The opposite of habit

If habit is such a limiting and disempowering force, there must surely be an opposite force of equal strength to whom we may turn for inspiration and consolidation. There is such a force, and it goes by the name of novelty.

Novelty is breaking new ground, novelty is risking ourselves and our self-appointed view of who we are and what we are capable of. A truly novel experience, is an experience that makes us fear for our own lives, since it challenges who we and our surroundings think we are. In other words, to be truly novel, means loosing your foothold, venturing into the dark desert on a late starry night, it means standing on the edge of nowhere, knowing that taking one more step would mean that you might never be able to find yourself a way back. In being truly novel, we literally put ourselves at stake.

But in return, the reward is equally great, should we survive with anything left that we recognise as life.

To be truly novel, means stepping out from the dimly lit side-scenes that serves at backdrop for your own life, into the main course of the play, wielding the role as one of the main characters in your own play, even though it means that you at some times allow somebody else to be the director of the play – yourself letting go of some control.

To be novel means risking the discontent of others, it means risking to in their eyes be reduced to a subject of ridicule stemming from their fears of loosing their self-imagined control over their own lives, of fear of giving in to novelty at the expense of habit.

Novelty/Habit

There are many examples over the course of human history to try to divide the world and human processes in different dualistic terms, Good/Evil being the most famous one, closely followed by Ying/Yang, Libido/Thanatos and so forth. Since its difficult for me to refrain from, I will also utter a few words on how you could divide the world in the dualistic pair of Novelty/Habit. It's not very complicated, nor particularly ground-breaking, it's simply a way of looking at human history in terms of novel and habitual periods, and this goes for individuals as well as nations, dynasties or any other structure. It's developments could be described in terms of novelty and habit. Of course, it would not be the whole truth, and I don't claim it to be either. It's just an alternative way of looking at things, which may yield information yet unknown.

The authority on this very subject would be the late Terence Mckenna, philosopher and ethnobotanist, so if you're not already familiar with his works, you might want to check him out (in links section). He takes this dualistic pair of habit/novelty to a whole different level than I do however, and make claims on a completely different scale.

Who is really in control?

Most of us do not question the notion that we are the enthroned masters of our own lives. This is true, as well as it is false. Paired with novelty, is also the insight that you are not always in control, but that is completely alright, no cause for alarm. But equally important is realising that you under most circumstances are able to exert enough influence over the course of your own life, in order for you to make of it precisely what you want. All it takes, is some tweaking with the basic principles of life, and the conviction of a pure heart.

Most of the time, we are altogether all to much governed by “shoulds” and “should nots” for our own best. These “shoulds” and “should nots” are part of the influence that habit is exerting over our lives, whether it's stemming from rules imposed upon us during childhood, gradually internalised as rules of conduct governing our lives as adults, official rules put forth as laws by whatever current government we happened to abide under, or any other murky authority asserting itself. It doesn't matter. It's all part of habit.

So the question is rightfully posed, “Does fighting habit equal a complete revolution of all values currently governing inter-human relations?” It would be preposterous for me to even hint at such a notion. Even though that would have been my agenda (which it isn't), it would most likely never, or as “never” anything ever becomes in this world, at least never enough not to happened over the course of a great many a lifetimes. Even if it would, it would not necessarily be desirable for anybody except self-appointed revolutionaries with an unhealthy habit to question everything just for the sake of questioning.

The way out of habit, embracing novelty

It's time for appeasement with some of the basic conditions for human existence that we seem to love to ignore, or at best dispose in the waste bin of religion or philosophy. It may not be easy, but once dealt with, you will slowly start to develop a sense for the subtler nuances of life and its workings. Although at first glance will seem a very mundane thing, the birth of a butterfly will deliver you greater joy than any out of money constructed cultural value or good. The roaring of summers thunder will cradle you within the confines of your mind, the sunrise will dazzle you with its plethora of symphonic colours, you will kindle within you, the very force that cooks in distant stars.

