The Weight of Consciousness

Sunday morning at home.

I’m gonna attempt and not make this overlong, but something’s dawned on me and I have to work it out.

One of the conclusions that I’ve drawn from some of the greatest thinkers is that there is a point where the weight of your intellect becomes a gift and a curse. It becomes the thing that gives you your greatest insights and introspections, but also the thing that can alienate yourself from others and rob you of joy. It’s the point in which one becomes alone in thought, where everything becomes all thought and no action. The mind spirals in all directions determining “this way that, and that way this” over and over again, foreseeing all possible outcomes to the point in which no path is taken. Overthought is a self defeating mechanism, or rather like some sort of a parasite feeding off its host that it can’t completely kill without destroying itself. There are warnings of this from a lot of the great philosophers and writers.

Dostoyevsky in “Notes from Underground” distinguishes of 2 men; the man of action and the man of acute consciousness. He wrote of a retired 40 year old man living in a basement writing about the men he could overhear from aboveground. He is ultra critical of these men who he deems thoughtless and imbecilic, but is jealous of the casual nature in which they can live their lives without much introspection. He is also a deeply conflicted character, self loathing and self deprecating, blaming his condition on an ailment, his appearance, his spite and contempt, though he does nothing about these things, and secretly enjoys his suffering. He is mad at the world for them not recognizing his “genius” and therefore hates the world and chooses a life of extreme isolation, where all has become hyper consciousness and removed from reality. The Underground Man is Dostoyevsky’s warning to humanity that these men, though fictitious in his account, must exist in society, and will always run counter to societal progresses in trying to prove their own free will. For me the idea is to become “the third man” who is both a man of action and a man of consciousness.

There is a fourth kind in my mind, who is a person that is neither of action nor of thought, who is a voided vessel floating adrift in a sea of confusion, who cannot remember how he got there, think of a way to escape it, nor care to know either which way. In “Thus spoke Zarathustra” Nietzsche wrote of “the last man” who is Zarathustra’s nightmare vision of who men will become if they become overly nihilistic, devoid of thought, completely complacent as to the state of the world, too lethargic and lazy to care either to obey or rebel because they have their small pleasures that keep them entertained and diluted, thus neither pushing nor pulling against the tide. He asks “What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?” the last man asks, and he blinks.” He asks the deepest questions but doesn’t really care to know the answer. In that world, all waters are calm, there is no room for greatnesses that would disturb those waters, rock the boat, and all are contented to stay adrift. Everyone is equal, made to be that way, and individuality is not only looked down upon and discouraged, it is perceived recklessly counter productive, detrimental, and even dangerous to the group. There are no heroes, no villains, no explorers, no artists, no philosophers, no conquers, no revolutionaries, the world just is and any attempt to pier beyond what is is a futile effort, not only that, even the will to seek that which is beyond is fervently stamped out of men. This is the type of person I fear to be, but also somebody I also believe to exist in today’s society. Someone I believe is referred to in modern times as “NPC’s” or “non-playable characters.”

There are other examples I can point to, Seneca said “a man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.” Alan Watts said simply “overthinking will kill your reality. A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about accept thought. So he losses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions.” The list goes on. It seems to me, though I’m a student of all of philosophies, even though a lot of them are opposing view points, that if there was an area all philosophers could agree is that overthinking is a killer. It becomes cumbersome, burdensome, and after a while it feels more of a curse than a blessing. Nietzsche himself towards the end lived a life of solitude and isolation, and in his time his works were not celebrated. There is a story of Nietzsche crying or getting upset when he saw a man beating his horse. Similarly, Nikola Tesla lived a life of celibacy, and towards the end lived alone only friending birds in the park. There is also a story of him falling in love with a pigeon. Is it possible that a lot of these type personalities find it difficult to connect with or relate to regular people that it’s hardly even a choice to go into isolation, it becomes an inevitable byproduct of their intellects? It could be the case, but either way, I can hardly think of a philosopher or creative who didn’t at least go through a period of isolation to confront their mortalities yet ultimately use that as sort of a right of passage on their journey’s.

So why do I say all this? Am I trying to put myself in the same vain and category as all those people? Am I some modern day Siddhartha? That is hardly the case, these are people who come around once in a generation, maybe even less frequent that in their ways alter the course for generations to come. I do not have any lofty delusions of grandeur to think I have some ultra gift of creativity to offer the world that i’m idly sitting on until their ready, that’s absurd. Yet there is still in me a person that has some of those traits in common and can identify it in some manor with those people. I do feel myself to be the type that had been in essence “gifted” a deep understanding of self, but sort of like a drug, it can become intoxicating to peer into the pond and therein lie the danger, where like a medicine that ought to be used responsibly can be abused and counter effective. I feel this to be a threshold that many a would be creative mind must cross, and that is to get over his own ego on his path towards creativity. The “underground man” seems to be the wayward intellect that is more self obsessed in his own revelry and has convinced himself that he is unloved and unwanted because people are too stupid and that wouldn’t understand, and that’s bullshit. To me, if you have a gift, a true gift, you want to share it, you want to make it available, you want to use it, you don’t want to hide away with it and say “well everyone else is just too stupid to get it” utter self obsessed nonsense. A person like Elon Musk just keeps pushing and keeps going, on to the next, that didn't work? on to the next, and so on and so forth, can’t and doesn’t spend too much time thinking about or dwelling upon petty shit, ultimately that’s a waste of time. Still to me there seems to be levels to it, and even stages of it that I and people like me must cross, or the end up one which way or the other, and thankfully, those that have gone before have left road maps for us to follow to let us know where we are now, where all the pitfalls and traps are, and what we must do to get to where we want to go. Though few there are, and few even willing to be, you need these people in society, they are the stewards, the pulse takers, the pace makers, the engineers of, but it comes at an awful burden, self sacrifice, and sometimes total alienation, which why too many people wouldn’t want that responsibility, to have the weight of your consciousness be dependent not only upon your own well being, but be the light and shining beacon to so many others. Is that what this is? Is that what I am? Hardly. I’m just a person at a crossroads who is not all the way the underground man, not the last man, but someone caught in between being a man of action and a man of consciousness, trick is to balance them, to apply them, to set a course then stay the course, and maybe after a while, be none of those men, just a man.