Conscious Labor and Intentional Suffering

Natural Emotion and Spiritual Feeling, part IV

Photo: Trout Lily, a spring ephemeral, Tallman State park, April 2023. So-named because it is believed that the patterning on its leaves is much like the pattern on some trout. Spring a femorals come up before there is foliage on the trees and bloom in a few short weeks, after which they disappear again beneath the forest floor until the following year.

Conscious Labor, Intention Suffering, and the Particle and Wave Functions; more Complex Materialism and its Implications

Wow, does the title of this piece ever sound boring. I’m sure I wouldn’t read it if I saw it so perhaps I shouldn’t even write it: the thoughts may bore me even as I have them. But I have committed myself from this point in so I suppose I’ll have to go forward into this wave of thought and see what it yields.

1. Conscious Labor

Labor is a function of the world of natural emotion, which relies on matter and particles for its actions. Labor itself is logically enough action on those particles; whether to gather or disperse them, it’s the same thing: labor. Labor on the natural level can only act through material; and our materialistic culture calls this type of labor “progress,” although all it ever “progresses” to is more complex materialism.

The reasons for which more complex materialism has become a merit unto itself, and seen as desirable, is a function of materialism itself: seen through the lens of natural emotion, it seeks to perpetuate itself in order to prevent change. All modern forms of more complex materialism actually conceal themselves as “advances” and “development” in order to prevent inner change, not foster it; and in doing so they can only make all the bad around human beings worse in the long run, because they are dedicated to what already is and that selfsame bad is a part of what is. Things that might change it are thus to be opposed; and we thereby unwittingly make the bad good and carry it forward as progress.

Conscious labor begins first and above all as a rejection of this premise; but while acknowledging the premises and forces of natural emotion and its consequent materialism as a collective fait accompli that surrounds us, it presumes that something much greater can be achieved. And it presumes this agreeing that that effort must begin where we are, the world of natural emotions and materialism.

It does not, however, agree that we should accept these conditions as worthy of worship or preservation.