Death Of Life-Wandering

A Theory On The Social In-Between

There must be some sort of cosmic consciousness tapping into me over the last three days. It began a few nights ago when I was dog walking. I used to walk my two scoundrels every night through a large, dark park where I could clearly see the stars if it wasn’t a cloudy night. I hadn’t done this in several months but decided it was a nice moment to begin again. Taking our usual path around a small marsh, it was fairly quiet except for the group in the distance playing soccer tennis, but their excitement was saved for good and terrible points. After a few moments of silence, the stars came out to me. I began to talk to them, talk about them and conjured conversations old civilizations might have had about what lies in the direction of Leo, Libra or Aquarius. I was amazed to think about how much knowledge has been lost to this point and how many people never look at the stars, can’t see them and couldn’t find a constellation if that was all that kept them from death or a life wandering. I felt a bit ashamed but something was listening to me which made the brief self-discovery relieving.

Were you listening? Not to bring up another tale of defecation but while I was going at it, relieving some tension, I opened up a “National Geographic”. I have three different issues in my bathroom, all of which have been there for months now. I don’t buy magazines, as these three were sent to me, so I scour each one over, finding something I hadn’t paid attention to before. This time it was a short story and pictorial on whooper swans. Angels of winter is what an author wrote about these large, pure avians. But that was something new. I eventually reached an article I’d browsed before about the Milky Way and just happened to stop there to observe the vast, telescopic depictions of the massive, materialistic, black-holed galaxy we so elegantly swirl around. There’s talk of other suns forming, yet the planets circling them aren’t developed into planets like ours.

From there, I traveled to a personal philosophy. We’re a matter of chance, a single burst of life out of a chaotic system with complex patterns infinitesimally difficult to understand. But, we’re the only matter of chance to have come around the revolution as human – to our knowledge – or at least to have been surrounded by the most suitable conditions for our nature of living. Though I’ve been of the pluralist school for several years now, resorting to the true psychological school of any and all possibility, the sincere plausibility of both and many overwhelmed my shitty scene. We’re both free and controlled, random and determined, rational and empirical, a matter of chance and a matter of fact. Each side then led to a spectrum of everything in between. And it’s with the in-between where everything matters.

As all short, sweet, recent essays go, I’ve been engulfed by the triumvirate and this is the third part. While I’ve noticed as of late how difficult it’s been to have sweeping, intellectual conversations about many topics, there are still hints of depth’s diversity. I realize as one gets older they tend to retain less and abide by stricter, epistemological guidelines. It’s a matter of learning ceasing and attention for uncertainty lessening, but whatever the case, we stick to a particular angle more than others. I’ve been struggling with that, with staying put. In coming of age I’m thinking this is exactly where I am, how I am and who I’ll be from now on. I’ve tended to see myself as more, or at least encourage more from me. I don’t feel that any more. I’ve even resorted to caring less about how descriptively I speak of me or anyone else I can’t meld with. All of this is besides the point. What does matter is my dream, my last connection to the cosmos. It comes from a dream I had about Tenzin Gyatso, or the 14th Dalai Lama. He was being followed by several tourists in Taiwan, some Taiwanese, some USAn, all very interested in being seen with him. It happened to be his birthday, or what was being translated as the “Death of Life” by a few of his patrons. At first I felt like a tourist, more focused on the man than what the man was doing. What he was doing was spectacular. He was walking the streets of Taiwan, observing everything living and nonhuman he could. He would stop at flowers and notice a small insect. He noticed a group of beetles rolling around in a clear sac left over from their consumption of the dung’s nutrients. He didn’t know they were dung beetles, so I told him. Until then he hadn’t indulged human life, but he paid attention. We bantered back and forth, which I think he appreciated. Then he noticed some tarps covering grass which themselves were shaded by scaffolding of building construction. He walked over to the tarps and began removing them before a few workers came over and hassled him. It was all caught on video yet no one helped him move the tarps, while I was the one recording. After being woken from the dream I had to check if today was indeed his birthday – it isn’t, but it’s two months to the day away. Not exactly cosmic unless I begin a search through mathematics, use equations and x’s, and place meaning to the end result of discovering it’s Avogadro’s constant, the golden ratio, pi or the number in-between. But I’m not describing ratios, particles, planes and cycles, or a psychological perpetuity. I’m speaking of true expressions of symbols, those we live with everyday through the words and images which confuse our notions of experience and thought. I’m minding the loss of wander and searching for it where it can be found.

