Take Your Makeup Off: The Age of Shameless Self-Promotion

My ex-girlfriend, whom I dated off and on for 18 months was one of the few people whose opinions I ever really took to heart. This was because she was a young woman whose profundity never ceased to amaze me, whose intuition was often spot on, a person who truly took time to examine the world. During the first few months that we were getting to know each other she once started in on an epic diatribe about the influence of social media on the society. I have learned that its tough to make such sweeping statements, so we ended up talking about what internet presence does to individual psyches and how that affects percpetion. Her biggest critique of me was my propensity to only expose my virtuous self online, that I wasn’t who I truly seemed. That was the beginning of my meditations on virtual self-promotion…

Who are you truly?

Are you the sum of your own thoughts or are you the sum of others? Whose statements hold more “truth”, yours or others? When you wake up in the morning who do you get dressed for, yourself or the approval of others?

Scroll through your online profiles, your Facebook timelines and your Twitter feeds: whom are you portraying, who you are or who you’d like to be?

Here’s the million dollar question: how many of us really know the difference?

I have long since railed against the notion of individual perception discovering truth. In postulations like my Noise Theory I examine the static created by information multiplied by development and created the philosophical dichotomy that is linear vs. nonlinear. Although I have a love of multisyllabic words my position on this is really quite simple:humans are individual “universes” whose unique experiences shapes them in unpredictable ways. Although many general statements can be made about perception, the human mind and — transitively human expression of sentience — are far too variable to directly interface with “Truth”. The few that are able to enjoy the bounty of timeless Truth are those who seek it through spiritual enlightenment..

In other words, it is intensely difficult for a person to see anything for what it truly is and instead to see things as they see fit. This becomes an intractable problem of awareness when one is considering themselves; a person cannot see themselves for who they truly are and therefore view themselves as they feel or as they see fit. This leads to a distorted sense of self-awareness and a slough of existential maladies including arrogance, conceit, depression, low self-esteem amongst others.

Looking back at my ex-girlfriend’s view of online platforms as bastions of self-promotion, one can see how a Facebook would compound these problems. Many of us spend our entire online experience posturing ourselves to seem larger than we are, smarter than we are, prettier than we are, or more interesting than we are. Armed with the intrinsic distance of remote control, we can edit how others see our lives.

I made a linked in account several months ago but only recently did I really start paying it any mind. I bolstered my summary, fully laid out my work experience and expertise, and made sure I dotted every “i” and “t”. Then I started adding people like crazy, hoping to line my “connections” pockets with as many LMU alumni as I possibly could. Given my penchant for active observation and subsequent introspection, I started looking at my friends’ profile and a troubling trend began to emerge. We were all doing the same thing. We were regaling about how intelligent we were, how experienced we were, how amazing you are for even knowing us. It has become nauseating to see. Moreover, only 30% of Americans are actually satisfied with their jobs, so why all of these smiles? Why all of these stomach turning attempts at importance?

Because self-promotion is how we have learned to communicate. It is how humans have been doing things since the dawn of recorded history. Really, I don’t even know a better way to explain myself without unhinged self-delusion.

Generation-Y’ers are the most guilty of this because we wholehearted trust in our delusion. We are important, passionate, good natured, genuine individuals of impeccable integrity. And if we just so happen to go through a phase of less than noble traits, then it was just that — a phase. Our initiation into the world, from childhood until adulthood has been marked by entitlement, thus our communicative faculties are heavily dotted with self-aggrandizement.

My admonition to all my readers is to take a quality look at yourself (trying to overcome the obstacles I listed before). Take inventory of who you think you are. Weigh that against the truth of the matter. Find objectivity. You MUST let go of the certifiable notion that know anything.

Let me make this perfectly clear: There are few, FEW, people on this earth that know anything. I’m talking less than a percentage of the population. The rest of us are guessing and pretending then turning around and proclaiming the veracity (truth) behind our guesses and performances. You are lost. You are lost. You are lost.

