So I was sitting there staring at the mountains and thinking, and if anyone asked me in that moment what I was thinking about I would have replied something along the lines of “Nrgh, I dunno…stuff.” But this is what was coalescing:
I’ve seen the best of life and the worst of life. The knowledge of one stops me from fully immersing in the other. The payoff for maintaining that kernel of hope in the depth of despair is that I can never shift the kernel of unease in what should be the happiest times. The depth of my idealism is matched by a corresponding depth of cynicism.
Nothing can be perfect except the non-dual; the whole that incorporates every imperfection is God.
The imperfect is our reality – it’s the plane we live on. It’s our job to be faulty, otherwise God cannot exist. Every imperfection we hide from ourselves and the world necessitates the creation of a person who embodies it so that balance is maintained. We are one entity, constantly splitting unwanted parts of ourself off. Collectively we create the evil that we deny in ourselves.
Accept every part of yourself and express as much of it as you need to in order to continually keep in mind who you are. It’s all necessary. It’s the design of the universe. The human penchant for control – of ourselves, of others, of our environment – just messes with the blueprint, and then we wonder why things don’t feel right.
(#1 I was happier when this blog was just for me).
Truisms that I have come to learn, though not necessarily ones that I have been able to put into practice. Part 1 – A-C
Pilfered from http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~field/holzer/truisms.txt with my comments in brackets.
A FRIEND TO ALL IS A FRIEND TO NONE (Sadly, I’m only just starting to realize this. My ego’s basic survival strategy is completely flawed).
A JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND MILES BEGINS WITH A SINGLE STEP (The daunting thought of the entire task stops me from performing it unless I am completely passionate about it. I need to keep thinking “SMALL STEPS! SMALL STEPS!).
A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE CAN GO A LONG WAY (Knowing how to use the knowledge is just as important as obtaining it).
A POSITIVE ATTITUDE MEANS ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD (Your perspective of the world defines how you experience it).
A SINGLE EVENT CAN HAVE INFINITELY MANY INTERPRETATIONS (Everyone else’s perspective is at least slightly different to yours, and so the truth is relative. As above, having a positive attitude will help you to make the best interpretation possible of any event).
A SOLID HOME BASE BUILDS A SENSE OF SELF (A sense of security allows you to explore more of the world and learn more about yourself. Consistency at home base means that your different reactions to things outside of it are more evident).
A STRONG SENSE OF DUTY IMPRISONS YOU (Living your life solely out of consideration for others kills your natural spirit. Duty to those you love is important wherever possible, but not at the cost of living your own life).
ABSOLUTE SUBMISSION CAN BE A FORM OF FREEDOM (Having complete freedom to choose your path in life is scary and is the root of most anxieties, which then trap you. Submitting completely to someone else’s (or God’s) will provides a boundary within which you feel safe, and then you can be free of anxiety and worry about whether what you are doing is the right thing).
ALL THINGS ARE DELICATELY INTERCONNECTED (In our universe we are all one, like interdependent cells in the human body).
AMBIVALENCE CAN RUIN YOUR LIFE (To move forward in life you need to pick a direction. In order to pick a direction you need to know which of the options on offer mean the most to you. True ambivalence causes stasis, which is calm and safe, but it won’t stop time and it won’t stop you from dying.)
AN ELITE IS INEVITABLE (There will always be someone with more power than you, it is futile to fight against this fact, but you can help choose what sort of people belong to the elite).
ANGER OR HATE CAN BE A USEFUL MOTIVATING FORCE (Anger and hate are expressions of pure energy in a particular, observable direction – repressing them is harmful to the body and the psyche. Expressing them and exploring them in a a safe arena can be eye-opening, and help you to get things done rather than procrastinating).
AT TIMES INACTIVITY IS PREFERABLE TO MINDLESS FUNCTIONING (If mindless functioning will lead to a negative effect on yourself or those around you, while inactivity leads to no effect whatsoever, it is obvious which is the better path).
AT TIMES YOUR UNCONSCIOUSNESS IS TRUER THAN YOUR CONSCIOUS MIND (I would say, at all times. Your conscious mind is used to mask everything about yourself which you don’t want to show others – it is all PR).
