Reclusland

While thinking about the recent use of the “extreme” today, I had a breakthrough in the use of language.

Granted, this is nothing new, but I think I understand it in a new light today.

The word extreme, in this sense, was used by skateboarders, snowboarders, and other people engaged in sports where risk is a high factor, and a large part of the fun.

The word was used to describe the rush or adrenaline and high concentration that comes when you realize that, oh shit, I just almost died (or got almost really hurt).  This rush, once discovered and understood enough to reliably know how to achieve it, can be the source of great learning about the self.  At the very least, it can cause a pretty high self confidence and calmness when faced with other tense episodes in life.

This self-understanding/mastery is what people look up to extreme athletes for.  It is where their charisma comes from.

However, some people are not aware that the self-mastery is the important thing.  Some people, even the athletes themselves, might confuse the cause with the effect, and begin to idolize the danger and risk that leads to self-understanding, believing the risk to be the self-understanding, instead of the state of mind necessary to begin to learn the self-understanding.  (This is not to say that people do not understand this, just that they, for whatever reason, are not consciously aware of this, so they consciously explain it to themselves this way, even though they are feeling the self-mastery at work).

As this interest becomes widespread, people look to make money off of it.  They use the word “extreme” in relationship to soda and deodorant.  They are trying to attach that element of risk and danger to their products, not realizing that it is what is achieve through that danger that is ideal, not the danger itself.  But then again, you can’t use the self-understanding to sell a product, because it’s not an easy thing to fake.

If you claim that your product helps lead to self-understanding, the people who are consciously aware of the importance of self-understanding will see right through you.  And the people who are not consciously aware of the importance of self-understanding would not think that this made your product any better.

What happens then, is that the people who mistook the “extreme” risk for self-understanding claim that “extreme” sports have sold out.  And in a sense they are correct, as the danger and risk is now being used to sell a product, rather than as a path to self-understanding.  This applies to both the fans and the athletes who were only into to the sport for the risk and danger, the outer form of it.

Those who were into the sport for the inner form, for the chance at self-understanding that the danger and risk created, know that what “extreme” meant to them is something that cannot be taken away and cannot be used to sell something.  The word “extreme” was merely a quick codeword for self-understanding for them, so when it begins to mean something else to other people, it does not effect them.  As long as they were grounded in self-understanding first, and extreme sports as only a way to that self understanding, then they are not bothered by this mis-use of the word “extreme” at all, except in the way it cheapens and waters-down the “extreme” community with people who cannot even appreciate the self-understanding on even a subconscious level.

“Do not confuse the finger pointing to the moon with the moon itself.  Otherwise, you will become saddened when the finger later points to a flickering lightbulb.  What happened to all that heavenly glory?”