Fabrice's Newsletter #11
Fabrice's Newsletter #11
Chapter 4: A guide to think in one’s owns way
I write commentaries through essays and philosophy designed to inspire you deeply to greater heights. I also write 500 word Memos on the future of the fiction publishing industry, storytelling, entertainment, tech and media.
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Hello all,
Took a small break from writing over the last month or two. Major changes are happening in my life and they’re happening fast. Really great ones. I actually found the title for this book project. It came to me earlier this week “Breaking Free From Mass Produced Consciousness.” In the following chapter of the book I explore in a draft form ‘a guide to think in one’s owns way’. Let me know what you think about it and we can start a discussion.
Breaking Free From Mass Produced Consciousness
Table of Content
Part 1
A guide to think in one’s owns way
Towards new meaning and human values
Irreconcilable reasonless pain and suffering
Chapter 4
A Guide To Think In One’s Owns Way
Think of this as the most literal metaphor of buying a new device, let’s say a television. You are an alien species brought onto this planet and are given this new flat screen television. It’s not turned on. It’s still in the box. You see the photo of the device but you have no idea how it functions. Where would you plug it in to give it power? Or would you even know that it needs plugging? What about the symbols you see. What do they represent? How do you find the turn-on button? Even if you get past that, what about the WIFI, the internet, the cables to connect other devices, the many game consoles or blu-ray disk players? How would you know the entire evolving ecosystem that gives it meaning and purpose to its utility?
The complexity gets wider and wider as you solve the laden steps laid in these foundations. Seemingly they’re gates that you have to cross and understandings that you have to know in order to fully maximize the television as a functioning device. These learnings first have to become second nature after a very labyrinthine experience in complete darkness.
Now that the television is operational, how do you know how to use it? Which channels do you enjoy? Which television series or movies or forms of media and information add meaning to your soul? Because you will have particularities, maybe you like sports and sports are the most intriguing and entertaining form of consumption for you. Or you love watching nature documentaries. Or Anime for a matter of fact. What channels will you go to? How will you know in advance the experiences that you desire deeply and the ones that will be soul filling or the ones you will hate?
To think in one's own way is to find and understand the manual that is steep to your life and your life only. The pages that encode the step by step processes to your specific lived experience in this moment. You are a unique being with unique experiences with unique particularities. You’ve travelled places. You’ve felt extreme emotions. Maybe you’ve mourned loved ones. Maybe you’ve failed countless times. Maybe you got rejected. Maybe you are a newborn parent. Maybe you have a unique historical past and legacy to rebel against or uphold. You’ve learned to laugh at yourself. You’ve entered a dark place that swirls you to emotions that have now become part of your identity. You know they are passing and you cannot see beyond them. Yet you hide your own weirdness. You hide yourself.
You have to hold the instruction manual to your life, to your mind, to your psychology, to your emotions and to your destiny. It exists. We live in a world that is most outwardly focused. The social winds. The economic winds. The political and historical winds structure our lives in such a way that it turns on and turns off us as our own television devices willingly.
And depending on where you are from, it holds a specific channel for you and it never changes. It locks you down. It locks you trapped into one show or just a couple shows. And you don't have permission to change nor do you know where the remote to yourself is.
You believe that remote control and that instruction manual doesn't exist because you have never seen it, ever. It's a tale. It's a myth from your own childhood where you used to roam aimlessly with extreme curiosity and at times blissfully. You fear what complete freedom looks like. To the same levels of feeling that you would be an enemy of the state, people would ridicule you for thinking and acting differently.
Yet, that's the only way forward in this life. You must break free in order to achieve your own greatness and one does it in that fervent pursuit of discovering yourself mercilessly till your last breath here on this planet and expressing it.
What do you want in this lifetime? What are things that you yearn so deeply for? Do you believe that you can live your greatest truth and recreate this endless bliss? You need an instruction manual that is going to serve both as a code for your life and how you should live it.
First realize that you are a multilayered being and in your mind are the ancient components and mechanical processes that speak for you but you don’t hear them nor see them.
Some may call these generative forces as values, commitments and deep seated beliefs that make you you. And without them, you would feel lost. These processes move you towards actions, behaviors and towards continuing living your life and the way it is now.
You must understand your mind. How it functions. Who are you in the morning? Maybe you prefer to sleep in and eat breakfast right when you wake up. Maybe you want to sit quietly and journal. Free write about your week, an event happening in your life or how your week is going. Maybe you need a dark cup of coffee to give your life meaning initially. Maybe you exercise. You go for a run or explore the gym. Are you dreaming? Do you write down your dreams to make sense of this world first thing in the morning? Do you do your best work at that morning rise or you don't like to be bothered at all. These finer points of energy and the aspects that give your flow matters here. They should matter to you tremendously.
