Your Wound, Our Weapon
“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.” ~Pema Chödrön
Pain is a whetstone. Honing is an honor. Pressure is a privilege.
On a long enough timeline all timelines are blips. The universe is shattered infinity, and your soul is a snail precariously inching its way along the edge of a razor-sharp speck floating through indifferent nothingness. There’s no buffer, save your own sense of humor. There’s no savior, save your own heroism. There’s no recourse, save your own discourse. And lest you slip into solipsism, there’s no separateness, save your own nonattachment to interconnectedness.
Your wound is our weapon. You’re not an isolated event. You are an infinitely interconnected resonance in human form. You are a wave in an ocean. You are the entire universe in a speck. Thus, your rebellion against absurdity is our rebellion against absurdity. As Albert Camus said, “I rebel; therefore, we exist.”
It’s high time you honored your interconnectedness. And it just so happens that the best way you can honor it is to sharpen yourself against it. Your antifragility is hidden within your fragility. Your fierceness is hidden within your pain. Your power is hidden within your weakness. Your light is hidden within your darkness.
It’s time to integrate. It’s time to reconcile. It’s time to Individuate.
This means that it’s time to stop being easy on yourself. Stop with the mollycoddling dogmas and sentimental politics. Stop with the woe-is-me placations and stopgap comfort zones. Stop with the winey woe-is-me nihilism. Get out of your own way and discover your ferocity, your mindfulness, your inner wisdom. Embrace the razor’s edge. Become cut, so that you may cut.
1.) Comfortable beds do not make fierce warriors:
“It’s better to get lost in the passion than to lose the passion.” ~Kierkegaard
You want real strength? Tear your muscles down, then rebuild them. You want real endurance? Stretch your body, push your heart to the limit, lean into full extension. Rest and repeat. Just make sure you’re repeating more than you’re resting lest comfort zones become unintended prison walls.
The world is Chaos. The body is self-organization. Health comes from a state of pre-established harmony between the body and the world. When you are engaged absolutely, your body is a sword cutting through the chaos and creating order and harmony from the void.
Meditation, martial arts, yoga, HIIT, weightlifting, parkour, these are all forms of pre-established harmony creating health in the body, transforming the body into an instrument sharp enough to cut through the chaos of the world. Practice is a sharpening stone for this instrument. The more you practice, the sharper your “sword.” The sharper your sword, the easier it will be to cut.
To cut with the body is to cut through entropy. The opposite of entropy is health. To cut with the body is to use health as a sword to slice through entropy, inertia, idleness, laziness, and even death. Where entropy is the ultimate state of inert uniformity, cutting with the body is the absolute state of engaged harmony.
As Klaus Mainzer said, “Chaos and self-organization go hand in hand, and only if they are in a state of pre-established harmony do life and health exist.”
2.) Painless inquiry does not make mindful philosophers:
“The first step toward philosophy is incredulity.” ~Denis Diderot
Don’t allow your beliefs to become delusions. Question what you think before a belief ever has a chance to form.
Mindful philosophy always chooses dangerous questions over safe answers. It shatters illusions and demolishes delusions. It is neither restricted by tradition nor bound by convention. It seeks power over Power, and it is always Dionysian in nature lest it fall into Apollonian ruin.
Mindful philosophy keeps courage ahead of comfort. It is determined to stay as close to the edge as possible without going over. It’s about taking risks, turning tables, flipping scripts, pushing envelopes, and kicking open third eyes. It questions comfort despite the tiny-hearted. It questions power despite authority. It challenges all gods.
Its unbridled interrogation is its saving grace. Nothing is off the hook. Everything is nailed to its respective cross and stabbed with a question mark spear. There’s no room for holier-than-thou pretense. There’s no resting on one’s laurels. There’s no place for certainty, rigidity, or dogmatism. There’s no place for fragile beliefs to hide. In the presence of a mindful philosopher, everything is put on blast. Everything is broken down with ruthless incredulity. Everything is interrogated.
In the battle against bewitchment, the destruction of a belief, no matter how powerful, is mere collateral damage to the Occam’s razor of the mindful philosopher’s Truth Quest.
As Blaise Pascal said, “To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.”
3.) Believing thoughts does not make wise thinkers:
“You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep-seated need to believe” ~Carl Sagan
Be curious, not certain. Be creative, not convinced. Be humorous, not full of hubris.
This is why the ability to self-overcome is so vital. Without the ability to self-overcome, you are stuck. With the ability to self-overcome, you realize that the “door to your prison cell has always been wide open.”
Curiosity will save you from the certainty that would drown you. Creativity will save you from the conviction that would deter you. Humor will save you from the hubris that would bury you.
Don’t ‘hold on for dear life’ to hand-me-down light. Embrace cosmic interconnectedness. You can’t steal the light from someone who carries the entire universe inside them.
You are the Universe’s way of learning about the universe. When you choose to believe rather than think, you inadvertently cut yourself off from the whole. Better to simply think within it, be with it, flow through it. Rather than dogmatic attachment, choose healthy nonattachment. Rather than clinging to a single basket of fragile eggs, choose elevation over the battlefield of the human condition.
All too often belief is a hook, and the fish mouth of your brain cannot help but take the bait. Hook, line, and sinker. And suddenly you are caught. You’re trapped! You’re stuck in a particular way of thinking, disregarding Aristotle’s wise words: “Entertain a thought without excepting it.”
Entertain a thought without accepting, see without weighing, listen without shaping, feel without forming. This is how truth begins to breathe.
As Osho said, “Belief is the most dangerous thing against truth, because it prevents you from inquiring. It makes you knowledgeable, but it does not make you wise. It can make you a great scholar, a theologian, but deep inside, you are full of darkness, and you don’t know who you are.”
Image source:
Gijinka by liberxx0
About the Author:
Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world.
This article (Your Wound, Our Weapon) was originally created and published by Self-inflicted Philosophy and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary Z McGee and self-inflictedphilosophy.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright
Self-inflicted Philosophy
garyzmcgee76@gmail.com
YouTube
Facebook
Twitter
©2018 by Self-inflicted Philosophy. Proudly created with Wix.com