BEING SURE OF YOURSELF MEANS YOU’RE A FOOL (If you look deeply enough inside yourself you will realize how contradictory you are, how you can change from day to day. Being sure of your position for more than the present moment reveals that you are believing your own PR).
COMPLACENCY IS JUST AS DANGEROUS AS AMBITION (But finding the middle ground is particularly difficult).
CONFUSING YOURSELF IS A WAY TO STAY HONEST (Playing devil’s advocate with yourself is so revealing).
Some photos of one of the most special places that I’ve ever been, in one of the most special areas I have ever visited. It was all the more special for being an unexpectedly delightful side-trip to a disappointing wildlife-viewing excursion.
The Cannery Buildings:
The Net Loft:
The Company Store:
Ye Anciente Typewriter:
Want to know the best thing about this place? You can actually stay there! If I’d have known, I would have loved to explore at length…
Thoughts from a friend, so true that I have to post them for posterity. And I wonder, is there really nothing we can do about this but resign ourselves to it? Life belongs to the energetic. We need to take the energy back from the parts of our culture that we are leaking it into.
“You know what’s wonderful about being a kid- or more being a teenager? You feel that things are possible. Things really are possible of course, but back then you have the energy left… we all get quieter, we all get jaded. At the most positive level, we just seem to get ‘content’. After so many conversations with so many people, it just seems global. A global lack of energy. There’s only so many times you can listen to the words in your head before you think– you know what, I think I’ll just put on a song instead.
All bright people who were encouraged by their peers, their family, their education to be “something” seem to find it very hard to cope when the reality is there are millions of us and achievement is a very quiet, natural, dull stone rather than a gem. Pebbles on a beach and all that.
I do miss it all- I do miss our freedom. I miss knowing we were only just starting out. The fresh taste of wine. I wonder if everyone does (and then I stop wondering at all, because it would hurt to imagine so much!).”
Now that I’m two decades distant from it, I think it is time I wrote about Jack. Those who were there at my side through this year understood how such an odd relationship came to be, and those who weren’t will never really understand, because it’s just not something that happens, and it is not likely that anyone can get their heads around the surface impression that it was totally morally wrong. If you didn’t know me back then, and are easily shocked, you may not want to read on. Be warned. This is part of my life that very few people know, simply because any time I tell it there are all sorts of judgements flying around, on me, on him, on my friends, my family. But it’s not something I’m ashamed of and it’s not something that I need to deny or justify. In fact, it is such a huge part of who I have become that keeping quiet about it seems stupid. Sorry, Graham. I know this makes you uncomfortable because you can’t look at me now and conceive of the person that this all happened to, but I am her and she is me.
I’m a nice middle class girl from a nice middle class family. I led a rosy life up until the age of 12 when I got bored of nice middle class boys my own age, and started aiming for nice older boys, but they didn’t want to know, other than to be friends. I was very mature for my age, intellectually curious, emotionally stable, completely secure in my home life, a perfect A-grade student, but I was also stubborn and impulsive and I needed a challenge, some sense of risk. Me and a couple of friends started hanging out with the wrong sort of kids, the ones that go out and commit petty crimes and think they’re all that. You know, the chavvie shites. But that didn’t last long, as they were only a year or two older than us and really not very interesting. And so it came to be that we started to hang out with much older guys through a chance meeting at a local bus stop. These guys were kind of social outcasts – they used to sit on a bench outside a local pub’s beer garden because they were barred from going inside, and they’d drink and smoke and have a good time and because they were much older and had that much more life experience, my god they were endlessly INTERESTING.
I started getting close with Jack almost immediately. It was he that introduced me to psychology and philosophy, to dub reggae and psychedelic rock, to cider drinking, to social and political issues that I was unaware of, to an entire world out there that is so many shades of grey. We would talk and talk about everything and nothing. He never hid the fact that he was in love with me, and would ask me out every other day, but I was 14 and he was 32 – wasn’t going to happen, because people wouldn’t understand, would they? And he’d get himself arrested. And, besides, I just wasn’t attracted to him physically.
