“The Sensitized Path”: Making the most of world, universe, and human selfhood for personal discovery and enriching enlightenment in a post-enlightenment chaosmos

                          “The Sensitized Path”

Subject:           Law               —              Wisdom

Correlative:   (Society)                       (Nature/“God”)

Objects:    People, Institutions,          Self, Ego, Soul

                 Cultures, Histories,            Mind, Psyche

                            Codes                   Health/Wellness

                                                            Living Beings

                                                                  Family

                                                 —

                                                Life

                                       (Humanhood)

                                          Experience

                                             People

                                   Literature/Philosophy

                                      Art/Music/Theatre

                                              Science

                                            Cosmology

                                            Spirituality

                                    Concentrations in Zen

                                                 (God)

                                                   Etc.

• “I don’t profit off of anyone following this path.  I’ve never made a cent off it and I will likely never intend to use it for my personal material gain.  But it can cost someone who follows it a lot of money.  Does it have to?  It all depends on the person and what they feel and think they need….I see their time as their own to spend–it might take a little time over a lot of years or a lot of time over far fewer years.  But then again, simply knowing the way (i.e. merely knowing the “map” above) can itself be beneficial.”
• “Having originated, followed, and written down this path, I would say there are two requirements that “shouldn’t” differ among people who have tried or are choosing it in good faith.  I have respect for the law and I have respect for those who need the promise of wisdom in their lives. That is not all I respect, but those are two elements in this path that I deem integral to fairly following it.”

Here at F.L. Ternskie, we contribute our articles to the website anonymously.   When one of our contributors sent to our personal inboxes the above “map” for “The Sensitized Path,” we decided it was finally time to schedule a meeting to discuss the next article (as it had been over eight weeks since our last meeting out of which came the decision to create the most recent article, “Under the Iron Firmament”).  We all agreed though, prior even to the meeting, that we should share our colleague’s admirable work.  But would maintaining the veil of anonymity be appropriate?  In truth, it didn’t seem “wrong” to us, and it even seemed of just cause, to the ends of ensuring that the originator’s work itself be regarded on its own terms rather than as an extension of a “personality” or a “psychology” or an “individual history or social pattern.”  Is this fair?  But then one of us came up with the idea of introducing the originator to those who might find they are “interested” in his path, whether their interest be from “skepticism,” “curiosity,” or even “genuine hope.”  A name and an identity wouldn’t be necessary if  we were especially prudent in interviewing him about his path and then having him go over it further in a lecture that followed the interview.  So we all agreed, as did he, to maintain our commitment to anonymity, but for him to introduce his path in his own words in answer to questions of ours that we feel touch on the expected public interest, on the questions and concerns that would be appropriate whether these be toward discovery of “intentions” and “motives” or toward distilling a grain or essence from the content of his work.   We conducted the following interview over e-mail.

F.L.T:  Let’s begin with your experience and background in this area, which you distinguish from philosophy and call simply “pathways,” and which I noticed you distinguish from both religion and spirituality.  In fact, you have spent a lot of time studying religion and over the years have explored spiritual wisdom, ways, and practices.  Can you tell us, first, about your own history with religion and, second, about how you distinguish “The Sensitized Path” specifically, and “pathways” in general, from so-called “religion” and “spiritualities”?

