Possible concept: the mental force

 Idea of a mental force: the force, intensity, energy, felt from the mind by its inner working: can be towards a conscious objective, e.g. solving a puzzle, when we feel powered-up and are impressed by our own speed in progressing towards one or multiple resolutions, or it can be without a clear objective, such as when inspired by a dream or a vision, and we feel our mind deeply occupied, busy, in that state. It can also happen when thinking in multiple directions, when multi-tasking. The mental force may happen on its own, stemming usually from simply "feeling good", supported by additional causes, or we may believe that it can come from our own volition, self-discipline. Many certainly have that belief, such as teachers. It seems like some have a natural ability to obtain a constant mental force (and often a solid set of fixed domains) such as scientific types, while most have a default minimal force and no consciousness in raising it up.  Yet one could lower theirs while the others should also be able to increase theirs, it's natural, Mental force must be partially in control of our power. It's the seeming invisibility of the methods to raise it up that are a problem, something for future centuries to discover. 

Moving

Moving to a different place reveals the priorly invisible mental roots one had established in the prior place. The sadness from replacing those roots with another one.. wait, no, it's mental/emotional work,  why sadness? Because those roots linked to us, and it felt that we not only belonged to the former place but also that part of it belonged to us, that some of it was ours. Sadness is that pain from something taken away from our soul, something that felt like possession.
And the brain doesn't distinguish much between space, things and humans, they all get attached to us.
Moving also reveals the energy it takes to re-judge every single detail. Like revisiting an old place, every small details comes back to the surface because the brain doesn't distinguish between details, and they all get attached to us, for no good reason. There is an efficiency in not being sensitive to one's environment that I long for.

Praise for an Acute and Fierce Concentration

The habits and mental habits and mental constructs of one grown man should be so far superior to the ones of the young adult and teenager and child, that they should repel all possible affects from the external world, and build with them a mental bubble so strong, like an iron dome, that only Efficiency lives in it and only Productive Work and Streams of Rational Creation follows from the Energy Within and all else is banned for the moment as non-needed activities and the focus and concentration is natural and painless and almost subconscious on the Tasks at hand, the Tasks under the eyes and heart and inside the Mind of the man, who knows better and knows where and how to focus and has forgotten the Time when all winds of the Mind were blowing in all directions like a diseased child suffering from ADHD where dirt and romance and war and softness all mingled inside the same activities and music confused images and all senses fired randomly and there was no silence, no calm Within It and we just wished for some Peace and it wasn't all that bad at all as we were used to it, but The Man, all grown up and with an Acute and Fierce Concentration, like a laser that does Not _deviate_ and does not chime in with the qualms mercilessly brought by Life and The Noise of it with all its Stuff and annoyance of basic things continuously surrounding us and The Shapes and Forms of Things non-stoppingly repeating their insistence as if we needed a different Conductor but ours is already pretty good actually, we just don't remind ourselves of it, and That Man is us really, it's just that we like to digress, to be honest with ourselves. 

This isn't a praise but a game with ourselves.

Past imperfect, conditionnal present, composed future

Rooms. a room. the mind is a room and it's easy to be within. Not so easy to rebuild it or see the world.
Importance of the necessity of remembering to build a future nostalgia, the foundations of the possibility of talking about oneself. Speech is power. Speech is the small odd tool necessary for communicating, for living a shared experience at its utmost. How odd when experience is not enhanced by speech!
Pourquoi ecrire en anglais, ne pas se laisser attraper par un nouveau language.
Maybe, the possibility that one memory contains our soul: its memories and all potentials: one memory, one image is enough. Native (americans?) were right on image's power.
The room contains all memories mixed with potentials and imagination, and our lives. Rooms contain us. A house is our lives. The importance of keeping a home to contain memories. Memories without a home decompose themselves through time. Each house is a museum of the lives it contains. Seemingly unrelated  thoughts join themselves (in it, the house). One thought shows lives as a continuous river (Buddhism), lowering the pain of death and passing time, while another one fixes specific lives onto each object of the house. Pain and suffering of time passing, versus objectification and a light heart. The lives and deaths of one's parents, of a family.
Too much sensations, too much feeling can make us specialists of sensations: at most times, being a machine that senses, maybe too many times, makes hard to see through and express oneself. Makes it look like one's soul isn't there, just too obscured by the mass of senses. L'aplatissement des capacites d'introspection et de construction sous la masse des sens, incapacite autistique a percer sa propre personnalite. But that's most likely just not being able to see everything and link everything together.
In pain from the past makes the present feels cramming.

