Living for Paradise

On many occasions, in deep sleep, dreams of paradise find audience. One can’t help but wonder on solutions to humanity’s problems divined in dreams. As powerful as our race is, we have failed to turn our world into a veritable Eden. Humanity has failed at a mission that should be as simple today as peeling an orange. The subconscious can pick up on this. It can haunt the sympathetic person.

For now, paradise finds its place only in dreams. Sleep serves as a doorway to happier realities where goodness and beauty prevail for the fortunate. Here, problems require simple common sense solutions. We wonder on human frailty, sickness, perversion, aggression and limitations and find them irrelevant. Birth and death find their purpose. An origin can be sensed from which one’s life sprung. A destiny that must simply overcome the pain of one’s demise finds peaceful enchantment its temper. Nature and spiritual life merge. Everything makes sense! And when all this is revealed we say, “Of coarse! It’s obvious these truths are so.” But, when we wake, they are forgotten. One only knows the day’s work ahead, while the knowledge of the dream remains only on the tip of one’s tongue.

Hope may find paradise not so hard to find in everyday existence. The trick is to get in touch with it. Becoming sensitive to its presence and allowing it a chance to permeate life and one’s character may serve as its means. Eccentric labels will proclaim its lack of practicality among the conventional. Perhaps eccentrics rest closer to paradise than most.

In a world where pragmatic hard work coupled with deadlines and efficiencies dominate, a Spartan and objectionable scheme compose people’s environment. One sees factories, warehouses, asphalt parking lots, and strip shopping centers. We settle for this where there could be more beauty. But beauty is unaffordable and impractical. We are left with this bland state and even find ourselves use to it. There is comfort in the simple and assert ascetically, “form follows function.” We have little resource for the ornamental embellishments of youthful idealism.

Most people come to accept this condition at some point in their lives. Too many will come to accept the condition all their lives. But for some, the soul revolts. Boredom, depression, and remorse haunt these people as they come to grips with a starving sensuality within. In some cases health takes a nose dive as illness holds frequent parties of discourse upon their bodies. In other cases, careers come to a screeching halt. A dreamer has been sleeping inside and is waking up. Careers won’t only halt. They will change.

With the emergence of the poet in the rebirth of the deprived, a collective memory of a better way can find itself externalized in the material. The artist is driven by their internal sense. Imagine the building of towers of ivory, enchanted forests, bodies of pure light, and being able to fly. What could it take to externalize these things?

Some say science promises these things. Technology is capable of achieving anything given the resources and time. But this tool is neutral in character. Its products are dependent on the probity of its patrons. It can be used to create hell as easily as it can create heaven. A knowledge that is the essence of human heart is required to govern science. It requires philosophical governorship coupled with artistic and spiritual benefaction. But philosophy does not maintain unanimity between its schools. Idealism remains at odds with materialism. Fatalists dispute with the indeterminists. Objectivists find dissolution with the socialists. Not to mention competing religious factions. How should such a potpourri govern our lives?

One may find that the solution does not require the recognition of one school of thought at the expense of the other. In truth, all these schools are incorrect in their assertions. We know they are inadequate because all the constituents hold some measure of correctness yet conflict. Harmonizing the various schools seem at the foundation to human liberation and euphony. Yet it is unlikely that this harmony will be achieved anytime soon.

For the present, recognition and tolerance of disunity seems an essential course in attaining fantasy’s subject. Philosophy remains paramount to return the objective, but its study must be restricted to the relevant. Perhaps epistemology and religion possess less importance in the quest for happiness than is assumed. Truth gained through primary experience, rather than secondary sources, may be all that is requisite. Like a math problem, the answer rests in essentially. Why bog the equation down with things that don’t matter? Experience tested by consensus and history could be the crude determinants of a path leading to a better life. Like calculus, one finds the derivative and the slope of the intersecting line while never achieving the point on the curve. Its proof and validity, though, are readily assured.


Essential Elements

They say that in heaven people have want of nothing. All is provided freely. Fulfillment has no issue. Yet, the constituents of what fulfills compose the essence of living. Without it, there is no life. This purpose is central to the quest for happiness and is an essential aspect of the human predicament. Purpose is the reason people want to live. It is what gets them out of bed in the morning and puts them to task. Dreams and ambition are its composition.

This is also the reason people seek the cooperative. Society helps people achieve their dreams by facilitating the requirements for self actualization. As a family, people achieve ambitions greater than anything they could accomplish alone. While motive rests dependent upon an autonomous soul, its resolution becomes easier with the help of others. Like motives, this social promise also seems an important aspect of the human condition. The promise is what the community provides its members. It is the procurement and distribution of personal resources. It is the assurance of fairness and justice. It is the responsibilities the society has toward its people.