If you just said to yourself, “no, YOU are lost, I know exactly what I’m doing” or “well I may not know everything about who I am or where I’m going _________” then you, my friend, are the worst offender of this scathing observation. If more of us would acknowledge, and I mean for real acknowledge, our state of confusion, self promotion would no longer be a necessary evil. We wouldn’t need degrees or other banal forms of self-representation to validate us, we’d probably be much further along as a species.

I don’t write this blog with a lot of academic rigor because I am here to stimulate thought. I want you to truly think about who you are with all your makeup off.

bryce

Stygian

I loved you so deeply,
You were my breath,
You were my life force.

The schism of a vital organ,
Is met by somatic survival;
But once that system has stabilized,
The realized pain becomes a constant reality.

How I loved you, Angel.
How I longed for you in the deepest moments of night.

May I drink from the lethian waters,
And be freed from your memory.

The moments that once moved us,
Become the ghosts that now haunt us.

Creativity

The creative process is something alchemical,
Partly physical, partly procedural,
Wholly spiritual,
Like touching the very essence of God,

For who can truly fathom the ineffable substance of the Almighty?
Who can truly capture the substance of creativity?
Who can quantify its components?

The esoteric has it’s place in the intangible parts of man,
For out of these constituents incorporeal,
He finds his legitimate identity,
And what pours forth is truth.

Digging Ditches: Your Growth Zone

The purpose of time is to organize human behavior. Although it is rather meaningless, it is also full of purpose. For one moment you are here and the next you may not. Yet, as diaphanous as time is, many young people, especially those within the Generation Y bracket are plagued by chronic impatience. We want our promotion now. We want our money now. We are tired of waiting. Time waits for no man….

The aggregation of mind-bodies that we can humanity is funny to me. Given our advanced perceptive faculties we can distort information — compress or expand its meanings– at will as we see fit. A clear example of this is the relationship most people have with God and the church. In moments of duress when all hope seems lost, many will find the most intense solace in their perceived presence of the Almighty. However, should better times — or in some cases worse times — beset them, the fragility of their faith becomes untenable, they divorce their previous perceptions of God and fall into deepening states of disarray. This is the elasticity of the human experience.

Yes, there are certain individuals who are must more stolid in their stance against the ebb and flow of life. They are not reeds in the wind, but obstinate mules who remain steadfast in their convictions day in and day out. However, having spent enough time with even the most obdurate of individuals, I know that the internals oscillations of will are present in all of us from time to time.

Because we are all artists, sensitive to the punctilios of our individual interpretation, we seek the greatest harmony between will and result.

Generation Y, however, is marked by an special vehemence around achieving this harmony. Many of us were coddled as children; we were the first generation to be freed from the tyranny of public school paddling’s and immersed in a highly interconnected world of image responsibility. We were “all winners” in sports competitions, yet pitted against each other in the most wicked of ways. The trade-off, of course, was merely to increase the number of awards available so that we could all enjoy the ecstasy of victory. Many of us became addicted to the rush of praise and picked up subsequent addictions to feed that rage. Coffee, Red Bull, Adderall, cocaine… The added stimulants to an already overstimulated generation hellbent on achievement.

I am not judging my cohort, we have gone on to accomplish many great things. Many of us are genuinely good people concerned with philanthropic global initiatives and social entrepreneurship to equal the playing field. We talk about passion and empathy, along with the obliteration of racial and socioeconomic shadow castes. We truly are visionaries in the art of humanity.

But we are impetuous, petulant, and most problematic, anxious, to get ourselves where we think we need to be. Our anxiety is driven by the fact that a few keystrokes can bring us to the accomplishments of a former classmate who is now a Rhodes scholar or our friend who just inked a million dollar athletic deal. That in tandem with our total self-absorption and our unabashed superiority complexes make us distrustful of any semblance of corporate hegemony. We will never be a faceless cog in the economic machine! How dare you even try to recruit me. I am special. I am an instantly worthy asset to your firm.

Everyone knows a version of a famous proverb in which a community that is miles from the nearest source of water devises an ingenious plan to endure the dry season. They had spent many generations trekking to the closest river with buckets, only to lose the majority of their collected water due to spills along the way. One day, a wise sage instructs them to “dig ditches” from the river to their town. Those irrigation ditches diverted the water naturally to the reservoirs within the city walls thus avoiding the wasteful and inefficient walks. These ditches were strategic actions taken, clever preparations for a people who understood the cycles of life.

