Valuing as desire

We implicitly desire in terms of what we already have (what we are) and explicitly value in terms of what we do not have (what we are not). In this way the "are and are not" are synthesized like two whirlpools coming together to meet at the points of their funnels. Actions are pushed outward in two directions, "to the inside" and "to the outside"; what moves to the inside is our inner sense of value, of meaning and motive, also called self-understanding, and what moves to the outside is our actions, what we actually do or say.

Sometimes our own thoughts and feelings are expressions of the outward movement, yet for whatever reason do not find natural expression outward and remain hidden inside us. In this case there is a confusion of what is implicitly vs. explicitly desired. One word for this "confusion" is reason, another is love.

Reason and love are poles upon a hierarchal continuum of self-reinforcing knowledge-states of the soul. Both act to unite oppositions within themselves, both are in this sense unifications-as-such. Technically love is built upon a ground of reason, or: that which reason brings together and unites is, in giving way to love, brought into an even higher-order unification and utility. Let us be clear, we are speaking here of redemption. Love and reason each possess their own gravity and constantly pull against each other, and create storms and nebulas in the soul because the reason in love and the love in reason each extent outward tendrils of themselves in many directions, which entwine with many things which they are not.

Men are like Jupiter, a continuous gravity of storms and conflict wed together into a massive self-sustaining sphere; man even has an 'eye', a greatest-storm that never abates, this we call our self-awareness or our sense of identity, a continuity across time. But that continuity would be nothing without those other storms and forces around it that, in always coming into existence and perishing, sustain the fire of the eye.

Desire is very close to the center of the self. Desire is also very misunderstood, in part because of those synthetic-rationalizing spheres of reason and love; desires at once emerge from the whole being as well as emerge from and resonate or center within both reason and love independently, either as form or shadow: technically every desire is a new self born from a world which it can never know, for desire is precisely that which may never know itself well at all, if it is to remain what it is.

We all know that one desire can birth a world of passions and powers in us. The desire for immortality birthed God, the desire for knowledge birthed reason, the desire for the other in whose image desire is most concentrated birthed amor, love. Man is immortality, reason and love. A storm without end. Socrates believed he had proved the immortality of the soul by the fact that unlike ailments of the body, which can bring about the death of the body, ailments of the soul never bring about the death of the soul in likewise fashion. The soul seems to suffer endlessly, for no matter what sickens it the soul never perishes, so therefore must have some sort of life which extends beyond the plane of existence in which the body is centered.

D&G got close with the concept of desiring-machines. Such a concept can be seen in how it emerged out of a difference + repetition conceptual framework Deleuze develops in his major work DR: difference-in-itself is the given (this is self-valuing in an ontological sense) from which repetitions follow given the fact that difference is perhaps fixed in space but not in time, or that difference is perhaps at other moments fixed in time but not in space. Kant notes that space and time are absolute categories; Kitaro also centers the self and its life experience in this mutual contradicting point and meeting between space and time, between extension and duration. The one enters the others and 'flips' to become a soul, a spirit, a ghost in the machine. The other, the body/mind/world is a matrix holding it in place, and it becomes free.

Capable wrote:

We implicitly desire in terms of what we already have (what we are) and explicitly value in terms of what we do not have (what we are not). In this way the "are and are not" are synthesized like two whirlpools coming together to meet at the points of their funnels. Actions are pushed outward in two directions, "to the inside" and "to the outside"; what moves to the inside is our inner sense of value, of meaning and motive, also called self-understanding, and what moves to the outside is our actions, what we actually do or say.

Sometimes our own thoughts and feelings are expressions of the outward movement, yet for whatever reason do not find natural expression outward and remain hidden inside us. In this case there is a confusion of what is implicitly vs. explicitly desired. One word for this "confusion" is reason, another is love.

Reason and love are poles upon a hierarchal continuum of self-reinforcing knowledge-states of the soul. Both act to unite oppositions within themselves, both are in this sense unifications-as-such. Technically love is built upon a ground of reason, or: that which reason brings together and unites is, in giving way to love, brought into an even higher-order unification and utility. Let us be clear, we are speaking here of redemption. Love and reason each possess their own gravity and constantly pull against each other, and create storms and nebulas in the soul because the reason in love and the love in reason each extent outward tendrils of themselves in many directions, which entwine with many things which they are not.

