the beginnings of a personal manifesto?
Personal manifestos are something I used to write often when I was younger, when everyone was making a lot of assumptions about who I was as a person and I didn't have the opportunity to speak for myself. So I wrote for myself, a lot, and I never shared them with anyone. I haven't really written one since I was about sixteen, probably since I've since found a better support system and gotten much better at asserting myself in situations where I don't have one. However, bits and pieces of this have been turning over in my mind for a while, so I thought I'd write them out in a weird psychobabble word vomit just so I could start to structure them a bit more coherently. This is nowhere near finished but it's a start.
Quotes taken from Dune and DS9, with apologies.
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Thesis statement: understanding as surrender. To truly know anything, you have to give up something of yourself in the process– sidestepping the self-identity on occasion in favor of total alignment with the Other.
"A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it."
"To become a thing is to know a thing. To assume its form is to begin to understand its existence."
There's joy in relinquishment. Terror, too, but that's part of the joy. Like going up the first big hill on a rollercoaster. Part of cultivating resilience– understood as a conscious delight in the fluidity of sentient existence, a willingness to embrace the process rather than clinging to its results from one moment to the next– is living in the joy rather than the terror. This is not a rejection of identity, but a celebration of identity as something lived-in and ephemeral, something one creates rather than something by which one is created.
Build something that cannot bend, and it will break. Stasis will shatter you in the end.
Replies
I love personal manifestos, as you've told, it helps to have a compass in an uncertain world. Something we'll follow even when we are not completely sure of where to go.
These last months I was thinking of my organization's manifesto, my personal manifesto, our mainly manifesto.
Has been a great excercise.
I'm not sure if people completely surrender their old beliefs when they learn something new. If our brains are the perceptrons we say they are, we usually just reinforce new beliefs with constant exposure to new proof over time, whilst older beliefs linger and fade. It's a slow transitional thing, and your identity changes probably in the same way that your body does over time.
Also, your post reminds me of Olaf Stapleton's Starmaker, where consciousnesses merge and create meta-consciousness that eventually constitute a galaxy sized brain
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