everything is connected

I was sitting in my car today reading Sartre when suddenly *everything* made sense. I could see these connections everywhere. The past few months of my desperate philosophizing were culminated into that moment, and I wasn't confused anymore. It was like everything was turned inside-out, and I could finally get it. Of course then I had to go stab micropipetters everywhere and do PCR so I got distracted, but I still remember quite a bit of my moment of enlightenment so I want to write it before I forget.

I was thinking about existentialism. I wrote that earlier. And I was reading mainly psychology in Sartre. I was thinking about institutions, and churches, and why Nietzsche and Kierkegaard especially were so different and so adamant about not having followers. I realized it was all connected. Something Sartre said triggered a fuse in my mind. Sartre said that people life in self-deception; they don't know it's a lie, which creates a unity of spirit, but at the same time some part of them knows everything, all the truths in the world, because you can't lie unless you know the truth.

So this is my truth. Feel free to disagree. It managed to bring everything wrong with me this whole school year together.

People are lies. Society has created a myth of consciousness and we adopted it. We say we are angry because someone did something to us; so many excuses. We aren't angry because people did it to us; we are angry because it hurt us. Usually anger occurs after hurt. Sometimes before. But I have rarely in my life experienced them separate from each other.
I learned last year at my seminar that the mind is like an iceburg. 90% of it is unseen. We are only aware of the top bit. I was thinking about that today in my car as well. How can the mind be conscious of an unconsciousness? The unconscious holds all of the reasons for our actions; in our consciousness we hold only the excuses we are willing to believe. It's like what Dostoevsky said about houses. People are actually believing themselves when they tell themselves the reason they do drugs or cut or something is that they are depressed. But people have complete control. I am bipolar. I understand depression. However, I think it's still an excuse. People hurt themselves because they are afraid of being happy. They are afraid of not having anything wrong.
So everyone, in their self-perception, is off. We are lying to ourselves. We don't seek the real motives of our actions, but we admit that they are there, buried in some subconscious. However, we are aware of our subconscious which means that some part of it must be conscious. We are lying, so some part of us must know the truth.

This makes the superficial world mostly a lie. This doesn't have to be a bad thing. People find a sort of happiness in the lies. Sartre says there is a sort of honesty in the lies. But I don't think they can ever find real fulfillment or existence. This makes our interpersonal relationships sometimes based on lies as well, but they are only lies we tell ourselves. I thought about Josh a lot today too, and how all year I have seen that he's afraid of being happy and healthy and not being busy but he would never admit it. It's crazy, to be told the truth, to know it, and to bury it in favor of the comfort of depression.

This is how it all came together. I think that people like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard become conscious of their subconscious to the extent that their whole mind is conscious. They are totally self-aware. None of the iceburg is hidden. They see the truth behind their actions, and that gives them a very different view of the world. I think that the 'existenz' is simply self-awareness and a rejection of the lies we have accepted about our psychology.

Sartre said that it is interesting when people go to psychologists because they usually end up subconsciously running away from the wellness they thought they sought by seeing a professional. And some part of people knows this. They are at the psychologist's office, and during the week they do everything they can to not get better. The psychosis is always conscious of itself. The self-deception can make this consciousness a sub-existence rather than awareness.

I have been in therapy for probably twelve years total of my life. I have been running from health that whole time. But also that whole time I have been fed things to make me begin to understand the real motives of my actions. People can't really feel fulfilled, they can't change, until they are willing to admit the real reasons why they do things. With all of these excuses we use, we are just giving ourselves excuses to not change.

Existentialism is intensely personal because all of this I'm describing is a personal process. You have to realize that your consciousness is a lie. You have to begin delving into the real psychology of people. And there you meet a sort of nothingness that most existentialists talk about. Only then can you face the truth. You know it, right now. But you can't face it yet.

I read Frankl's book about happiness and I agreed with him. I think that people always have the option to be happy. They use outward circumstances as excuses to not be happy. They use a lot of things as excuses to not be happy. They even believe, sometimes, that they really want to be happy. But that reminds me of Josh, how he says he loves me, and he doesn't act like it. People that say they want to be happy but then run off after some self-injurious muse are lying with their actions. Honesty leads to happiness. Not an easy happiness, but an authentic happiness.

I'm not trying to downplay the seriousness of addictions and the need to punish oneself. I know what it's like. I've been through it all. But I'm still convinced this is the truth. I'm convinced that these things are just structures we put into place to escape the fear of what it would be like to be 100% conscious.

I think that church can easily become another excuse to not face things, even though I do believe in God at this point. I think that people should discover their religious convictions themselves, and then seek fellowship. There is no real fellowship until we know and love ourselves anyway.

I sat in my car today, and it all made sense, everything. Existentialism suddenly connected to philosophy and theology and all of the mistakes that I've made in my life. The knifeblade between self awareness and self-produced insanity made sense. Life in general made sense.

However, I still think that real truths are only self-derived, which I guess makes me an existentialist. I'm not sure, however, that in the end some of those truths aren't universal. I just know they have to come from inside, not some institution.

It was just like the domino scene in V for Vendetta (should be italics but I'm lazy). Everything began hitting everything else until I could see the last domino standing.