something.

 I read a blog post recently which tried to lay out principles for group rationality. 

I wanted to see how they could come about emergent as a set of interactions between healthily developed egos. 

To debate, you need to have high self esteem; The idea is to get others to believe in what you want. The ideal platonic essence of a debate is to 

My break with platonism - deleuze talks about breaking against it in the sense of focusing on a essential perfection in things beyond the form that is revealed to us. My enjoyment of my music or my movement of my body is in the sense the atium shadow (from Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series) of the platonic essence of perfection I have already cognized. 

This is the 'natural intelligence' Krishnamurti talks about. I realised that there's no objective grounding for a concept of "self esteem", because it is never about focusing and doting on yourself. It is about nurturing it in so far as it can become something you let go of. 

That has made me insecure often about dating - In always cognizing the platonistic essence of things I am motivated and driven, but I am always a work in progress. I always see places where I can improve upon my faults and I don't have a concept of "self esteem". It is an extremely scary prospect to be faced with because when you let go of it, you empty and your mind starts grasping at anything and everything to obtain a grasp of itself - ideologies, people, ideas, beliefs. 

What ironically helps is the sense of helplessness and desperation, that none of these things are working or can never even work. It is in that movement that now the true essence of debate and rhetoric can be understood. Rhetoric is power. It is the ability to look at yourself as "a work in progress" yet still sell yourself as a finished product. Narcissism is neediness; a lack of love that manifests as a need to love yourself. The best long term solutions to rhetoric and power is a little bit of love - to for example groom yourself a little bit before you meet someone or to be more present in conversation, orient your body a certain way. 

These micro changes themselves add up. When none of these things seem to be working, you will realise that it was never about you anyway. Nothing is personal, it is all about what is happening through you. As soon as I tell myself to have self respect or self esteem, I look for qualities or attributes in myself to attribute that love to. I am dedicated, or I am smart, or I am attractive or I am a nice friend, I am religious, I love my country. In that, the ego is seeking to attach to a value to avoid the pure loving gaze of awareness which will dissolve it. 

I have self respect just because I am. I don't have to stand out against the background of my perception or the people I know to qualify. I don't have to never fuck up and always be anxious about it. I don't always have to relentlessly pursue truth (I am struggling and hesitating as I say this, for I am afraid of going down a useless path and wasting an entire life). No, it is simply about having faith to some degree. It is not faith in yourself your "self". It is not faith in "god". It is perhaps a middle line between that, simply being okay with the fact that things are the way they are. Letting yourself be. You're not the best in the world. You're not someone who merits the intense hatred you give yourself. You simply are. 

The self hatred of a perfectionist is disguised narcissism. If what they really wanted was to improve then self hatred was a waste of time and cognitive resources. The only thing that could help is love for what they are doing, to give it more care in a Heideggerean sense. This is the real reason for the moral grayness of the protagonist in whiplash. Again this realisation does not mean I am better than them for my ego is just as much of a snake as everyone else's. The point is that if Neimann's motives were not corrupted in the first place, he would have spent the three hours on that first day practicing the song instead of sitting there waiting for the band to assemble. 

Is striving for that platonic purity of ethics itself a sort of perfectionism? The point is to shut up and realise that it really really isn't about you. And now that I've said this twice with such illocutionary force it becomes a prescriptive marker to you. No, I am directly speaking to you through this article. It is not about you, and that is okay. 

Is it possible for one to remain in that state of awareness? For extended periods of time? That is a line of thought I have already explored and I know the solution that Krishnamurti has thought through. Relating this to the Math Olympiad, if there is a problem whose solution I look up and apply to similar problems, it still doesn't have that intense freshness. 

It is a spectrum of purity in the cognitive movement - from a mechanical application to actually coming up with something entirely novel. The freshness of the movement also scales the energy required. We funnel our "vital energy" through awareness at a certain problem to destroy our illusion towards it. In that sense we are pure light molding ourselves through the way we move through life. This reminds me of another talk by Krishnamurti where he talks about how are we to have the energy to live as intensely as he suggests. 

My thought has a tendency to get slow, apathetic, numb, alexithymic everyday. It was also correctly noted that the movement of creativity is literally regenerative for the brain cells. I would posit that it would be linked to psychedelic experiences of integration. Funnily, that integration is also integration in the Jungian sense. 

As I talk about these concepts, my mind is leaping through, making new connections left and right. Even though I am extremely tired and it is 4am in the night, the creative process has such intense vigor that I would not even think of sleeping. Yet as I detach from this movement, suddenly everything becomes very tough again. 

Where do humans take this wrong turn? Why are we okay with pockets of creativity, happiness, joy filled with river bouts of sadness? When do we make this compromise? The compromise itself is a naive way of thinking about it. In Ido Portal's words it would be the "cost for specialisation". The cost for specialization really is suffering. It again reminds me of the savant from Brandon sanderson's mistborn. 

Because of continuously utilising some aspects of his perception, he can see extremely minute differences in that domain. But he pays for it because perception almost always becomes too much and he needs to blindfold his eyes and damp his ears. 

My brain seems to want to abstract this to a sense of meaning - again that platonic sense of a purpose we can uncover. A naive platonism hiding itself with the rational garb of perspective realism. 

Essences, ideals, perfection is comforting for us. I do not know the correct subject verb agreement for the previous sentence. And that is exactly the point - life is not perfection, it is granules, undulations. It is a rocky trail sometimes. But the negation here itself does not break out of the structure. For the negative of perfection is also perfect. 

It is kind of related to chaos theory in the sense that this ideal of perfection is seen as a causally deterministic unfolding in science. We want it to be true so bad, but we are limited by our own perceptions. Postulating total randomness or total determinism is easy - the frameworks they lead to are also comfortable in some sense. But to break with that totally - to actually see that which is happening - a middle path between them. That is complexity science. 

Life is nontrivial, irreducible yet still patterned complexity. It is easy to go the jungian/kinda platonistic route of cognizing the patterns in the complexity deeper and deeper. But there is also play in these patterns - how they break. The chaos to the logos. The yin to the yang (or the other way round, I do not remember). 

Thank you for reading.