Maybe This is the End

        Okay. So where was I going before I got distracted by the stupid, ridiculous world. Where I was going was-- I encountered some psychological trouble, which went like this. "Connection" is existence, continuity, between perception and agency. And this is a fantastic thing to settle on, but then our trouble becomes-- we have gotten to this point through an image of the agency that acts upon perception as the plurality which is causality. Which then becomes an agency of the perception-connection, which exists again in a plural nexus. And connection is also coherent with valuation, because valuation is the connection between being and peak experience. But what dark thought entered my mind was that the causality that influences us is disconnection, and the causality it advises is disconnection. It was very strangely articulated, but it came out as this idea that the plurality causes plurality, that therefore the action is negation which is required, the negation is the will, that plurality itself is negation. Which I suppose is like saying that our connection is created by plurality and then we create negation, we disconnect the unity in order to recreate it. But this is batshit-- and it reflects what I said two posts ago, how our intellectualizations spring back on our personal problems, and we go through a little agon. The night I came up with the texture is form/emptiness thing, and conflated simplicity with emptiness, there again, negation reared its ugly head, and we settled negation as the friction between components.

        As I have said to myself prior to this blog, the process of affirmation is always a process of elimination, in one moment, whereas a process of elimination is only at the end a process of affirmation, in sequentiality. What this comes down to is selection, and how selection relates to objective componency, to the valuation of presence. We select one thing which negates all the others, this we have said to ourselves quite well, but what we have not said so firmly is that this one thing that is selected is the abstraction of all the other things. In this way it does not negate them but categorize them. The selected part is the part that is the whole. This is the meaning of my recent emphasis on peak experience. So although existential rage does intrude on discussions of selection and preference and valuation, peak experiences also assess all the other experiences. So it is not quite so simple as a process of affirmation/elimination. Or rather, it is a degree simpler, because the items that are eliminated are not merely cast aside. The item that is selected is the item which contains the whole set of items selected from; natural selection in intellectual terms is the abstraction of universals from particulars. And this is why an archetypal dynamic can be detected by Jung in matters of sexuality.

        Choice is choice, is agency; and so though we have a connection-unity which is acted upon by a plural causality, which then participates in a plural causal field, the agency, the choice is still unified, as unified as the valuation occurring beforehand. So it is true that we are passive recipients of our perceptions, but the nature of our perceptions in a moment is decided by our valuations, by our selection of a representative quantity. So negation of the will, will-negation, will as negation, that was all a distraction. What this trouble highlights is how our conception of causality failed to identify the preference for some elements over others in what has influence over us, and how that preference indeed expresses the unification of all those plural influences, which then reflects the connective nature of the perception which is acted-upon, and thus agency is found in perception, an agency that reasserts the gestalt, that affirms the gestalt by picking one among a plurality. So, valuation, preference, once again establishes itself as presence and continuity-- or perhaps for the first time, rather neatly-- because of the understanding that the peak experience is not just the "superior" experience for being larger than the other experiences. It is also the "representative" experience.

        Thus we survey a scene, and pick one detail of it. And we travel towards that detail, where we survey another scene. And this detail is the archerelation, the organization of the scene. Maybe this is the end.