P.T.:  I have a personal, social, communal, and psychological history with religion.  I was raised Catholic but my parents were not strict about it.  They themselves both became atheists over the courses of their own lives.  I myself became an apostate at fourteen, but in spite of this I came into contact with Jesuits and several diocesan priests throughout my young adulthood which was highly influential upon me.  I think the resurrection could be true, but I don’t believe for certain that it is.  I don’t subscribe to the Catholic’s belief in the “Spirit of Christ.”  And for this reason and others that I will bring up, I don’t consider myself Christian.  My own views are complicated if you try to connect them all up into something internally consistent, but individually, they are simple and well-grounded and based in much experience, contemplation, and reflection, and much reading and discovery in many different areas and traditions.  I consider myself a theist who at times becomes agnostic.  I have never been “empathetic atheists” like both my parents, although at several times in my life, and even just yesterday at one point, I wished I could be.
I call my work “Pathways.”  I am not a “spiritualist.”  I don’t believe that “spirit” is a real phenomenon of or in our external physical world, and I see the word, when it is used to refer to something “independent and beyond us,” to be far too diffractive, and to complicate things in too many different ways for too many different people for it to be anything but pathogenic to personal discovery, development, and sustainable wellness.  Imagine learning about “spirit” as something “real” from the perspective of what the public is given to understand spirit to “truly” be!   Why must it be anything beyond how we think, feel, and are in ourselves?!?   In my own personal experience, nothing was more harmful to me during my years of serious depression than the Christian belief in a personal and communal spiritual connection with God Himself.  But only through Christ, of course!   And, furthermore, I knew only the Spirit of the Antichrist (of depression at that time), so in waiting for Christ to save me, I only became more depressed and much worse.  Not until I gave up Christianity and, in a sense, “chose God over Christ” could I access my own spirit.  Only then could I liberate myself from depression, which I succeeded in doing over the course of several years.

There are other pathways, but this is the pathway that I learned over many years in search of some integrative and holistic set of interests, knowledges, and concentrations that I feel are the fruits of the human pursuit of personal growth for the sake of God in ourselves and others.  I say “for the sake of God in others” because we sometimes must be able to look beyond what is good simply “in ourselves” and find what is good in us all for our own good to be truly grasped.  Everything in this pathway is good for one’s own wellness, but in being good for one’s own wellness, it provides the knowledge, strength, and awareness, but just as importantly, the sensitivity and cognitive fluidity, to be someone who is able and strong enough to help others.  Being able to help is such a big difference!   Actually, I’m not sure about “strength.”  I would say it certainly provides certain necessary conditions to develop strength.  Necessary conditions to develop strength while also developing everything else I mentioned.  This is actually an important point.  Often what people do is challenging enough to provide enough resistance so that they develop strength from “keeping going” or, in actuality, “drawing on their core strength” to do what they need to do.  The pathway I’m presenting develops sensitivity which actually transforms the core of oneself into something that itself must be strengthened.  One draws on the content of the practices, understandings, and knowledges for the purposes of forming and developing the core of the self through sensitizing oneself.  The core becomes part of the self that in becoming sensitized becomes a source of resistance throughout one’s entire being and the self then can administer practices and knowledges to better form and strengthen it or something else that one discovers needs strengthening.  I’m getting so far off onto specifics in order to say that it is called “The Sensitized  Pathway” for a reason.  A person becomes stronger “further down the path” from being sensitized, from becoming sensitized through knowledges and in learning the path, and then adapting further learning and knowledges to what their core comes to communicate is needed for its own or some other element’s development and strength.  The wayfarer learns and acquires what is needed as a matter of discovery, and in discovering what they need, they learn this much more about themselves as a living and changing being.

F.L.T.:  Great!  Very cool!  You are also leading me into my next question.  You mention your own lengthy and involved journey with and without religion, with God and also at times, as you say, wishing you could be “free of “God.””  I use quotation marks there, around “God,” as you do in your map of the pathway.  You use God as “God” and God as (God).  You also include “Spiritualities” as one of the objects under the Subject of Life, rather than, as people might expect, under the Subject of Wisdom.  And you yourself do not believe in the concept or phenomenon of spirit as something “real,” nor always, or even perhaps as “often,” beneficial.  Can you please explain how God and Spiritualities are intended to be regarded upon the map and within your own concept of pathways?