Men are like Jupiter, a continuous gravity of storms and conflict wed together into a massive self-sustaining sphere; man even has an 'eye', a greatest-storm that never abates, this we call our self-awareness or our sense of identity, a continuity across time. But that continuity would be nothing without those other storms and forces around it that, in always coming into existence and perishing, sustain the fire of the eye.

I am quite in awe of this whole insight, and the Jupiter reference is fascinating. I offer an expansion on the astronomical metaphor; if men are like Jupiter, woman is like Saturn; cold and elegant, balanced, the signifier of cycles. Metaphorically Jupiter is sun-like, Saturn is moon-like. The man is more electrical, the woman more stable.  Perhaps desire itself created that division, in order for it to be able to desire stronger. The desire for greater desire, the explosive self-valuing of desire itself. Indeed Jupiter is a very good symbol. But in woman the desire is rather to be desired. She is conservative and smooth-surfaced, her rings, adornments belong to what she is. In occultism Saturn is called the dark mother, and she is the throne to the daughter-queen, the world, with its seasons. Demeter is Saturnian, the sorrowful one, the bitter sea.  Persephone, in her going down in animality and re-emerging as purity, is the focus of the life-sustaining mysteries of the west. Love is called victory and mercy, reason is called splendor and severity. Two lesser polarities standing to each other in a greater polarity. victory and severity are matched optimally as are mercy and splendor. And in between them is balanced the king, beauty. The son of the lightning and the bitter sea, the sometimes darkened groom of the shifting, Persephonic world. When it emerges the spine of creation shivers with life and the serpent is stirred. As he crawls upward pain turns to beauty and beauty becomes terrifying and the need of justification is created; so great is beauty that it must be divine; divinity not out of lack but excess. No human can humanly bear his own immortal gaze, arches though the sky are required to conduct that inspiration, and so the world of man comes to be cultivated under a huge expanse of magnificent bows and as an ensemble of strings, tied between the limits that represent the beyond, eternal, helplessly music. To play and to play reasonably well, this is the task at hand for all of us. But the task required to perform this task is to discern to the greater harmonies, and not only the closer strings. Humanity's health depends on the effective distribution and reception of individual expressions. Art, but also the apparatus that finances and disseminates art, organs without which consciousness can not survive itself.

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Desire is very close to the center of the self. Desire is also very misunderstood, in part because of those synthetic-rationalizing spheres of reason and love; desires at once emerge from the whole being as well as emerge from and resonate or center within both reason and love independently, either as form or shadow: technically every desire is a new self born from a world which it can never know, for desire is precisely that which may never know itself well at all, if it is to remain what it is.

We all know that one desire can birth a world of passions and powers in us. The desire for immortality birthed God, the desire for knowledge birthed reason, the desire for the other in whose image desire is most concentrated birthed amor, love. Man is immortality, reason and love. A storm without end. Socrates believed he had proved the immortality of the soul by the fact that unlike ailments of the body, which can bring about the death of the body, ailments of the soul never bring about the death of the soul in likewise fashion. The soul seems to suffer endlessly, for no matter what sickens it the soul never perishes, so therefore must have some sort of life which extends beyond the plane of existence in which the body is centered.

A pain and a desire for resolve, and a delight in the pain and in the seeking of resolve, and an encounter of more pain on the path to resolve, sidetracked into slippery paths through the frozen trees, this is reason out of love for reason. To be lost out of time and space. A bliss increasingly common to man. Bliss as a phenomenon; in the old yogic formula, awareness equals bliss equals love. But for good reason, yoga itself means union - the good reason being that division, difference is the primordial state. That seems to me to be the reason that one of the titles of beauty is the crucified king. Another is the child - who unites his mother and father, and is the ultimate power; the future embodied. Potential is innocent, in consequence lies either learning and growth or bitterness and decrease. I suppose the latter are always going to be the majority, hence the bitter sea as the Saturnian gravity and Jupiter as fortune and the higher law; the positive law; which is the negation of direct consequence the suspension of disbelief, the space where both reason and love can generate themselves, from the creational plasma that is desire-for-desire.