Day 548: Exhalation Is (Not) A Metaphor for Dying
Day 548: 7 November 2022, Monday
Breathing in.
The Reformed Cognizer: one who has emerged from the gap in memory and thinking into the world of feeling, pure sensation, becoming-sensation. Why is one reformed? Or rather, the question is, ‘How is one reformed?’ Reformed how? By the release, the freeing, the liberation of the mind from the mind. By letting go of the clinging, attachment to forms and objects of sensation. (There are no objects of sensation since such an object can be only more sensation. Take a cup of tea or coffee. Taste it. Smell it. Feel it. It is not some abstract thing that has sensation as its function/purpose. In actuality, there is only the sensation itself, and the object as idea is abstraction.)
By liberating the spirit of the body, that which some call the essential soul, one discovers the realm of pure sense. Far from the land of rationality—yet situated within its core—the alchemist cognizes matter from thin air. Meaning is unharnessed from its captors. With stone in hand, the teacher listens to a room of leaders. The body without organs is an egg. Find a new plot of land, consider ®evolution.
‘How could the conjunctive synthesis of “So that’s what it was!” and “So it’s me!” have been reduced to the endless dreary discovery of Oedipus: “So it’s my father, my mother?”’
Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 20
Death is the ultimate reminder.
There is always more.
How might one live?
‘As the light grows, we see ourselves to be worse than we thought. We are amazed at our former blindness as we see issuing from our heart a whole swarm of shameful feelings, like filthy reptiles crawling from a hidden cave. But we must be neither amazed nor disturbed. We are not worse than we were; on the contrary, we are better. But while our faults diminish, the light we see them by waxes brighter, and we are filled with horror. So long as there is no sign of cure, we are unaware of the depth of our disease; we are in a state of blind presumption and hardness, the prey of self-delusion. While we go with the stream, we are unconscious of its rapid course; but when we begin to stem it ever so little, it makes itself felt.’
Fénelon
Breathing out.