As far back as I care to go and as recent as a few minutes ago I wasn’t aware of just how colossal the proximal space of me is. There’s some much to be sensed and become aware of within an arm’s reach or a mile’s walk. The in-between lies there, the social microcosm fully-developed and adapted for a human’s discovery. In the process of civilizing and domesticating material, and contriving and destroying nature, we’re generating single bursts of life unknown. Random, purposeful examples right here. Time has been such an essence, such a relative experience for many and an absolute for me, I’ve forgotten to give it up. I see numbers and colons scattered throughout my living space and never forgo a chance to glance. I didn’t conjure this to end in a decimation of time and a glorification of space, but it has been just enough time for me forget the need to remember. It’s the death of life and the advent of living. The loss of wander and the search for in-between. It’s the love of where and the hate of when. I’m old and need some friends.

War Machine Means…

…win or nothing, worm!

Psychic Relief Communicated!

Chopped, but wrought with a smile…

Yu-Xa!

With more than water falling…

The Careless Many

Yu-xa For A Friend: 2/21

A friend of mine died yesterday and yu-xa, or eye water, falls.*

She didn’t survive surgery following a car crash on what I expect to be the icy or snowy conditions of a mountain pass. While this should be about her, I want to respect her life so I’ll express a little more about how I feel. It’s been nearly 14 years since a friend of mine has left all who know them. I can say I knew her, if only expressed as the few months we lived in the same city, the few times we chatted about life and ourselves, or the time I was invited over for dinner. There are people immediately and deeply connective, and her and her family are those people.

I wasn’t sure how to feel about finding out. At first I wasn’t shocked, instead absorbing the feelings my partner was exuding. She was shocked and saddened, and I was recruited to support her. We both listened to the phone message she’d received late last night from a mutual friend, and I wanted to be talkative after hearing it. I wanted to and did say how wrong it felt that our friend was gone. It wasn’t until my partner left the room to continue prepping for work that tears were shed. How could someone I know, yet so young, die? How are her husband and daughter going to handle her death? Now, truly reflecting on it, tears are flowing. Her daughter wasn’t even a year old. They still needed to have another child in order to make a son the fourth in a line. On learning of her death, I felt for my partner first, then for my friend’s family next.

I know life may have not been easy for her. She was a 40 hour-a-week working mom and social servant. She designed her own successful, outreach programs while feeding and nurturing the most beautiful, calm little girl. While their daughter’s “lovable forgiveness” had become their life, there was still passion between husband and wife. A child changes the romance, but they appeared to take it in stride, holding hands along the way.

I don’t know if this is supposed to be an exercise on mortality; if I’m supposed to consider why life can be so short, or how important each moment is. I do feel that, but not because of her death. Not right now. More than anything I’m conjuring tears and sadness, looking for a deeper connection to her now that she’s gone. A heartfelt relationship was starting and I’d been drawn back to their family on several occasions since moving to another place. Maybe I don’t fully accept the circumstance yet because I can’t be around those who’ve know her years longer and are grieving wholeheartedly. Once in that place, there would be nothing I could do to stop showing my love for her and her family.

I was hoping to be scared of death. On the drive to drop my partner off at work, there was a moment I considered myself dead. It wasn’t frightful and I wasn’t concerned about my loss to others, but then again, I’m still living and still hoping, even if just for the moment, just for my friend. I’ve been drawn to death my whole life, threatened it with the utmost lack of common sense. I’ve attempted to kill life – my own, other people and other animals. Some have succeeded in dying because of me, but I can’t call it success when I feel void at the loss of my friend. I can’t feel either relief or despair. It’s as if I’m waiting for something. Maybe I want to do something for her family. Maybe I expect to play a bigger role. Maybe I sit here and consider how invaluable I am and that her death brings me closer to no one, especially my vital self. It’s shameful that death inspires what I consider the soberest words from me in months. I’m ashamed for not being there to see her one last time.