Another group of guys suddenly entered on the scene and my friend started going out with the youngest of them (19), while I started falling in love with Steve who was a bit older. He had a car and a bunch of us used to go on little excursions. We went on a couple of dates, there was attraction but some weird dynamic between us which was constantly frustrating to me – he seemed to like me, but then kept acting off. Eventually it came to a head – he sat me down to talk to me, and I thought he was going to ask me out, but instead he told me that he wasn’t 23, he was 33, and he had a ten year old son, and although he was very attracted to me, he was a sensible adult and had to stop being attracted to me. So that was that. I was a little heartbroken, mostly annoyed at him for not being upfront in the first place, but I understood.
About 6 months after that, I had a change of heart about Jack. It wasn’t like I was interested in any of the boys at school, except one who was already going out with a friend, it looked likely that I would end up with someone older than me anyway, and me and Jack spent pretty much all our time together by then anyhow, so I thought…why don’t I just give him the chance? Is it really going to change anything? And probably my biggest motivation was…if I have a proper relationship with this guy, then maybe, just maybe, I’ll be in a better position to help him cure his alcoholism.
And so began an extremely up-and-down 18-month relationship…the madness of which I will detail at other times during other musical memories. And yes my parents knew about it from the very beginning, and their trust in my maturity and common sense, and their openess to something they didn’t understand but knew was important to me is the very marker of the extraordinary human beings that they are. Other parents would have caused complete chaos for me and this man, and driven me away from them in the process, but instead they grudgingly accepted the situation and kept a crystal-clear line of communication open with me at all times. This wasn’t me having a teenaged rebellion against my folks, it was me exploring what it meant to be in love with someone who society and logic said I shouldn’t be, it was me taking on the misguided challenge of trying to fix an addict. It was me growing up way too fast, but that was inevitable anyway.
I was a 20 year old stuck in a 14 year-old’s body and he was a 25 year old in a 32-year old’s body, is basically what it boils down to. When he told his friends and his parents about me and our relationship they were ready to kick the shit out of him, until they met me, and then it made more sense. And I have to give them all utmost respect as well, because throughout our relationship I always had people looking out for me, making sure that I had a support network to rely on at all times. They knew I had a good future ahead of me, and they knew that they didn’t want me to turn out the worse for wear for my optimistic confidence.
You think that you can make snap judgements about people from the way they look and how their lives have turned out through the bad choices they may have made, but you can’t. As a teenager, it was fun to hang out with people who put two fingers up to the status quo, lived with few responsibilities and were non-judgemental, but the thing that really kept me interested was that there was so much good inside so many of these people that society had cast out, and that experience I had living among them, in my 18 months with Jack and about a year after we split, has made me the person I am today. The person who automatically looks beyond the surface layers to the essence of the person beneath. The person who can see all sides of you and still love you regardless of how much I disagree with everything you say and do. I can’t say I’m not judgemental, but I am accepting and my judgements are constantly shifting with each interaction, because nothing in this complicated life is static. And I believe that, aside from complete psychopaths and sociopaths, there is much to love in everyone, you just sometimes have to dig really deep to find it and it is often entwined with the bad stuff that you’d really rather not know about.
That’s a challenge I used to love to rise to, but I am much wiser and more selfish now in that I don’t bother trying to see the good in anyone who doesn’t want to help themselves find it. I’ve done my part over the years, been too compassionate to too many freeloaders, and I don’t have the patience for it anymore. These days I tend to challenge myself in intellectual ways rather than in social ways.
I learned all sorts from my relationship with Jack but you want to know the biggest two?
1) You cannot make yourself fancy someone who you are not physically attracted to, however satisfied you are with everything else. It’s a recipe for disaster when you’re sitting there fancying everyone except the person you’re supposed to be attracted to. It’s not fair on either party and can cause all sorts of mental anguish.
2) Addicts are addictive, but if you’ve never had one in your life it is difficult to understand where the attraction lies. To me, it’s the intensity of the drama they create on a daily basis, and the puzzle of trying to solve and fix them, combined with the satisfaction of always being the morally superior one. There is some genuine power in playing the victim, but it is not a healthy power and you must block whole parts of yourself off to play the game.