Pieces

Idea from reading Musicophilia, by Oliver Sacks: the requirement for sound to be architectural, in 3D, in order for an emotion to happen. If not, if all sounds feel "flat", music stops provoking feelings.
Can we extend this and say that this should apply not only to sound but to all perceptions, and that "architecture", or "3d", refers to and extends to two related characteristics of a perception: 

• its richness, hence a piece of art void of complexity (e.g. pop-art) cannot provoke much feelings, and some of the most complex work of art can provoke feelings that small works can not.
• its natural fit into our human nature. Just as our ears have been created to alert us of physical dangers, hence need to match the physical world and can't naturally express such dangers and then feelings without this match, then a piece of art cannot be felt without a minimal anthropomorphic projection into a familiar scene. 

A different thought: I was missing the feeling of family and friendship this morning, so went on Facebook,  and only saw an inarticulate forum, sparse of reality, content with unrelated self-expression. A group needs a common goal to stay solid, sharing some background past isn't enough. Religion needs goals.

Difference, the explosion of it on my face, and the secret inspiration of travels

I moved from San Francisco to London - materialistic times require mental decompression.
I have been exploded in the face by innumerable instances of Difference. Differences here and there, of everything. In other words, the concept of differentiation has been hitting me with a symbolic violence like I'm a war victim.
An invasion has been overflowing me with the constancy of a daily rain, the constancy of a World War II bombing, a repetitive trick (I almost wrote: a mental rape) of an everyday life that refuses to resemble a far-away not-so-long-ago place and time.
The couple identity/difference and its spectrum are piercing rays through banal normality. This newly refreshed sensitivity, echoing old feelings, reminded or showed me some aspects of the conceptual echosystem of Difference: the subject and identity,   the mirroring effects of difference: subject/object, sub-sub, o/o, going perhaps towards orthodox psychoanalysis.
My personal feelings are: an unknowledgeable amount of noises and mirages, a wealth of illusions, passing before my eyes, as I breathe along, all with an exclusive ordinariness. What Difference is to me: the passing of past attempts to recognize and master particular idioms, forms or being, into different ones that are so close yet so far. Going back to square one and re-discovering flavors.  Yet so close.   A set of modifications that impose themselves with the irrelevance of a chewing-gum flavor.  Yet not just one flavor, but a million coming to all senses, beyond mere distraction.
(Thinking of explorators of the past, at least I know I'm around human beings, and I know I have means to survive, whereas past explorers doubted both crucial statements when venturing inside new territories.)
This relocation, and this feeling of being a blind victim repeatedly shot by the assassins of Habit, the Delicious Snipers Against The Same, has placed me in a situation of enjoyment. Something similar to being a tourist, although deeper, as allied with the feelings of potential citizenship, the sensation of being "one of them", the feeling that one needs to go into a process of becoming united, the feeling of needing to care for a nation.
Without having good reading material (materialistic times require mental decompression), my main best thought was about wondering why this exaltation exists. Why would a change of trees and street maps, architecture and bread shapes be enough to create and sustain such an enjoyment? At first I thought it could be like the strange excitement of watching fire or waves, but no, it's sort of the opposite, watching waves refers to the expected repetitive regeneration of a single recursive pattern, whereas travels usually (well, at least mine) point to the unexpected one-time change of myriads of either repetitive  or non-repetitive singular patterns. (for instance: repetitive patterns: faces, the way each smile, or rather for London, do not smile; and singular patterns: a new ticketing method for transports, the new symbols on the coins).
So the experience is different, but I was getting somewhere.
And then there was  something deeper.
 My dreams changed. I had nightmares of a different kind, perhaps not fear because of fear, but because of the altogether indescribable strangeness of those dreams.  The dreams had reached a very new ground, yet reminiscent of some childhood feelings, a je-ne-sais-quoi that is not small, an untitled sensation that occurred multiple times. So I realized, the secret inspiration of travels, it's just that: because we are brains with sense and muscles, the subconscious is only about that. And the change of senses is enough to excite it at core, as the practice of different games with different partners suffice to entirely refresh us, and we always are children wanting to play games.
 So without regards to an existing condition of itself, the subconscious knows, without morals or any knowledge of its worth, that different outside conditions will be enough. It knows and desires it, and then I suppose some will desire it more than others, just like anything else. Travels are like milkshakes.
  I remember a documentary about Sarajevo, where it said that people were dancing in the ruins. There is no escape from lightness of the heart, the elegant compositions of flickering details that compose us. Materialistic times require mental decompression.
In a way, that's all the last weeks were worth, a dubious observation of the naturalism of the subconscious.
Yet there is something deeper, to be found.

