late night musings

4/29/09

Its almost the end of April. Unbelievable! It seems just a few days ago I was in Kansas, Mexico, Utah, Germany, Austria, Holland!  Where has that time gone? Stored in the annuls of my memory which always seems to be slowly purging itself, recycling information no matter how hard I try to hold onto certain things. It seems a dream to me! How strange a thing is the mind! I wonder how much goes unused. How many synapses fire in our brain that will never come of anything? If only we could learn to harness some of this waste! But who’s to say that’s not possible?  Whit was telling me of archers in some eastern land who can hit dead center of a target every time, blindfolded. What about the Buddhist monks who can sit naked in the snow for hours unharmed, or the coal walkers in India, and what about all the supposed voodoo that goes on in the tropics. Are these stories real? Who’s to say?  I think there are supernatural occurrences that happen on a daily basis and only few have an open enough heart to realize or observe them. They may not even be supernatural, just incidents that we have not yet been able to explain so we label them so. Even though I am open to the paranormal, I really have no inkling of such things, no personal experience with them, but I am not one to say they aren’t  possible.  I must ask who defines the absolutes of possible and not possible. Who has the authority to say there are things that simply can’t be learned or understood?  “Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find” . I think this is probably true with more things then just god. Or maybe it is all related. All I know is that we progress only as far as we allow ourselves., and that the only limits we have are the ones we create… 

Maybe I am spewing rubbish now. But the older I get, the more I believe in magic. And not the rabbit out of the hat trick, but the utter phenomenons like light particles traveling from millions of miles away that were generated millions of light-years ago, giving tiny seeds enough heat to germinate and then later to photosynthesize, producing oxygen which we in turn somehow suck into our bodies, which in turn is converted into liquid which is pumped through hundreds of tubes by some self generating electricity,  and on and on and on. When I actually think about these processes and the thousands of others just as amazing, it blows my mind. And it is not just happening to us, but everywhere we turn! It can’t be explained--the science of it can maybe, but the meaning? Is there any meaning? Are things connected? Are they only connected if we want them to be? It seems that the more of an effort I make to become aware of minor details, the more they seem to relate. But is that all in my head? Maybe it will take me a lifetime of experience to decide. Maybe if I happen to be lucky enough to live long enough to lie on a deathbed someday I will still have no idea. I think we believe in things a lot of the time in order to make sense of our lives. Certain people believe in reincarnation. But as Jack Nicholsen puts it so well in “The Bucket List”, what does a snail need to do to move up in the caste system, lay a perfect trail of slime? Or just as strange of an idea, that of predetermined fate. How can there be free will when an all-powerful being knowingly created certain beings to go to hell, also a place of its creation/imagination? Along with that, why would a god create a nemesis trying to lay claim to souls this god originally created to glorify himself? Why would he create the entire concept of sin? This version seems so incredibly selfish to me-like all of these things were brought about at the expense of our human suffering in order to fulfill some master plan. How can that god be good? Or how strange is the idea of blowing up hundreds of random humans to get to a fairytale land of fantasy and bliss? Where is the goodness and peace in that? All of it seems so bizarre to me. There is one common theme I see among all religions though, or at least the ones I have heard about, and that is fear. Fear of death. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the lord. Fear of hell. Fear of not being accepted. Fear of sex. Fear of being de-ranked into lower standards. Fear of change. Fear of evil. Fear of the unfamiliar. Fear to really live. Fear, fear, fear. It dominates. Is it a universal human quality? Every human I have ever met has fears, for lack of a better cliché, their own demons.  From where do these come? Even if raised in a perfect environment, how and why do they come into being,  lodging themselves in the minds and souls of the strange homo-sapiens? The meaning of life is a mystery to me as is the entire universe, an infinite concept of time and space which my mind cannot comprehend. But I ask myself, am I afraid of the unknown? And if I am not, why are other people? The unknown arouses my curiosity all the more-leads me to believe in endless possibilities-makes me question anything any human ever said as an “authority” of a subject/s.  I guess one could say I am a disbeliever. Maybe I am jaded, but more and more I have become less trusting of what I am told until I discover it for myself. And god? If he, she, it, or they choose to reveal themselves to me, I don’t think they will need any humans to do it. Of that I am fairly confident. Personally I already believe I see a bit of god/s on a daily basis. In the water, in the sky, in the sun, in the trees, in the rocks, in every creature, every human, in everything, even the very gas we suck in our lungs. Its everywhere. I don’t “know” this, but I feel it, hence I believe it. And whether I am wrong or right, I believe in something like this because it helps me to make more sense of things(which in itself is a bit of a paradox as I have a hard time making sense out of anything). But every time I find myself experiencing this planet in its original and natural state outside of the modern human’s range of disruption and disturbance, I feel a pulse, a vibration, an energy in all the Life around me. And an overwhelming feeling of gratefulness floods my soul. I don’t know to whom, or whether if it needs to be to anybody specifically, but nonetheless its there; it permeates my entire insides through and through. I feel lucky to be alive, lucky to have a flash of experience in this mysterious universe, this infinity of  time. Is time infinite? Do we constrain ourselves to this concept because we only understand the reality in which we find ourselves? Are there other realms of existence governed by other laws? We know time keeps ticking no matter if we  live or die. Time itself is not measured by human life, or any of the natural laws that we understand. Even if the earth were consumed by fire, time must still keep going. Yet we define ourselves with time. We chronicle human “history” as far back as can be remembered, we measure our individual life spans by numbers of days, months, and years, and we schedule our daily lives around appointments, increments, and rotation of our earth around the sun. We define ourselves by time and have thus defined time, but this confounds me because time is indefinable, incomprehensible. How did it all begin? Or was there a start? Many people believe in eternal life. How can we even know what the concept of eternity means?  If time has no end, then can it have had a beginning? It is something impossible for the human mind to comprehend, at least my human mind. I really should consult some books and people way smarter then I. Didn’t Einstein have a theory? I must admit I am pretty uneducated when it comes to his contributions, and physics in general. Wow! I feel I have “entwickeld”(pardon the deulisch) my way into a thick bramble of rambling thoughts- maybe it is has something to do with the fact that its 3 AM and I can’t sleep. And what is causing my mind to stay so active tonight? To be honest, I think it must be a bit of pain, a bit of hurt, a bit of betrayal, all of which I may be subconsciously trying to ignore by filling my mind with unanswerable questions and concepts. But now that I have analyzed this, brought it from the sub-conscious to the conscious, maybe I can deal with it. Maybe it is an example of some of the human fear that I was hammering upon earlier in this entry showing itself in my own soul. What is it that I am afraid of? What is it that’s aggravating me so inwardly and once I can define that, the question becomes why do I let it?  And since I have volunteered this journal of my experiences and reflection  to eyes other then my own I cannot delve any farther into the subject, at least not on paper. It will have to suffice leaving it at that. So. Here I lay digging deep within myself. One thing I have learned is how easy it is to be dishonest within oneself when it is convenient, and precisely the thing I am trying to relearn is how to only be honest with myself all of the time. Only then can I be content with who I am--only then can I truly know myself; know the stuff I am made of. A quote on the skipper’s special coffee mug just came to mind, and it seems like an interesting note to end on. “To judge a thing, one must first know the standard.” Maybe I can personalize it by saying “To  judge myself, I must first know my standard.”