It’s a darker day than usual. I retain negation and reality, but today I’m drunk with impulse. She has intoxicated me with awareness at the cost of life. I’m stretching and reaching for more, asking for more from her before her soul has been diminished into the hearts and minds of the one’s closest to her. I want to catch her before it sets in, before the physicality of body removes any ethereal remnant of a woman I shared a frame with. I’ve got to catch her now before the heartache dissipates into remedy and resolution. I can’t bear to imagine the face of her lover, her husband. I can’t bear to feel the empty sense her daughter will develop, left by the missing touch. I can’t hear how the cries will carry once the stories are rehashed and distributed because she was loved and embraced. The sadness will build in my throat but she will turn it into a smile. Her face will flash between each word and pause it takes to explain how she makes me feel. She’s really not yet gone and if anything, I’ll imagine her face as long as my eyes and awareness can be kept away from the careless many. She and I aren’t one of them today.

We learn nothing. Death can creep rather close to the ones we love, but we learn to value less while they’re here. We banter and retort, argue and yell as incendiaries, yet there’s something which remains to be spoken by us. The mild acceptance of one another’s grieving goes unchecked as the pain of death is directed inwards. There’s anxiety ad naseum because we can’t stop it. But we’re anything less than careless and she was everything more than caring.

* In some feat of reverence, I began researching the origin of her daughter’s name, tracing it to Japanese and “forgiveness” as she had mentioned, or Ghanaian and “lovable”. I found it’s exact spelling in Athabaskan as the suffix for Eel River clans and in a Nicaraguan tribe, the Hokan, as part of the word for raccoon, s-kaiya. Also in the Hokan language, I came across the word yu-xa, meaning “eye water” or “tear” and it’s appropriate now.

IDK Where The Hole (And) [In] My Heart (Are) [Is]!

The Truth of the Matter…

Tracing Humanity in the Civilized Mentality

Synaesthesizing Feelings of Synthesis

Humanity is the single most important idea of our lives. If every culture, religion or state dissolve imaginary boundaries and feel humans as one colossal group intended to maintain happiness, self-interests we serve are irrelevant. Humans follow a specific course through history – prehistory and modern history – and unintentional lessons have been learned. They’re lessons given to us by inside and outside of ourselves.

We’ve learned killing kills the killer quicker. We’ve learned selfishness make us happy at the cost of others. We’ve learned technology has caused us longterm pain at the expense of giving thirty more years to consider how to prevent it. Thirty years compared to millions of people before and after today who live their lives without the fear of death or loss of happiness. Make a judgment as to which might be better.

Are we certain life will end without human influence? If the answer is yes, then why do all the work of extending human life?

It is the civilized mentality we now commonly think with.

When our collective viewpoint was replaced by an individual and private condition of survival, singularity spread because it appeared easier and was forced more readily. Years later we return to the difficulty of knowing how it helped us. We still can’t find a way to reconnect, if indeed we ever were connected.

Is this what our civilized mentality asks for – a continuous rise and fall? What about the linear path we have always been so confident about? What about  growth? Are they also as irrelevant as selves?

What is irrelevant is humanity – the group mentality that started us off. Instead of reciprocity as a means of survival, humans grew in number to fend. This kind of population explosion is a strategy to keep humanity alive, irrespective of personal interest. Blame it on human nature, but don’t define it with humanity.

The survivalist concept – carbon-copied by thinkers who can be dust-binned together – relies on the notions of domestication, agriculture and hierarchy. Human endeavor first provided, then forced possibilities for increased population. In our modern era we see real innovations are few and far between, and now for a select group of individuals to discover a way to increase their numbers seems counterintuitive. The mixing of cultures and the increase in population was the creative force behind the development of domestication, agriculture and hierarchy. Population increase and civilized lifestyles most certainly co-developed. The question unanswered is: which one began the first steps toward the history we’ve tried to establish for ourselves?

