Bleeding out our Reflections

I’ve found a danger in putting words to my explorative experiences, because I could begin fictionalizing the original experience, filling in the narration with things I’ve already read and experienced. I could fall into philosophically complicating it and I could lose the clarity of my experience. I risk becoming fascinated with theory and buying into existential theories and language games that stray from referring to the actual experience. It’s easy to theorize, but it’s harder to actually penetrate into the states of mind being described.

So last night I had another waking dream. It was a dream-movie about the human and his self, facing each other in the mirror. Into the mirror the human stared, until the one who stared faded away and all that remained in consciousness was a shimmering image of a person in a mirror. This image no longer represented the self. It no longer represented anyone.

Next scene: The subject was standing in a white room before a brown door and a single light hanging above. He was dreaming of himself and the world. This was what was captured: The human, placed within a world, found himself thrown into a world.  The world is silent, but what is it, why is it here, what is it telling us? It does not hand meaning over to us. It takes courage to step up to our existence. Meaning is something we have to provide for ourselves in the facing of our anxiety around whether we belong here or not.

This human-world relationship was realized as being towards death. The fact that something is being here contains in it, in the same moment, the possibility of its absence.

So this absence was felt as inevitability, which came with an exhilarating subtle state of mind, riding a wave of fearfulness. The world-projection by the human mind became fragile, a dim light surrounded by black nothingness, void existence. In the subject and his projection-dream there was no matter, no material, only the fragile movie of consciousness. This precarious fact of existence was recognized to be incredibly improbable, but a fact nonetheless. The fact of this struck out: and it was comprehended as a brilliant and terrible spark, fading into the background of darkness

I like the new theme, but the title is just a little off setting. Someday maybe I can be updated from “writer” to “administrator”

When I was a kid, a friend held up a grain of sand on the sidewalk in California and told me it could have blown from the Saharan desert. He also said A molecule of air I was breathing right now might have been the same Caesar let out in his last gasp.

These ideas left me awestruck. I envisioned the grain of sand floating on the winds all the way across the ocean to California. Wow, I thought, “even a grain of sand has travelled so far. It must have a great story behind it.” I picked up the grain of sand and wondered how I could find out and tell the story of this grain of sand. At first I thought a scientist could best tell its story, so I wanted to be a scientist. At another point I thought a historian could even better, so I wanted to be a historian. In the end, however, I wasn’t too much into geology labs or historical research in the library, but the idea of storytelling still stuck with me. I realized that perhaps I didn’t have to go through all the trouble of research while still telling its story. It was at that moment that my imagination gained victory over my knowledge and my whims won over my discipline. (I’ve noticed that younger kids actually think big quite often and usually have little reluctance in working with ideas of “God” or larger cosmologies. It leads me to abandon the idea that you have to be older to start any genuine exploration.)

A few years later, I heard saint say simply that the spiritual path is about loving what’s in front of us and what’s available. So I left the idea of wanting to tell the story of everything for awhile and I just wanted to know things as they were, here and in the now. Already, I was having moments where my mind would calm down and I would feel a sense of peace. Ordinary things in my room would begin to take on a very vibrant quality. After such experiences, I would think “Whoa! I was just strangely fulfilled inside myself, needing nothing else!” I felt a revolution begin to turn inside of me.

I began to stare at other things “here and now” to explore this new quality of mind: doorknobs, doorhinges and table corners. One time I dropped a spoon on the ground for my friends and told them to watch it closely until it would completely settle. Isn’t it amazing? I said. I was discovering that these corner spaces were bright, shining, and very interesting adornments of the world we live in. I saw that these ordinary events of life carried a kind of existential message. Many people see the value of things in the world only through the light of their usefulness, I thought. I noticed this in myself as well. Going to thrift stores and seeing all the old, discarded items in their faded uses still gave me an uncomfortable feeling (the kind that often leads one to a truth of some kind.) But after seeing a kind of presence in everything, I began to have compassion for these discarded things, “boring” things. Why must our culture be so obsessed with youthful spaces and modern aesthetics? I began to see that not only did everything, even ordinary things, have a story behind them, but that there was also a quality of things that was inherently meaningful, without needing any story, a quality that was a simply shining, beautiful, and inexplicable presence.

