Stop Thinking

I don’t know if this post makes sense or is good advice. It was written quickly in a fit of passion and not in my normal mode of writing. Maybe it’s worth something, maybe not. I can’t tell. I asked Mother Mary to inspire me and this is what came. JMJ. Blessed be.

Nietzsche told a parable, I think it was in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” about a diminutive little man with one enormous ear. He was no more than two, maybe three feet tall, and the ear, the man’s most prominent feature, was most of the mass of his body. Zarathustra describes the rest of the man as little more than a stalk, a shrunken, shriveled bit of human beneath this enormous fleshly auditory apparatus. A body with a tiny head that nonetheless wore a smirk. The creature with the enormous ear believed he was special, better than other men because of the great acuity of his hearing. What’s more, other people believed it too.
“There!” They screamed, pointing at The Ear. “There goes a man of greatness! A man of genius!”

“I could never believe it,” spoke Zarathustra. “I hold to my belief that it was a reversed cripple, who had too little of everything, and too much of one thing.”

Yes.

Modern Men are reverse cripples.
Modern Women too.

The Age of Enlightenment and Reason has reached its apogee, and we here at the end of its ascent value only our thinking minds. We begin school as early as two or three and stay there sometimes into our thirties. We believe “status” to be more or less synonymous with “education” and rank and order the occupations and salaries of our citizens based on who has more degrees. We require “a study” to tell us everything, and will disbelieve the facts of our own eyes if refuted by a man with accreditations and a white coat. The most insane positions, the wildest perversions of instinct and nature, all of them are permissible if only we think about them enough. If only we exercise our Reason to delude ourselves. If only we make Black white and White black by changing the definitions of the words.
“I have a degree in X,” says the serious person, and by this, you are to know they ought to be taken seriously. The entire society nothing but one giant game of one-upmanship. Everyone trying to tell everybody else, “I’m smarter. Therefore, I’m better.”

And yet we are miserable.

The shrunken man with the giant brain is like the shrunken man with the giant ear. He is no genius. He is merely malformed. Like Rain Man, we may be able to perform clever tricks, instantly counting the number of toothpicks in a pile or having a greater knowledge of calculus than our grandfathers. We may be more well-versed in ancient Assyrian history or have read more Jane Austen novels.

But what have we built?
What have we made?

Our forefathers, with their sixth-grade educations and hand-me-down copies of Shakespeare, connected the continent with railroads. They bridged the Oceans via the Panama Canal. They created families eight to nine children thick, they invented cars, flying machines. They discovered X-rays to probe the body and its interior.

Faraday’s seminal paper, which described for the first time electromagnetic fields… contained no math. He barely went to school at all. He didn’t even know trigonometry. He intuited the nature of reality, visually, with pictures that he could feel. James Joule, likewise, the man from whom we get the name for the unit of energy, was untrained. He was a brewer of beer. A yeoman with nothing but muscle and curiosity. And Oliver Heaviside, the wood carver and telegraph operator who formalized Maxwell’s Equations, advanced calculus, and predicted the ionosphere… he did so without a certificate.

What do we make now?
What do we discover?

All this education, all the billions of dollars and millions of hours poured into The Brain.

What has it gotten us?

Where are the new cures for diseases?
Where are the new modes of transportation?
Where are the colonies on The Moon or cities under the sea?
Who has figured out Gravity?
Who has solved the mysteries of fusion?
Why have lifespans not increased?
Where are the new materials and new sources of energy?

The best we seem to be able to do is Wind.

Hmm. Windmills.
A technology from 900 years ago.

Outside of Tech, of computers, there has been…
…scarcely any advancement at all, and to cover up for this failure of Scientific Progress that Liberalism based itself upon, we have instead pivoted to all manner of Social Progress and tried to call it even. No. The Concorde may never fly again, and all the money thrown into cancer research seems to disappear into a black hole, but listen, no one will judge you for masturbating on camera anymore, so, hey, who cares if we still run the world primarily off dead dinosaurs?

It’s laughable.

But… We can’t create because we’re not Whole People. We’ve neglected our bodies, focusing exclusively upon our brains.

Stop.

Have sex.
Fight.
Bite things.
Kill a creature with your own hands and watch the life drain from its eyes as you prepare its flesh for food.
Make children.
Swim in rivers.
Put your fingers to wood or steel in craftsmanship or bury them in the earth planting crops.

The body is not a vehicle to drive the brain around. It’s not. No. The body has five senses. Touch, taste, and smell. Sight and sound. These are vectors into Truth. Your sources of data into the nature of Reality. Abstract thinking, without being checked by the hard physicality of life, meanders off into endless ramblings and ruminations, driving the thinker further and further into despair and despondency. We want everything to be reasonable. We want everything to make sense to the conscious mind.

Yeah? Well who crowned it?
Which god made Reason king?

The body has its own logic, and the raw instinct of the flesh knows what it needs to survive.

You, in the throes of passion, you sin. You think. Rather than giving yourself over in abandon to another person, you start weighing the pros and cons. You start imagining scenarios. Instead of making love to a woman, you pull out a condom, choosing instead to jack into the equivalent of a Ziplock bag. People insult you at work. You try not to let it bother you. You try to be civilized. You “talk it out” and try to “be the bigger man.” The insults continue. You never burst into an office screaming and pounding on a table. You never fix it.

“Aggression problem,” people label it.

Nature knows of no such thing. In Nature, Aggression is only a solution.

“Be Smart.”
“Be Smart.”

A thousand deaths caused by “Be Smart.”

Don’t go outside without sunscreen. Don’t swim in the lake because of bacteria. Don’t hike off the trail. Don’t take more than the recommended daily dosage. Don’t scream. Don’t shout. Don’t strip off your clothes and stand naked beneath the moon.

Instead. “Be smart.”

Play it safe. “Be careful.” Subjugate your every action to the dictates of Reason and never let the Passions fly.

A sickness. A great and terrible sickness.

You actually can’t achieve Knowledge like that. “Smart” people don’t grow. They just get old and their bodies decay, and they post-hoc rationalize their entire existence into a series of sound choices. Sound, reasonable, boring choices. Lives without consequence. Lives without meaning.

Fortune actually does favor the bold, which is another way of saying that God loveth the reckless. Those who follow the Instinct to try and to go and to experience The World over and above those who sit around and try to make a facsimile of the world inside their heads. You cannot know Truth unless you touch it. Kiss it. Breathe on it and see it fog over with your steam. Life is visceral, and those who would possess it must go out and chase it down. You have to sing in the rain. You have to feel your blood pumping. Those who would save their lives will lose them. Your risks have to be real.

Behind my house there is a hillside and, sometimes, when I am low, I go into that hillside and dig.

I dig holes with a pick and a spade.

It is impossible to be depressed while digging a hole.

The ruminations, the endless cycles of thought and worry, they are obliterated by the sun and the dirt and the heaving of the lungs and the burning of the muscles. The mind gets lost only when its connection to physical reality is broken. As Nietzsche said, trust no thought that you have indoors. It is likewise impossible to feel depression or anxiety or despair while riding a horse or shooting a bow and arrow or while wearing boxing gloves and getting punched in the face. You cannot feel it while you are building something. While you are Making. Creating. Using your hands for the purpose which God intended.

My friend, The Brain doesn’t exist for its own sake. It exists in conjunction with your body that you may inhabit and rightly order The World.

Stop thinking.
Stop passively consuming.
Stop ruminating.

Go. Do.