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What artists do is they expand consciousness. They make us think we didn't know we could think. Things that maybe we were too scared to dig too deeply into.
People literally used to have to wait for their families to die to experience this type of grief. Now you can just watch a good sad movie really intently and you can experience a similar grief. Good art makes us FEEL.
When a feeling you didn't even know you could feel comes into being it's like something is created from nothing. A wondrous miracle. The act of creation.
When you feel stale, like your life is just a bunch of the same feelings being combined in the same patterns there are some escape routes...
The route of the artist expands this realm of feelings, constantly seeking new feelings.
The route of the technologist realizes that there are infinite patterns. With merely 2 feelings, you can have 1s and 0s and create literally a virtual world by carving rocks into computers.
What's interesting is how they interplay with each other. The artists is constantly COMBINING the existing to create the new. The technologist avoids the new and so creates new emotions.
These 2 processes or intricately linked with the greatest power a human has. Naming. By naming a specific pattern you can train yourself to see and feel an entirely new pattern even though it was based on old patterns.
"Fire" for example is 4 letters you've seen before f, i, r, e but the word itself invokes an entirely new feeling than the feeling you have towards letters of the alphabet.
If I make up a word like "Kasitooey" i'm invoking a feeling in you. What makes this type of nonsense feeling unique is that I can't control the effects. Where as if I said "fire", I could predict what would emerge in your mind.
Art balance at the tip of this recognition. Something like "FlameyoIcicle". I use the 'flame' word embedded to anchor, and then add something else that adds wonder. "How can ice and fire combine?"
There's a quote from David F Wallace on how we all worship. I think what that means here is that we all believe in newness to our lives. Getting that promotion, having a family, going to six flags, etc... We have faith in newness.
Do you believe in newness or do you not? The cynical nihilist who says "What does it matter, we're all gonna die." does not.
Even if you intellectually understand the infinity of consciousness you may still feel trapped because you may believe that those higher states of consciousness require more skills than you have.
You theoretically know that every scribble you draw on a piece of paper is unique new information but it just doesn't FEEL like invigorating newness. Your scribble is undisciplined and untrained and unskilled.
By not allowing new feelings to come into existence, you deny yourself the ability to change. Often this is due to a desire to repeat consistent performance due to trying to perfect something like grades.
You can't get "I'm good at drawing" feelings when they're locked behind first having to feel "I'm bad at drawings". If you're afraid of feeling bad or stupid, you never get good.
The depressed person fundamentally believes in god but doesn't fundamentally believe in him or herself to be worthy of god. For some reason, out of guilt or fear, they deny themselves new experiences. They afraid to feel pain, afraid to feel pleasure.
god is such a difficult topic because we all have so many different ways of dealing with our pain and making our way into our future.
Losing faith is the dead end of suicide. So if you're alive, it means you still have faith. Don't lose that last shard of it. Follow it. Even if it leads to you emotions you don't want to feel.
The courage to live is the courage to feel everything. The courage to be disliked is the same courage required to love. The courage to be sad is the same courage required to be happy.
Courage to live == belief in god == belief that everything will be alright == courageously facing death
Your life and your death are both ahead of you. Stop looking backwards.
To have faith in god is to see your death as good. That is how you balance on the path of life. With both eyes facing forwards.
If you're looking backwards chances are you're lonely. You don't want to face what's ahead of you alone. But take heart in this...
Everyone is alone. That doesn't make us losers. That makes us real.
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