Fabrice's Newsletter #12
Fabrice's Newsletter #12
Chapter 5: Towards new meaning and human values
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,
I hope you have been well especially in these times where the media seems heavy and destruction is the norm that we see of this world. Haiti has been weighing on my mind especially with the recent earthquake that has rocked its land again just a few days ago. I am pensive, reflecting and praying that all that has happened to her, she will rise stronger than ever. The spirit of her revolutionary ways will one day sweep the world’s hearts and minds once again.
In these turbulent moments, you have to take time for yourself. Seriously you have to create space for your heart and mind to be still. Going through the motion intensely and not taking time to stop and be still will leave you burn out. You will be like a gigantic wax candle, extinguished, formless whose gut has melted completely all over the floor. It will leave you with a lack of purpose and lack of being. Go out and spend more time in nature. Journal more often. Use other avenues in your life to uplift your spirit, sharpen your mind and hold on very tightly your visions and dreams.
I’ve been thinking about this particular book project and found a new title (“Breaking Free From Mass Produced Consciousness”) that I will stick with. It better engages the holistic messages of semiology imbedded in a nietzschian, barthesian and derridean lens, post-structuralism and existentialism that one must go through to thrive in this very intense world.
These teachings I have been writing since the start of this year I hope to finalize the last chapter soon for the first part of this small book that is part-philosophy and part-Self help for artists and leaders who care about making an impact in the world. I will take this little book - edit it, package it and format it so you can see it in it’s entirety.
I’ve hyperlinked the older parts so you can check out the raw drafts.
Breaking Free From Mass Produced Consciousness
Table of Content
Part 1
Towards new meaning and human values
Irreconcilable reasonless pain and suffering
Chapter 5
Towards new meaning and human values
We don’t know what we don’t know. How can you know something if you’ve never ventured out towards it, seen it with your own two eyes and claim it? Everything we’ve thought really has been the construction of dried words that cast spellings in our mind and bring images that have come to define for us our entire fields of meaning and reason. We can’t go outside of it because it is in us. We are it and we define it. Yet it defines us.
There’s about a million words that exist in the entire English language. How can we possibly think they have allowed us to really feel the depths of the soul. How can we possibly believe every time we have cried, every visceral angry raging emotions we have felt pulsing our blood, and every laughter of lightness of being we have floated, how can we believe they have defined for us and that we have truly lived?
These individual words are cages. Most of them are. They are signs and symbols that communicate a meaning that does not lead us towards the truth of new realities within us.
Think about it for one second. Shouldn’t you seek to define and uncover the language and the vocabulary of your own myth making? The sweet poems that wind flows through your own internal universe. The verses and words to your own liberation and higher purpose? Each of the words of this human language are limitations imposed on our consciousness. To extract ourselves from yourself and to the world. These words they extract and then distract us. Truth is not bound in their construct. We consume them like fast food mindlessly walking out of tune, disjointed emotional messes. This is our society. It breeds our meaning structures like farm animals to behave like cattle, we don’t question who we are and why we are and what our body feels inside. It's the illusion of free will.
It is imperative that we must strive for new meaning because it is the destiny of mankind. It is a flow we must align ourselves towards. The next stages of our evolution as a species resides in our ability to absorb new meaning within us and outside of us thus enabling the human values to rise we don’t know yet exist. These values are the guiding elders of our inner life. Each of them carry a magnetic force that connects and anchors us to our purpose and to our why for living. But these elders and all their potential are only limited and can only rise to the level of the meaning that we offer them and have experienced.
As a collective species we are living in a time that has never occurred before in human history. We are most infinitely connected by technological forces. Our societies are almost borderless and our media is defined by endless truths. We face crises of meaning beyond our comprehension yet we only use the old meaning that has been given to us from before to live and it's complete insanity.
