Why you can't have what you want.

I've said before "disambiguating between 'you' and 'you'" is tough to do. Disambiguating between you and I is even harder sometimes.

BUT - you can't have what you want for the simple reason that what you want is not a great idea.

Back up.

You can have what you want, but don't expect God to give it to you. God only wants to give you things that are good for you.

If you want something bad for you, get it yourself.

Why is everything so hard? Because you're not asking for what you should want, but for what you think you want.

Why would I want something that's not good for me? Aren't I the arbiter of what is good for me?

Unfortunately, no. If you knew everything, then you might know what was good for you, but you don't. Live with it.

Who is this who thinks they want something that they should not want?

It's the pseudo-you. The you-image that the real-you has. It is what you think of yourself, how you delude yourself about yourself, the words that you use to describe yourself all put together into a nice mental image of you.

Who is that you? Really it is nobody.

Who is the You that is putting this picture together?

THAT's a real good question. Who would you ask?

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I say that thinking is what happens when you don't let words have their natural relationships with each other. That is, when you assume what is common sense about words is possibly false and move from there.

For instance, common sense says "There are no square circles." But there are. I would put up a picture of one but I'd rather have you get the impression of it yourself.

They say, for instance, that mathematics is the history of taking what was once considered a contradiction and assuming its truth as an axiom. That's how we got negative numbers, transcendental numbers, curved space, etc. We took the obvious and assumed it was false and followed through.

That's THINKING.

When thinking about oneself, the obvious is to think about one's thoughts. But the truth is I am not my thoughts, nor am I the string of them being put together. I am the maker of my thoughts when I am thinking, and the lazy one when I'm not.

That is, thinking is precisely what happens when words fail. When a word loses its given meaning, we start to have to think about what it means. Children do this when they learn the language - they think about something and then assign words to them. Sometimes our thinking begins with words alone - when we are given ideas that we don't originate ourselves. What do we have when these words fail? Nothing, I think.

Rambling on again.

When you ask for something you want but should not want, this just means that it is not you that's asking for it, but rather this word-constructed you put there by your socialization - your words without origination. That is, it is something OTHER than you doing the asking.

In order to be thinking, you have to be connecting words to things yourself.

What is doing the asking?

How did these words come to have the organization they do? Who invented this language stuff, and why do we use it the way we do?

Language changes over time. The question is not who invented it, really, but who is inventing it NOW?

If it is YOU inventing your language, hurray.

If it is someone ELSE inventing your language, what has that to do with you? Who is doing the inventing? How are they giving it to you?

Some people say it's the Media that is giving us our language as an expression of the capitalist society which is building our world the way it is. That's somewhat true, art and culture are defined by society in some ways. But the truth is, art and culture that have been coopted by a vague they - people we do not know and with who's words we can not connect - this "they" - the producers of culture - are not completely amorphous. They are are around us and when we let them, in us.

Sometimes we produce culture ourselves - we can do this in two ways.

We can produce culture out of ourselves or by allowing the culture that has been produced in us to reproduce.

In memetics we hear of idea-genes - the genetics of ideas.

If we make a song for production and distribution on the radio in order to make money, we are following an idea that has existed in our culture for about 100 years. That song may have value as a cultural artifact of the money-making system. But if we make a song because our heart burns to sing, that too is an old meme, many centuries older than making music for money.

Is there a way to make a song without it being the result of songs we've heard before? To actually re-invent music? Someone obviously did it.

But we will never hear those songs, the we of our "culture" for those songs will not carry our society's genes - it will not bear the mark of the beast, so to speak. In fact, "we" may not even recognize such things as songs, as music even. This goes for every other aspect of our culture. As it breeds itself, it forces acceptableness into the language, in the same way that spelling is pounded into children when they are young, and mistakes pounded out, cultural correctness is pounded out of us all the day long.

But children's spelling mistakes aren't -mistakes - really. IN fact they're following rules - just not all the rules. They learn some rules - what "t's" sound like and then when they can't spell "thought" we teach them the exception to the rule about how t's sound. But their original spelling of "thought" wasn't a mistake, it was the following of an earlier rule that we gave them.

Errors are not what we think. Errors are correct in some ways.

Are there any real errors under these "pseudo" errors?

Yes. I think that some of what our culture says is harmful to us as individuals - we are asked to drink CocaCola and eat at McDonalds. But the truth is these things are harmful to us. God rightly makes it hard for us to have them while our society tries to make it easy. That is, it's hard to be a member of our society, but once you are, having a CocaCola is easy.

Why is it hard to be a member of our society?

Because in order to do it, we must reject our own inner-selves in favor of this pseudo-self, the non-self that our society teaches us that we have.

So why can't you have what you want? Because "you" don't want it.