Imagine two circles. One circle is Zach’s Inner World. The other is Society.

In order to begin the process of integrating with Society, the two circles must have some region of overlap. But the circles are too far apart. Evidence for this can be found in the poor state of this website, which before today hadn’t been updated in two years.

One major recent transformation of my self-image is that I don’t see myself as a Self-Starter anymore. I had thought that as an important mystic returning from a profound journey, it would be self-evident to me how I ought to go about presenting my views to the world. I should write a book, for example, or create a podcast or video channel.

But as it turns out, my Inner World is too stubborn for me to be able to construct my presentation without help. My Inner World did not want to be so easily expressed. While I allow that at any moment the inspiration could strike and I could produce an expression of my world fully formed, I no longer expect it.

Instead, I must rely on “a little help from my friends,” which is much harder to come by than most people suspect. As a very rare mystic, I do not fit into any category with which people are familiar, and very few people know how to help a person in such a situation.

My stuckness extends even to the dilapidated condition of this website, which is only being amended because a friend shared a strong opinion with which I agreed. I should post something to let people know I’m not dead. Or at least, not ALL dead. I could be mostly dead— Awaiting Resurrection—which seemed like a good title, so I’m going with it.

The difficulty is in realizing that what I produce must meet my own high standards, and also be acceptable to Society. Previous efforts to accomplish this goal have ended in failure. Necessity is pushing me to try again.

During this process it is inevitable that I consider posting snippets of the book to my blog, or writing the whole book as a blog. I am not certain enough to commit to either of these processes. My foremost concept of the book is that it will serve as a credential-establishing entity. Since Society has failed to produce (or preserve) any institutions which both meet my standards and whose standards I meet, I have to produce the work with the idea of meeting my own standards, which is what Society should demand and ask for, but has not. I have to bring Society up to my level.

Should such a credential-establishing book be written as a series of blog posts? It would depend on the type of dialogue which resulted. For starters, if I keep relatively quiet about the existence of the blog, and nobody hears about it otherwise, it will be little different than if I wrote the book in secret. This would be fine. I just don’t want the blog to incur more burden on me than the book itself would incur.

People are always worried about publicity, but until I have a firm grasp on the nature and contents of the book, this will be my last concern. My first will be ensuring quality. And since I am not a great, nor experienced author, doing my best on the book will be enough. Once it is in relatively good shape, I can turn my attention to publicity.

One thing I will say about why I am writing a book instead of doing anything else: I find that doing things with Society almost always comes with a cost I don’t want to pay. Becoming self-confident in such a situation is very difficult, because the human instinct is to assume that Society is fine, and that oneself is to blame. This instinct can be purged only through relentless examination of the facts, and refusal to submit to faulty reasoning. If the truth, no matter how uncomfortable, is followed, it is not at all hard to conclude that Society really does fail to accommodate certain good people in unavoidable ways. But it can take decades to get the strength to take that position. I wish my path could have been more convenient. I don’t like accusing a Behemoth such as Society of anything, because it is terribly inconvenient. Writing a book is one of the last options for someone who cannot reconcile himself with Society in any other way.

If Society didn’t want books like this to appear, it should have tried harder to stop them.

I do not desire to lack a connection to Society. But I suspect that if my senses were keener, I would have found an object of focus which would have brought me closer already. It would be great to have money, or more importantly, social status, which I call SocStat to elevate it to a deity. But even more desirable for me right now is a feedback cycle, wherein Society and I engage in a conversation. No one, unfortunately, speaks for Society with regard to me. Most people do not understand Society and therefore they cannot speak for it.

I have slipped between all the cracks. The way for Society to form a relationship with me would be for a member of Society to see me truly. I have no idea how this will happen. Then that person would formulate communication. It would be a back-and-forth.

The alternative to this would be for the integrating dialogue to occur within me. Such a dialogue has led to this blog, for example. But what has this blog led to? Thus far, there is not enough energy here to create a feedback cycle.

Thus, I keep thinking that if I just understood more about what things were worth, I could more actively pursue the Good and avoid the Bad. That’s all. I’m not saying there aren’t tools available, or progress to be made. It may seem strange for me to declare that there is something wrong with me, as such declaration may itself be a stumbling block. This blog post is an active example of my internal dialogue, of my thinking things through internally hoping to establish a stronger sense of what things are worth.