Simple observation of superstructures

I need to write about some important ideas, one of which is the progressive realization I've been having through the years on the necessity of over-thinking things. A good visualization of this is the classical intelligence problem of having 9 dots and 4 lines to draw through all dots, called Thinking Outside the Box by Wikipedia. Another example that I prefer is simply found at any construction site: one can see the building being built, at least the skeleton of its structure, and more importantly the super-structure of the workers' crew around the contained in-progress new building. It's the civil engineered arrangement of ladders, cranes, containers, the whats-the-name-of-it elevated cubes that wrap the structure and transports workers and equipment to nourish the structure. That's what I mean by the necessity of over-thinking, because there is a natural tendency to disregard super-structures, when one learns something, or thinks about an issue, or tries to connect dots of any kind. About connecting dots, one can discover the nature of the mind's associative nature without looking into neurology, in other words one can recognize the need for linking elements of knowledge in order to master them (e.g. teaching a language by starting with words similar to the language familiar to students), and the inadequacy of a disparate sets of isolated elements (e.g. teaching history as a random series of dates and facts), by simply reflecting on oneself's experience. Super-structures are the places connecting the dots, whether creating them (civil engineering) or displaying them (a good teacher), they are the matrices of the Work, the hidden factor in the symbiosis creator/created, a goal of philosophy, an unattainable goal of metaphysics, the Graal and Black Matter of the Mind.

The intimacy of immediateness

Towards getting into a religion that helps the self living, without the unnecessary extraneousness of past religions, only the self towards building an equilibrium of itself, giving proper attention to what can be done with and through the human body. Some meditative mediums: the attention given to small things in "Nadja" (by Andre Breton), me at a young age staring, amazed, at my own hands. We, as beings, tremendously lack the inner echo of our selves that would tell us the consequences of our actions. Blind-sided donkeys.
For a passion of righteousness: knowing with intensity what is good to do, the ethics of the muscles. The self as a two-parts invention.

the Right and Loss

Developed from Harper's: idea that conservatism is the party of Loss, imaginary (most likely) or not, linked to the sentiment (2 meanings: point of view/emotional feeling) of entitlement. The feeling of being deprived, longing for daydreamt rights and properties of a fantasized past. The fat bastards feel they should reign.
Consequences: it is much easier to re-acquire (the right) than to create (revolution, the left). The left being the party of the difficult (invisible, intangible)-but-real causes: greed, illnesses, injustices,.. the right being more the party of the symptoms, immediate and short-term consequences, solving issues by quick and dirty fixes (war, nationalistic regulations..). The right being focused on the object (lost) and sensation (loss), tending towards depression, sadness - an immanent sense of injustice and deprivation. (Anger towards God, feeding Christian self-accusation).
I want to find a historical analysis of political programs (right: anti-abortion, slavery, anti-freedom.. left: civil rights, ..etc) and voters (military is right, scientists are left,..etc).

Towards keeping states of inspiration constant

In past trips, I realized the easiness to be somewhere else, and hence the "multi-location" aspect of life (sensation of being somewhere and elsewhere simultaneously).
But the real deal I found in my latest trip is the non-existence of my current location: it's not that I can be somewhere else, but that I am just not really here right now. It's the deconstruction of the current self, the absolute doubt and rejection of every senses that can keep the current state of things as interesting, because finally I wouldn't be subject to the tyranny of the environment. Finally Dailiness and earthly things wouldn't win.
And maybe that's why I never got crazy, because the environment controls me so much. Things never break by themselves, so being a mirror of things is a natural defense to madness breaking in.