Sitting on a coach on my own headed to London, 6 months after graduation, just before the big world trip, friends already starting to drift apart across the globe…writing and writing whatever came into my head. And here it is:
Snow is falling, weather is cold…I remember doing this a couple of years ago, sitting outside St Paul’s Cathedral too skint to afford the entrance fee. I just wrote for ages and I have no idea where all that material went. And there’s the beginning of the book I started in Benidorm but gave up on Chapter 2. One less than the chapters that I managed of the other novel I started to write at Uni. Motivation to write, man – it’s certainly not coming through walls and pelting me. Especially when I am trying to write on a coach that is jerking around all over the place in the snow.
Wow, that glare on the snow from the sun is truly, well, enlightening…Just passed the spot where that accident held us up for an hour last time I went to London – must’ve been a month ago? They seem to be getting regular, these trips. Maybe I’ll just stay next time.
You’ve got to keep moving, wiggle those toes and shake those legs. Must remember that on the plane – don’t want to end up at my destination dropping dead. Moz will be in Germany by now. May even be travelling on a coach like me. I wonder if it has hit her yet? – the enormity of leaving for four years, and if she settles then this country will only be a holiday destination from now on. The place she was born, the people she grew up with, her friends from home and uni…are Fix and a few friends over there enough to compete with all that forever? I wonder if she will come back? Honeydew.
It’s 10 a.m. Come on – wake up people! Stop pretending that a half hour of travel has made you tired. Look lively – you’re on your way to exciting things! It’s beautiful. It’s all beautiful. Even the grotty bits of the world are pieces of art. Each little part has been expertly crafted and moulded over time by nature or man, or both and we just take it for granted. People should learn to appreciate more – including me. Everyone’s so busy being stressed out or finding ways to be miserable about their lives that they don’t take the time to look around them occasionally and take it all in. This little planet, spinning around in the solar system, heated and lighted only by the sun has developed into something fantastic beyond words.
And the variety…try thinking about how different the life of a bird is to yours, then a plant, then think about how different your life is to the person sitting next to you on the bus. From the same town but with a whole different set of life experiences. And then just think that it is completely within your power to find out what that person’s life is like and share your life with them, just by starting a conversation. But you don’t because you think they will think that you are a nut. I find people so fascinating and I can’t get enough of meeting new people and collecting new friends. But I am restricted by my own inability to take the first step, my shyness and by other’s reluctance to share any part of themselves with a stranger and by people thinking I’m weird. Of course I’m weird – I have a completely different life to them. I can’t see the world in their terms, from their perspective. And I have an overactive mind. I think constantly and one thought jumps to the next arbritary thought without notice and with only a tenuous link. Which is why I coume out with some bizarre shit occasionally.
So, anyway. The wonder of life and the universe and all. Of course there is some terrible stuff going on in the world, no one can deny that, but it’s just the downside of free will. If we didn’t have free will, or at least an illusion of it, then nothing would be great in this world. No one would be able to get anything productive done, anything revolutionary, anything to change the world and move it onwards and upwards. But if you give everyone free will, you’ve got to expect that some people won’t play by the rules that everyone else has decided they will stick to. And I guess why should they? It’s their own life and they can do with it what they want. The only trouble is that “bad” people tend to involve other people in their life who are playing by the rules and those people get hurt. But then it’s all part of the theoretically limitless possibilities that are out there that govern the way your life turns out. And all your choices are half chance, as someone said somewhere.
I guess the most amazing thing is that everything I know about the world, and everything I see and hear – the good, the bad, and ugly – it’s all what is processed by my brain. My spin on reality might be completely wrong – completely different to everyone else’s. It’s not often that you check for sure youre experience against everyone else’s apart from indirect reassurances in everyday life – like when I file something in alphabetical order, someone else comes behind me and finds it using the same system.
But I guess the constant search for someone on the same wavelength as you is just for that person who see the world in very similar ways to you – not that they have been through the same experiences as you or hold the same opinions – just that they have a very similar perception of reality.
