Psychokinetics

11^th October 2024

I really cannot emphasise enough how important realising this was for me. Nothing is more powerful, addictive, anti-depressive—I daresay spiritual—than the feeling of motion, the rhythm of progress. The true sin and misfortune of being stuck is that you forget this, you forget what it feels like to be moving, so you cannot really price it in correctly. Instead, you try to get moving for some sort of abstract or philosophical or ideological reason, but these things can never compel a person strongly enough to get unstuck. The only worthwhile reason to move is movement itself, how good it feels, what it does to the way that you exist in the world.

In the future if I ever have to help get a person unstuck in life, I will not fall into the trap of appealing to their better nature, trying to awaken their mind to the possibility of mokṣa or eudaimonia or some other such fantasy of exalted liberation. Nor shall I engage in some sort of psychoanalytic perversion in which their stasis is deconstructed into extremely sensible and eminently solvable banalities. That soil is totally barren. I am just going to tell them whatever nonsense I need to to induce some agitation, stimulation. Here is the sophist's vindication: language must be treated not as a medium of correspondence but as a musical instrument. Its tune must build towards a profoundly empty ecstasy; the contemplative stillness of true insight must be avoided at all costs. The goal is energy, energy alone, just enough of it to push my victim stumbling forwards, just enough of a kick for them to take two steps without realising it, a happy accident. Two steps! The first step is totally meaningless. You can have one good day and sink back into your old patterns like it’s nothing. You need 2 good days, 2 good days in a row. Then you have something to lose, something worth defending. You have a trend, you’re going somewhere, dim light peers through that great scrim.