There are certain systems of thought that evoke, illustrate, or support idea of this immediate relationship with reality. In the theory of art and literature, there is idea of seeing every scene of the world, however plain, as a text that a can be read into. In this line of thinking, everything in daily life has many different meanings and relationships that can be extrapolated endlessly. There are kinds of poetry whose contents are self-aware of this power of interpretation. Inherent in the form and content of this poetry are questions about form, designed towards attaining a more free and expressive art.

There is a power in interpretation. Poetry has the power, like all art, to expose and illustrate systems of relationships between things in the world that are not usually compared or are not immediately obvious. The languages of art, both verbal and visual, have the power, in our consciousness, to impose thought forms and systems on the world that highlight relationships. When we view art, it produces the effect of framing our world for us, of guiding our attention to certain states of consciousness. In this way, language has the power to create immediate perspective shifts in the listener. But there is also a kind of violence in interpretation. Art can direct our moods and emotions, and if it is not made with pure intentions it could severely mislead us or even hurt us.

In my quest for direct access towards “being”, I began to feel how much of our lives is focused on our human created concepts, thoughts, materiality. Life on this planet seemed so obsessed with talking about, interpreting, and reinterpreting life on this planet.

I found a place in nature where I could go back to being. Natural systems possess an incredible higher organization and complexity of form that is so inexplicable and beautiful at the same time. Nature’s art works in a realm beyond human ideas and mechanics: there is no ideology, no impure intentions. Nature is perfect mathematical harmony but it simultaneously transcends mathematics. Nature has no idea of mathetmatics: it does not to ascribe to its rules and transcending any needs for symbol or explanation. Nature has no “author”, but is composed of patterns that reflect the deepest nature of an ungraspable and encompassing energy called “consciousness”. This consciousness is difficult to understand. The world often eludes any attempts to understand it, so I’ve found the only solution is to maintain a distance from the world and allow it its complete autonomy, the same autonomy you would allow your lover. Often times we can only be impotent onlookers.

Nature is close to what I would imagine as an alien art form, but we humans are also completely nature’s creation and therefore in our “onlooking” or “letting things be” we are also participating. Our rational minds don’t understand at the intuitive level, though it is eventually forced to admit that much of ourselves are far beyond our tools of comprehension. Often we wield our rational minds as a technology, as a powerful extension of ourselves, without self-awareness, without understanding that our technologies are only different functional sets of clothing that we can wear. The rational mind can perform its operations but can never understand the nature of those operations. This is the role of the intuitive mind.

My question of being led me to all kinds of thought experiments playing with the idea of self-identity. If a person suddenly found himself completely alone in the world, and there was no longer any consciousness generated by the social sphere, where would he go to find his identity? If we were to lose all the forms that society and culture give our minds, how would our minds change? Would long lost forms, symbols, and images come and arise in their place? How would our subconscious mind’s change? How would our dreams change?

Perhaps if a group of humans lost all the forms of our civilization and history, would a new cultural evolution take place, with completely new art forms, languages, and cultures? Separate a group of birds from a species and within several generations another species will evolve. Today, there are many who dream of creating a new, separate, alternative society. By this separation, they are hoping to evolve new forms of living and thinking, or reinstate old ones that they see as less destructive and more in touch with our deeper selves.

In my life, I hope to exist and create work in a way that makes a statement about the human and how he experiences himself. I want to actively explore conceptions of the human, new and old, within myself and my experience. In my lifetime, I will witness the birth of new sciences that provide an explanation of how human consciousness is created, but I won’t see this as valuable until it can also be applied toward making a moving and valuable statement about what the human experience means.