P.T.:  Sure.  I’ll try to do exactly that! (lol!)  God is always (or, “at some point”) going to become a question, a concern and a curiosity, at the very least, but very likely also a necessary hope for anyone.  I have framed God in terms of what I think can be regarded as universally true both at the beginning point of the path (in quotation marks, next to “Nature” as a correlative of the Subject of Wisdom) and where one is becoming more comfortable, more familiar, and perhaps more closely connected to God in terms of their own experience and understanding, and in their reflections, commitments, and practices in their life (in parentheses, as an “object” present within and increasingly “accessible” in their path, under the subject of Life).   I think a beneficial goal is to become more comfortable while being more aware, perceptive, and adept in God’s universe.   For atheists, this question of God is not a matter that is all that significant to them qua God but it is rather a matter of philosophic, cultural, social, political, psychological, and scientific concern.  Still, it pertains to “God” and (God) all the same!  God in quotation marks is as though to say: “Yeah, right: “God.”  Good luck with that, whatever that is.”  Meaning, when we start out, we can really have no idea what we’re even talking about or referring to when we refer to God.  It actually means more than that though.  I’ve got “God” next to Nature (and Nature is not in quotation marks).  I see one’s idea of what God is when one is starting out as being caught up in Nature, even caught up in our own nature–at the beginning, our experience of Nature and our experience of “God” often being entirely indistinguishable or at the very least inextricable.  This, God bound up in Nature, is even sometimes a brutal, horrible, and terrifying experience.  Or, in our innocence, it can be bliss itself, resembling transcendence in its placing us at the very center of the universe.  But life shows us that God must become one with our experience of so much more than just the extremes of Nature and everything of Nature in between.  Experiences, people, books, the creations and expressions of creative minds reflecting what is also true of the universe and nature back upon us,  the ways we must adapt to the challenges our own nature presents to us (i.e. with the use of Zen practices), all that we learn about the physical world and universe in science, all these spheres and objects of life, will put God into parentheses for us.  God within these spheres?  God of these spheres?  God as progenitor of and within them?  God for us and others within each and all of them?  Or no God at all but the signs and expressions that reflect people’s relation to something like an “essence” of an “idea” about “God” or (God)?   So, God in parentheses as we journey through life but still either “God” or (God) all the same.

As for Spiritualities, I have included Spiritualities under Life because encountering them and following them can be beneficial toward Wisdom without directly connecting to Wisdom in their providing a “definite content” to Wisdom themselves.  They also enhance and enrich one’s developing appreciation of Law as something based in necessary principles, reasons, and appropriate practices that aim to ensure civil and benign relations and conditions among people within the greater whole of community.  It doesn’t matter whether one believes in “spirit” or not.  Spiritual paths can help a person’s mind and understanding grasp their own wholeness in and of themselves as part of a greater living universe and totality.  Spiritual paths also increase the capacity for sensitivity and sensitive awareness while also enriching the mind’s sense of itself so that it becomes more agile and more supple and less brittle and intractable.  Spiritual paths can fill one with the feeling of “good essences” and can enhance one’s experience of just about everything in life—one’s meals, one’s exercise, one’s sleep, one’s work and pastimes, and one’s own reflections, observations, and memories.  Finally, I’ll just add that one shouldn’t dismiss “spirit” without experiencing what “spirit” means within a spiritual practice or path.  Spiritual paths can teach us what “spirit” is even though we may not regard spirit as qualifying as a “real phenomenon” in and of itself.  One can learn for oneself what spirit is, or what it can or cannot be, from one’s own knowledge, experience, and understanding.   But you can’t “know” spirit to begin with without having some experience of “what is meant by it,” for you would have nothing to relate such knowledge to.

F.L.T.:  Excellent.  I think that actually answers all my questions regarding your own spiritual and religious background and influences.  You prefer a practical or pragmatic side to spiritual and things of a higher order, so to speak.  Would you accept that characterization of your view of religion and spirituality?

P.T.:  Sure I would.  I like that you weren’t afraid to say, “things of a higher order.”  I think in today’s world we are suspicious of religion and even spirituality because many of us today are more incredulous of the intentions, motives, and quality of so-called “higher authority” than at any other time in history.  Many of us resign ourselves in opposition to religion because it is so like all the other modern institutions that become disconnected from humanity and human reality and so fall out of favour with members of the public.  I think it is fair to say that many people tend to be incredulous, or even downright outraged, with political actors and governing powers (and with priests, I should say, also) when in exercising their authority, these actors choose hegemony over genuine understanding, divide- and-conquer over good faith and conscience or they narrow their interests and vantage to a “popular” standard merely for the purposes of perpetuating their own power and authority, for usually the popular standard is one we know by now is deleterious to what is required for human progress and social evolution, harmful to the conditions involved in human life and development, not to mention to permitting life to exist on this planet overall.  But, while all that is true, religion and spirituality, at its best, can liberate us and even elevate our minds and selves so that we can then truly come to know and often feel when we need to that we have “room to grow.”  It may even induce and/or facilitate growth itself.  Still, you are right, I intend for religion and spirituality to have a more reduced role, to be potentially, as you said, an entirely “pragmatic” aid for people.  To be reduced to its place among many other significant aids within the path of life of the human being.  I feel less can be more in this path when it comes to religion and spirituality.  But I do leave “how much religion and spirituality” up to the wayfarer.  People can always spend more time in spiritualities and more time studying theology if they so choose.

