Tag: suffering

Mind-Heart

Posted on by Marko

Our minds are essential to practical life and establishing the familiar, as well as our relationship to it. But beyond practicality, a mind, left unbalanced, can also thwart life because it is uncomfortable with change. New information about the world or self challenges the mind’s subjective reality that it worked so hard to create and understand. It’s a threat to mind’s established identity. In short, the mind wants what is, not what will be. It wants what is familiar, labeled or labelable, not unquantifiable possibilities or change. Some of the most intense suffering we endure in our lives is psychological, stemming from change and our attachments to what was.

Since life is one continuous process of change, and our society puts disproportionate emphasis on our mental abilities, it is crucial that we balance this harder part of ourselves with a softer one. I call it the heart, others call it something else, but they point to the same emotional intelligence that penetrates labels, and gives numbers and theorems meaning beyond their formulae.

Our mind separates us from our surroundings through differentiation, our heart unifies by seeking interrelatedness. A heart wants change, evolution, growth, even if it means pain in the short-term. It’s fiercely driven by curiosity, a passion to discover and connect. It leads us to new worlds and realizations, pastures for our mind (and us) to feed on and grow from.

Art Class

Posted on by Marko

Art is a medium of self expression. When you commercialize it, you poor the society of its spirit, of its potentially transformative nature, of its gift. When art becomes an investment/asset, fewer people can afford it and gain access to it. And those that do, consume it for the status, not the original creative expression, commentary, or intent.

Free-flowing art pollinates the world with ideas and ideals, perspectives and potentials. It evolves and ushers equitable progress, for most art is born from present struggles, personal and societal. Art, when received as a gift, liberates; art, when commoditized and accumulated; splinters and separates. In other words, art can be steered toward its quality or quantity, and when you focus on its quantity, when you commercialize it, you become a vehicle of classism, of divisions, of have and have nots.

Pathos of Ownership

Posted on by Marko

To own is to suffer. To own is to grasp and crave, endlessly, unceasingly. Ownership is attachment, a practice that is widespread, and oftentimes, pathologically encouraged. To obsessively accumulate until we are bogged down, physically and mentally, in the futile pursuit of security and validation. The idea of ownership is a human construct, though perhaps a more accurate word is man-made, considering modern civilization was built on an unbalanced, testosterone-directed patriarchy. On the most basic level, ownership is a form of aggression, a fruitless conquest of an insecure ego over material.

The compulsion of ownership is self-perpetuating, since you cannot truly own anything, not permanently anyways. If you cannot own a moment, an essential unit of time and space, you cannot own anything material borne out of it either. Like all moments, material things pass. Intuitively, we know this, but instead of continuing to move forward, taking as much as we need, we obsess over our future security. We start hoarding things, en masse. We start measuring and comparing each other on how much we’ve accumulated, and take pride in owning more – or shame in owning less.

Ultimately, the mechanism of ownership reaches a point where its internal relationship inverses. Our imagined security becomes so dependant on the idea of accumulation that the things we think we own now own us. They consume us and run our thoughts, actions, and ultimately, lives.

You don’t need to own something to benefit from it. Enduring societies and ecosystems are built on networks of sharing, not hoarding. Your own body exists, and thrives, because trillions of its cells are reciprocating. And when they are not, you get sick.