Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not the the pithiest title for an entry, I know. But it will have to do for now.
As a child at the age sometime before turning the age of awkward I recall developing a sense of how I ought to process the world. In reality, I suspect my (overly) analytic mind was attempting to build for itself a model of itself, a “Who am I that is I?” kind of doubly redundant kind of query. Maybe a question only an overly analytic, self-absorbed child such as myself would find worth any consideration. In many ways I was trying to determine how to learn and absorb the world. I discovered very early in my childhood that thinking during the act of doing produced poor results; I instead discovered that if I could push whatever I had from my conscious mind to my subconscious mind I could very quickly assimilate a skill with a certain amount of prodigal finesse: I try not to think what I am doing, I just try to do what I am doing. In this manner I had stumbled upon, in a very cursory way, ideas such as ego, ID, self-awareness, consciousness and subconsciousness.
In this time I also came up with a question about god’s self-awareness, or: “Does god know it is god?” For whatever reason I did not then nor now believe god, whatever it may be, knows of its role; it just is. By definition, self-awareness is predicated on being conscious. If you think of god being aware of all things at all times then a conscious god does not make a lot of sense to me. Consciousness is a pinpoint of coherent thought, the biological version of a laser. God, the way we might envision it, needs to be bath of light in order to everywhere at all times, the very opposite of consciousness; namely, god is by definition and my way of thinking subconscious and ergo not self-aware.
I actually think the conscious mind is too oft over-emphasized in this age and culture. What do I mean by this? Let me try to answer my own self-stated question by addressing the question of what is art. Art is simply the act of self-expression. Art is the expression of self in context to the perceived world. In this way it is no hard thing to say: Art is Life; Life is Art. In this manner everything I (we) do is art. Every word. Every gesture. Every thought. Every conversation. Nothing is outside the purview of art and artistic (self) expression. If we step back into the world of art that most people understand and attribute to the noun, the act of creating by hand or taking with camera is far more an act of getting the conscious self out of the way so the subconscious mind can discover a truth, can express itself. An artist will describe to you that something does not “feel right”, they will pace and look at the work from various angles, all while perturbed that something does not fit. It is the act of problem-solving, there is a final solution somewhere in there but it takes time to discover the path to it. It is a solution that has no meaningful, originating question, though. The solution is just a link in an infinite series; the solution itself will just breed more “questions” that lead to more “solutions”, a never-ending quest when the quest is the everything and the (final) destination is the nothing. In a word: the conscious mind has words to express itself; the subconscious mind has everything else.
God, if were to be everywhere all at once working through us, feels no different to me than my subconscious mind. In SAT and GRE-like analogy, my body of life is to the universe as my subconscious mind is to god. And thus Spinoza’s god is the Nihilist-Solipsist god is the egoless-subconscious self.
