Fulfillment as a Process of Becoming 4
Life as Flow
The Self
The self is in flux.
The self is an effect in motion, not an objective ideal.
The self is a flow of perceptions, not static identity.
When we disengage from this flow and adopt an ordered approach to the experience of life, whether in terms of values or meaning or narratives, fulfillment eludes us.
On the other hand, when we stay with the singularities in life, remain open to the psyche as a multiplicity, view life as an open narrative, fulfillment stays in sight; never caged and possessed, but always on the horizon motivating us to continue the journey.
Motivating us to continue the adventure.
Value Creation
If values and meanings were objectively attached to the world, we could easily adopt them and the narratives that might accompany them. We could easily pass judgement.
But this is not the way life is.
We create value and meanings, and we do so by engaging authentically in a process of becoming.
Life is the movement and the becoming from which reality is actualized.
Life is a flow of images not of underlying objective things or ideas, but images of passing actualizations that arise only to dissolve back into pure process.
If at any moment we assert a value or meaning, articulate or reflect on a narrative, as that moment passes, it washes back into an ocean of change.
Experience Over Meaning
The secret to life is that it is not a search for meaning, as if we might finally discover it and then be happy.
The secret to life is to be immersed in the sense of the experience of life; to stay in the studio with the act of creating, and resist attending the gallery to judge the creation.
When the search for value and meaning and narrative dominate, we have overcoded our own lives. We grasp at a structured purpose in life, when there is none.
Life as Excess Desire
Life and desire pass through and across our bodies as impersonal flows of reality.
We repress when we deny the excess of life in us and around us; when we identify with the actualization, the interpretation, the narrative.
Desire is free flow, creative difference, becoming.
Life is not about uncovering or interpreting meaning or normativity in the unconscious, but instead creating from pre-personal singularities across a plane of becoming, encountering virtual forces within and without, freed from the crystallization of human norms or ends.
I hope you enjoyed this article. Thanks for reading!
Tomas
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Excerpt from my forthcoming book, Becoming: A Life of Pure Difference (Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of the New) Copyright © 2022 by Tomas Byrne. Learn more here.