Maturity, experience, don't come necessarily as a surprise, they can come as the psychological realization of a truth known before, like: we are all equal - is still a surprising thought.

 Apprendre a laisser tomber, laisser faire, se separer du monde meme quand il est la, tres present, apprendre a laisser les liens qui nous attachent au monde a exister par eux-memes sans essayer de les toucher. Laisser les sensations se faire et se defaire, oublier de vouloir tout controler. La respiration, y penser, mediter lentement. Redecouvrir l'eau, l'air. Laisser les sensations revenir a l'interieur, passer au travers. Ne plus etre un obstacle.
Learning to let go, to forgo (to ignore), to detach oneself from the world even when it's there, so present, learning to let our ties with the world live by themselves and not try to touch them. Let sensations link and unlink, forget to want to control everything. Breathing, thinking about it, slowly meditate. Rediscover water, air. Let sensations come back inside, go through them. To no longer be an obstacle.

Action

 The problem of action/decision/intention has always struck me as fascinating but without really knowing why, I just got an insight into this mystery: Who is it we are trying to please when doing something? Any action aims at a state of our world that most pleases someone, or a group of people identified with a possibly invented character. So to act best, one needs to identify who that someone is. And what if we act for ourselves but can't recognize who we are, and act for a pretensed individual that is not us? The aimed individual is often-always a representation, pleasing someone to please someone, the mirroring and projection effects are playing again.
 Why is it that it often looks like we're more limited by what we can do versus what to do?

prison

Realized the hypocritical paradox of prison: we want to keep prisoners away, but physically they are inside the territory, hence imprisoned, hence hurt, but the pain is an unspoken consequence, a taboo. Prison is supposed to be a purgatory, but is a closed empty box. Not just a wall between us and them, it's supposed to have a sense.
And then there's the pain, of being imprisoned, of having nothing to do, no entertainment, training, tests and tastes of the true life. That pain which should be compared to a physical tribulation. Prisoners sometimes have the opportunity for physical exercise, wouldn't they want to exchange a few days of freedom for a few beatings? (who would dare ask that question? when?) To recognize that pain is to recognize the bad environment, the lack of support, the missing hypothetical hypocritical purgation process which prisoners are supposed to go through. It's the lobotomy that zombifiy humans and makes them acceptable to others.

Keeping ends meet (keeping hands meat)

One needs something to be taken away to feel something. The constant movement of getting/giving, waves of life. (Habits are a stop in the movement, Work often forces that absence).
--
I dreamt of a new title.
-- found:
We have no more beginnings. (I revere you, George Steiner)

The twentieth century has put in doubt the theological, the philosophical, and the political-material insurance for hope. It queries the rationale and credibility of future tenses.

Language is immeasurably saturated. Words, grammatical forms, phrases, rhetorical conventions are saturated, nearly to the level of the phoneme, by usage, by precedent, by cultural-social connotation.

There is now a fascism of vulgarity. For shorthand, I call it Berlusconism. Bright graduates hanker to fill their boots, and not their minds. There is a contempt for the life of the mind on the part of money. Money has an enormous voice. It has never spoken louder.

On findings

Imagine 2 parallel lines.
___________
___________
How does one define parallelism?
Intuitively, one will say "2 lines with the same orientation/angle", but that forces to define what an angle is. It is very hard to guess a cleaner demonstration, yet the best, clean, and simplest way is "2 lines that never cross.
That statement is hard to guess because the mind focuses on visible portions of the lines, and uses a pre-defined concept (the angle) as an immediate aid.
The point is to force the mind to think of the plane and the lines as being infinite. Then to think of an infinite number of lines, and to discover that given 2 lines, the likelyhood they will cross at some point is much higher than the opposite. In fact, for any given set of 2 different points, there is an infinitely higher number of sets of 2 lines that cross at some point than sets of 2 lines that never cross. Hence parallelism in that way should be considered an exception (even an aberration).
To be thought: every demonstration and their mental difficulties.

farm life dream, and protectiveness leads to egoism

Just saw outside of my building an interesting scene: rich parents and their daughter, next to their BMW car, parked in front of the Ritz (they don't stay there, but they chose to park there), man around 50, tired eyes of working a lot but successful, a bit authoritarian, woman blond tall, around 40, urban and classic, child in the outfit of the private catholic school nearby. The dad moving fast around the child and rolling a dust-removing tool over the child's outfit. The child, puzzled by a chinese kid passing by, says 'why is she walking alone to school?'