While society has obligations to its citizenry, the individual also has responsibilities as members of the community. This responsibility may best be described as virtue. Virtue is what makes a person good according to society, tradition, and reason. It is a quality of perfection individuals seek to attain so that potential for themselves and others is maximized. Purpose, the responsibilities of society, and virtue are the things most important when beginning a appreciable improvement on the human condition. This utopian aspiration depends on finding the right motive, social system, and conduct to achieve the ideal.

Motivation

The center and source of a person's life is purpose. There would be no life without it because without it there would be no reason to exist. While inherent mandate insists life's continuance for most plants and animals, people often require more than a mere instinct to live.

Different people have different reasons to live. The artist's is to create. The poet's is to express. The athlete's reason is to play. The romantic's is to love. In truth, though, purpose is but one thing for all people. Experience people dictate to themselves as desirable is the reason they persist. These experiences are what keep them working, seeking, and breathing. They can be big things like rites of passage, graduation, or marriage. They can be little things like a child's laugh, a spring rain, a good book, or to accomplish a perfect score on a test.

Most will contend that there must be more than desire’s intent to drive people. They may be right. But only the objective of experience is verifiable through reasonable doubt. Most other reasons to exist require a considerable leap of faith. It's more useful in this social study to stay with the shallow yet proven. Otherwise, one might find themselves lost amidst the many possible theories of mystics and philosophers.

Others would suggest that sensual dissertation is inadequate because it doesn’t explain why people like the poor and homeless keep striving to live. They endure despite a desperate situation. They have few experiences to live for. If only motivated by these, would they not prefer to die than live in misery? But people that have nothing actually have three things that can keep them going. Some may work off of instinctive will. Their animal side just keeps pushing them to continue.

Maybe they have future's potential. There may be hope of escape from their non-rewarding life sometime in the future.

Regretfully, many may have anger to keep them going. The way this works is easy to understand. Because of their predicament, they tend to hold some low self esteem or self doubt. If this condition remains unchecked, it can keep a person down through a self-fulfilling prophecy. But, sometimes a fighting side emerges. It is almost as though an aspect of the person seeks to deny and reject the situation. It takes a mind of its own, feeding off of anger, desperate for redemption in proving one's worthiness to a normal life. A system that puts one in this mode of negativity isn't maximizing its potential. Moreover, the person who engages it usually forgets what they started out fighting for. Life's experiences become flawed by the spirit's mad redemption. The initial pursuit is no longer the reason to exist. Redemption becomes the experience.


Activities for Living

The course of experience involves five human activities. The first is called assimilation. Assimilation is the taking in of sensory stimuli. It is the sensual taste, smell, touch, and sound. It is the scent of Star Jasmine in bloom or a spring rain. The sight of the ocean for the first time. It is a song. Or perhaps the touch of a spider crawling up one’s arm. The second is interpretation. Once felt, the stimuli is reacted to on two levels. Unconsciously, the stimuli can generate programmed reflexes or emotions. Consciously, thought composes the interpretation. A texture or color can be recognized and attributed an abstract name. Some ramification may be deduced from the perception. Sometimes, this can produce its own automatic reflex and emotional response. Once the interpretation is made, a third activity may appear called motorization. Motorization is the act of a reflex, emotion, or any engagement in the material world as a result of stimuli and its interpretation. It's interesting to note that the division between interpretation and motorization is blurred on the subconscious level. But on the conscious level, interpretation is the mental while motorization is the physical.

The fourth activity of living is called affinity. Affinities dictate what people wish to experience. They are the desire for companionship, the need to take a long journey, or the desire to be organized. Why these affinities exist is a mystery. Maybe they are learned. Perhaps they are instinctive, a product of genetic evolution. Perhaps they are a soul surmise, messages from that other world of absolute truth. Whatever they may be, they do exist and they drive humanity and fuel active living. They give the experience of life motivation.

There are many things that will maximize human potential for experiences. The merits of courage suggest people never give into fear. Knowing what to fear is requisite in living. Fear keeps many from maximizing life’s capability. Hatred and bias can also hold individuals back. For example, hatred for other races can destroy the potential for rewarding relationships. Bias impedes logic and hides these potentials. Respect for others and their dreams by everyone insures a consensus and determination that all be assured potential’s rewards. The individual, who appreciates even the most dubious intentions of others, will have their own protected in turn. Protection of variety on all levels of life seems essential and beneficial. Regard for dreams, art, belief, as well as environmental preservation of species and habitat dwell in the realm of what is right and good.

