The Vehicle of Progress

A good way to think about my motivational system - or, rather, the issue I have therein - might be to conceptualize it as the engine of a run-down car attempting to start in a very cold climate. This abstraction applies equally to both the microcosm and the macrocosm; on the macro scale, the way to move towards my goals is to keep the engine running day after day. This enables the vehicle of progress to overcome the initial inertia and begin to gain speed through acceleration, which can be described in more straightforward and concrete terms as a cultivation of certain positive, productive habits that cumulatively have an effect that begins to loop back around and feed into itself. In the micro sense, part of the reason that the engine won't start in the cold is that it is not running yet, in that if it were running, it would itself dispel the cold which prevents it from starting. This is illustrative of the self-perpetuating nature of the issue as well as the parallel yet inverse effect present in its solution; it corresponds to the disparity which exists between the volume of tasks and responsibilities I have awaiting my immediate attention and my capacity to complete them, in that not only would I have less demands on my attention all the time if I did more of them more often, but in addition to that, I experience a somewhat debilitating feeling of being overwhelmed when there is an immense amount of work awaiting and requiring my attention which makes the prospect of attempting to begin almost intimidating - this intimidation is the cold of the climate which is dispelled by the engine itself once it has started.

This car has some issues with it and so too does its driver, such that not only is it difficult to get the car started in the first place, but it's even harder to keep it running for very long. It seems that almost as soon as the driver has managed to get the car started, he's decided he wants to stop and check out some new unexplored territory and the engine is back to square one, or absolute zero. Not only this, but the driver is on something of a journey and every time he stops his car, he forgets exactly where he was going and sometimes doesn't even remember once the car has started again, resulting in him potentially heading away from his next destination in favour of checking out some other interesting but potentially irrelevant nearby landmark or event. He also has a bad habit of getting caught up somehow in these stops, spending time socializing with people he meets at the stops and smoking weed with them whereupon his head remains 'in the clouds' for days at a time, impairing his ability to remember not only that he was supposed to be going somewhere, but also where he was supposed to be going and when he was supposed to get there. Speaking of the car now, the radiator has a critical leak which means that even when he does get the engine to begin running, it doesn't stay running for long - soon enough, he will need to stop the engine to refill the radiator or risk damaging his engine. He keeps trying to fix the problem by refilling the radiator with more water, rather than locating a mechanic and having him patch the leak. Instead of keeping in mind that he needs to fix the leak however, he keeps forgetting where he's going and getting lost because his marijuana use leads to laziness and forgetfulness, and he only recently fully recognized this to be an important element of the problem. Since then, he's decided to get his radiator fixed and is currently waiting at the mechanic for his car to be returned to him. While he's waiting, he's decided to perform a kind of meta-analysis on some of the difficulties he's been grappling with in trying to complete his journey so that he might be able to synthesize some gems of insight that might help with his own issues that tend to lead him 'off-road'.

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What does it mean to 'bridge' the gap that exists between any two given interpretive frameworks, especially if they produce a jarring tone when combined together? What does it take to reconcile the blindness inherent to each point of view which so makes it impossible to see through one's own projections in one's interpretations of others? How does one calibrate their influence on the matrix of perception such that their framework emits no noise?

These questions are ones I've been meditating on recently, brought to the surface by a substantial precipitation of psynchronistic qualia that manifest in such a way that I am called forth to play my part, and the part that I play is that of the conneqtive medium through which frameworks may interface with minimal cross-talk. This means that, during a dialectic dialogic process, I position myself such that I can oversee the progressive misunderstanding that emerges from the ongoing discourse and pinpoint it such that I can facilitate a moment of illumination that denies the misunderstanding the chance to grow and mutate. This, of course, is an experience that I thoroughly enjoy - if I wait patiently enough, I can come in and connect the dots so that everyone can see what I can see, and at that moment everyone is connected to what is going on in the conversation; consequently, I am then comfortable fading back into the background to watch ever-so carefully for the next moment that I can step forward and play my part as a bridge between disparate points of view.