You have to experiment and see what works for you. What renders you most vital. You have to be willing to search through all of them and try those processes that work for you and you only. You can learn from others, but only you can and must take action towards it in your own life and see for yourself, otherwise nothing will ever happen.
Make a choice and exercise your will. Own up to it. See the learnings that arise from it. It’s true that there will be a point where that choice will no longer be valid because you will have moved beyond that point of alignment. You will have outgrown the old. Yet you have to keep fine tuning yourself to yourself, that is the right channel. What about in the afternoons or at night? How are you then? The intricacies deepen then even so, your finer habits and the type of thinking that arises then must be brought to light and be understood and reasoned with.
If you live in a location with different seasons, you are most certainly different in behavior and in thinking over the winter and then in the summer. How so and to what degree. To begin to think in one’s own way is to see the fine realities from within your mind to where you inhabit and your relations with the natural world and your community.
Who are you with different types of friends or individuals? Do certain friends make you more creative? Why is that? Do certain people allow you to think more deeply about the world, then why is that? Do certain groups of people make you angrier at the world and all the problems that occur? Do others inspire you to act and make you believe things are possible? Do you feel miserable with a certain group of people, that you are alone, that they don’t understand you and the pungent smells of misery have caused a meltdown in your mind? You have to know why. Why that person or thing have made you feel this way.
Who of you do they bring out inside of you? How do you face rejection and cope with traumatic experiences? Is there a special mechanism that you have learned in your own life that you know will allow you to heal and move forward? To contemplate the entire world of your life and make sense of the impossible? What are the things that you are hiding from?
Your mind is an engine and to begin to think in one’s own way you have to give yourself some honest truth. Are there things that obsess you? Things that tire you. Things that give life to you. Why do all these things and the thoughts and emotions they bring do that thing to you. What are the finer make up of all these interactions and connections? How can you use them against one another and to each other? Your destiny is within your grasp but you have to understand yourself to be able to think in your own way.
There is great necessity of uncovering the manual to your own life. That should be of the utmost importance. This you should prioritize it as a number one process. If you don’t then you will remain a silent prisoner in your body. The more you know how your own particularities function, the more free you will begin to think in your own way.
To think in your own way is extremely hard. It is merely impossible and very few people on the planet do it at any given time. Not everyone has the space to do so.
You might be in survival mode, barely holding on to life and the last thing you can do is to be aware of yourself. You might be in a dark forest unable to see that life is full of meaning and that you can continue and you can become more than you even dreamed of.
But I challenge you. It is the only way out of the hole you have dug yourself in. It's the only way you will be able to gain the wisdom to move swiftly into the next stages of your growth.
To fully think in your own way is to utilize all your finer intricacies to create a television channel that you know has never existed before. That you know it's all about you, it's important, it's needed and it matters. That only you yourself know it's true happenings. Some might call it the artist's voice. Your voice to the art of your own living. Others could call this forms of authenticity, audacity and originality. Standing for something. Betting on you and your gifts.
This channel is your life and people will watch. To think in your own way is to risk alienation because not everyone will like nor love something they have not seen before. Something that doesn't fit their preconceived notions nor their thinking mind that has been molded and shaped by society. Yet how can you create your own channel - your own pictures, your own unique stories, drama, colors, movement, emotions to move people in their own dormant existence - if you do not know where the turn on and turn off button of yourself is. If you don't even know there was a television in the first place that has you locked into one channel. The complexity of shifting ourselves in such a radical way that can honor who we are is a very liberatory act and truly expansive. It will allow you to create with this world and to this world and in yourself you will become more.
This instruction manual of yourself, let it guide you once you have seen its pages of yourself and have flipped through its core of yourself. This manual of your own mind, your own psychology, your own fears and patterns, once it's in your hands then you will have a chance at living with fulfillment. Then you will move away from reading this manual and code and you will embrace the next stage of writing in it with purpose and with audacity.
Shaping yourself with yourself that is the goal here. That is the greatest thrill. That is the snake eating its own tail. That is the manual becoming a book that you write and you stand fully to yourself and show the world unashamedly and unabashedly.
It will encode your purpose, your mission, your visions, it will be the document that will enable you to track your own personal evolution. Knowingly so especially when you have outlived your own life and you are seeking new adventures towards even greater degrees of fulfillment and greater joy.
Those who can think in their own ways are often the leaders of their communities, leaders of the world whether they are introverted, silent or extroverted and dancing their lives. Those who think in their own way live in service of change. Those who think in their own way stand out from the crowd by having discovered their own uniqueness and weirdness. Embracing it all. They are those that have found their voice and speak directly from that manual. They speak to the world through their actions and deep expressions. The future and the world will belong to those who can think in their own way.
Thanks as always for reading. Share this newsletter if you like it or please reply if you have feedback or reactions to share!
In good spirit,
Fabrice