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I cannot over-emphasize the role that motivation plays in the phenomena of progress. As I move forward into this chapter it will become clear why our motivation acts as the compass or guiding principle that protects us from the dangers of detaching from an insidious system. For this reason if one is able to comprehend with profound clarity the scope of the previous chapter all that follows is more descriptive than instructional. For someone to save the world from inequity, corruption, sedation, and brutality they must first identify what part their own actions play in the accumulation of these threats. As I have said before, if society is constructed by the sum of individual actions then someone wishing to save people from the ills of society must first eliminate those personal activities that contribute to the threat. This is the nature of self-purification, removing from one’s life the channels of social corruption, those elements that allow for the flow of chaos and destruction as well as those things that thicken the veil of denial.
If one becomes committed to progress the art of self-purification is a natural consequence since commitment to an ideal demands that we see our actions as vehicles for the expression of our purpose. Everything we eat, everything we say, every job we take, every friendship we nurture, all of these activities are subject to the scrutiny that someone working toward progress must embrace. That being said there are certain trends in the art of self-purification that it might be helpful to describe. Also, as with all of our pursuits the object of the art of self-purification is fluid, impossible to attain. It is always necessary to our humility that we accept this but it is more necessary that we not allow this to deter us from the process and the art. The ideal may resist capture but the results of the pursuit are quite palpable and worth every bit of effort. There are many that hold themselves in measure against what is known or what can be achieved in order to avoid idealism and they invariably suffer mediocrity in their results, proud that they did not succumb to the seduction of romanticism about life. Only human beings, as far as we know, can consider the ideal action. Holding ourselves against perfection takes great courage and a faith in one’s ability to reach unknown heights is a talent. If one wishes to discover their potential the art of self-purification will at least give them some certainty about their limits. Personally, I find no danger in a romantic relationship with existence.
Sedatives
As I discussed in the previous chapter there is nothing more indicative of conformity than the use of sedatives. The most glaring examples of these are mind-altering substances such as drugs, alcohol and pharmaceuticals. All of these are used to numb the instinctive responses to the apparent and ever-present threats to humanity. Less obvious ways include consumption of television, media and internet, the over-consumption of food, and sexual dissipation. Even though these seem less explicitly targeted at our physiology they are just as powerful as forms of sedation and distraction. Individuals wishing to escape from the social duty of seeking progress participate in all of these activities in varying degrees and combinations. Often the thought of working to eliminate these addictions or comforts from one’s daily life seems too arduous to consider. However, detaching from these activities is the only way to unleash the rational mind in order to live creatively and progressively. It is the act of detaching from these activities that marks the end of conformity and the beginning of awareness.
The Nature of Self-purification
There is a great truth that most people will avoid discussing when encouraging someone to eliminate the abuse of substances or over-indulgences of any kind and that is that once one begins to value one’s own life with some kind of reverence they will stand out among their fellows. Any action that one takes that has as its focus the improvement of either the mind, body or spirit will stand in stark contrast to the prevailing social standard. This awareness is just under the surface at all times and the avoidance of any type of self-improvement evidences the interconnectedness of these pursuits to social resistance. So if you consider the art of reading, the five motives or this art of self-purification you will see that any one of these practices intuits the other. One either engages in all of them as a lifestyle or avoids all of them as a rebellion against one’s own conscience. For instance, if we read great teachers we are encouraged to look inside of ourselves for solutions, leading us to our motivations. If we choose a motive for salvation or progress our actions begin to reflect greater responsibility and therefore we seek better books and healthier foods. If we quit drinking, drugging or losing ourselves in sensuality and distraction we will then be faced with a hungry and needy soul, and if we are committed to our self-purification that soul will need to be fed, inspired by a motivation toward progress and bolstered by the words of great teachers. The cycle of human health favors no part of the self and favors no individual above the community. Any human being that experiences the miracle of personal salvation automatically becomes an element of progress in the world since their actions become teachable ones. The minutiae of one’s daily life begins to have a positive accumulative affect upon reality. However, such people will, in our time, live a life of resistance to the norm and acceptance of this must come very early in the process when they happen to be at their weakest struggling against the longings of dying internal dependencies. For this reason spiritual enlightenment and intellectual independence is understood by many, including myself, as one of life’s true miracles.
As if it weren’t enough discouragement that self-purification is itself a revolutionary act there is another truth that people shy away from when discussing independence from sedation. It is that the art of self-purification is never-ending. Just as one eliminates one form of sedation he/she discovers something else that he/she uses to avoid the driving force of his/her conscience. This is called taking comfort in things. If one is lucky enough to have some distance from mind-altering substances, although I doubt they ever completely leave the body, one finds that there are foods and forms of entertainment that are used to destroy or deter one’s progress. The health of one’s body becomes a primary form of measurement for this art of self-purification although one’s health is not the goal. One is not seeking preservation of the body but one begins to see the body as a vehicle for the service of progress and the maintenance of that vehicle is a daunting challenge. As clarity of mind becomes increasingly essential to the practices of the art of reading and meditation upon one’s motive one must be aware of how foods affect one physiologically. There is also physical exercise to incorporate. All of these checks and balances must be used to tune the instrument of self for the achievement of a wise and creative perspective. The balancing of this infinitely complex practice of self-purification conjoined with the art of reading, research and commitment to progress is very difficult if one is simultaneously trying to satisfy the demands of our society.
