90 Days of ILP

Please pardon the previous post, I was temporarily forgetting the essential enduring feature of life on this planet: ceaseless slavery, hard work, and the grueling nature of life as a soldier in a war without end. The thing is, my ego is fighting back against the ILP regime of personal growth. Big time. To wake up at the same time every morning to do the same things each day smacks of everything the separate self sense finds anathema: routine, dullness, death of the pleasure principle. The ego wants to live, it wants to be "free" to "express itself," it wants to live in the sponteneous ever-present Now... and ILP is here to put a stop to all of that. If you feel like crap, if life has become a monotonous act of drudgery, it means you're on the right track. Grin and bear it homie.

Thus I take great inspiration in a variety of authors, all of whom have a piece of what it means to be an artist living beyond ego.

First we have Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art and many works of fiction, whose attitude towards his work is that of the cold-blooded mercenery, a professional ably to cooly assess his craft, and to excise those things the wee stupid ego finds so clutch-worthy. Pressfield has indentified the enemy of artisans everywhere to be Resistant, that whinging brat holding court in the middle of your brain who works by way of tornado, hurling spinning shards of excuse after excuse into the face of any artist trying to take his work to the next level.

Then we have K-Punk, the post-postmodern British theorist and Spinoza phreak who joins philosopher Slavoj Zizek in the denunciation of the "pleasure principle" of postmodern depressive adhedonia. Asked how he was able to write so much, the prolific blogger once quipped that "[W]riting, far from being about self-expression, emerges in spite of the subject." Elsewhere, he states "Psychedelic Fascism legitimates and propagates a radically unSpinozist notion of being free: i.e. give free reign to your Inner Child = yr Inner Fascist."

K-punk pal and music journalist Simon Reynolds tends to agree: "Symptoms of this syndrome ("an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure") being a binge approach to everything, with the result that kids get locked into an addiction/debt control matrix, and also an aversion to anything that involves difficulty or the non-instantness of gratification/comprehension."

Hmm, difficulty like... practicing ILP?

Anyways, the issue with me is one of the ego making its last stand against the overwhelming success of my ILP plan to robotize my life and render the whinging pleas of the stimulus-craving Inner Kid obsolete. Lucky for us, an entire module (the Shadow) has been devised to deal with just this thing.

And so, into the depths we go, with a machete and a capture bag at the ready....