Going berserk on my graduate thesis

I'm in the process of finishing my studies, pursuing the parallel path of an internship at day and my graduate thesis at night, the latter corresponding loosely to what has been called 'the dark night of the soul'. Just kidding ;-)

Nevertheless, I get pretty frustrated covering all bases (boooring), reviewing literature and including what's been said. I'm a guy, a masculine piece of shit, and I want to transcend! Screw including, embracing, connecting! I want to lift off and soar through the uncharted, empty space of being.

Then again, it's also true that I just need to finish the fuckin' thesis and get over it, so I can get on with the transformation of the self and the world, and properly find out who I am to be, proceeding to be all that, whatever it is to be - and stuff.

Anyway, my monkey mind can get carried away with all this, and in fact it just did this past half hour. I love to listen to my own rambling and laugh at me - such an annoying, yet sweet little child.

So here's a rant I just dropped in Thesis.doc, and will probably be taking out again when I reread it tomorrow. Better capture it here and have something to smile at, before I get all serious and rational again. Pffff.

Minimal context: my thesis is about the action-structure debate in sociology, which refers to (I claim) the relationship between creativity and constraint, the past and the present. Think Henri Bergson, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and good ol' Ken Wilber.

=<[
Any theory, approach, account or perspective on the action-structure debate which tries to get rid of ambiguity and present an all-encompassing explanatory account of human agency, is bound to be deterministic to some degree. "If there is one genuine necessity inherent in human agency and social action, it is the necessity of ambiguity." (Dawe, 1979: 388) Choosing certainty over (a certain amount of) ambiguity is to lose the creative, open-ended qualities of human agency to a deterministic, simplifying theory. Any ontology that is to deal in a satisfactory way with human agency as a whole, then, will need to find room for ambiguity, probability and all those other eternal enemies of the scientific drive towards explaining the nature of what is, of providing a theory of everything. This is never, never, never possible. To be human is to accept both temporary, contingent knowledge and unconditioned, creative ambiguity. All that can be pinned down is necessarily in the past and therefore incomplete of the present, which is by its very nature boundlessly novel, until it manifests, until perception pins down the probability space into wave or particle, this or that, labels it, categorizes it, makes sense of it, and stores it away in memory, continually, endlessly.

The very act of theorizing, of labeling, of writing this down, is both an expression of human agency and a wholly inadequate, incomplete simplification of it. To recognize this, operate upon it and consciously let go of knowns, of theories and labels and ideas, is to transcend the apparent duality inherent in being human. To recognize the past within the present, consciously let go of it and lean into the unknown of what is arising moment to moment, is the ultimate principle. And to write this, to read this, to make sense of this, in effect is to negate this, to prove this wrong, unless the inadequacy of the words and the knowns is recognized. Utterly paradoxical, negating itself at every turn, the neverending story of humanity unfolds, poised upon the brink of ‘the inward turn', a revolution of new thinking, only to arrive again, and see with new eyes: it is always-already this.
]>=

Let me know whether you laughed or cried. I hope the lack of context on the rest of my thesis is no obstacle to soaring with me for a bit. Transcend kicks include's ass anyway, right ?!

;-)