Humanity was the bond that kept people together. It’s still the word we use to describe the special unity a person has to another person which nothing else can claim. It’s only a word now. Many people felt it and others pondered the reasons why they did feel it. It was more important than freedom, happiness, life or death. It meant there was someone else who could feel the same things as you did.

When humanity was felt, we also lived synaesthetically – taking or perceiving, and knowing or cognizing, the beauty of life outside of us with a connective feeling or sense. When we couldn’t explain the sensory crossover we went elsewhere, deciding to develop a civilized mentality to explain and attach temporary meanings to the this newly formed capacity.

So what happened?

There were those who altogether neglected the connection, instead serving diminutive beliefs in things – matter, energy, laws, egos, beliefs, truths and wars. They chose to defend civilized mentality rather than humanity as a whole. But it’s always been humanity that has provided the connection, the synaesthesis.

How is it so important to humanity?

Synaesthesis (sin-ass-thee-sis) is experiencing the integration of sensation and mentation in mutual communication.

The common senses, mentally known and studied, are: sight, sound, touch, taste and smell; and their degree of importance to people are ordered similarly, unless absent. There are four lesser known senses – balance, movement, pain and heat – which do not receive so much attention. It could either be because the receptors are less physically obvious than eyes, ears and so on, or they are infrequently used, such as pain reception. We strive to avoid pain. Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian scholar and Anthroposophist with Rosicrucian leanings, suggested three more beyond the nine: language, thought and ego. Beyond Steiner, Guy Murchie recently described up to thirty-two possible senses. Even further beyond are the numerous latent senses we’ve evolved through which other species use readily to maintain successful cohabitation with humanity.

Taken physically, sense is feeling light, vibration, pressure change, chemicals, gravity, movement and heat, as well as the structure of communicated thought, ideological patterns such as ration and intuition, and people not yourself. Though the latter three are presently more difficult to explain as senses, they are nonetheless felt physically in synaesthesis. Beyond this conscious utilitarian array is a vast unconscious array of incarnations only experienced through mentation.

Mentation is the summation of two or many of the senses resulting in perception and cognition. Perception is a philosophical and psychological concept often debated over, but primarily means the conscious or attentive processing of sensation. It is taking all the senses of an object and using them to identify what that object is. Cognition is putting meaning to the object, relating a thought and getting to know the object beyond identification.

If sensation and mentation are simultaneously acknowledged, often done by consciousness training and cognitive transferability, the interaction can initiate a mutual communication – at the level nonhuman animals have with nature or nature with earth. It can be just as understandable with other humans. It can be felt as real as a hug or a kiss is felt. We were once aware of this connection, as nonhumans are, and will slowly return to a similar fluency. The most comfortable aspect of recognizing the connection is the ability to shift between being yourself and being a part of the mutuality.

Recognizing this feeling can be as simple as saying, “I can see because my eyes are open, and I think them open because I’m directing my attention to them.” Imagine seeing and hearing at the same time you’re thinking about seeing and hearing – this is synaesthesia physically, and best described mentally by Georg Hegel’s dialectical synthesis. Recite the simple referential statement when you feel the deepest recoil.

Clinically, the experience of synaesthesia is considered mentally disordering and involuntary. It includes the integration of colors and numbers, which is less sensory and more cognitive. Hegel’s dialectic, based on investigating the truth of opinions, suggests contradictions in thought – thesis and antithesis – are part of a synthesis, or combined truth.

If feeling light and sound by being able to see and hear are combined as a mental synthesis – meaning they can be perceived as the same matter and energy philosophically –  a moment of synaesthesis will occur. Both synaesthesis and synthesis are commonly combined behaviors in life.

How does it work? Reading aloud is one example.

Typically, we understand vision and hearing to be two different senses and often contrast them as primary and secondary. In fact, they receive the same physical matter and energy if you synthesize it enough. The wave-particle duality is a traditional separation of matter, though the matter and energy of light seems to have its own form of interchangeable mutuality. Often, physics and math are analytical, separating things into their parts then continuing to investigate subatomically and abstractly. Of course, quantum matter and energy behave synthetically in nature, and especially in humans – both physically and mentally.

