In a recent post, Frost extolled the masculine scowl. A badge of independent, rebel manhood. But what is it? And why doesn’t an ingenopath do it? Today I learned.
The ingenopath recognizes the rights and claims of everyone and everything as absolute, leaving literally nothing for himself.
The scowl is a freedom from commitment to anything save one’s inner integrity. It is the dangerous, unpredictable freedom of a man. Nature’s bright red markings on a poisonous insect; the rattle of Gadsden’s “Don’t tread on me”. The indifferent strength of strong personal boundaries that irresistibly attracts women.
Though my commitment to the koans was as deep as I could make it, this commitment was still divided. I still recognized other commitments. These diluted my personal integrity, my personal boundaries. Which, paradoxically, reduced my ability to fulfill those secondary commitments.
The commitments I still recognized, overmind commitments, were such things as keeping one’s word, romantic obligations, duty to employer.
I decided I wanted to blow them all off (in the psychological sense) and be emotionally committed solely to the koans – solely to integrity.
So I did. I wrote the ten letter word “commitment”, one on each knuckle.
Now external stress, dissonance, anxiety etc from those sources doesn’t touch me. The overmind no longer has those excuses to kick into gear. It is simply the koans – the glass that breaks the surface tension of the ocean beneath. I am unpredictable, dangerous, and I don’t give a shit – without compromising my ingenopathic core.