Monday 27 July 2009

I am convinced in my self-sufficiency, and that of those around me. I read about different techniques of thought or systems of belief, introspection, change, and I encounter people who are fascinated by them, by new ideas and new syntheses, and it all strikes me as an elaborate way of deferring the inevitable. You can spend your life chasing transhumanism, the singularity, nirvana, moksha, righteousness, the rapture, some new exciting convergence of human, cyber and divine...it's a fun ploy, but all it does is take up time. We're already self-sufficient, and nothing really changes all that much. An intelligent individual from any period in history could be transferred to any other and, with a few years of training and re-orientation, fit right in. Or not - but so many people from our own time period fail miserably to fit right in. I think by this time, you mostly know what it is you need to know by the time you're an adult, and it's a question of applying it. But people are addicted to searching aren't they? Our myths and religions prime us for it, for looking at life as a quest, a struggle, a search. It can be, for specific new things - a continent over the horizon, a cure for cholera, a new way to paint the sunset, the right words for what you've decided to say. But searching for yourself, or disguising the search for yourself in some other search? It strikes me as silly. How can you search for something with the very thing you're searching for? No, we are already sufficient unto ourselves and it's just a question of realising that and working with it.

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