Stop

One of the hidden goals of non-actual action is to introduce creative absurdity, blatant illogicality, passionate naivety and impracticality, irrational spontaneity into the boring everyday life, to break fixed connections between the elements of individual existence and recode the semantic structures of social space (desemantization). Such sociocultural and existential inclusions destroy the usual course of monotonous life, and make the obvious unobvious and perceptually problematic, i.e. radicalizes the element of the incomprehensible and dark in the surrounding reality. This leads to a restructuring of the perception mechanism, when the audiovisual environment around the individual begins to mutate and lose its hitherto stable and familiar outlines

...after all, what is the difference between a child and an adult? The child lives in the purity of the sacred, in the dimension of miracle, inside the fundamentally incomprehensible and mysterious. His perception penetrates into the very essence of things and phenomena, because they are transparent to him, that is, they are not burdened with heavy functional cause-and-effect relationships. Therefore, the child LIVES in the full sense of the word, not trying to understand, articulate, or classify anything, preferring to leave everything as it is in a mystery and an intriguing riddle that does not require disclosure and exposure, but exists only for metaphysical play - endless sliding on the waves of ironic nonsense. For an adult, the opposite is true: in the process of socialization, under the gentle but persistent pressure of society, he joins the designated world of clearly numbered values, becomes terribly serious and respectable, the very sight of which makes him somehow awkward and uncomfortable. For him, reality appears as civilized, desacralized, having lost its virginity and mystery, a surprisingly boring zone of existential confinement, which the Chilean intellectual Miguel Serrano called the “concentration universe.” In such a pragmatic and boring world, everything is known, everything is placed on shelves, entered into catalogs, lists, into computer memory, everything has a long-known meaning and answer...

This world is supported only by cause-and-effect relationships, which in the gloomy eyes of an adult are as unshakable and indestructible as two and two are four. It is clear that in such a dense and heavy world there is no place for a miracle to appear, because life turns out to be de-energized and too “correct”. But when, by one action or another, you introduce into the present situation an element of the incomprehensible, non-practical, inappropriate, a-logical and seemingly childish, while investing in it some higher irrational meaning (= nonsense), then a “short circuit” occurs: cause-and-effect relationships collapse and This world, supported only by causality, collapses into nothingness, i.e. it becomes transparent, not hiding the light of the Other behind itself. In such a resacralized world, from now on, the dimension of miracle returns, the phenomenon of magic, where two and two are as many as you like and not necessarily four, and causality, which strictly imposes on the human consciousness the idea of ​​unidirectional linear time, is replaced by a flexible and fluidly flickering system of metaphors, when the status of any object, event and phenomenon is no longer unambiguous and can instantly change to the opposite...

It is in the destruction of causality (horizontal modality) that the universal feature of intellectual practice for the liberation of (individual) consciousness from the tentacles of society lies. In this regard, let us recall the “stop” exercise that exists in the Sufi environment, when, at the command of the teacher, the student instantly stops any current activity and freezes in immobility. This exercise can be successfully applied in the midst of city life. For example, you are walking along a noisy and crowded street, where an atmosphere of false efficiency and bustle reigns. You are one of many going about their business. But as soon as you give yourself the magic command “stop” and freeze, everything immediately changes. You will feel that you have stepped out of the impersonal herd of monotonously moving bio-machines and found yourself in a different space. It feels like you are not here, you are not noticed, and you are watching what is happening from somewhere in another world. In a word, this exercise helps to carry out the act of removing a person from causality, from the everyday samsaric cycle of mercantile affairs, which we, out of our own ignorance and stupidity, consider vitally important for ourselves and whose slaves we are until the moment of awakening, that is, until the moment of leaving the current cause-and-effect regime of This world.