The Purification of Labor
The burden of this practice is great and because of that it very quickly begins to conflict with the demands of our over-active society. Competition and fierce ambition begin to lose appeal and thus we, those of us working toward progress, become less valuable because of the innate market preference for inequality. This is a bitter pill for many activists to swallow. It is scary moving outside the arena of public praise but a society hell-bent on destruction is supposed to have disdain for those whom insist on progress. Persecution and ridicule is to be expected. I am not suggesting here that one should fight publicly with others, that we should grab hold of conformists and insist on their falseness and at the same time declare our virtue. This is pointless and somewhat suicidal. I am merely drawing attention to the inevitable need to find ways to survive, to eat and have shelter in a society that busies its members with destructive labor and does not reward non-participation. If we truly believe in these values, in progress, in equality and peace we have no need to declare it to anyone. We merely have to find ways to stay alive, that is evidence enough of strength. Again here, we find that one form of purification leads to another. A progressive individual will carefully abstain from work that is part of conformity, which does not serve their vision of progress and thus will receive fewer resources and will have to eliminate the unnecessary expenditures such as drugs, pointless entertainment or any variety of frivolity.
The purification of labor is simply a method of gathering food and adequate security with the least possible compromising effort, the least possible participation in conformist society in order to free up time, that most valuable resource to be used for the construction of a progressive community. This is an extremist activity that forces one to negotiate with society as with an enemy. One must be very conscious of one’s choices and price of exchange. To be satisfied with the purification of one’s labor is to work happily for it is necessary that the labor of our bodies make us happy, if any law exists this is it. Be careful however not to turn this maxim around as many who would enslave you do. One should not feel ashamed if one is not inspired by the available work, nor should one do work that does not serve one’s progressive vision. This common call for the virtue of the ‘working man or woman,’ working for working’s sake, is a simplistic and intolerable form of ignorance. I do believe that a virtuous person is active, pursuant of a venue for the expression of his/her purpose but I believe that the great human beings of our time will be known not so much for what they did but for what they refused to do. Too many people have been excused for atrocity with the notion that they were ‘just doing their job’ as though that means something. Horrible leaders depend on this naïve attitude about work. Mediocre leaders depend upon those whom are in alliance with denial for their power. The non-questioning conformists are those whom work with no consideration of its nature.
There are very few adventures as exciting as purifying one’s finite capacity into its highest potential. I want to take a moment to augment this argument, the controversial character of it by warning against the danger of a particular rationalization. Many attempt to purify their labor by working for ‘humanitarian’ organizations and I want to explicitly criticize this notion. I am certain that there are some legitimately progressive organizations but the great majority of those that are classified as humanitarian or non-profit are merely vehicles for the rationalization of wealth. These groups are used to sell indulgences to the wealthy thus relieving them of their very healthy guilt. Furthermore, many of those working in these institutions are merely afraid of direct confrontation with society so they hang out in these organizations as the pious servants believing in the need for such an absurd social structure where begging for the poor has become an industry. By doing this they affirm the innate imbalances that require the graces of the fortunate. It is painful to address this issue because it is masked as being so well intentioned but it is the truth as I see it. Progressivism is a personal and philosophical individual movement. There is no army of justice.
The Purification of Language
I hope I have been clear enough in my emphasis on the elimination of sedation from the body for it is sobriety from these poisons that allows for, intuits almost, the purification of labor and the development of a progressive perspective toward one’s society. When a person begins to reap the benefits of this process, namely unifying psychologically, spiritually, emotionally and physically he/she is often struck by the power of language in how it binds all of these arts together. The power of language is like all power it can be channeled creatively or destructively. The process of enriching one’s language has already been addressed as a doorway to deeper self-discovery but it is also important to see language as something that can be dangerous so that we may treat it with a proper and mature respect. Just as we need food but can be mislead by our hunger so too must we look at our relationship with language as something that is corruptible. In the Hindrances to Progress chapter I will further this discussion but here specifically I want to call attention to linguistic purification and even more specifically to the practice of abstaining from the use of labels in speech.