Accepting the fact that you live on this planet for a very brief period in time, and no hoard of wealth will change that fact. Time, is not freezable. You cannot freeze a certain amount and then heat it up when needed. Not yet. No matter how great the number cosmetic surgery operations, no matter the speeding progress of science, will change the fact that you one day will face the ultimate end. Alone. Other people will take over, live their lives facing the same dilemmas that you did, albeit in other forms, as countless generations before you yourself walked upon this very soil. The basic conditions for human existence does not change so easily, even as the marvels of our technocratic age might imply so.

The way is not through exclusion and detachment, its through acceptance and embracing the notion that your very organism is an integrated part of this planet and its time. Proven many years ago, time and space are interwoven, and in the same way you, as matter, are an integrated part within time and space. If you sit down for a while, at a sparkling stream or on the floor in your office, you can sense how time is running its course on you, having its way with you, regardless of how in control you think you are. Time doesn't care about human notions such as control. It's runs its unyielding arch through space, shedding and transforming matter as it pleases.

Time will have its way with you as well, even though you might dedicate some of it to reverse its effect on your body and skin. But in the end, it will have its way with you anyway, as whatever way deemed appropriate. Time doesn't favour fancy corpses, as little as it favours anything at all.

So with the stage set, the conditions given. We just have to try to make the best out of it, have we not? And here, is where it all connects to novelty. You may spend your life living in habit, or in novelty, the course is yours to set, you can fix the coordinates and create the necessary complex adaptive system needed to change coordinates as time runs its course with you. Afraid of making the wrong decisions? Don't worry, either way, you won't be coming out of it alive.

Look at it like this. It is a crazy world, with all its varieties, seemly random outbursts, cults and cultures, good and evil. The best we can hope for, under all circumstances, are temporary solutions that successfully addresses whatever issues we have to deal with at a given moment. Consequently, any solution has to be replaceable, or at least radically adaptive in order to not deteriorate into malfunction, or even worse, habit – which is the combined worst of all worlds.

If you are in need for examples, just look around you at the appalling breadth of havoc solutions, deteriorated into dogmas, prescriptions, rigidity and rituals, and marvel at the psychological mechanisms needed in order to maintain the notion of that these sunken vessels of human culture in fact does humankind any good at all. Shake your head in disbelief, turn away in horror at the examples how critics to these havoc systems are handled by the systems themselves and their supporters. The whole spectra, from stranded relations to political deadlocks, suffer from the lack of inherent adaptive systems to respond to the problems arisen within the systems themselves, or even more appropriate, the willingness to abandon these non-functional habitual systems themselves, once proven unfit to respond to whatever issue set out to respond to in the first place. What good is any marriage that only serves as a mutual ball and chain? What use is a political system falling short in ability to respond to the crisis of its time?

I'm asking questions, rather than giving answers. The answers are for you to work out, within the frames of your own, hopefully, complex adaptive systems known to yourselves as “your mind”.

By embracing novelty, you will not only begin to treasure the small wonders in life, such as the birth of the butterfly. Even more importantly (however novelty-enthusiasts would question how anything could be more important than that), you will start to realise, that the way “out”, runs in the spirit of novelty, and once tasted, you will never do with a less of an acquired taste. Novelty can, and should be, embraced on all levels, from strictly personal levels, to state and global levels. There is no limit to what we can achieve, once we set our minds to it.

We are limitless, and in that sense, divine.

If Novelty is such a great thing, why does so many stick with habit?

There are many reasons. Firstly, they might not even recognise their lives for being habitual. They might give different names for it, or they might agree that they live a life in habit, but come up with excuses for it, for example that they do it for the greater good of something else, often undefined.