In a recent social situation approximating something of a tempest that occurred on Nameless Debates, the energy in the room took on a strange, wild and unconscious vibe which took me quite by surprise because although I knew that that there was a convergence of certain shadow-games occurring, I didn't expect it to manifest in such a volatile or resonant fashion. To some degree, the orc army had assembled in front of our eyes and it was up to us to dispatch their forces - so that we did. Even more surprising than the atmosphere in the room was the fact that it was, after a sufficient amount of effort, resolved in a relatively productive manner and this was only due to the synergy manifested between the complementary methodologies Mystic and I wielded in parsing the conscious and unconscious motivations of each orcish interlocutor that we faced. This experience was oddly draining for both of us, and I found myself slightly off-centre for the rest of the evening after this strange experience despite how successful our efforts had apparently proven.

The value that I see in this role that I play is simple enough to my perception - by maintaining my position as the connecting piece between others during dialogue, I optimally facilitate their own capacity for eloquent expression through my recognition of what it is that they are attempting to say and my subsequent assistance with the articulation of that intended meaning. In doing so, I find that I am able to come to a better understanding of what it is that they are putting forward than perhaps even they had themselves, and then express that to their interlocutor in terms which they will find comprehensible. This means that a lot of the procedural methodology which I employ in my role as a conneqtive piece, or a bridge, involves a certain talent or skill in translating between interpretive structures which predisposes one to the kind of communicative clarity that I believe I bring to a conversation, and that's one of the things I love about having and facilitating the conversations I do - I really do feel as if I am helping people understand one another, and getting closer all the time to truth, and it is all down to my bridging method.

On the morning of the aforementioned tempest, a psynchronistic timing contrived this conception of a 'bridge' in my mind through the juxtaposition of my drifting in and out of meditation and the music playing on my phone. The music emanating from my phone directed my attention to the notion of a linguistic process of translation between the dialects of different participants in a conversation, and that night when I went to meditate again I found that the events of the day had fleshed out my conception of how it is that I manage to bring about the effect I have in a conversation, which meant that my meditation that evening was a productive process of integration. This integration struck me as invigorating, and so I redoubled my efforts to focus just as a new song came on - a song with a familiar, yet unfamiliar feeling attached to it. As I was focusing my attention, what struck me first was the feeling which made the night that I had first heard the song significant, because that was from whence the song had inherited the meaning attached to it; that night, I recalled, I ended up getting charged with possession of marijuana...

Huh, I thought to myself - I'd never linked that song to the other events that occurred that night before - not consciously anyway. Curiously, I looked a little closer - were there dots to be connected here, as of yet unnoticed? What I saw when I looked intrigued me, because sure enough I realized that if I had not been charged with possession that night, then I would never have been arrested a few months later, and so I realized that some of the consequences I suffered were connected in a chain of some sort - this seemed odd to me, so I looked closer again. This time, when I looked closer I focused on the feeling attached to that song, and as I was analyzing it I realized that this was not a feeling I'd only had once, but rather I'd experienced it dozens of times without ever forming an interpretation of what it meant. At first it seemed to elude me, but then it came to me - the feeling was my recognition of the fact that I was somehow cheating someone, that 'time was running out', and that 'I couldn't get away with this forever'. This occurred to me in relation to problems that had been emerging for some time now in the romantic relationship I was in at the time due to an inextricably linked pair of problems which I was not as of yet linking to the consequences that were resulting from their enigmatic interdependent overlay. Shortly after this night whereupon the feeling had become attached to the song in question, I suffered a great many losses in connection to these same two problems which ultimately followed from the lack of attention that I paid them at the time when they were most pertinent.