Every young person must surmount the same impossible problem during their youth: “I can’t get hired because I have no experience, I have no experience because I can’t get hired”. As an entrepreneur I endure a similar quagmire: “I can’t get clients because no one has heard of my business and no one has heard of my business because I can’t get clients”. The the impetuosity of the Generation Y’er becomes compounded when faced with such impossible parameters. But I’m special. I’m mature for my age. I’m not like these other candidates. I’m me.

This is the time for us young people to set aside our inflated egos and begin digging ditches. As a strategy consultant I help my clients exploit differences between their products and their competition’s. The same goes for people (everyone is a business). We live in a world where more and more of our peers also have college degrees, “specialized” knowledge, and unshakable wills to work. We live in a world where literally hundreds of thousands of kids walk across a graduation stage per year with all manners of creativity itching to be expressed. No longer is a college degree enough.

Its time to dig ditches. Its time to go full bore into an idea and stop being concerned about the illusory concept of time. Rising through the ranks should be secondary to generating truly creative, visionary concepts. It is time to relinquish all of the preconceptions, anxieties, and comparisons between you and other people. It is time time to set aside the perfectionism that plagues us all and be prepared to mess up then face the music with lessons learned and humility instilled. Its time to truly engage in wisdom because out of that wisdom will come the “fast-track” to success we are hope to achieve.

Those ditches.

Those ditches eradicate time by eradicating inefficiency. They take time to set up, they are a task of toiling, backbreaking, humbling work that many will not immediately understand. They make take you to parts of your life that you never thought you’d have to confront; they are the no where near your comfort zone.

There is no growth in the comfort zone and there is no comfort in the growth zone.

Your chosen ditches ARE your growth zone. In those fields you will build the mainstays of your character.

Do not let impatience, fear, or anxiety of comparison deter you. Do not let setbacks break you down. Do not shy away and digress because things aren’t moving fast enough. Don’t quit because you messed up. Do not become a slave to your ego, your insecurities, or your pride. Understand there is always a greater purpose for your life, follow it with reckless abandon.

Anything else isn’t worth doing.

bryc

Revelations: Life, The Canvas

Life is an amalgamation of images, shadows, and derivations of solids. Everything we hold to be real is subject to change, for change is the only thing promised.

Our four dimensional world (with the fourth dimension being time), is virtually inexplicable by human terms. When we communicate we attempt to create consistent explanations and logic, however, existence offers no such simplicity. Every affirmation will be accompanied by a cluster of contradictions and those will be further muddied by the interpretations of each individual.

The key is in then changing the way one views being alive.

For a very long time I absolutely hated it here. I wasn’t unhappy or selfish enough to seriously contemplate suicide, but I was certainly disillusioned enough to consider inappropriate modes of escape. The problem is that when I was younger I was taught a very concrete way of living dominated by Christian morals and views but as I got older I was relentlessly reminded that life is anything but concrete. It is purely diaphanous, volatile, and subject to a complex mélange of variables which may or may not be affecting outcomes at any given moment. I found myself sinking more and more into abject hatred of this entire realm and all its inhabitants, to me everyone here — including myself — was outrageously delusional with no possible remedy to be found.

However, out of this bleak outlook on being, I have begun creating some semblance of existential freedom. I have slowly begun liberating myself from the inefficient postures taken by a world so confused. It is out of this slow emancipation that I have begun maximizing my efficiency across the board, as a business owner, as a friend etc. The plasticity of existence means that one, through very delicate and persistent means, can begin to rewrite the rules on how to be here.

When you see the world as a hodgepodge of illusions, you are better able to manipulate those illusions for your greater good (and hopefully the greater good for humanity by proxy).