All these things, which maximize human potential, are determined by a simple tool. This tool is called reason. It is reason that sets the ground rules for living. Reason recognizes the human predicament. With it, one composes what being human is. This includes an appraisal of capacities. A determination of human limitations given our natural state of being is made. Reason examines this, recognizes the imperfection of people and their condition, and works with it. Through reason, people see the economy of practicality. Setting priorities and determining technique, it tells us the means to fulfilling as many affinities as possible. It is the fifth and final activity in life’s engagement. Reason shares relevance along with assimilation, interpretation, motorization, and affinity. It, in fact, seeks to govern them all.

Assimilation - the taking in of sensory stimuli

Interpretation - reflex or emotions, thought

Motorization - physical response

Affinity - drives the experience, is the motivation

Reason - guides the experience


The Artist as Affinitarian

In an age of reason, the poet seems occult. There has been a neglect of the artistic experience in the lives of most lay people. Many choose the more practical career at the expense of a promising childhood of artistry. An artist’s life is a harder road. It is a path that, in our society, leads to poverty, branded eccentricity, and the foolish appearance of court jest. This seems desperate as a career and life’s work. Science and math rather than the humanities prove the means to success and survival. But one can learn all the sciences to find that they only grant a portion of paradise. A fulfilling human life must also include the aesthetic.

That reason seeks supremacy over affinity can prove detrimental to the art of living. It is better that reason’s logic form a partnership with the heart’s affinity. It is not that people should experience more music or read more books. Consumerism by an under developed population of connoisseurs only yields excuses for art. Its content is entirely pleasure requiring little poetic sacrifice. It is as a football enthusiast glues himself to a television, a bag of potato chips, and a pack of beer to watch a game of tactic and human strength. From middle childhood they watch as lean healthy athletes impart an adventure competition prescribes. By middle age they find themselves physically impoverished and half of their lifetime wasted away. How much better it would have been to have spent one’s life playing the sport rather than watching. Like the “couch potato,” would it had not been better to be the artist rather than consumed the art? I say this because pure consumption neglects some aspects of mental enrichment the practice of art can achieve. Beyond the consumption and re-discovery, there is the nature of the artist’s exploration and true objective.

Life is like crossing a stream dotted with stepping stones. For most people, it requires stepping from one stone to the next. The stones are not always stable and it’s possible to loose one’s balance. The cautious carefully step from one stone to the next fearful of wet feet or even worse. If one is sure footed, they can get from one side to the other without getting wet. Intellectuals might approach the goal of reaching the other side differently. Using their mental capacities, they could build a boat or perhaps a bridge to reach their objective. But poets find an entirely new approach to this situation. Artists can appreciate the technology of the intellectual’s bridge or transport. They can also stand upon a stepping stone and dwell upon its means. One can bring out the inherent emotional responses in these perceptions. But beauty composes more than just a simple and practical path to the other side of the waters and journey’s end. There are the torrents, ebbs, and undertows of the river’s current. These too can evoke emotion. The artist captures these ancient apprehensions, fears, and terror. Fascination in the awful curses the poet as he stands on his teetering stepping stone. Then, in enlightened exploration, he jumps into the waters! The artist’s beauty can be found in evil as much as goodness.

Holocaust, incestuous transgression, violent mutilation, and madness belong to darker realms of the mind. This as well as the good and pleasurable captivate. A collective subconscious redeems archetypal responses to all. Whether these are products of natural selection or products of some idealistic world, the artist discovers them. She interprets them. She expresses them. Finding the affect of reality on the human psyche yields the poet’s intangible beauty. Its engagement profits the explorer with agreeable pleasure. Sometimes it can cost the observer in emotional toil. Regardless of the shallow drawbacks that might ensue, a deeper advantage permeates the experience. Intangible beauty, whether grounded in good or evil, is the artists objective in exploration, discovery, and creation.

Appreciating aspirations toward intangible beauty lie at the beginning to finding a more enlightened lifestyle for all people. Its attraction seems driven by an undeniable affinity. People should recognize this affinitarian experience as a motivation to exist. They ought to commit to existence and life by living by its suggestions and by exploring all it dictates. Upon internalization, they should compliment the discovery and interpretation through the pleasure of its creative expression. In this, people retain title to poet, artist, and craftsman and they begin to find advantages in all reality. 

The Rockaway Beach Papers

Double click image above to access link.