The Diary
Fantasia
I often find myself lost in an imaginative world when idle. Illusions of grandeur, subtle and prominent, reel just behind my eyes. The world through the pinhole of my pupils is a flat plane with a blurry glaze. Inside, so many interesting things happen.
I’m at a conference I’ve been invited to. My publishers wanted me to go, even enticing me with a plus one, accomodation and airfares all paid for. I forgo the responsibilities of my nondescript career to attend this conference, where admirers of my great novel sit in rows, listening to me. Every word I speak flows as naturally as it does in my head. O the trifles of fame!
Attractive women admire me from afar, though in such a way that their interest is stupidly obvious to me (how observant I am!). When they make an advance, I discard it plainly, no matter their beauty. I’m totally uninterested for how committed I am to my wife who I love most of all. O it’s not my fault they admire me so much!
I’ve been invited to the main office of the place I work for. The CEO is in there alone. I step into the room, shutting the door behind me. “What did you want to speak about?” I ask. He tells me that he is retiring from his position and invites me to take his place. I know the company better than anyone else after all. Though I am greatly honoured by this offer, I turn down his offer. As great as it would be, I love the work I do already and don’t want to abandon it. He nods in understanding and gives me a handshake.
I’m in a room, gray and devoid of detail. Yet I don’t notice this. In front of me is a person, usually a generic man with a shirt and short facial hair. A strawman, in actuality. He speaks to me with a great ignorance on some topic or other. I perceive him in whole, him being a shallow figment. In a lengthy diatribe (wherein I myself pause, yet the conversation flows continuously), I succinctly explain his wrongness. I’m so persuasive that he immediately understands me and is forever changed. O the wit I hold!
Suddenly, the film is pierced. I shelve the imagined scenario briefly to collect my surroundings. It’s seven o’clock at night, I’ve reached my road but still have another kilometre to walk. Depending on what my mood is, I’ll dip back where I was before, or I’ll admonish my silly imaginations. No matter, because one way or another I end up back there, the next day or otherwise.
I can’t quite figure out what Fantasia is. At first, I thought it’s merely imagining myself as the sort of person I wish I was. But it doesn’t feel that way. I don’t want to be a famous author, or someone who gets a lot of attention from women. If I were a famous author then I must only have written a very insipid novel, and the rare times I do notice (or think I notice) a woman staring at me, I actually feel quite uncomfortable and violated.
I recognize one common thing though. All of these are fixated on other people. Not a single scenario, not these ones nor the ones whose complexity prevents me from describing them quickly, are of only me and my activity. Often, the scenarios show me easily communicating with other people, or other people thinking about me positively. This is so different from reality, where everytime I open my mouth my sentences come out as mangled hairballs that hardly approximate my real thoughts. What good is speaking, when your speech does not reflect your thoughts? I don’t even have social anxiety, and I’m rarely nervous when speaking to others. For me, speaking makes me feel like a spastic trying to walk; I can sense the correct motion of the legs, but cannot translate them into reality.
Life and Travelling
Am I wasting my life? Am I doing what I should be doing? I’ve thought about this over and over, but I can’t identify what would make my life not feel wasteful. The trajectory I’m going down is a straightforward one. Do well in university, get my engineering degree, move away with my fiance, have a good career, have two children, and die. People eschew this sort of basic path, as if there is less ’life’ in this than any other. As if it is wasteful? Some people think you should travel the world, as if that could fulfil you somehow. Travelling the world doesn’t seem altogether different than doing anything else except for some temporary novelty, and a couple stories you can repeat to others in vapid conversation. I don’t see how travelling can satisfy me in a way that studying cannot. In another sense, any activity seems to either hold the same sort of value, or they have no value. But even if they held different value, is life the pursuit of maximizing the accumulation of value? Not really.
Undesirable Feelings
I have certain attitudes and feelings I wish I did not have. Lust affects me a lot. I wish I could simply ignore the sensation. Fighting it exerts my mental attention too much and gets in the way of activity such as study. Therein is a tradeoff I must make. Selecting either mental exertion and loss of attention, or negative feelings of guilt and shame. Shame is intrinsically linked to sexuality, especially male sexuality, for some reason.
