I'll Leapfrog You Then

At the very base of the Western sensibility - which may very well be a foundational component - is the desperate need to surmount or subsume that which exists, especially that which is demonstrating some power, as opposed to merely letting it exist apart from oneself as it is.

Like the wave and trough and their mutual interdependency, this tendency produces increasingly steep oscillations of power, in positive feedback with itself, until it burns itself out. Though of course the waves we tend to think of in nature - waves in liquids for example - aren't often fed by highly concentrated energy sources like the petroleum stores we are fed by, though this limited modeling still doesn't account for the early power formations in early agrarian societies, where our lineage can be traced.

This tendency accounts for countless formations on numerous tiers of relation, such as the formation of institutions, economic entities, cities, communities, families, individuals, and even biochemical patterns within individuals, ecologies, and other systems.

Take your pick of whatever else effect or formation related to the Western master formation: within it you will find this signature. 

Tragic Systems

Here we see glimmers of the godhead within the rational mechanism, which gradually appears through the transition from the heroic myth to the tragedy archetype. Those pillars of heroic myth, by which we stand, begin to topple, and so the tragedy is the gradual release of that standing tension, often punctuated by a liberating catharsis through the final fall. What was once perceived as a timeless reality reveals itself as built and ephemeral, a revelation that allows for a release from a constant exertion which no longer comes naturally and with joy, but with a burden and an overwhelming sense of artificiality.

And so what is the answer for maintaining complex systems within this milieu of comprehension? Well, it is intrinsic to these systems that they eventually fail, and that the best one can do is let life systems maintain these greater complex systems as best as possible. Let life be. Relinquish controls, which, although may have been effective or even essential at lower and earlier stages of complexity, now only serve to extend the gradual unwinding of a system through constant modulation and tuning.

On the Ropes

During the course of the fast and the recovery, my writing tendencies slowed substantially, and since then I've been involved in almost non-stop community activity, some of it good - music and friends - and some of it not so good - helping members of the nearby community center wrangle with shady executives and various social pathologies. A one-two punch if you will.

I need time to sit and be alone with my thoughts, but alas, work is backed up and I am feeling the money chain tugging. When I get the time, the writing will come, as it always does. A fairly large piece on Bitcoin is planned, which I have been sitting on for some time, and I am kicking around various other ideas, which occasionally pass in and out of my attention in a vague manner.

I am very tired, and off balance, but moving.

Nietzsche and Master Morality

Nietzsche admired what he called the "master morality" of the aristocratic class.

But this was a wholly reactionary view. What Nietzsche saw so much beauty in was the crest of the wave just as it was about to break, or perhaps even as it was breaking and returning to the ocean. His despised "slave morality," or Christian morality at the time, was a direct consequence of the overextension and exhaustion of the master morality, a pagan morality which did indeed celebrate the enjoyment of life, and the goodness of the gods, and of strength and power, but which was creating a hell on earth for those left out of the sphere of enjoyment, itself buttressed by the concentration of power.

The weak had no choice but to invert these values.  Nietzsche's noble insistence on an embracing of the universe and an enjoyment of life, with its passionate intensity, forced him to sympathize with the oppressors, as he was only experiencing the growing swell of yet another wave, the crest of which was still out of sight for him, which would begin to break in all its sordid glory in the midst of the present age.

There is a strange twist in the ideological fabric, in which the morality of the strong crashes and becomes the morality of the weak, and the morality of the weak gains power until it is again the morality of the strong. This results in a paradoxical situation in which the oppressed secretly bear the values of the strong, and the powerful drape themselves with the mantle of the weak so as to mask the reality of that power. 

Nietzsche's view is a peculiarity of the era he was living in. His cultural and spiritual critique, as it relates to our time, was all too prescient. He urged us to embrace life and the cosmos, as opposed to shrinking away from it, and break away from Christian morality, which had become corrupt and riddled with inner contradictions.

Though it has been argued that Nietzsche didn't necessarily favor master morality on an absolute scale, but on a relative one as it related to his time, his ultimate judgement was unavoidably reactionary, as to posit the value-generating self, with its will to power, as an isolated entity, was to completely ignore the consequences of its spontaneous action, and deny the life-field outside of its self-interest, paving the way for the rise of a new master/slave relationship: a capitalist order which drapes itself with claims of equality and democracy, while dominating everything within its reach.

What Nietzsche was experiencing was a curdling of the slave morality, which proved revolting to his sensibility, but had temporarily solved the problems of a curdling master morality centuries upon centuries ago.

Perhaps what we experience today is a curdling of the grim union between a master and slave morality that was already curdled to begin with.

This evaluation itself takes its shape from the ideological contours of our era. Was it necessary to experience the total failure of an attempt at self value creation - after previous failures of centralized constellations of values - to come to the realization that the good and the bad, the good and the evil, the strong and the weak, all relate to each other and depend on each other in connection?

On Taboo

To briefly comment on taboos, some of them have their uses, but many of them contain in them statements of power relation.

For example, consider the effects Coke can have on your body. You'll notice the effects of Coke compare to heroin, and the combination of effects of Diet Coke compare to cocaine, yet these substances are freely available; indeed, they are even abundantly available and very cheap.

Or consider that the neurological changes associated with meditation and fasting mirror those of certain psychoactive drugs, only they are not as compressed.

Instead of sitting down and deliberating over the many ways to go about something, and the merits associated with those ways, we generally opt for binaries, buttressed with strong opinions and emotions.

There is much to investigate in order to account for this phenomena, though I just wanted to touch on it for now.

Emphasis

By emphasizing something in your writing, you are drawing it into relief, or bringing shape to it, drawing it out of a complex fabric of interconnection. This brings that thing or subject into your attention, and into the attention of your readers, which results in actual practical changes. When you are aware of something and perceive something, you become affected by it, and you may affect it in turn.