But who’s to say I’m not making all of this up – that I have created all of this from the sun and snow and Niagra Falls to paedophilia, war and famine? If that is true then I am undoubtedly a great and imaginative person – it in effect would make me god. But then even if I didn’t actually create it all I am still a god in my own person as far as my own life is concerned. I choose what I see and hear of what goes on in the world, I choose the people who surround me. If I wanted, I could ignore all of this world that I see, disown all my friends and family and become a hermit living in a cave somewhere. Eventually I’d forget that anything else existed. Because things only exist to me because I exist and I perceive those things to exist as well. If I didn’t exist anymore then nor would anythng else. For everyone else, if everyone else is actually real, life goes on, the world exists to them and nobody is any the wiser.
So if life is all about existence, and existence and reality is all about perception – your own personal perception of the world – then how can death be anything but non-existence when your brain doesn’t work and you can’t perceive anymore? So there you go, life and death are absolutes – conscious life is absolutely everything – a flood of percepttion and reality – death is absolutely nothing at all. Nothing is a hard concept to understand because there is no nothing in life – there is always something – we don’t live in a vacuum do we?
Death is a vacuum. But seeing as a vacuum normally occurs between two existing things, maybe death is just a limbo between two lives or heaven and earth or something. Problem being that nothing can travel in a vacuum so how do you get from one side to the other?
Or maybe life is just a Choose Your Own Adventure book – but is it me or somebody else making all the decisions? And if it’s someone else are they playing by the rules or cheating like I do and going back a few pages to make the other choice if it all goes pear-shaped the first time round?
My friend wrote this blog post about the scene in The Matrix where Mr Thingy main baddie guy whose name I forget right now (OK…got it, Agent Smith) is telling Morpheus how he sees that humans are a virus, a cancer of the planet that needs to be cured, and her thoughts on the matter. This is a topic that I’ve broached in the past in debate with others, have read a couple of articles touching on it in scientific journals, and which I do have a particular opinion on. So, I’ll share my original comment and further reflections here:
Yes, humans are naturally like cancer. Our genes have mutated in such a way that we are stronger and more evolved than anything on the planet (we think), and so we set out to control and conquer that planet, spreading to areas we “shouldn’t” and invading territory, and in doing so killing off the natural inhabitants.
But we are conscious and intelligent and so can choose to stop or reverse our spread in order to sustain and protect our environment rather than destroying it. Cancer cells are not evil. They are a non-conscious mutation. They have no choice in what they do. They are simply what they are and do what they are programmed to do. They do not plan to override the entire system that supports them – if they had any kind of intelligence they would realize that doing so ends in their own demise.
Cancer is a horrible disease (or group of diseases), but I repeat – cancer cells themselves are not inherently evil. If you strip away that judgement of it, then it is easier to understand how the human race can be compared to it. But it is not something that we necessarily need to be cured of if we understand what we are doing to the planet and decide to stop it. That is our choice to make, and hopefully our civilization will make the right choices in this regard, to co-operate and find ways to live fruitfully within our means, and/or to expand our territory in ways that don’t destroy the balance of our physical world…otherwise something WILL come along to destroy us before we destroy the planet, I am certain of it.
This is the key to what I find myself mulling over a lot recently. We need to find a way to evolve socially and culturally, while still maintaining balance – the ideal is a symbiotic relationship. Less push/pull between black or white, more grey in most matters. Not grey, more…integration. Like strands on a rope, the dark and the light, the good the bad, all polar opposites combining to make a stronger whole. Less rejection of what we don’t want to exist, more acceptance of what is followed by a deep inquiry into how that came to be and how best to integrate it with what we know we do want.
It will take more courage than many people have, but that doesn’t stop me from chasing the ideal, and trying to persuade others to join the game. And that’s all it is. Our individual lives are a game of limited duration, but one that we have invested the highest stake in – our own existence and the future of the human race. And that’s why it is so scary to do anything of our own violition and so, in general, we just go along passively with what the world already offers and maintain the current status quo. Heaven forbid we take responsibility for something that we don’t already know will have a positive outcome.
No more. No more. NO more.
I have absolutely no idea how I’m going to do anything that I want to do, but no more am I going to sit here passively and let a world that I can be an active part of continue going down a path that I don’t agree with, excusing myself by saying it doesn’t matter to me. Because it does matter. Deeply.
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