I have a desire to socialize. At the same time, I have a compulsion to eschew it and avoid it. Sometimes, extensive socializing gives me a bad aftertaste. My natural communication is through text, and that is why I used to waste a lot of time on imageboards. It’s the only time where I feel like I’m talking with people in a way that is natural to me. In this way I desire communication, even connection.
Against Naturalness
Naturalness is not a virtue. Many people believe it is, but I think this is usually rooted in ideology. Humanity has always been about becoming what it is not. This includes bodybuilders and other body modifiers, the netizens who jack into cyberspace, and even Buddhist monks who seek Enlightenment. Their goal is to move their human selves beyond the natural human tendencies of Body, Mind, and Spirit, each respectively. In a sense, they pursue the violation of human naturalness, yet at least, some of the first and all of the third are looked upon positively. Perhaps it is natural for us to feel uncomfortable with what is natural for us, which is what creates the tensions that leads to these sorts of actions. Again, there are people who choose to try reject this part of themselves, and then turn into hedonists.
Duality of Socialization
I’ve got to talk with a lot of people, who seem to be my friend in the past week or so. I’m not sure how, with them I can talk naturally, but not honestly. I’ve found that during conversation, negative feelings melt away, but the effect does not necessarily last. It’s a temporary respite, but doesn’t contribute to any feeling of fulfilment. I think I am understanding that feeling authors talk about, where if you don’t write your only choice is to die. That’s how I’m starting to feel. Like I can’t do anything else, or should not try anything else ? I simply need to do this.
Reflection On Work
Historically, men were made to work incredibly hard. The form of their work was usually physical however, and had a direct effect on how they could survive. Work is the natural state of man. It comes to be this way anywhere. Look at the Asian countries, with their crazy work ethic, because they see it as the only means to pull themselves up the rungs of the ladder. A lot of the people I’ve known are divorced from this, and get by with minimal or no work by some means or other. But I subvert this, or I wish to, and through this I am not exceptional. I am simply working as we all always have. My ancestors put in such great efforts.
Tension
Human life is consisted of permanent tensions and no satisfactions that are lasting. There are satisfactions for particular problems, but when a man is completely satisfied his ensuing malaise will create more problems for him. Happy and uneventful marriages sour in adultery. Even the rich who have great material possessions, discover some problem or other that bugs them.
We ourselves are sort of systems that are constantly chasing short-term satisfactions to whatever problems we are faced with. Enlightenment can only consist in becoming impervious to thiese dissatisfactions, even as they course through your body, your mind, begging to take control.
Music itself relates to our humanity unlike any other art because it’s components are the intentional creation and ressolution of tension, which appeals to our own desire to resolve our dissatisfaction. This could be transposed slightly for even other sorts of music. Say, punk music or whatever, which is just brazen loudness and violence. This is a temporary ressolution to our violent natures. We (some of us) have violent tension within us yet lack an outlet for the natural dissolution of these feelings.
Kill The Spirit
One of the most powerful phrases I have ever heard: “We all must give up our youth for something.” Of course if we refuse to, we wither into nothingness. Foremost this brings up the question of what is it we should sacrifice our youth for? But disregarding this for a moment, I want to say that this plays into the eternal tension I discussed, because it is a choice where we despise both of the options. Yet, the only reasonable action is to wholeheartedly embrace the awful first option, that is, suffering by sacrificing something of ourselves is at least better than suffering as some bloated, pathetic creature.
There are some creatures who do not respond to anything except violence against them. They are impervious to fake structures, only tangible admonishment effects them. Thus far, my body has demonstated it is a disgusting, base creature. The Christian root idea of the corrupt body, is accurate at least.
For all enforcement of norms has failed to work, the only thing left is violence. Violence against the spirit, in a perhaps nontangible way, but real all the same. The higher self must be strong enough to whip the lower into submission, for it takes cooperation between the high and low for the high to achieve its goals through the lowly self. We eternally must grapple with the higher self’s whims fighting the lower self’s. From now, my own higher self must be extreme against the lower self, and deaden the senses.
