The Mysterious Engulfs Us

The mysterious engulfs us. There are no answers, or just as true, any answer at all will do. There are no reasons but mind. I can stop myself from doing or speaking occasionally, but my thoughts run through me unbidden, like a horde of unruly children. They make reality in their image. The outside is ruled by that same incessant clamor that dominates and defiles the “would be” sanctuary under the dome of my skull. The shape of my mind calls things to me in secret, without my consent, making of me a sleeping witch, a conjurer of illusions which fool even, and especially, me. The unspoken things die away in the world of endless electronic babble. The things without name or face, lacking these qualities, borrow them from the storehouses of our mind, and when the borrowed guise no longer suits their purpose they vacate the shapes and sounds that once costumed them, and we are left with their empty shells, shells that refer not to their nature, but to our own, as it is from our nature that these shapes were borrowed. The mysterious is forgotten, denied, wrapped in linguistic structures, and when it dares show its face we who have been indoctrinated by THE WORD call that the exception to our rule. But it is the other way around. It is the bugs, the quarks, the exceptions that are in fact the rule. Our brittle fortresses of order will eventually crumble and the hot breathed broken faced real will lumber and slither and dance in, wreaking havoc over our bones and rambling thoughts, thoughts now bodiless, flowing out directionless as they always have, to be absorbed in the icy folds of the real. We are always grasping for answers and peddling them and buying them and clinging to them, but they are only words clung to in desperation. We are hiding from the true answer, the mysterious abyss that looms beyond the constructs of the tongue and the tongue mind wagging furiously as though it could fan off the eternal with its chatter. We have never been free of the mysterious, it was always clinging to us like a skin, but some part of the self recoiled from it and began to spin the great con to hold it at bay. The ones who claim to have answers are liars and artisans of the con. There are no answers. No words that can hold the real absolutely. All that I have experienced has been a play of consciousness. There are no reasons but mind.

The Three Directives

There are three directives which move a human being into action. These are “need”, “desire”, and “will”.
Need is the most basic and primordial mover. The human machine needs food, needs water, needs warmth, needs affection, needs to excrete waste. Once a need has been met there is a sense of concrete satisfaction that sets in until the need arises again according to the physical cycles of the human machine. Needs can be met.
Desires are a trickier monster. They arise when needs have been transformed through the symbolic structure. For example, thirst is a real need for the human machine so an advertisement for a clothing line might depict a well dressed man and a woman drinking from glasses. A human machine that sees the ad will unwittingly transform the need to drink into a desire for a dress or pair of slacks. The trouble is, that while drinking a glass of water will quench thirst, buying a pair of slacks will not. Satisfaction will be denied.
Desires can never lead to satisfaction because they are born of the symbolic realm and not of the real. This is true of any desire, it is what distinguishes desire from need. It is an endless circle, a wheel fit for a hamster. The pursuit of desires can never yield fulfillment. This is not because there is something fundamentally evil about desire. It is because desire is a need that has been disfigured by language and made abstract. You cannot eat, drink, or hug an abstract.
A young gorilla needs something to love in order for its life to continue. This need can be met by a kitten or a doll or a fury blanket tied to a post, as long as the gorilla can touch it, the need is met. The same is true of human animals. You don’t need a porn star to hug. You could give a squeeze to a warty old hag to meet the need. You desire a porn star, a picture from a magazine, but even if you meet a live porn model, she will never be exactly the same as the picture from the magazine. She may meet some of your needs, but she can never quench your desires, those will go ungratified into eternity.
Will stands in a category all of its own. It does not arise from the machinations of the human, physical or linguistic. It is neither a need nor a desire. It comes from elsewhere. It is infinitely more difficult to act on will than it is to respond to a need or a desire. Will often conflicts with the needs and desires of the human biological machine.
With both needs and desires occupying the attention and energy of the machine, it can be almost impossible to heed the strange call of the will. Desires are particularly an obstacle. While the human machine has a limited number of needs which have to be met repeatedly, the ghostly world of desire is as unlimited as it is insatiable. The desires will breed more desires and will come to occupy all the space of the mind, demanding that one thing or another be pursued until the will is nearly buried in an avalanche of desires.
Desires will propagate on their own without any effort being made on the part of the human machine, but the true will, if it is denied attention and left unused, will wither like an atrophied limb. Efforts must be made to invoke and support the will, efforts which may seem most unpleasant to the machine because those efforts will be of no direct benefit to it.