Creativity, Sex, Metalearning (FI #6)

 The best way to learn something is to create something with it. Every interaction in life is an oppurtunity to learn. I have let these thoughts ruminate in my head for way to long, I wonder if they have gotten stale in the process or just fermented to a more careful, beautiful potpourri.

Sloppiness with your thought prevents the deeper flowering of something you hold in your mind. It disallows you from going through the process of solving more difficult problems that require more thinking through. Sure, writing down your claims for each problem also slow down the process of your thought, your intution yet at the same time, the ability to disentangle a web of observations about a problem and look at it objectively, slowly through them is essential. 

In the pure state of perfection where I am pulling each next word out of the ether. In that tremendous clarity, perhaps this slow process of proving everything I know is meaningless and slows down the unfolding of truth, but other languages are not so nice.

Abstraction and the big other - there is always a dynamic interplay between the knowledge in my collective psyche and my ingenuity as an individual. Though there is some insight required to even unlock the harder aspects in my collective psyche, that insight is nowhere close to the pure aliveness of creativity. It is possible to learn up the most difficult prescriptions, the hardest most niche tools in a discipline through mechanical training and convince yourself that you have loved that thing but that is not always true. It is possible for me to learn Jensen's and Holder's inequality as a 9th grader and feel entitled to solve all inequalities problems in the math olympiad. It is possible for me to learn esoteric algorithms and feel irritated with myself when I am not able to apply them, but if I haven't gone through the authentic process of discovering these things for myself, they are not really a genuine part of my knowledge base. I am using their existence as prescriptions to define my imperfection. 

yes, i am imperfect, across multiple dimensions of my life, but pointing that out doesn't mean anything. I used to conflate this with viveka. and perhaps there is a place for this, as it builds intensity to some degree.

Sloppiness in thought is indecisiveness, apathy. Your buddhi or intellect is sharp enough to cut through a mountain. If you are sloppy with it then you don't let it assemble into the shape of a sword that can cut through what you want it to cut through. Your desire to cut through that thing is not intense enough, big enough. Though we may conflate the urgency and desperation with desire, a slower and more intense desire is what ensures that you will get even deeper with the thing that you want. Even that prescription is not to be taken as true, it needs to be broken sometimes. In general though, the more one foreplays the more they can understand the partner's body, every aspect of it and allow their own body to respond in a manner that the "lack" in both sides is filled the best - a more intense and intimate encounter. Insisitng on desperate and fast sex is the ugly and bastardized product that society has sold us, a race to orgasm between two perfect pieces of plastic.

Another thing I want to explore is the duality between desire and creativity. Is it true that all desires in their highest form are creative to some extent? Desire is also suffering. In moving through life there will always be suffering, gravity, inertia. But a conscious, creative engagement with this desire is what frees the individual. That is not a prescription, but rather an exploration. Is it possible to interact with your life circumstances in such a way that every suffering is a wind for the raging fire of your being? That refines its perfection, subtelty and granularity?

Every want I have creates a path to seek that want. If my desires for something are genuine, the path opens up. I am ready to take it slow if it means that my unfoldment of the path to obtaining what I want is genuine. My impatience is merely betraying the insincerity of my desire. In such a scenario, what should be one's goal? A prescriptive goal of trying to create with every quantum of life is also not enough. One's ego is simply too heavy a burden to carry through the process. Should I be okay with simply being better? Even that is rather naive because then I can fall in the trap of comparison. Should I be submerged in the love for the thing I am doing? How do I then come out of it and move through life. And there is an anxiety of not being able to do the other things I want, getting stuck in excelling at just one thing. The cost of specialization is suffering as ido portal would say. That fear betrays my insincerity again. It is not the case that in my total devotion to a certain discipline I would be stuck in that discipline. If I want to get better at math, I need to have a healthy body that can actually be a vessel for that creativity to come through. To eat healthy, to give it the excercise it needs. I am not really ready to let go and explore everything as deeply as I want. That is the place where I am at right now. And perhaps that is fine, my mind says. I should focus on creating pockets of time wherein i do not have the anxiety of moving through life and am ready to explore what I want to, as deeply as I want to.  I am not sure whether this desire is genuine too, yet I feel like I am losing energy to continue this examination further. 

Why do I not have the required energy? That was a question put to Krishnamurti as well. We have infinite energy for sex, or for war, or when our identity is threatened and we are in the movement of fear. But when it comes to the pursuit of one's own freedom, suddenly we become tired and we want to go to sleep. Is it the societyal conditioning and the evolutionary disincentives to thinking through this for myself that stop me? That is again dishonest. Or is it the work required? In the process of studying something, why am I not ready to direct the energy of my intellect into destroying illusion? Why do I get numb, apathetic? Is it because I do not really see the beauty? Perhaps that is true. Somewhere along the way, I stopped seeing, getting lost in the abstractions and now the truth is not visible to me. Or perhaps it is because of the slopiness itself, that the magnificent jump of my brain from every cognitive success, the miracle of understanding something is hidden from me. 

The suffering I feel then is nice, it is a reminder to me of my illusion, my limitation, my finitude. That is not enough to describe its phantasmic contours. But it is enough for me to push against it, to lean into it, learn it more. It is the shadow boxing opponent that is always there for me, always pushing me, always teaching me. My ignorance is my greatest teacher. 

Namaste.