Becoming aware of something, and taking enough interest in it to actively emphasize it and draw attention to it is part of what you are.

Fasting

If meditation functions like a sort of psychic reset switch, and a method of accessing and transforming one's deeper mental functions, fasting seems to function as a physiological reset switch, and a method of experimenting with and exploring physiological reactions to food, and of course, the lack of food.

If you think about it, eating regularly results in an almost constant process of digestion, in which overlapping effects of various foods and liquids are always interacting with each other, and obscuring each other, so that it is difficult to get a handle on what foods are doing exactly what.

And our modern diets can be very complex. We have at our fingertips many different types of foods with many different types of ingredients, undergoing many types of processes, all of which put varying loads and metabolic requirements on our digestive system. And we may consume considerable clusters of these elements in a single sitting.

I spent a week with a partial fast, or subsisting on very little calories, to ease into a week of juice fasting - I'm not sure anymore that juice is a great idea for this - and it was very interesting to feel the effects of an occasional apple, salad, or egg. Various foods have their differing payloads of energy, and differing effects on the digestion system, which can be distinctly felt, depending on where the body's energy is diverted and committed to the various processing organs, and what exactly enters the bloodstream, which of course makes its transit throughout the body, and contributes to certain global effects.

There are of course problems with these self-experiments and observations. The body's stomach contains an ecosystem of its own, which is altered or even reset as the stomach completely empties in the course of a fast, so each subjective observation has to take place within the bounds of a system that is changing, and is either working on convention, slowing down, dormant, or speeding back up, among other possible dynamics, and the totality of these effects work on the mind itself, and enter into a feedback loop with the mind. It will always be difficult to determine exactly what is happening.

It is also possible that during the course of a fast, when energy is being diverted away from the stomach, the body begins using the energy to clean and process unresolved food stores, and expel toxins from the tissue, much like the brain expels toxins during sleep, a hypothesis that could be confirmed with oral and body odors, various discharges, and sudden spurts of energy, clarity, and vigor reported by fasters on the second week and on. Part of  what kills people when they starve is the toxic shock when the body begins its cleansing process. With healthier bodies, and abundant water for the cleansing process, fasters can last as long as 40 days, which is the outer limit for safe fasting. After that it seems the starvation process truly begins, but some human beings have made it past this threshold.

One takeaway from this observation is that our constant exposure to numerous toxins and contradictory elements - which produces the physiological schizophrenia of the modern industrial subject - makes us much more vulnerable to a variety of maladies, despite a preponderance of resources. Though of course we could beg the question of what exactly constitutes a resource, considering that our manufactured goods fall apart out of the box and our industrial agriculture poisons us.

Moving on, when you disrupt your eating habits, it casts into relief just what exactly those habits are. What do you hunger for? What do you reach for? How do you eat? I've found that I constantly overeat, not out of sheer gluttony, but because my OCD compels me to finish everything, and I haven't yet learned to measure out proper portions. A corollary to this is that I eat too fast, so the signal that the stomach is full comes too late, and unsatisfactorily chewed food may make its way through the system only partially processed. There are other factors and tendencies at work as well.

Considering that fasting addresses the mastery of the will over one of our greatest drives, the hunger drive, it is also a good way to build on the faculty of the will in general, which of course has global benefits whenever the will happens to be exercised.

The will is often difficult to modify in isolation. The things that one is compelled to do, such as eat, drink, maintain shelter, and meet social obligations, exercise the will in their own way, so as to bring about the success of these things, but as soon as one attempts to develop some discipline or meet some requirement outside of these pressures, one finds one has to double one's efforts. These requirements grow proportionally to the complexity of one's living environment, and the more one is expelling one's surplus energy in various avenues.

This is because the regular exercise of the will to meet certain recurring bare requirements and obligations begins to carve out pathways for its regular exercise, which allows it to function with greater ease and spontaneity to achieve perpetual success. It generates convention.

To fast is to completely invert the logic that the drives perpetuate. One is beginning to fight against one's drives, and thus, the conventional structure of one's life, unless fasting is a ritualistic component of one's religious social obligation structure. This of course assumes a conceptual model in which the drives are actively shaped and directed by one's society and environment. Perhaps to better explain, the drives are very honest in their desire, but executive functions necessarily develop around one's drives so as to direct them, to repress or amplify them, so that one can move with relative harmony within one's natural and social environment, and these functions have to be taken with the drives in a complex society, perhaps to be understood as overriding drives of their own.

So to bring all of this together, to fast is to modify the executive functions by diverting energy from them, therefore making them more dormant and malleable. It is a way of tampering with one's physiological - and at times psychological - structures of convention and habituation, a desire, a drive which can only be generated through the failure of convention itself, granted that this practice is not already a part of one's habituation.

Further, it seems as though when you fast, energy is first diverted from energy-intensive higher brain functions - which are perhaps not immediately useful to survival - to lower brain brain functions, much like what happens during meditation, or after ingesting psychedelic drugs. The visual and perceptive systems feel especially vibrant and immediate, and visual awareness is sharpened. One's thoughts drift away from abstractions and anticipations to favor one's immediate reality. And supposedly in its advanced stages, intensive fasting can lead to profound spiritual experiences. It becomes more understandable as to why fasting has been so common to various religious traditions for thousands of years.

The practical and health benefits of fasting are still unknown; understandably the practice has not been rigorously researched, though it has been found that about 3 days of fasting can reboot the immune system. The same goes for the experimental opportunities behind fasting, and whether these opportunities can provide genuine physiological and psychological insights, or mere distortions. Still, there is a decent constituency that swears by its spiritual and physiological benefits, and it remains a time-tested tool, to use with other tools, to attempt to shape one's own life.