The blog post itself might help me arrive at the goal. I am merely recording my wonderment at my lack of direction, which is painful and yet such pain has never been motivation enough to surmount the difficulties. The obstacle remains greater than the pain of being stuck. Not sure what to do about it.

I have infinite trouble conceiving of what I want, what I “should” do. I think a clear picture of such could organize my Motivational Minions, but the vision rarely clears up enough to provide a sustained reservoir of reliable energy I can put towards action. The army of little minions does as it pleases, and much of my life has been learning how to surrender to them, simply so I don’t feel ashamed of what I cannot control.

Perhaps a finer resolution of consciousness could bring into view minions which are currently invisible. Then I could become “self-made,” with 50+% of my motivation brought into relation with consciousness.

It’s important not to pass judgment on why someone can’t control their minions. There are so many misguided people anyway who need a proper container in which to grow. It’s normal to join a collective, a hive of some sort, to turn over some of one’s autonomy. This is both a sin and a virtue. If the larger organism one joins does good, it is justifiable. But if it does evil—which happens just as often—then one has not successfully escaped the burden of determining what is right. The task of determining what one “should” do never totally goes away, and since Society is not stable, the best of all possible worlds requires individuals to constantly consider it.

When one doesn’t join a larger group, one may find that motivation is elusive. This is a bad situation, because we all expect people to “do their part,” and we have no ready justification for the unmotivated person.

That is me. Try as I might, I simply cannot make a plan and act on it accordingly. Only when the invisible mass of Motivational Minions decides on something do I ever enact “plans.” My future is therefore up to them.

Unless of course, should Luck involve me in a self-sustaining, interpersonal group dynamic, the burden would be temporarily relieved.

I said it.

But I won’t say it.

I’m still grappling with it.

The inner sphere is conceived as bounded by a circle but we call it the individual self, whereas the outer sphere is called the social sphere, and it is best understood by the vague concept of Society. Society is plural by definition and includes the collective thoughts of lots of people, but also the performative necessities that the people demand of each other regardless of what they think internally.

My motivation for this article cannot simply be to describe what I mean by the necessity of double-motivation, because that would be a single motivation and I would not be motivated to finish it. What’s more, I cannot specifically articulate the secondary reason because, I believe, the two motives for an action cannot be equally disclosed publicly. Again, this must relate to the Inner and Outer nature of the Dual Motivation. Perhaps what is Inner cannot be disclosed because it would inherently violate the performative demands of External Society.

Indeed, my reason for writing this article was not originally to talk about Dual Motivation. Dual Motivation was merely a thought which arose afterward. But if I cannot disclose the second motive, it will be difficult to determine what to talk about next, since I think I already expressed myself regarding Dual Motivations. Perhaps, then, the point is for me to break through this kind of barrier generally. This is the article in which I break through a barrier, a type of obstacle which has obstructed me for many many years. I can break through the barrier now.

But I still don’t know what more to say. Again, this is a common barrier for me. The little King inside me says, “I’ve said it already. Why should I have to say more?” But the crowd of King’s subjects inside me has no idea what the King meant, or at least is totally unsatisfied with the performance of the King. The crowd knows there is something wrong and will only be disappointed if things are left to stand as they are.

The King must realize that at some level he hasn’t said anything.

It can’t be done directly. It has to be about something else. The Meta Question is: How much can a video game be about the challenge of making the game itself before it gets too jumbled to be a good experience to play?

I ask because I know so little about where I am going.

It’s not that bad. I have many clues as to how to proceed, many intuitions that would be inexplicable if not pressed upon me by my inner artist. Paying attention to those little feelings is rather painful, but it has gotten me this far. I’d say I am about halfway done making the game, and that is not because I have anything to show. Rather, I’ve spent so many years studying that the actual making of the game is only half the true work. I’ve done the first half. Now I just have to make the game.

Pay attention to details. Whenever I feel inadequate to the task, make a careful mental note. Use placeholders so that I can build the game without having everything be perfect. Follow those intuitions!