F.L.T.:  Thank you.   I do now want to get away from religion, “God” (or (God)), and spiritualities.  Tell us about the highest order classes, the Subjects.  Why “Law” and “Wisdom”?   That kind of “blew me away” actually, that there might be “something” placed in a cardinal or prime place in the order “above all else.”

P.T.:  It took me twenty-four years to get to a point where I could develop a path that I thought could benefit absolutely anyone, a path that no matter how long a person spent on it, they would derive some benefit and would never “lose their place” if they decided to abandon it.  The good thing about this path is that it never needs to change for a person throughout their life.  They can come and go off this path whenever they like and they need never feel that they have “lost” anything they have gained from it.  After twenty-four years though of struggling to find a “vehicle” in which to express and share ideas about life and God, it occurred to me that I was missing, not a vehicle, but an order or even simply a pretext that would be both true and intuitively true to people.  Apostate of Catholicism that I am, I was missing the universal subjects that would make any course worth following, with these subjects being “consolations” should the person decide that they are no longer interested in the way forward offered through them.  This may not do the degree of the problem and the “joy of the solution” justice though.  The Law and Wisdom are two things that can be universally highly regarded—depending on how you view them—as what have made human beings “human” as higher “forms” of life to begin with, as being a “form” of life that can grow beyond what nature would otherwise determine all life to be.  Without “Law,” humans really can’t be or even become civil creatures. Without “Law,” there would be chaos and then we simply would no longer even exist.  Without “Wisdom,” knowledge has no connection to any human or “planned” future, no part in any personal or shared posterity of our own preferred designs, for the fruit of wisdom is simply better practice, better understanding, and a better life for one and others than what is achievable without wisdom.  The law is how we learn respect, but through wisdom, respect becomes something through which human life can be seen as a path to become one in one’s very humanity with others in Love, Hope, Peace, and Joy.  These things are, I think it’s fair to say, what make life liveable if not of themselves worth living, but I feel they are universally within reach through genuine wisdom (at least via my path).  But you always must start with Law (even and especially as a child) and develop Wisdom out of the need to respect the liberty and special differences of others, the universal need for which is what makes the human law universally necessary and causes it to exist at the beginning everywhere.  No path is possible then without Law at the beginning and throughout one’s way and without Wisdom as an aim or end throughout all of life.  This is the fundamental path in my own philosophy, and Law is where one starts with the end being Wisdom until one perhaps realizes one’s own end, although this too will likely be regarded as “Wise” and suffused with the content and essences of the path(s) one has taken and the life one has lived toward “Wisdom.”

F.L.T.: It’s been wonderful talking to you about this.  I feel that there will be great interest in “pathways.”  And so my last question is, you just spoke about how you came up with this particular path after twenty-four years of kind of wondering…well, I guess I picture you sort of shuffling your feet, taking the “long roads” home, doing a lot of navel-gazing perhaps?….
P.T.:  Yes, that is exactly right.  Kind of “kicking the can further down the road,” so to speak.  I was not one who was “waiting for Godot” exactly, but I was more delaying or “putting off” what other people were making seem inevitable sense for everyone, waiting for things to make sense to me in a way that I knew I could then begin to try to make meaningful sense of everything that had ever happened or of everything that could possibly ever be known.  I was waiting for everything to crystallize.

F.L.T.: And?  Did it?

P.T.:  Uh, in a way, yes.  But not in a way I could ever have expected or would ever have wanted….I was “put out of commission” for a great length of time.  Of course, I still read, thought, and wrote during this period.  But I was not well, to put it mildly.