Infinite Experience
Sometimes I try to see if I can change my experience so that I feel an infinite amount of time passing by. I’ve found the closest you can reach this experience (of immortality) is to make your state stable to your environment. All of us experience natural flux in our state. When we sit and do nothing we become bored. If we do this in bed we fall asleep and experience grat state fluctuation. Do we want to experience the passage of infinite time? Not really. With this granted, we prefer time that is finite, thus bound by a beginning and end. So, we should prefer death to the alternative. Some of us may want to have as long as possible time. This relates to another idea.
The Full Human Experience
What is the total human experience? I think at every moment we experience it. If the psychological theory is correct, then all feelings are illusory; we have arousal and non-arousal states, which by context are given further meaning, which serve to inform our response. Experiencing these different interpretations doesn’t really satisfy a ’total human experience’. So without this, we see the full human experience is actually quite simple, in a certain perspective. Thus we cannot be too upset if our experience is not inclusive of all the variety of the world. Whether we live in one place or travel the world, we feel the full range of human emotion, or at least we could. But the desire to feel all these feelings strikes me as pointlessly completionist. The same sort of mind that drives hoarders. Novelty in life is not really that novel.
The Lower Self
The Lower Self is a strange creature that is difficult to understand. In gifted ones, who have the capacity for development, it is the most confusing. At least in hedonistic type people, their Lower Self is in full control, and does not create extrenuous tension. In myself, the Lower Self even on the basic level (not just on the Higher Plane) has a tendency to self-hatred and despair. It’s regretful wallowing is discordant and useless, and puts the whole self in a careless, meandering state. Even The Lower Self wishes to cooperate completely, and to submit to the Higher Self, in some degree, but is spastic and cannot submit, and is often forgetful or even deliberate in it’s self-inflicted pain. This is why it is necessary to take the extreme measure of Spiritual Self-Violence. In either case, there is great suffering. There is a potential to ascend beyond the Basic, the Lowly, to completely kill the self-loathing Lower Self. But The Lower Self unwittingly resists all attempts at it’s murder. How stubborn it is! The Higher Self, however, has potentially infinite energy to draw from, and could carry on direct confrontation indefinitely, which is equivalent to the complete killing of the Lower Self in any case.
Fantasia’s Effects
Fantasia is terrible, for it can cause emotional instability from within. The emotions can be, roughly speaking, a positive or negative influence. In the former case, it is like a vice; we desire positive feelings and for lack of them in the world, we create our own surrogates to fulfil ourselves. In the latter, it obviously has a negative effect without purpose, bringing down our mood, impacting our judgment.
Fantasia is dangerous for the social psyche. In individuals who have issues with verbal communication, there is a distinction between how well they can communicate in their own mind, and how they actually communicate with others. This barrier is sometimes imperceptible, even though the effects are most noticeable. Very often Fantasia fulfils the desire to communicate verbally, naturally. Long conversations happen that never leave the head.
Death
When I die, it will be the right time. There will be people close to me who will mourn me. It will be sad for them. They too, will die as well. Before that, they wilol mourn and adapt and move on. There’s nothing sad in this cycle of death to me. It is purely natural.
Pretty much all fears that are not socially related, are linked to death. Overcoming the dread of death is a big milestone in anyones life, because then things seem to get better, if you interpret it the correct way. I feel I’m mostly apathetic to the state of life. I have no particular reason to live, yet I have no particular reason to die either. Without knowing what lays beyond death (and as that knowledge is strictly forbidden from the living), I cannot say for sure if I should be concerned or not. The best policy then, is to just have no fear, to not worry, to let go of anxieties.
Is my path as an engineer any more noble than any other pursuit? Whether I were an artist, or a labourer, life seems to contain the same things. It all becomes hazy in my vision. Not strictly pointless, but more so because the word carries certain connotations. I at least know that putting myself to work, to suffer and to overcome suffering, is inevitable in any path of life, even the lazy ones.