How do I know? It’s like my body navigates a labyrinth and the walls move and force me to enter the room with the blank screen. Not just any room with a blank screen. The specific room in which the results in a blog post on ZachTollen.com.

These shifting walls. This labyrinth. What does it represent? My psyche appears to be organizing something. I shouldn’t call it mine—Reality itself appears to be organizing something. And there is a bit of shock to that idea, that Reality should be so intentional, like a human mind, reminding us of the myth of the Intentional Creator of the Universe.

The idea that God has a plan seems laughable to the mind which doesn’t believe in him. There are too many chaotic factors which clearly operate according to their own internal logic to think that anything is organized by a hidden, higher consciousness. Thus I do not even believe it myself when I suggest that “Reality” is organizing something.

So what IS organizing this blog post? I could review the multitude of factors which make it Socially Acceptable for me to be writing it—perhaps it is a mere matter of having successfully instilled in my mind—in Reality—the Social Appropriateness of this activity. Organized? That would be like saying a child is allowed to play in the pool and somehow expecting them to perform feats of Olympic swimming or diving. Just because I am allowed, or it is my duty, to create here, does that mean “God” has a plan for the results?

I can’t rule it out entirely. I don’t fully understand the mechanism by which this Social Acceptability functions internally. Maybe the mere fact of its existence necessitates the organization of its publications. As a reader, where do YOU think this blog is headed? Not to put any undue pressure on “you.” Each individual reader will have his/her own life and mind through which what I say gets interpreted. Perhaps you believe in God, and if so, then perhaps you are able to convince yourself that you are reading this blog post for a reason, that God has helped to organize my words in order to make this experience meaningful for both of us (assuming God would not leave me out of his blessing merely to bless you!).

My writing is stimulating me into uncertainty, into daydreams. The act of writing may force me to think about things which I would not have realized needed thinking about in the attempt to articulate them. The goal of provoking myself into thinking things I hadn’t thought would seem to run counter to the goal of producing entertaining, coherent posts for public consumption. I pressure myself to accomplish this, to produce coherent articles. Yet I always end up feeling satisfied merely for having prodded myself into new thought.

Too bad for the reader, who might have hoped to finally be entertained by one of my efforts!

Starting my video game. Last night, I produced a very simple pixel image which most bloggers would copy to their post for entertainment purposes. Whether or not I do that now is besides the point. The pixel image was of a landscape. A horizon. A road leading into it from the viewer’s perspective. The viewer is presumably standing on the road. At any rate, the picture is taken as if from a viewer standing on the road. Two trees. A sky. A cloud or two in the sky.

The pixel image was 64 pixels by 48 pixels, magnified eight times so as to occupy enough screen space that I could see it. By reducing the pixel count and scaling the image up (most images are much higher resolution, many times more pixels in both width and height), and also reducing the color palette to about eight colors, I realized I had stumbled into a psychic energy zone which my brain actually enjoyed conforming to. Point being, I had to reduce the number of pixels and colors.

I did not know I would hit this energy zone. But it felt like a true harmonization of my left and right hemispheres. I seem to have found my psychological center. I realize I can make a video game with this situation.

I wonder if there are any simple music synthesizer programs I can use instead of recording my songs to an mp3 and taking up like 100 megabytes for music while only taking up 0.1 megabytes for graphics and programming.

I digress. I have talked about my situation, by no means completely, but I now am no longer blogging in order to help me think about it. Tempted as I was to simply return to my other activities, I now realize that having begun this blog entry, it isn’t quite fair to publish it without giving the reader any more guideposts. Thus I am now blogging in order to help the reader a little bit.

I rarely help the reader much! This blog has not yet reached the point where the intent is to be popular, or even good.

There is, however, a narrative to the story of Zach which it is the purpose of this blog to represent. “What do you want to know?!,” I ask the reader in frustration. I then realize that the reader has done little or nothing to provoke such frustration, at which point I recognize that my shadow is at work. The key point is that I really do owe the reader, i.e. the Public, some words, and I also know that I haven’t produced enough of them. I think it should be made easy by the reader actively soliciting specific answers. My instincts are not good at providing enough spontaneously. Thus, the question, “What do you want to know?!” serves as a substitute to get me to produce words that my instincts have failed to produce automatically.