F.L.T.: Yes, well, my question then is, how did you come up with the idea of doing this as a “path,” or as a “map” for a pathway.  Did you ever wonder whether you would be writing a book of philosophy or simply lecturing on the topics that most closely connect to what is most of concern?   By the way, I had a hard time framing this question because, well, I already know the answer, but one of our colleagues said to me, “Make sure you ask him about the mandalas and the labyrinths….” (lol).

P.T.:   Yes, it is true.  I spent many years thinking on what mandalas were about, while knowing that they weren’t labyrinths and that mandalas served a “more humble,” more modest purpose than labyrinths.  I suppose all that time, my brain was “working out” what mandalas could do for people who designed them or for people who contemplated the mandalas of others.  Labyrinths can of course be great fun or, if one gets lost, not so fun….But what they both have in common is that they are path-based, spatial designs that require people to choose the “best way” given a set of constraints or parameters.  One can no longer make a mandala any way one pleases once one has added the first line.  It is the creation or the appearance of a doorway that generates the direction of the path one then must take.  So one is already on a path once one decides (or fails to decide) in which direction one will initially travel.  I came up with the idea of a pathway-based design because I wanted the philosophy to be knowledge-based but to allow intuition to be instrumental and to include “freedom of choice” and “life” sufficiently to ground wisdom in “experience and people” while offering everything else that I thought had been helpful to me over those twenty-four years.   But another important reason for a path-based approach, of setting it out in a way that can be “mapped,” is so that the wayfarer has choices while also being able to “see” the path “from above,” in terms of how everything interrelates and connects to a personal and communal posterity (so that a wayfarer need never get lost like in a labyrinth).  I also wanted “genuine understanding” to be furthered which is far more intuitive and practical for “getting at” human meaning than what western culture calls “knowledge.”   So I decided to come up with a pathway that gave people many choices, many options, within a set of parameters of what will prove to be a reasonable, respectable, and highly fruitful path consisting of a beginning, a way-as-means and means-as-way, and the promise of an end that is both sufficient to be exactly that and as an end for whenever an end is needed because one must part ways from the path.   The beginning of the path, the way of the wayfarer on the path (through life), and the end of the path make up the vehicle of the path, with the person being the substance, the essences, and the forms that change in making up their own present reality, which also involves a way forward and what is seen and remembered in looking back.   Hopefully, at the end, whenever it is decided this will be, it will be possible to look back and to discover one’s own wisdom.  As I said earlier, the way along the path can be ended and restarted as many times as a person likes, and one need never lose one’s last known place whenever one does return to it

The following is the lecture to go with the interview.  In it, the “Sensitized Path” is elucidated further by its creator with additional insights, commentary, and analysis on the map shared at the start of this article.

With The Sensitized Path, I discovered a way of doing philosophy that could be part of a way of life that didn’t shirk or excuse or rationalize, or reduce in some other “convenient” way, the persistent realities of humanity, human history, human beings, and the challenging circumstances and situations of individuals, families, and communities in today’s world.  It is a way of doing philosophy rather than the philosophy itself and it can potentially also offer (as any way of doing philosophy should) a way of solving the problems of religion and culture (at least for wayfarers themselves).  And I now feel that it could only have been discovered with a two-decades-long and very difficult personal journey whose crucible required the wayfarer to go through a mortifying and pathogenic awakening through social learning, his own psychic disintegration, and much time feeling unvalued and being unemployed in the world without any use for popular media, books, or anything besides music, a healthy diet, and himself (although I did follow the news, as this also happened to be a pivotal and potentially precipitous period in our late-modern history (and, unfortunately, at this time of writing remains so) and I feel following the news has been one of my duties as a late-modern writer and thinker).

The pathway, and the map of any pathway, are together a way of “getting better at making things just so.”  This particular pathway is centered on Law as the best possible beginning at any point along one’s way and Wisdom as a happy and fruitful end throughout one’s life.  Life is the means, the middle, and the “small vehicle” for making one’s way along the path, “the greater vehicle.”   I feel that Law and Wisdom are also the most likely subjects to lend stability and an enduring sense and content of coherence and internal consistency to any of one’s pursuits and concentrations, and they provide a sufficiently strong anchor and rudder to one’s experiences and any difficulties one may encounter along the path.