I could have been a mere spermatozoa. A tadpole who like most, perishes. A tadpole that grew into the short-loived frog. Instead I embodied the grand and complex hum,human, the universes self-analyzing machine. There is something to be said about this grand miracle of existence.
I must painfully acknowledge my lack of religion, of spiritual belief. The fact that each day brings me closer to a materialism, albeit with exception for the soul. Do I hold on to it because of a fear of void in the afterlife? Yet my parts will return to whence it came, and that is not so bad. A temporarily formed system am I, and grand is my operation.
Connection
I’ve realized, and admitted to myself, that I don’t really want to socialize with others. For a while I’ve been obsessed with how I can appear normal, how to socialize, how to speak, how to get others to become your friend. For what end? The mere mere placating of a gross feeling inside me? A lust to speak with others, but I’d rather not have that lust in the first place.
I’ve wondered if simulated conversation is a solution. It would be preferable to just be lonely though. Better, to not feel lonely when alone, and be isolated from others. Better, to just be happy with the ones I know are close to me and want nothing more. This would be much, much more preferable.
The Postscript
These excerpts present a period of internal struggle in my life about many things related to rightful living. How to handle the apparent dissonance between our ideals and our actuality? What to make of my personal struggles with communication? I posted this raw material, because I felt that it was reasonably coherent as it was, I thought it may resonate with other people, and I did not desire to transform this into another work. But, some commentary is necessary on this.
The Two Selves
First, I want to explain an implicit theme, which is my idea of a person having two selves in one, a lower and higher, or you could also say a base and noble self. For some time, I had the belief that if I could frame my actions and feelings in terms of a battle between the lower and higher selves, I could develop highly effective and violent techniques of self-development, while retaining my sense of dignity. There is parallel to the idea of the self and the soul, in that the lower self is your self that inhabits the body, has a direct effect, and is bound by energy, while the higher self has only indirect control but endless energy. Furthermore, the lower and higher self have different goals according to their name; how convenient that any goal of my self that I dislike, I can discard as being of the lower self, and everything I like is of the higher self.
The problem I came to see is this separates the concept of responsibility, and actually increases a sense of helplessness. While reading Nietzsche, I reflected on the idea that my ideas are actually a continuation of destructive Christian ideas about the self. I’d been ignoring the possibility that the whole self is all me, that there is no separation. I am not exclusively a ‘higher self’ who lacks control over his puppet, because the puppet is just as much me. It’s sobering to admit that your own self is what is disgusting and base in your own eyes, but at the same time, there is a deeper sense of hope and potential for change, considering that now, the goals of the higher self do not have to be indirectly coerced, but can be actually practiced.
Fantasia
Fantasia is a whimsical word I use instead of ‘maladaptive daydreaming’. I dislike the latter, simply because I don’t like terminology that implies I buy into contemporary psychological ideas, because I don’t. At any rate, the two terms point to the same thing. This is something I still struggle with, but the frequency has reduced, and I’ve got better at identifying when I’ve fallen into daydream, and snapping out of it. I’m working on making a strong habit of snapping out of it, and pointing out the absurdity of the daydream. What I said before about how these scenarios are focused on socialization has remained true, and I’m curious if it’s like this for other people. For instance, I have at some times been curious about learning to work with wood, so I can make my own beautiful furniture for my home one day. It seeps into Fantasia though, and notably, it’s never about the woodworking itself. It’s always about how a neighbor reacts to something I have apparently already created.
Surprisingly, I don’t feel embarrassed admitting this. My admission has no bearing on the fact that it is actually happening, and that in itself is the source of shame. My inspiration to write on this came from a mysterious user called redacted234 on Agora Road, who talked with deep earnestness about his experience with daydreaming. He is what made me realize I’ve been having the same problem as him, and it’s why I ever decided to do something about it. Until then, I was quite literally sleepwalking, so stuck in my head that I was unable to identify what I was doing. I’ll always be grateful for his work, and I hope he is well.