Let me tell the basic story of Zach which relates to the topic which began this article. When he was about 25 a woman came up to him in a dream and claimed she had his baby, and that it was already 10 months old. Upon waking up, Zach remembered a trick he had read about dreams in one of Carl Jung’s books, where the date mentioned in a dream also applied directly to real life. This has happened to me a couple times in dreams where the times given correspond exactly to moments which have happened or will happen in real life.

Applying this logic to his dream, Zach asked what had happened 19 months prior (10 months plus nine months for the gestation of a baby), and recalled an impulse to make a video game in order to express the powerful magical things he had discovered since his grand mystical experience 5 years prior. At 19 he had discovered Joseph Campbell and felt the “call to adventure,” and much happened in the following months and years. Then at 25, the notion arrived that it was time to “return,” and it seemed natural that such a return involved a formal expression of the nature of his mystical voyage. Having acquired tremendous insight, his task was now to communicate it.

That was almost 20 years ago, and Zach has only just begun to make his video game RIGHT NOW. It’s now that he did not try before. He just didn’t succeed. At that time, he had no inkling of the vast amount of experience and knowledge he would still have to obtain in order to make the “return” possible, to actually MAKE the video game instead of merely “knowing” that he ought to make it.

Okay, end here. I understand that it might be abrupt for me to end things arbitrarily sometimes. But my mindset around this blog is still fragile and I might not have the discipline or the courage to post things at all if I delay. There might actually be a decent blog entry here if I spent the time to edit it. I know I left a whole lot out regarding my adventure.

There are some oppositions to the philosophy of “it’s your duty to express yourself.” That concept of duty is what allows me to overcome those oppositions, but I am not so free from them that I am able to simply express myself and not talk about them. I suppose none of them is entirely unique to me. They are the standard things which inhibit most people from expressing themselves. Primarily:

• The lack of expressed interest from other people.

I don’t know what the expected amount of interest is. I am not easily “gotten” by other people. Therefore they are typically in a state of relative confusion in my presence, and cannot muster the confidence required to affirm the idea that I should be “expressing myself.” Also, if they have lived a pattern of repressing, rather than expressing, themselves they again have no confidence with which to affirm that I should be expressing myself.

• Lack of clear model in my head for the ideal audience

Who is the younger teenage version of myself who would be the ideal audience for what I have to say? Someone just as earnest, but innocent and ignorant and perfectly suited to learn from a wise master, should they find one. I do encounter variations of this in real people. It’s not totally absent in my life, but it’s not fully present either, so when I task myself with dutiful self-expression, I don’t have a clear enough view of to whom I should be speaking. I’m not too worried about this issue—it’s just it happens to be one of the obstacles mentioned above.

So yeah, there are obstacles to my free self-expression. If there weren’t, I would not have needed to talk about it. I could be freely expressing myself on other topics. Certainly, admittedly, I have put no effort into building up a public audience. I do not regret this, because an active audience would threaten to contaminate the process of self-discovery. A large part of the purpose of this blogging process is to identify all the factors which allow or disallow effective self-expression. By building up the process before I add a real audience, I can more effectively identify and isolate the factors which go into this. Since it has to be self-sustained and cannot ultimately depend too much on the size of the audience, it’s not a bad idea to avoid advertising for the time being, so I can establish my pattern.

Therefore this is simply a private journal, but one which happens to be public. I have not yet tried to answer the question, “If my duty is to express myself publicly, what part of that duty actively should include advertising and marketing?”

For the last month or two, the de facto answer has been, “None.” But that is merely an avoidance of the question. I still have pieces of the puzzle to figure out which would only be complicated by more advertising at this time.

I find the idea of “expressing myself” difficult in that I am accustomed to either saying nothing, or responding only to other people. Expressing myself requires the development of an internal “second self.” I suppose everyone has such a self, since everyone has “taste.” But I have to really hone my own taste and elevate it so that I want to create things to satisfy it. Sadly, a person’s own taste my not be popular in Society, and sacrifices may be required in order to pursue “the road less traveled.”