Thought: doesn't parental attention (focus or even obsession) create and nurish the notions of possession/individualism/egoism within the child's mind? So kids with brothers and sisters should be more sharing/communists than single children.

Meta-question: [prelude] last night I dreamt (when waking up, at the half-time where you still remember your dreams) that I was living in a farm, working 11-12 hours a day, without distractions, entertainment, and life was clear, simple. [question] What makes reflective ideas interesting? The particular flavor of intellectual ideas, how it occupies the mind (with a blue color), fills it with something that makes everything else uninteresting. And then the oblivion, when life comes back.

Some truths

1) Often the act of writing itself seems stupid, so present is the idea that we wish to write. [ Souvent stupide paraît l'acte d'écrire, tant présente est l'idée que l'on souhaite écrire.]

2) To be written, an idea must be unachieved, incomplete, cold. [Pour être inscriptible, une idée doit être inachevée, incomplète, refroidie.]

Strange instant [étrange instant] (where life presents more than one single direction to take, instead offers a fork). To live, intensely.

3) The Internet is a technology offering a potential that can be defined in a few vertiginous words:
- ability to communicate (in human languages) to anyone (in the world)
- ability to publicize all visual and auditive human creation (exhibition of pieces, and orchestration of the works : not just listing/ordering of the works, the word is too weak: each page/site is dynamic: its links constitutes the movement for which the permanent communication (to/from the page, sites, links) is attached to.
Compared to the Internet/digital era, may 68, the industrial revolution, the space conquest, the crusades,... all those are like cat pee : jokes.
The Internet/digital era can be compared to the movement of religions through human history. In later times, it may appear that religions were also a joke compared to the Internet/digital era.

4) Travels are traumas. Brains forget the effects of travels, the transformations they bring upon.
Like travels, love is a trauma.

5) Every trauma has 2 essential characters:
- L'ipseité (to be checked) = uniqueness : unique if the subject is I, otherwise can be perfectly banal if the subject is someone else (cf. Vladmir Jankelevitch, Death).
- Forgetfulness, or hiding process : the brain forces details to hide, to be transformed.

6) The analytical studies of language often forget the ethnological and/or psychological(*) about why words and structure of a language are created as such.
(for instance: Paul knows vs. Paul believes, let's not forget the original purpose of words, vehicles of a message from one to another).
It's like using a mathematical theory without some of its theorems or axioms: it's useless and frustrating, it immediately looks incomplete.

(*) 3 prehistorical men would create a similar language to a million of men, as they have the same needs and conditions. Hence the importance of psychology in the creation and meaning of any language.

Compassion

From Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being : compassion in all Latin languages is made from the prefix con = with and a suffix derived from passio = pain, so compassion means one suffers if someone else suffers, and is close to pity, where one lowers oneself to the lower state of someone else in a caring way, probably to raise the other a little bit. But compassion is a low feeling compared to love and thus isn't associated as a romantic sensation.
Whereas, in german/slavic (?) languages, compassion's closest translation are words made from the same prefix (con = with) but suffixes meaning feeling instead of pain. So compassion is an almost telepathic ability to feel any sensation along the other, it's the highest feeling - part of lofe, justifying and explaining it.
So what happens if one has a supreme compassion for the other, a sort of fantastic problem solving tool I suppose. But what happens if both have that ability - infinite mirror effect happening all along a couple's daily life, random events shared ultimately. Does it lead to a too strong coexistence? a too tight sharing of emotions, making brustle the slightest difference, the slighest lie or mistake. Would it amplify in too large proportions the differences of romantic feeling? Would it render them as passionate ultimatums? Or instead be the perfect melting pot, rendering the individuals as calm as super-intelligent telepathic aliens of sci-fi B movies?