And further, some may fully realise that they live lives in habit, but really don't consider it a problem, they might even not only seem content to another person, they may actually feel content themselves, if they full-filled a sufficient amount of our modern myths on what a successful life should consist of, like a nice big house, expensive car, good looks, a beautiful partner and smiling kids to go along with it. Once fully internalised in society and individual mind, these myths will constitute “real” and good things to strive for, even if success comes about on behalf of somebody less fortunate. Hopefully, this “less fortunate” will not be somebody we know or have the slightest relation to. Preferably living in another country, preferably not of the same cultural sphere, and preferably adequately enough dressed in rags for us to be able to dismiss this somebody as something less of a human being.

Indeed, they are the ignorant blissful ones.

But for the rest of us, self-deception of this magnitude, is not an option at this point. Throughout history, new and radical movements of all political colours, always had to deal with the issue of what to do with everyone else who not as crystal-clear as themselves, grasp the unquestionable truth of their theories. Fortunately, history provides us with an array of examples of how to go about solving this minor problem. “Of with their heads!”, is an old classic, favoured by many from the liberals of the French revolution, to the communists of the Russian revolution anno 1917. In the case of the liberals, the quote was pursued more literally than elsewhere, but the ambition remains the same – to clear the field of unnecessary opposition from people who are not so easily convinced.

If this is not enough, consider the widespread method employed in south and south-east Asia back in good old days, namely crushing by elephant! This will later be thoroughly investigated in the upcoming series, “Novelty and Torture” :P

Now, if you're not yet convinced of the unquestionable truth that novelty will bring about world peace, solve the energy problem and call down Jesus, all in the very same moment, ponder upon what fate that could possibly await heretics and splitters... ;)

The endless potential of the moment

One important part of breaking with habit, living a life in the sign of novelty, is realising the principle of that I call “The endless potential of the moment”. It contains a few notions that at best might seem very novel to you, more likely, they will seem outlandish or even alien. It actually states, in its very simplest form, that every moment is infinite in relation to its inherent potential, which is also infinite. You might find yourself reading trough the following more than once.

If this seems terribly abstract, think of how speculation on the stock market works. At each given moment, whatever the timespan of that moment is, measured in human units, a given stock has an infinite potential, and its potential is that it can go in either way, up or down. If just a sufficient amount of buyers and sellers are in the market at the very same time, the stock may be traded to any level. This because of the element of uncertainty, that nobody in the market can put a value on an infinite potential, its infinite, at any given moment. So what the traders do, is that they make assumptions often based on statistics to predict how others will act, and act accordingly themselves. The word “guessing” comes to mind.

In the same way, we make guesses or at best assumptions in every given moment of our life, no matter the length of the moment, on how the present moment and the following will evolve, what they will bring, if they will be different from past moment, or just the same. In order for us to do this, we have to give every moment a value that is directly comparable to other values, as well as measurable within the framework of its own devised system. This is what we have commonly internalised in ourselves as the notion of time that can be depicted on a line, with a timescale of different units.

Since few would dispute that our imagination is limitless, we can use our imagination in any given moment, for infinite and limitless creativity. Everything that falls short of this, for example if we try to bring about any of these marvellous thoughts in “real life”, is actually nothing more than a human problem -. maybe you didn't dedicate yourself hard enough, maybe you didn't plan it well enough, maybe you lacked some of the necessary tools for going trough with the plan. In retrospect however, all these “problems” would have been able to overcome, in one way or another. Realising this, you will be able to forestall any failure by realising that anything perceived as “failure”, is just a product of the human problem of looking upon the thing as a “failure”, with all its negative and unfruitful associations.

Using your imagination in the infinite moment, you will discover unsurpassed creativity and joy, and as everything that you try to bring out from this realm of imagination, never will be able to manifest exactly as in the grandeur of your mind, there is no real cause to see any lesser manifestation of it in “real life” as a failure – everything that is aimed at trying to realising the fantasy in this physical world is a victory for novelty, creativity and humanity!

Should you however, for any reason, find yourself in the murky waters of dark thoughts, anxiety, fear, hatred, mistrust, jealousy or any other of the not-so-charming outbursts of human nature, be assured, it will not haunt you forever.