We are a birth waiting to happen stuck inside the womb. Don’t you know that you can create a new world for yourself? Don’t you know that you have to move towards new meanings and each step that you take to inform this living world inside of you and you must grow it, that through it you can bring humanity further towards its destiny. Are you willing to throw away and leave behind all that you were? To seek something new knowing that this wandering will bring you more purpose, more excitement, more balance.
You have to actively find new meaning, everyday and every hour if you can. The soul demands it, the mind requires it, your mental health needs it, this seeking out for new perspectives and configurations of the world that you didn’t know before is what uncovers your destiny and your becoming. It’s the only way.
Our values are nuclear reactors that demand massive amounts of organic foods like meaningful experiences and new understandings. Their potential and evolution to be fully manifested and fulfilled demands these new meanings. Or if we don't, a nuclear meltdown will bring toxicity all your inner life landscape, the symbols of the world will drown you out, you will feel down, you will feel lost, you will be a being without a voice, without that lighthouse to guide yourself and those around you.
Learn to let yourself be in love with learning, in seeking to challenge your own belief systems, to continually grow in ways you didn’t know before.
To move towards new meanings and new human values is to seek to move to your highest ideals. It's possible and it's true. Your highest ideals are your innate right. Isn’t that all we seek in this world, to be loved, to feel the beauty all round us, to feel connected to a large community, to have a level of belonging that allows us to thrive. To feel completely fulfilled with the challenging task at hand. To actualize all that you can be. You can have it all. You can have that and all the mysteries of your world.
New meaning is always hidden within a crowded forest of infinite masks, signifiers and infinite series of illusions. It is not a given in our society, it is not something that the world will teach you to do.
You must grow your meaning structures, you must engage the deeper aspects of your being. Do it as if your life depends on it.
Imagination is the active shaping of civilization of yourself and the world with your actions, your words and your characters and the art of your life.
You have to engage your imagination. You have to see new things in your mind and breathe life into them. You have to consume new things you’ve never done before. Don’t harbor in your cage of dogma, don’t be so sure of the land you have formed for yourself. Do be too comfortable in the pain that has become your identity.
Your imagination is the rivers that overflow within your consciousness to the eternity of the outer. Your imagination will be the surest thing that will uplift you out of an old habit. The imagination will be the thing that will integrate parts of you. We are imaginative creatures. This is the way of your future.
Your imagination is the vehicle that is the map, that is the ship and the ocean to venture towards the new parts of yourself. The new meaning of your imagination is the world that has yet become true in you. Your imagination is the edge of your personal evolution.
Towards new meaning and human values is to become polymathical in your ways. To expand outwardly in every direction. To syncretize your thinking like a gigantic star moving planets all around. To learn from all dimensions and seep closer to the emotional, psychological, creative, intellectual layers and powers within you.
To find new meaning in your life is the next stage of your evolution. It's to reinvent yourself. Reinventing yourself is the only way to reconfigure the values in you.
New human values will be contingent on the single few who do the inner work within themselves that can lead by example and carve a path for others to see and reimagine what is possible. Those who will rise among their communities and express their inner world radically will begin to transition humanity towards new meaning and new human values.
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
Dear Fabrice GUERRIER,
Next Text :
SPIRITUAL REMEDIES FOR THE SICK
(*This is written about 85 years ago)
[This treatise was written as a salve, a solace, and a prescription for the sick, and as a visit to the sick and a wish for their speedy recovery.]
It describes briefly Twenty-Five Remedies which may offer true consolation and a beneficial cure for the sick and those struck by disaster, who form one tenth of mankind.
FIRST REMEDY
Unhappy sick person! Do not be anxious, have patience! Your illness is not a malady for you; it is a sort of cure. For life departs like capital. If it yields no fruits, it is wasted. And if it passes in ease and heedlessness, it passes most swiftly. Illness makes that capital of yours yield huge profits. Moreover, it does not allow your life to pass quickly, it restrains it and lengthens it, so that it will depart after yielding its fruits. An indication that your life is lengthened through illness is the following much repeated proverb: “The times of calamity are long, the times of happiness, most short.”
