Why you should put yourself into a block of tofu

To become, is to desire to be inserted into a block of tofu

The Hari Kuyo ceremony is typical of Shinto Thought.

Every year, house-keepers take their sewing needles to shrines, and place them into blocks of tofu, acknowledging stresses of the tools of their craft.

Until the turn of the 21st century in the West, it has been taboo in popular discourse to talk of the existence and relations of material objects beyond human thought.

Objects have instead been controlled and demoted by our system of language, subjected to a status operated on by linguistic code.

The system of language subjugates reality to only what it can capture.

Systems, through the production of interiors, always create exteriors, considered or not.

Systems cannot capture the infinite.

In the 19th century, after a boom of mechanical automation, popular thought shifted towards the idea of the universe having similar machination, imagining the universe operating like clockwork.

This is known as the

“mechanistic paradigm”.

In this vein, discourse today believes in reality as a closed system, balanced and complete, measurable and without an outside.

This paradigm of thought, reality as a closed system, prevents us from unfolding the abstractions that language has carved out for us to operate with.

Systems operate on the world only through the perceptions they have of it.

If systems are fed our already coded reality, what is returned cannot step beyond our abstractions. Instead, we can only think through what we know to truly exist.

To form new perceptions of the world, we should construct and experience new perceptions of reality.

To become something isnʼt to fly into guileless freedom. It is to delve deep into the structures and limits that shape material.

To think in becoming is to think beyond systems.

It is to think beyond finitude.

To become, is to desire to be inserted into a block of tofu.