A requested video on the purposes and uses of meditation.
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The Necessity of Meditation This is a requested video which comes from Jack.
And brother, it's a great question.
Thank you for your support.
And if you guys want to request a video, click the Arene's Insight link down below.
Now meditation.
Why is it necessary?
Why is it important?
What's the purpose of it?
And meditation, prayer, feel free to toss in your own word there.
I'm going to start off by asking you, what is Western literature?
You see, Western literature is actually a very unique development in history.
There's a certain quality that, you know, especially starting in the Renaissance and moving forward from that, there's a certain quality that you get in Western literature that's just absent before that and elsewhere in the world.
And you can sum that up as the character's arc, the growth and change they make within themselves, which corresponds to a growth and change in the world around them.
See, literature, our storytelling, is all about a protagonist encountering adversity that shakes them up and makes them confront things about themselves, and then having that protagonist go out into the world and enforce the discovery they have made about themselves.
They go and enforce that and change the nature of reality.
This is what Nietzsche would call the will to power.
That there's this element in humanity.
There's this spark, this ability to change reality to fit our vision, to demand that our vision of reality come to be.
And so long as it is a true vision of reality, that tends to work.
If you've got the guts, if you've got the grit, it tends to work.
You see, there's something transcendental to all of the great things that humanity does.
Music is not just pleasing to listen to.
Art is not just aesthetically nice.
And civilization, it's not merely the natural product of free market economics and evolution.
Okay, you know, we certainly see some very complex behaviors coming from ants, some phenomenal, amazing things coming from ants.
But we don't see civilization.
We don't see ideas.
We don't see that divine spark of creation.
That divine spark is something that comes purely from humanity.
No other animal has it.
And so, where's that spark come from?
Well, let's talk a little bit more about what that spark does first.
You know, in particular, there's going to be another requested review coming up for the movie Tombstone.
And I think this movie really illustrates the fact that it's men who create civilization.
Not women, men.
Women have their own mysteries.
Sometimes I understand women very, very well.
Other times, I have no idea whatsoever.
And I couldn't tell you what women's mysteries are.
Women certainly sustain the race.
They comfort the race.
But they don't create civilization.
That's entirely the domain of men.
Women can even learn to do science rather well, but they can't be a genius scientist the way a man can be.
And so this urge to create civilization.
Obviously, this comes out of the tribal pack nature of the chimpanzee.
We see a more primitive form of it in the chimpanzees.
We all innately, as men, or at least we aren't really taught how to do it anymore, but it's there.
It's there in the instincts.
It's there in the gut.
You know how to associate with other men as a tribe.
You know how to be a man.
And you can figure out the pecking order.
It's harder because there's so little initiation these days into masculinity, but it's still there.
It's still there.
You can find it.
And so civilization is a natural outgrowth of the pack, of the tribe, of the all-male team.
Whether we're talking about a military unit or a football team, we naturally organize ourselves into hierarchies and we go out and accomplish some goal.
Now, amongst chimpanzees, and amongst most men, you know, when you see four or five college kids going out on a Friday night, it's the same mentality.
But like the chimpanzees, their goals are prosaic.
Their goals are simply, you know, go out and get laid, or go and hunt down and kill an animal, or go and kill this enemy.
You know, this is just the natural nature of men, is to organize and create hierarchies.
Patriarchy, though, patriarchy is one of the unique wonders that humanity can create.
It's the natural outgrowth of this.
But what men do is they then demand that there be law and order.
They demand of reality.
They impose upon reality.
There is going to be law and order.
There's not going to be this raping and theft.
There's going to be order.
There is going to be civilization.
There will be fair treatment of other people.
I mean, can you imagine a chimpanzee pack doing something like that?
No, the idea of extending the ethos of the gang and creating something new with it.
That is pure masculinity.
You know, you can talk about how, you know, art.
Art obviously responds to, you know, we like the curve of a woman's breast.
So, you know, breasts are very prominent in art.
You know, we have a natural inclination as a species to look for fertile valleys with woods nearby.
It's, you know, like that's the kind of the idyllic environment because we have all the natural resources that we need to live.
And yet, paintings, they're more than just that.
A painting isn't erotica.
You know, it's not base, it's not vulgar.
It is more than that.
There is more going on there.
You know, we are taking this nature of ourselves, whether it's to appreciate female beauty or to appreciate melodic sounds or to organize ourselves into fair and just hierarchies, to practice leadership and decency and fairness.
We take our nature and then reshape reality to become that nature.
That's the divine spark.
That's the will to power right there.
How do you access this?
Because here's the thing.
Most of the time we are just animals.
Most of the time, we are just responding to our environment.
Most of the time, we're just working by instinct when you really get right down to it.
You know, filling out a TPS report is no more the behavior of a conscious human being than the ants making this amazing underground city is the conscious behavior of the ant.
No, that's an aggregate superorganism just following basic rules.
It's no more sentient than a router figuring out which packets of data to send.
You know, if you actually tried to draw a diagram of that, it would be just as complex as an ant mound, but no, the spark is something more than that.
And when you are surrounded by the world, you know, constant sensory input, sensory overload, constantly bumping into other people, responding, reacting.
You know, I think it's the Navy that came up with this for their Air Force pilots, but they talked about getting out of the loop.
You know, the respond, react, adjust, respond, react, adjust the loop of how people behave.
And the way that you win a dogfight is you jump out of the loop.
You jump out of the system, juiced, I think they call it.
Same thing for civilization.
And this movie I'm going to be reviewing, Tombstone, it's about two gangs of men.
Why is it that one of them wins out over the other?
Because one of them jumped out of the system.
One of them confronted themselves on the inside and discovered a fundamental truth, an absolute truth, a higher truth.
What's the difference between a true genius artist and somebody that's just good at doing corporate artwork?
The genius jumped out of the system.
Same thing for the scientist.
All the great advances in science didn't come from these paper pushers that are peer reviewing and publishing in journals.
It came from gentlemen amateurs more often than not.
And this is actually going back to literature.
This is the one thing you don't see in literature much of the time.
Because it's very hard to explain or describe or to film.
Especially given that we men, we are the act of sex, which is why most protagonists are male.
And it's very hard to have an active character who is meditating.
But the difference between the protagonist and the antagonist, the reason the protagonist has victory, the reason the great artist is a great artist, and the reason that civilization exists, it's because of the man that jumped out of the system.
The man that retreated from the world.
Respond, react, adapt, respond, react, adapt.
They got away from that noise.
And they sat in the silence and asked themselves, who am I?