The spring sun is out and is flooding my entire backyard, making everything very white, bright, and warm. My body is ill. This fact, combined with the warmth and light of the sun, makes my body feel heavy and grounded and slows down my mind to a standstill.

I’m looking at a red crate on the green grass that is filled with clothespins. The image of the crate upon the grass is projected unto my mind with surprising detail and clarity for being such a mundane sort of object. Yet it carries with it a statement that defies all interpretation. A humble crate on the grass: what then is all this hullabaloo of art and culture about?

My backyard is an enclosed garden. I cannot seem to see or think beyond it right now. It seems ironic that closed spaces make me feel more expansive. Maybe it’s because while I’m in them, so much is left to the imagination.

Springtime is a good time to plant a garden. It’s also a good time to sit and just watch it grow.

A few thoughts of the philosophical sort sprout in my mind. They are new fangled oaks set on alluring horizons, but amid this bright heat and sun, where is there any place for them?

Forgetting in can be a virtue. It certainly relinquishes the sense of control and command my knowledge can sometimes want over the world. I come to distrust how well my knowledge accounts for the world. Nietzsche propounds a skepticism that is not removed from life, but engaged in life.

He has a common skepticism about the basic constructs and procedures we use in conversation and conduct. By living in society, it cannot be helped that the mind takes on its forms. Yet freedom is not found in the abandonment of all forms, it is found in a process of self-observation whereby these forms are not allowed to be held and acted upon in ways that are contrary to that person’s true sense of happiness and well being.

I have lived in the world for some while and I know how some of it works enough to make reliable predictions. Yet at times, a sense of doubt gathers around the tacit assumptions I find myself to be making in my interactions with the world. This doubt causes me to feel like an alien to the world, and the world to seem alien to myself. It is a moment of finding that much of my mind functions as part of a subconscious network under rules that are embedded in a layer beneath my control.

At this moment of the recognition, there comes a moment of surprise at the crystal-clear quality of this mind. This surprise, the last cry of the rational mind, is not long lasting, since surprise necessitates an outside observer. After a moment, no surprise remains, there is only the crystal clear quality of the subconscious mind.

While though perhaps not the most accurate description, there is the feeling of abiding in a consciousness that is removed and far away, that knows nothing of the world of action but has its own sense of œtranscendent knowing. Dwelling in this state of consciousness, all the workings of the mind are seen as constantly changing permutations of a universal mind-matter function.

Of course, dwelling in this state of mind at all times is difficult. There are different approaches for dealing with obstructions. The driving attitude should be that each mental state unique opportunity to apply a sense of curiosity and penetration to it. For Nietzsche’s thinker, this should be his usual mode of being and how he approaches reality. Nietzsche’s critique is when the artist ceases to be a thinker in his tendency to become emotionally attached and carried away with his experiences, in his tendency to want to possess, capture, and add to his experience through his creative activities.

In sum, the thinker does not try to grasp his fundamental experience of the world through intellectual means. He doesn’t denounce knowledge; he sees at a tool that is not always handy. He doesn’t denounce science, he merely asks a different question, a question about Being.

In his skepticism, he is not overly entertained by multitudes of other alluring and awesome questions to ask about the world. And I have heard from several scientists, who are in the business of knowing these things, how, despite how much science has accomplished, what is known is still a small portion of the universe. So far, however, science has shown so how far how much information can be gained about the world and can be used to successfully reengineer and manipulate the world. How much has it changed life on this planet!

And in the coming years, when science becomes more able to manipulate the mind, more huge ethical questions will be raised. What could be the positive and negative uses behind the science of mind? If it will help us understand behavior better then how will that understanding be put to use? Science of mind promises to help us through all kinds of mental diseases and disorders by the manipulation of the components of our minds, yet perhaps what is really needed is true emotional freedom that is only found from our own capacity of insight.