I will now talk about the structure of the map.  There are three headings by which the elements are presented and related to one another.  The first is the Subject which is the matter of substance toward understanding, appreciation, and knowledge, and toward which one can grow and develop oneself.  The Correlative is the reflexive, expressive, and embodied (“experienced”) Image or Representation of the Subject that changes by way of the path as the Objects are investigated and learned.  The Objects are the ”core concepts” important to appreciating, learning, and gaining true experience and insight of both the Subject and the Correlative.  One’s overall aim is the knowledge of the Subject, but one must view the Subject through the Correlative that also changes in one’s perception of it as one learns and develops knowledge and understanding, and this happens as the Objects are learned as concepts most vital to the Subject in view of the changing Correlative.

Let’s look at Law, which is the “true” starting-point on the path (although you may start from wherever you wish and “look to the Law” from that point).  One need not ground oneself in the Law entirely or at all times, but it is there for one to consider all of what one sees, learns, and experiences in terms of the requirement for universal standards of practice and conduct that, when taken together, can potentially become a formal system and body of rules intending to balance the needs and interests of persons and groups with the well-being of all other persons making up a Society.  I will say, Law should make all individuals in a Society freer rather than less free.  Freedom of all people in Society requires Law.  Any law that makes any one person or group less free in the interests of another’s freedom or gain is a bad law.  Any law that itself imposes a further limit on freedom without enhancing freedom overall for all people, whether this enhancement is by degree or by quality (depending on what is deemed beneficial for all people), is a bad law.

The Correlative of Law is Society.  Society develops and changes as Laws upon people develop and change.   Society is a reflection, expression, and “experience” of the country, community, and even one’s very own laws (whether of the laws themselves or the effects, enhancements, or repugnancies of the laws).  Of course, we all do make our own laws for ourselves, our own policies, our own preferred practices, our own rules.  Our own Society with and for others is an expression of all our little rules and the quirks and qualities of ourselves partly from these “concerns” of ours that appear from time to time and affect our relations within our personal community.   That is a small, “micro-level” insight on Law that I felt I should share to get people thinking more concretely about how laws affect Life.  But countries, of course, have laws, and life in that country is directly and indirectly affected by the quality and content of its laws.  The Objects?  What do we look to to enhance our study of Laws in a life, community, and country?  Institutions (conventions, rules, regulations of practices, opinions urdoxa, legal principles, and doctrines), Codes (which are the enforceable prohibitions in a Society), Culture (how a distinct people views itself and its history and relates itself to others through this view), Histories (of individual persons, groups, communities, or nations), and, of course, “People themselves,” but this against “how “People” are regarded” by individuals, communities, or the nation, and how individuals, communities, families, and nations are regarded from how “People” are apprehended and understood.  People of a discriminated group?  Yes, that is one aspect of People under Laws that should be considered.  This, itself, can be seen in terms of Institutions, Codes, Culture, History, and all the concerns regarding “People” under Law in Society as just outlined.

In order to provide a “way into” pathways by an analogy with the pilgrimage or walking trip with a definite end, I risked clouding or obstructing the only way the pathway as a whole can work.  The map is meant to be read as a space that is both static and dynamic, finite and infinite.   As static, it is a way to classify different things in potentially fixed relation to one another and also in potentially fixed relation to some possible whole.  And yet, there need be no pattern whatsoever to the order in which one proceeds along the path and there is no determined content beyond what comes to be of all the elements individually, in relation to one another, and possibly in some form or kind of unity altogether.  Wisdom is the end, but that does not mean that Wisdom should come only at the end.  One must learn from investigating Self, Ego, Family, the Psyche, and one must learn how to take care of one’s physical needs in a beneficial rather than harmful way, with any or all of these at any time or even at “all” times coming into one’s awareness along one’s way and adding to or requiring one’s drawing upon one’s wisdom.  And life never stops happening.  So I will spend a little bit of time talking about the Subject of Life and how this operates within the pathway.

