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