The Life and Art of Jean-Paul Niko
Thoughts
Don’t read anything if you don’t want to read.
Oct 26th
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Don’t read anything if you don’t want to read. Don’t read for entertainment because it’ll dull your mind and make you used to the idea of reading just to read. It will set grooves in your mind, patterns that will repeat over and over to same purpose– nothing.
Don’t read for knowledge. Knowledge is just useless. Some people try to make a distinctions between knowledge and information or data. I’m telling you that it’s all clutter. There is no point in thinking about things if it doesn’t eventually lead to action, right?
There is only one reason to read, and if you are not reading for that reason, you’re training your mind to become more and more useless over time.
The ability to read is something that we have that is pure solid gold. It is our ability to take the life experiences of other human beings and fold them into our own. It is the way we can lead many lives and have minds that span generations. If you are not reading for this purpose then you should put down this book and any other book and go out and live your life, experience reality. Come back when you’re ready to immediately put what you read into action, when you are ready to make this your reality. You have to become this, you have to make this a conversation between two lives so that you can go out and live more. Why spend your time doing anything more? If you can’t immediately live these words, then they are just words, and words are just letters, which are useless.
I don’t know what form you’re getting this in, but I am going to call this a book
Oct 19th
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I don’t know what form you’re getting this in, but I am going to call this a book, and I will call this book “How to Live”.
The title almost seems like it was meant to be open ended, but I assure you that it was not. Yes, this book is about how to be happy, and about how to live well, and about how to stay healthy and have lots of energy. All of these things are a part of how to live, but they are only steps on the road to being truly alive, and as time passes you are either becoming more alive or more dead, there is nothing in between.
I wrote this book because I want to save you some time and I want you to have your life back. We are all humans and we have to help each other. In these pages I will explain to you how I live and how you can too.
I’ve lived in my own since I was fourteen years old. Nobody taught me how to live. I was in the unique and terrifying position of having to figure out how to live on my own. I read books. I tried drugs. I looked for mentors around me to replace my family, but my world was hard, and there wasn’t enough time and love to go around for someone to teach me what it meant to be human.
In and out of institutions until I was twenty-three, it was then, when I was homeless, living on the streets of New York City, that I realized I had to make a choice, I had to decide if I wanted to live or die.
Living is kind of like light in the sense that light is both a wave and a particle at the same time. Living is something that _is_, it is the superimposition of being and time, but there is also a process to it; it is something that we have to achieve.
Our own complex thoughts and the heavy framework of society get in the way of it and as we progress through life our mental landscape becomes littered with debris and it becomes ever harder to really live.
By now you realize that when I talk about living I mean both the biological function and our subjective human experience. We need to address both of these things because our existence requires it.
It’s taken me a decade to achieve real living, but I’ve had the double advantage of starting late (twenty-three) and starting with a clean slate (trusting no one and believing nothing).
I’ve tried all the systems of philosophy. Then I threw out the books. I went to churches, temples, and mosques. Then I stopped believing in religion. I visited gurus. I’ve tried all the drugs. I’ve lived in different countries and I’ve lived in wealth and in poverty. Now I just live, because now I know how.
We need a place we can call home and we need to eat and breathe
Oct 19th
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We need a place we can call home and we need to eat and breathe. Understanding that, we can say we don’t need material things; we don’t need possessions. Of course I should have a set of clothes to wear when I go outside, but I don’t need any specific set of clothes. Do you see the difference?
I like to listen to music. I have spent a long time collecting it. Now I mostly just stream music off the Internet. I question how much time I’ve put into building and maintaining my collection of music and all the other collections of things in my life. Do I really need to have them?
I think I could live without having any music on my own personal computer. In fact, I wouldn’t need a personal computer at all if I had access to another with the same applications. I would keep all my content on the Internet, where most of it is now anyway.
Sometimes online content will be inaccessible and we won’t be able to listen to the music we like, or get to the files that we need. There is nothing wrong with that. Sometimes we need to sleep when the sun goes down. We are mammals as well as thinkers, and our animal should not be out thought by our minds every time. Sometimes it makes sense to let our environment decide things for us.
The best thing that can happen is for you to realize that you don’t need anything. Then you will discover absolute freedom. The fact is, you are already free. It only remains for you grasp it.
If you don’t need anything, it follows that you have nothing to lose. Of course you shouldn’t give away your life, but don’t worry about it either because I’ve found that in practice it’s almost impossible to die. Try to if you like.
Would it make sense to say that we can’t have freedom and nothing to lose at the same time? What about if I take away your freedom? You had something to lose after all, didn’t you? No! This is not freedom from a cage, or freedom from persecution, or freedom from death. This is freedom from everything. Freedom from the concept of life and death. Freedom most especially from the slavery of concepts.
The Eastern religions call it nirvana. The Western ones call it God. Please note that nirvana is equivalent to God, and not a ridiculous concept like heaven.
Nietzsche discovered that if you destroy God, you become him. It makes perfect sense in this context. It is the only context, and it drove him insane because only he understood this at the time.
We’ve since had Krishnamurti and Feynman. We’ve had quantum mechanics and post-modernism. We’ve even had punk, and this is punk as fuck. None of it matters, but we needed it to get to here. Get it?
The first thing to do is convince yourself that you’re best
Oct 19th
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The first thing to do is convince yourself that you’re best, that you are perfect.
When you leave the house forget about yourself completely. You don’t exist anymore except as a kind of spirit or life force, disembodied, searching for a body to flow into. When this happens, the other body will experience a reverse death, reanimating, rejuvenating the dry husk. What was brown will become green.
You must practice this happening with every person you interact with. You must become the other person in order to feel who they are and know what they need.
You always make the same mistake of thinking instead of becoming. You know what you want and you try to get it. You know who they are and you try to simplify them. You label them. You think you understand them. Enough. While your breath rises and falls with their breath you are moving your mind inside their mind. Look into their eyes so deeply that you become their eyes looking at yourself do the same thing to this other human being.
Now that I understand the secret I can use it for anything. I realize how stupid I’ve been. But I can’t go back and replay the past in order to learn from my mistakes. The past is a collection of memories, at best, cloudy and subjective, at worst, false. We use these as markers for the present and future. The future never exists. It is a concept invented and agreed to by the mind. You could die this very instant. About 1.8 people die every second and one of them could be you. What happened to your future then? Yet we must behave with the assumption that the future is somewhat predictable and that it will become this present moment. In other words, the future is a thought, an idea. Only right now is real. What i mean by real is the animal, the spiritual, the essence, the energy. I mean the furniture, the street, cars, trees, even people. If you still don’t get it, hit something hard, real hard. That’s real.
People are special because they layer their own realities on top of this core reality. Existence is the foundation. It is not something to do but rather to be. Practice being other people and you will be everything you ever wanted to be.