The difficult parts to understand aren’t the theories and conditional judgments. What is most difficult is consciously adjusting your mind to recognize the integration of sights and sounds when doing something like reading. You pay attention to the content of the written piece, not considering you’re looking at it, hearing it and touching the keyboard to scroll it. But if you could recognize all four actions at one time, the experience might be one you’ve never had before. It’s not as hard as it sounds. Just re-read from the top, but aloud this time.

Did you understand it a little better the second go-around?

Imagine we take this a step further by incorporating all of our senses into a single behavior. This action could be called life – every single moment of your conscious day and preconscious night. But instead of focusing on specific acts or knowledge such as typing at a computer, taking bites of chocolate, or trying to define life, we should focus on our fingers pressing keys as we watch the letters join to form a word we are thinking of spelling. Or we hold the piece of chocolate between two fingers, noticing our saliva increasing, place it into our mouth, and taste the cocoa, which can only taste like chocolate and not sugar. These are synaesthetic moments of life; beautiful moments we pass up for less meaningful half-truths. They are still as separate from the whole as atoms are from matter, but are mutual experiences connecting our sensation, mentation and humanity stronger than anything nonhuman can.

Think about life now.

Could it be the synthesis of every moment in our days and years before we die? Does it include good, evil, matter, energy, war, conflict, homelessness and destruction? Ideas are hard to experience and harder to define. Should it include these things if it presently doesn’t? Will they make life more complete if they are included? How do I feel as connected to humanity as I do to the keyboard I touched and the words I just read? Or to the chocolate only my mouth and brain know are chocolate?

It’s still not as difficult as you think, but there is one thing that keeps getting in the way, and it’s inside of you. It’s your civilized mentality.

Our civilized mentality has been a constant impairment to the ability of conscious awareness. Most people find it hard to recognize because of belief and knowledge systems which continually occlude the feeling. Beliefs and knowledge are safe and stable, offering humanity an easy way around the perils of actually having to oppose the fun and selfish parts of life in order to sense and mind it. If we believe an idea we don’t accept anything else. If we know something we don’t have to search anymore.

“Ah, ma. I don’t wanna,” is what we tell her again and again. Life, nature and the earth, the realistic trinity which created humanity, won’t take that excuse anymore. But at least it warns us death, destruction and disaster may come to humanity and our civilized mentalities sooner than we think.

Civilized mentalities are historically chronicled as such:

Myth was ousted by philosophy

Philosophy was ousted by religion.

Religion was ousted by science.

Science was ousted by technology.

What will technology be ousted by?

We still have the opportunity to answer this question.

Each of these belief systems occluded an opposing and mutual pattern of feeling:

Myth was the antithesis of humanity.

Philosophy was the antithesis of craft.

Religion was the antithesis of learning.

Science was the antithesis of creativity.

Technology is the antithesis of humanity.

The pattern seems to start over again.

And each area uncovered certain shortcomings about itself:

Myth exemplified humanity’s insignificance.

Philosophy exemplified human’s fallibility.

Religion exemplified supernatural intangibility.

Science exemplified empirical susceptibility.

Technology exemplifies progressive frailty.

We’ve had plenty of time to deal with inconsequentiality and to realize we have a very important part to play in humanity.

The civilized mentality has followed a particular course of brain function:

Feeling – Knowing – Believing – Experiencing – Rationalizing – Feeling

The first feeling was sensory feeling, like connecting to the earth, plants, nonhuman animals and celestial bodies through myth. The second coming of feeling is emotional feeling, like connecting synaesthetically to humanity, life, nature and earth again with the most personal encounters and memories of each.

Now is the time to sequester technology. So, what opposes technology?

Read it aloud. You have the synaesthesis to do so.

Humanity (has)

heart (due to)

passion (is)

love (forming)

unity (is)

cooperation (through)

tradition (from)

ancestors (mimicking)

nature (whose purpose is)

sustainability (for)

earth (and)

life (and)

humanity.

 

Flames Are the Eyes of Exploding Brains!

Destabilize or Disembody?

Xeriology, My Friend!

Neomission in the old-school classic…

Her Lover’s Flaming-Tossing Canvas-Smearing

She used what was left to appease the rather common need…