Notes from Dec. 5

The search for a path through life

Photo: Starling at the feeder Nov. 2023

1. One cannot pry one’s discoveries about how to work out of a book. One can read all one likes; in the end, one has to go by what one discovers personally, not by what someone else discovered. Not that anyone else is wrong, but I can't do my work with someone else's work. In the end, I have to assume ownership of the effort; not assume that cutting and pasting someone's else's effort into my personhood will bring the same results they got.

2. If there is no attention in the body, there is no attention anywhere. What is voluntary is from the will; and to exercise, will is to exercise agency, to take ownership of in the immediate sense of effort. In this way, Agency is the most important manifestation. I do not own life. I don't own my body. I don't even own consciousness. The effort, however, the agency that initiates the effort and – that is what I am responsible for.

I don't even own that; but I have been given responsibility for it. I am a steward in charge of that agency that will make the effort.

If the attention owns itself and acts under its own will, then I become responsible.