Applying Functional Integration to the Mind: An exploration of truth

The truth is not a bludgeon.

It is easy for a truth to be conveyed in language for the form of language is too gross an instrument to convey the subtleties in truth. 

Once conveyed, we have access to those mental markers. Yet, if it is something that you are not yet ready to live by, or doesn't correspond to your lived experience then it creates debt. 

In the same way as having conversations about concepts that you assume to be true without examining for yourself creates epistemic debt, having principles or prescriptions for life given to you by others creates existential debt. I suppose that is karma in some senses.

I have often used these deeper truths as bludgeons. They are guiding lights for sure, for example the metaphysical understanding of the Upanishads however, if one's body-mind apparatus is simply not ready to live by the truths it sees, these truths can break them. 

It is no different from an addiction, an obsession.

The life of a human can be seen in some ways as manufactured by the principles one holds. Considering the huge amount of perceptual stimuli and everyday experiences that come by, it is these principles that act as filters, as muslin cloths in the flow of life. 

The residue left inside as one lets life flow through them is their being. Not only in an abstract sense, but really, in terms of psychosomatic influences affecting your brain which decides which stimuli are preferred and paid attention to. 

The motto for specific adaptation from any excercise is time under tension and in terms of life it is "time under attention". The intensity of attention cannot grow past the flow state. Being situated below the graph of the flow state is something that has been pretty frequently observed; Not spending the energy one creates, leading to accumulation, sloppiness. 

The other side is lesser seen, better characterized by overworking. The overworking here is on a different metric than traditional understandings of success or finance. I realised recently that I have been optimizing for 'truth' more than my experience allows for. I have lived the last 4 years of my life on a baseline mental state of nihilism, sadness, desperation and anxiety, or perhaps 6. How many of us can say the same? It has led me to explore very widely and very deeply, the archetype of a desperate seeker in some sense. 

Hegel is in some sense right again. There's no shape to truth which one can firmly grasp, it is only through the labour that its outlines become more visible in the background of our perception. 

Wherever there is a genuine desire for anything, a path for the iterative clarification of truth opens up. 

When there is no genuine desire there is only delusions and rabbit holes. 

Is it in your lived experience to understand that the truth is the only thing that matters? For it is not in mine, yet I have considered it as an axiom for my system of thought for a long time. Do not run away from nihilism, loneliness, emptiness. Yet embrace them in all their shuddering implications. 

Because it is only in their darkest depths that the seed of truth can grow. 

That is again romanticization of my current ignorance. There is no prior for me to be biased towards the belief that these experiences are necessary for one to deeply intuit truth. 

Through the process of this post, I've deconstructed my own system of thought, based around axiomatizing from the truth. What I am left with is emptiness. 

Jumping for a deeper truth without digesting what one has deeply is as dishonest as being convinced that what one has is the whole picture. I have often looked down on people settled into their mechanical bougie routines as dead people, yet still longed for the same, an end to my search. 

Perhaps that really is the truth, that these people are dead, human-like things instead of actual people.

Perhaps the truth is that we are all living in absurdity, yet they are just more well adjusted and able to enjoy it. 

The real truth is that I don't really know which one is true. How am I to live with a space open for each of these possibilities to be true?

Is the only true solution to ethics simply aesthetics; Creating one's own objective functions "meaning" to optimize for instead of societal understandings. 

I constantly critique my thought as being rehashed from different sources. It is only a handful instances in life where I remember the movement of my mind and I feel genuine integrity for the movement of my own thought.

To me that is a better metric to maximize than "success" or "money". But perhaps again that is because my conditioning has not instilled the burning need for those as it has in others. 

My decision making is always limited by my ignorance. 

The truth is what works. 

Namaste.

(This is an attempt to use something similar to the feldenkrais method on my own mind in the sense that I start with language and ideas that are easy and try to explore an open stream of consciousness wherever it leads.)