Lets take a quick look at love. In this day and age deception is more prevalent than dedication. We are like the Greek economic crisis where one person doesn’t pay his taxes because he believes that his neighbor isn’t. So many of us harbor these intense reservoirs of distrust that we end up hurting all of those who are around us who are simply acting along the same parameters that we are. Thus, young men cheat on young women, young women play games with other young men, and the vicious cycle of nonsense continues.

But imagine, seeing the world as a canvas in which you could choose to love wholeheartedly. Imagine taking all of the distrust you feel and reworking it into something else. Imagine being able to understand the fucked up aspects of this dimension and still being able to continue on as the virtuous man or woman you know you could be?

Excuses cannot be made under this plastic view of existence, no one can be to blame for your missteps. It places responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the individual.

My best friend laid out a very interesting point to me the other day as he was explaining a conversation he recently had with an inquisitive young woman:

You could take all the skill, talent, basketball IQ, and footwork of Michael Jordan and put it into another person and they still would never become MJ. Why? Because none of them possess his mind. They do not possess the unique life experiences that molded him into an ultra-competitive workaholic that refused to accept failure. Mind you I am not saying the individual wouldn’t be as good as or even better than Jordan, I’m saying they would never be him. The mind controls everything.

The mind. The mind. The mind! All learned individuals very quickly figure out this ineluctable quiddity of human existence. Without venturing into a pedantic ontological discussion of mind vs. matter, I just want to emphasize the importance of mind-stuff. For most of us our mental acuity is inchoate and unfortunately remains in this nascent phase for the majority of our time here. We believe that matter is irrefragable truth and we approach society from those same suppositions. Thus the rigidity that I learned as a child serves as illusory stumbling block across the board. We believe in corporate cultures and racial partialities and all matter of “convention”. Creativity becomes less expansive, ambition is replaced by the need to please others, and before we know it we are inundated by what we think is real.

My humble request: do no be fooled to believe that life is anything but a persistently blank canvas. The human mind and spirit are the brushes and artistic implements, daily you can create masterpieces. You can change the world — truly.

But be warned, you are free to choose, free to create, but you are never free from the consequences of your choices. There are no excuses for the Awareness I am trying to initiate you into. You must choose and pursue all strategies to maximize the results of your choice, that is the path to fulfillment.

bryce

Love, In Infinity

Love is a circuitous concept, especially given the labyrinthine qualities of human cognition. The deeper issue is, of course, that life is both boundless and bounded, thus anyone that truly interfaces with it will find themselves subject to the infinite permutations and combinations such a paradox provides. Love, as one of the most potent forces in the known universe, exemplifies these anomalies perfectly, providing an intricate framework which allows for much interpretation and conjecture, some effective, others not so much.

The ego is, without a shadow of a doubt, the single greatest obstacle for any human to surmount. The ego is the center of selfish desire, the wellspring of skewed suppositions. The truly invidious part is that for most it serves as the rudimentary position of self-awareness; more often than not, people express and define themselves through the eyes of the ego. Thus insecurity, arrogance, pride, depression and all manners of existential malady come to the fore, effectively crystallizing a person’s perception and thus their greater interaction in the world.

As a Christian, I have always been taught that Christ consciousness is the goal for all those that choose to follow in the ways of the Gospel. But what made Jesus so special? Besides the fact that adherents hold him to be 100% Divine and 100% human, Christ had an overwhelming power over his own ego. He understood that the ego self held “The Law” over “The Spirit” and was most salient amongst the self-righteous scholars and leaders in the Jewish community. Jesus instead chose to bring people to God, asking them to submit, not as master to slave, but as child to father. With the surrendering of one’s life, they relinquish their primitive, limited ego for the greater pleasure of cosmic or Divine consciousness.

For my readers that are non-Christian, the great yogi Paramhansa Yogananda offered significant syncretistic insight from the perspective of a Hindu in his seminal work Autobiography of a Yogi. He through the narrative of his own life shows the immense benefits of laying down one’s own selfish proclivities to pursue the celestial fruits of higher dimensions. His guru, Sri Yuketswar, though stern, truly embodied the pathway to higher understanding and instills these tenets in the young Yogananda.