Finally, after observing the manifest psynchronicity of this particular coalescence, I asked myself what lesson I might learn now that I had failed to learn in the past, and suddenly everything clicked into place for me and I had my first sober experience of pure interconnectivity. The experience lasted several minutes, though it faded fast, and in that space I felt the regret that I should have felt long ago for consequences not taken seriously and for a connection that I repeatedly damaged in my inability to connect the dots. I realized, for the first time, why my relationship had fallen apart and why it was that so many negative events had occurred at once - I wasn't pulling my weight, and I had stopped paying attention. And I realized, for the first time, how sorry I was to her for everything that I put her through, and how much I had never understood about those elements of our shared experience together that she alone bore.

In attempting to access the resonant frequency of psynchronicity and tuning in during my meditations, I was able to crystallize an insight which has long escaped me, and it was a crucial insight to my personal life without which I would be practically crippled moving forward. This realization was only possible due to the increased mindfulness and attention cultivated in pursuit of the psynchronistic signal that is orienting us all.

The insight pertains to an intertwined pair of problems which spiderweb in their implications on the rest of my life; one of these such spiderweb cracks met another in my romantic relationship and the cracks became a break which split us apart. All I could see at the time was that I was being abandoned, and I could not see how I was making things worse or what responsibility I bore in the entire affair, for my projections blinded me to the reality I didn't want to see - that I WAS indeed responsible, and that I should have seen all of this coming long before I did - all along, in fact.

These dual problems, my motivation and my management of my marijuana habit, involve one another at a level of intricacy which I have been trying to discern for years now and the consequences of that inter-relationship have escaped me for even longer - for as long as I can remember I thought that perhaps there were no real consequences to this particular problem, and even when they were materializing in front of my very eyes I managed to form some kind of disconnect in my mental space between what I was doing and what was happening as a consequence. This disconnect exists no longer however, because it was the leak in my radiator which I am just now waiting for my mechanic to finish fixing.

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While I've been waiting here for him to finish with my car, I've been meditating in an attempt to gain some insight into why I struggle to reach my destination even though I am thoroughly committed to my journey.

It's occurred to me that I should stop spending whole days with my head in the clouds, and that I should institute more strict rules around when I should permit myself to stop the car for a smoke. I should also boundary my social time more strictly so that I can ensure I don't get too distracted when I do choose to stop and forget that I'm actually supposed to be somewhere. I should be more reticent to stop the car because I know that staying on course is the only way to ensure that I stay on course. Sticking to the schedule seems to be an important element of getting to the destination too, so punctuality should be a big focus - I should focus on learning the boundary for punctuality properly. The key to sticking to the schedule is making sure that you are tracking your arc, and that you don't lose sight of the entire arc; the continuous progression seems to come from holding the journey plan in your mind and not allowing anything, such as a frustrating wrong turn which leads to a new part of town, to distract you or discourage you from hitting your targets and reaching your destination.

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A cold start in the vehicle of motivation is best accomplished by the recognition of progression towards the valued goal.

Focus on progression towards the valued goal is achieved by aligning one's own reflexive reflective capacity with the psynchronistic symbology of the phenomenological world and deriving a provisional orientation therein.

Progress towards the valued goal is achieved by planning the upcoming arc based on the insight derived from the psynchronistic symbology and executing it step-by-step without permitting discouragement. This can be achieved by establishing a boundary around the incapability archetype for the purposes of cultivating progress.

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Recognition of my own resolve to reach my destination - as it is evident in my continuous progress towards my destination - is the key to keeping the engine running in perpetuity, and this recognition can be utilized to cultivate a continuous flow state which maximizes engine performance.

With the prospect of an engine potentially running in perpetuity arises the possibility of stalling, which would seem to be shade thrown over the path of future dominos that thus frustrates rather than fascinates. This is, so to speak, the forgetfulness of a driver with regards to their journey plan, or a regression of the conscious awareness of the arc to an unconscious one.

One can avoid stalling the engine of progress by recording a plan for the arc yet to come in your moments of clarity to serve in those moments of darkness. If no plan is available, one can always refer back to the psynchronistic symbology to rekindle the flame of insight regarding what is to come.