SECOND REMEDY
O ill person who lacks patience! Be patient, indeed, offer thanks! Your illness may transform each of the minutes of your life into the equivalent of an hour’s worship.
For worship is of two kinds. One is positive like the well-known worship of supplication and the prayers. The other are negative forms of worship like illness and calamities. By means of these, those afflicted realize their impotence and weakness; they beseech their All-Compassionate Creator and take refuge in Him; they manifest worship which is sincere and without hyprocrisy.
Yes, there is a sound narration stating that a life passed in illness is counted as worship for the believer-on condition he does not complain about God. It is even established by sound narrations and by those who uncover the realities of creation that one minute’s illness of some who are completely patient and thankful becomes the equivalent of an hour’s worship and a minute’s illness of certain perfected men the equivalent of a day’s worship.
Thus, you should not complain about an illness which as though transforms one minute of your life into a thousand minutes and gains for you long life; you should rather offer thanks.
THIRD REMEDY
Impatient sick person! The fact that those who come to this world continuously depart, and the young grow old, and man perpetually revolves amid death and separation testifies that he did not come to this world to enjoy himself and receive pleasure.
Moreover, while man is the most perfect, the most elevated, of living beings and the best endowed in regard to members and faculties, through thinking of past pleasures and future pains, he passes only a grievous, troublesome life, lower than the animals.
This means that man did not come to this world in order to live in fine manner and pass his life in ease and pleasure. Rather, possessing vast capital, he came here to work and do trade for an eternal, everlasting life. The capital given to man is his lifetime. Had there been no illness, good health and well-being would have caused heedlessness, for they show the world to be pleasant and make the Hereafter forgotten. They do not want death and the grave to be thought of; they cause the capital of life to be wasted on trifles. Whereas illness suddenly opens the eyes, it says to the body: “You are not immortal. You have not been left to your own devices. You have a duty. Give up your pride, think of the One Who created you. Know that you will enter the grave, so prepare yourself for it!”
Thus, from this point of view, illness is an admonishing guide and advisor that never deceives. It should not be complained about in this respect, indeed, should be thanked for. And if it is not too severe, patience should be sought to endure it.
FOURTH REMEDY
Plaintive ill person! It is your right, not to complain, but to offer thanks and be patient. For your body and members and faculties are not your property. You did not make them, and you did not buy them from other workshops. That means they are the property of another. Their owner has disposal over his property as he wishes.
An extremely wealthy and skilful craftsman, for example, employs a poor man as a model in order to show off his fine art and valuable wealth. In return for a wage, for a brief hour he clothes the poor man in a bejewelled and most skilfully wrought garment. He works it on him and gives it various states. In order to display the extraordinary varieties of his art, he cuts the garment, alters it, and lengthens and shortens it. Does the poor man working for a wage have the right to say to that person: “You are causing me trouble, you are causing me distress with the form you have given it, making me bow down and stand up;” has he the right to tell him that he is spoiling his fine appearance by cutting and shortening the garment which makes him beautiful? Can he tell him he is being unkind and unfair?
O sick person! Just like in this comparison, in order to display the garment of your body with which He has clothed you, bejewelled as it is with luminous faculties like the eye, the ear, the reason, and the heart, and the embroideries of His Most Beautiful Names, the All-Glorious Maker makes you revolve amid numerous states and changes you in many situations. Like you learn of His Name of Provider through hunger, come to know also His Name of Healer through your illness. Since suffering and calamities show the decrees of some of His Names, within those flashes of wisdom and rays of mercy are many instances of good to be found.
If the veil of illness, which you fear and loathe, was to be lifted, behind it you would find many agreeable and beautiful meanings.
FIFTH REMEDY
O you who is afflicted with illness! Through experience I have formed the opinion at this time that sickness is a Divine bounty for some people, a gift of the Most Merciful One.