Labels are pieces of language that represent ideas, distinctions or phenomena that are not understood adequately enough to justify linguistic representation. It is theoretical language disguised as factual data. Labels can refer to perceived cultural movements, to cultures themselves, to historical forces, to nations and most dangerously to peoples. Without labels we would not be able to say the word people in a plural form. Labels can be used to reduce a man or woman’s life work, they can be used to trivialize a philosophy, and they can be used to symbolize a religious understanding. Labels are symbols of symbols, copies of copies, and therefore their use undermines the integrity of language. Labels are parasitic. Labels reduce individuals to traits, populations to agendas, and people to products. The use of labels as a form of reduction is a result of the drive toward efficiency that is paramount in the competitive war-wrought environment of modern civilization. Practically speaking labels are born in our education system whereby a small number of teachers are entrusted to impart ever-increasing amounts of non-prioritized information to an ever-increasing number of children. The only way this can be done is by reducing the process of education to memorization of terms with a very slight description of the relationship of the terms to one another. Since division and competition and the politics of oppression find their cultivation in the classroom then it can be understood that labels are born in the worst of environments and therefore perpetuate inequality, mistrust and inevitably violence. Labels do this by rewarding volume over quality. The power of memory is prioritized over the power of critical analysis, which evidences a paradoxical futility of the information since it posits that the information is not important enough to analyze. The language is merely symbolic of body language, bullying and domination supported by the memorization of terms of power that have no foundation in real knowledge. In this way the use of labels is most dangerous in that it is a form of idolatry. People, hoping to increase their power, adhere to certain cultural trends, types of thinking or opposing versions of history without believing deeply in any unifying thread. The labels are used as weapons in a conceptual war of allegiances for one purpose, to secure the self against society. Labels are a defense mechanism that evidences mass trauma and they keep us from the things that are most beneficial to people so traumatized: intimacy, knowledge, unity and peace.
For the purposes of this chapter I will divide the labels into two types. One, that kind of label that is used to signify an idea, philosophy or phenomena. This first type is the less innocuous one but it is important to the process of self-purification to be aware of the words one uses and whether or not one is referring to a theoretical concept such as natural selection, cubism or self-purification as opposed to hard concepts such as evolution, art or humanity. To purify our language we must only use such a label when the goal of our expression is not undermined by any limitation in our understanding of the concept. At any point we may consider the nature of our expression and most likely we will find a purer drive that is not only simpler than the labeled concept but serves us in a more profound way. The essence of this chapter is that the use of labels, as a shortcut, is a type of dependency and like all other types of dependencies comforts us with a feeling of connectedness to that which it is inevitably taking us further away from. Silence is almost always preferable to the use of a label since it grants us immediate access to learning’s greatest friend: listening.
It is the second type of label that I wish to advise against categorically and that is the type of label that signifies a type of person or population. These kinds of labels are so dangerous that I will not damage the integrity of this text by citing examples. I see these types of labels as the most sinister elements of our language and the purification of such labels, I believe, would have profoundly progressive consequences within the human community. Such an elimination was attempted when I was a child through the cultivation of public opinion against the use of labels always considered derogatory but many types of rationalizations for their use have sprung up again in ways that can only be described as insidious. I will discuss these rationales in the next chapter but first I want to clarify that it is not only the openly derisive terms that identify people and populations that are dangerous. The danger is not the malintent of the term but in the ambiguity that allows for an abuse of power. And so even a friend, using such a label in a friendly tone of voice, perpetuates a linguistic dissipation of equality. The division of human populations by attention to differing characteristics is an affront to unity and anything that disrupts unity is a great danger in every way to the future of the human being. Yes, there is diversity in our species but I will not sacrifice the much needed attention to unity to any recognition of that diversity. It is a sign of widespread immaturity that we, as a species, pay so much attention to minor differences at the expense of those principles that secure us against all manner of threat. The obsession with labeling our community members has reached a point of frightening insanity. The same people that would resist this purification of language argue that the diversity is a direct result of language, so they are simultaneously arguing for and against the power of language. This paradoxical position is common to modern conformity and helps to explain the internal frustration that leads to conflict between labeled people. To purify one’s language is to begin focusing on those things that unify us instead of those things that divide and most importantly beginning to affirm those things in our speech.
If one is motivated to eliminate the destructive forces and dependencies that connect them to the collective consequences of self-destruction then no part of the self is neglected in the effort to eradicate the internalization of the outward threat of nature. It is victory on this internal spiritual battleground, evidenced by a sound mind, body and spirit, through the process of self-purification that inevitably leads to the purification of our community as it profoundly transforms every aspect of our social engagement. Language, labor and consumption all become purified conduits for progress dissipating the efforts of those working toward destruction and comforting those longing for fellowship, support and hope.
Summary
The art of reading driven by a proper motivation and a commitment to self-purification all tempered by a sound understanding of the fluidity of the object defines the science of living. Such a balance is difficult to achieve and even more difficult to maintain in a world such as ours. One must rely upon grace, good friends and lots of faith to move forward in the development of these tools. They are however, the tools that we use, that we have always used as a species to maintain the fire of inspiration, love and optimism. In every construction there are hindrances to progress, ways in which the best intentions can lead to the very thing we are working to avoid. The insidiousness of nature, like all objects, is impossible to define or contain, so what follows in the next chapter are a few pitfalls to progress that I have identified but many more will follow, that is inevitable and I leave it to future lovers of the humanity to redefine these tools in ways that revitalize us as a species, inspiring our destiny of progress toward unimaginable victories of the spirit.
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