For my non-religious, humanistic readers, the relinquishing of the ego does not have to be a highly esoteric, “mystical” experience and really requires no greater existential understanding. The ego is what truly obstructs man from creating better societies. So many of us are pursuing goals, engaging in behavior, and subsisting in ways that are denigrating to any semblance of social unity. Many of my agnostic or atheistic friends believe we should just be good people and I agree wholeheartedly! We should place empathy over abject self-absorption, we should learn to view the world from multiple viewpoints as opposed to obstinately sticking to our acquired perspectives, and we should strive to maximize utility for all.

Now that the foundation has been laid, let me transition into my chosen topic for today which is intimate love. The ego and intimate love interact constantly and consequently result in total failure of intimacy. Why?

Why do we have such high divorce rates? Why can’t “twenty-something” year old men remain loyal? Why is marriage such a dirty word now? Because of ego!

Egoic love is suffocatingly possessive. It wishes to own as oppose to nurture. A man wishes to possess the body and mind of a woman. A woman wishes to possess the mind and checkbook of a man. Neither are truly engaging in any edifying behaviors. The end result is a tempestuous connection marred by selfishness, disconnection, pain, and abandonment. As aforementioned, acting out of one’s ego is akin to acting our of one’s insecurity, one’s feeling of inadequacy, one’s feeling of desperation. None of those are fertile ground for love! All of those are perpetuated by fear of loss as opposed to hope for unity. You pray that someone completes you instead of coexisting in each other’s completeness. This is the fundamental recipe for heartache.

Moreover, how many men or women are truly pursuing the paths of enlightenment? Few, if even that. We are all aware that we can do anything. We all talk about infinity in these terms, proclaiming that anything is possible. Yet, as expansive as this 4-dimensional world is, it is an absolute unreality. It is prone to alacritous changes and all sorts of insidious shifts. True love must transcend this realm by taking root in the planes higher than this, the True Planes.

God exists in all dimensions, known and unknown. He simply is. Thus as heirs to His cosmic kingdom, we must come to understand that this world is not all that there is. Egoic love, as previously stated, tries to possess things in this abject reality, it hopes to hold and consume. It is racked with fear and uncertainty, thus it can never love universally. It can never give a man or woman the true emanations of nurturing. It sees this reality as real and is limited to it in all of its disfiguration.

When a man meets his soulmate, his love, his passion, his very soul should begin investing in the Divine. If that person be his soulmate, she should begin investing in the Divine. Its like a bank account: you give your money to a person that understands finance and who is more or less independent of all the shifts in your lives. They can make prudent decisions based on their expertise as opposed to operating on hunches or whims. This is congruous to intimacy. Invest your energies in God and reach beyond the banalities of this life.

Loving in infinity is not an easy task because we are so tethered to the illusions of this world, the Hindus refer to this as MAYA. We are prone to fears, emotions, and forces acting upon our hearts, minds, and bodies. We think that this concrete world is solely concrete and bottleneck our perception. We think that things occurring are intractable truths. We are molded by our experiences, herded into inefficient mindsets and quickly follow paths to temporary destruction.

Let me assure you, reader, that these things are simply not the case. If you can believe in the infinitude of the future then you must train yourself to believe in the infinitude of the present. You must see this earth as an abstraction, a passing dream for all in existence, as everything and nothing that one needs to reconnect to God.

Thus love is not a vehicle for one to possess, but a vehicle for one to enjoy. You become intertwined to appreciate the completeness of life, to allow your love to be literal worship to God. That is infinite love and that is how you create a life bond.

bryce

Blessed Fate

Divine visage, a sight truly pulchritudinous,
It seems an extant magnetism betwixt just the two of us,
For if passion can give way to occurrences rightly salubrious,
No lugubrious or dubious fate shall ever be the doom of us,

I know that perfection must exist when I ponder the possibilities,
Nascent, nude love, an innocence that brings forth plausibilities,
Where my virility meets complement fertility,
Such stability created between man and wife,

No condemnation for he who offers truly his heart,
No consternation for she who proffers purely her soul,
Empyrean rewards for they whose intentions are part
Of the Great Architects quest to once again make man whole.