The Subject of Life is the small vehicle within the greater vehicle of the whole.  It is the means, the medium, and provides a great deal of the “essence” of wisdom needed for understanding Laws, and Wisdom is the true fruit of Life even as Laws are the beginning of one’s way in Life toward Wisdom.  People might say that a person’s own Life or the Life of another person that one knows very well would be extremely difficult to “sum up,” “condense,” or even to “frame” in a way that would make evocative and just description of that life possible.  And yet, an experience one has in life that is meaningful can feel “just so” with one not necessarily being able to just then describe in words what one has learned or how one has grown, and yet one does then have, even then possesses inalienably, the very clear sense that one has changed and that one will even one day be able to do just that, describe “what changed for me,” and “how I myself changed.”  Real life is change.  This is why another’s life as a whole is difficult, and should be impossible, for us to put into words.  We didn’t live it.  We didn’t experience the changes and we certainly cannot then take all these events, experiences, moments, and reflections together, and explain what all that change meant for them and what all that change is about and might mean for Human Life itself.  

The Objects under Life are recommendations.  I highly recommend a Zen concentration of some kind.  I don’t necessarily mean meditation, but I recommend a hobby or activity one can do everyday that will (eventually) focus one’s energy, one’s mind, and one’s self on something one will eventually be able to visualize and create from one’s own sense of unity in body, mind, soul, and “spirit.”  I love to cook.  I have cooked my own meals three times daily for twenty years.  Cooking is a good Zen concentration, as is painting.  Knitting is good.  Can you think of others?  As long as you are concentrating and you can feel that you are improving at something that reduces the stress in your life while your are also undergoing resistance.   This is the best way to generate resistance from within in order to strengthen your core while increasing sensitivity.   Resistance is important until you master the concentration.  When you master the concentration, you will have a greater ability to mould, shape, and influence your inner states.  Mastery of one goes with mastery of the other.  The Objects under Life are things we can do to enhance all of what is presented in the map.   But if there is something you are doing that doesn’t qualify in this way, as long as it doesn’t harm your or another’s way in anything on the map, then feel free to pursue it.  But don’t worry too much about this little piece of advice.  Living is also about learning from “simply living” and from our own experiences and those of others (and “Experience” and “People” are Objects under Life also).  As for the other Objects, a few words might be said about Literature and Philosophy.  The verbal is to be elevated above the image because thinking in language is necessary for the cognitive processes and the development of the mind’s faculties that are sensitive to meaning and nuance as these are experienced, apprehended, stored, and further processed by the individual person from and as their own experience.  Images short-circuit the pathways between direct experience and “a rich and living text of meaning,” and “bearing witness” is not equivalent in the path of understanding to “drawing from one’s own source of understanding and knowledge, encountering one’s own past or another’s history, or connecting with one’s own or another’s experiences.”  Printed or digitized words in sentences instil in order to “express and reflect” one’s experience of a text as one’s own, one that involves special resonances of that text from one’s own life, memory, and present circumstances and situation of apprehension.  Those resonances are one’s experience of the text as of essences in one’s own life at the present time.  These resonances may remain unchanged or change as the wayfarer themselves change, and, if changing, they will bear additional fruit for future texts and reflection.  It is like living in a world of images is living in a world from which our own bodies and minds as our own living selves are excluded.  That is all I will say on this, but the saturation of people with images and the substitution of increasingly powerful images in people for memories of their own text will continue to dissociate and disconnect people from the “true source of their own life in and of themselves” which will sever them from their own experience of who they are and can be.   So a text in words involves the person themselves while a text in images requires only a passive witness or mere observer.  I’ve included Theatre, but “film like theatre” is recommended, at the very least for “observing people in our world.”  I do not strictly mean “theatre as film” or “film as theatre,” but “film of some special quality” with a connection to theatre, but one less rigid than “film as…” or “theatre as…” indicate.).

I will leave the rest of the map “open and undiscovered.”  The purpose of this lecture was not to explain everything, but only to show how the map was intended to work so that a wayfarer could make a pathway their very own.  This particular pathway has been tested and tried.  It is being shared because it is entirely safe and will prove beneficial, if not too challenging.  If you find you need to make a change to it, then feel free to do so, but please for your sake and for the sake of others (in case you’ve shared this change in some form with another person), be aware of and be able to recall the change you have made.  If you make changes and they don’t work out the way you would have liked them too, then this too is wisdom in life, and you will benefit from remembering “everything that happened” and reflecting on “everything about what happened,” and not just “what didn’t work”!  Good luck!