Sacrifice

To have something to take, you need to give it first. The act of sacrifice decides what you get back because it decides what you give up. Sacrifice means giving up a core part of what you need to survive so that a part of you remains incomplete and you have bandwidth to deal with more problems. Giving up on these essential parts of yourself is not easy as it first requires you to run an assessment on yourself at multiple levels. This assessment determines: which are the unique parts that you consist of, of these which parts are peripheral in their importance and which are critical. Once this assessment is done, you can proceed to thinking deeply about sacrifice. You can think deeply about how you are going to render yourself incomplete.

There are many ways to be incomplete. One of the important ways is to not desire completeness. This requires you to suspend some features built into your mind that evolution deemed necessary but now are holding you back. Some of these features we can tell you about, others you have to discover yourself. Your mind has a tendency to make sets, search for patterns. Long before we developed agriculture and settlements and rigid ideas of personal space, we had to survive on our mind's ability to form patterns from disparate fragments of information and directly from bits of chaos itself. These patterns provided our ancestors motivation for further action and offered them directions about what to do. This ability to recognise patterns was a precursor to thought. But now that we have thought, now that we have the illusion of free will, we can think about what to do, we can make mistakes, find out what works better and learn. We do not need the analytical and pattern-sensitive of our mind. We can do without it. To learn how to sacrifice, we need to first be able to give up on this nature of our mind. Then we will be able to give on our core components painlessly, without automatically pining for completion, for a closure of our pattern.

Next, we have do away with our tendency to adhere to scripts. This tendency is actually a residual, lurking facet of a presently ongoing process of evolution. In the future we will not have any desire. We will be numb. In that time, we will need to know what to do again and then unlike the past things will be too complex for us to find patterns in situations anymore. So, in that future we will follow scripts. Talent will be commonplace. The ability to write, to script situations will be commonplace. Each child will be gifted a personal script for life. Lives will have a credit-page, attributing their character and flavour to specific authors. Doer-ship will disappear and the identification of free will will be absorbed by the attribution to third-party authors. This is what the future is going to be like and our tendency to follow scripted situations is a hangover from the future. It is a germinal process that will bloom into an all-consuming, world-defining characteristic one day. If we do away with this tendency now it will also do the future a big service. If we do this we will also manage to learn how to sacrifice soon as we will then be safe from the temptation to keep living with the same rhythm, following the same script.

Sacrifice could have been the novel behaviour that inherently had the power to add dynamic noise to plastic personas. But now sacrifice is just a missed opportunity.

Sacrifice can still be learnt and imbibed but it is highly improbable because that will require us to already know how to sacrifice. If we do not know how to sacrifice how will we do away with the characteristics of our mind that we describe above? It is a bind, a paradox, an impossibility.