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Wednesday, November 29, 2006 A New View I awakened this morning with the strangest perception of reality. Foreign would be a better word. Because it seems the more truer of the perceptions. My eyes confuse me. All of my senses confuse me. They give an extremely altered perception of life. What strange filters we wear. Our society serves to confuse us. Our homes, our cars, even our clothing gives us an altered perception. No wonder I'm so lost. I'm living in a land of confusion. For what, truly, is life? Is life our daily activities? No. Life is as simple as the wind, the sun, the dirt beneath our feet. And what we humans do is confuse that. We try to create something that is not true. For some reason, we've created this "life" that has absolutely nothing to do with life at all. No wonder we are all so confused. I woke up this morning and realized that my bedroom is in my way. My computer is in my way. My clothes are in my way. My kitchen is in my way. I looked out the window and saw houses and cars and streets that are in my way. In the way of what? They are blocking me from being able to see true reality. They are blocking me from seeing life as it truly is. I don't understand society. I never have. The only problem with that is that I was born into it. And so my views of reality are completely skewed by it. This is why I'm so lost. This is why I seem to be disconnected from reality. Because reality has absolutely nothing to do with the life that I live on a daily basis. Absolutely nothing. So it's time for a new life. A new view. It's time to start seeing things as they are. I asked for help in understanding the world around me before I went to bed last night. And this is how I awakened. For the first time, I see everything as it is. I can not zero anything out. My bedroom is this strange box built of white flat panels with a hole cut in one of them that contains a piece of glass to let light in. Under my feet is this strange brown material meant to keep my feet clean and probably to help keep them warm. All around me are strangely colored lights meant to keep the box in which I live from seeming so much like a container. And what do I see when I look outside? More containers holding humans. Aluminum and glass containers with wheels that can move faster than any animal on earth. Houses built of flat panels with glass-filled holes, oddly planted flowers and grass that do not seem to belong where they are. Black rivers that do not flow, that are as solid as the dirt beneath my feet, lined with rivers of ice that are not cold, that do not break beneath my weight. No wonder I'm so confused. This life we live has nothing to do with reality. It only serves to confuse us. What is a place, like the cafe at which I spend hours upon hours in my day? It is nothing. It is, like everything else built by man, built by our strange perceptions of reality, in my way. I can not see what is real because everything is blocked by things that are not real. Wow. I understand now more perfectly why my soul seeks simplicity, silence, solitude in nature. For that is the truest reality. And without regaining that perception, my soul becomes utterly lost in the land of the created and the creator. In our world, who is the creator? Man. Man believes he is God. Man believes that God does not do his job well enough, so we must constantly re-do it for him. He didn't make us warm enough, so we make clothing. He didn't make enough places on our planet for us to stay dry, so we build houses. He didn't make us to walk fast enough, so we create cars and trains. He didnt' give us wings, so we build airplanes. He didn't supply us with enough to eat, so we tilled farms. And then, because we could not walk fast enough to obtain these things that we've created, we made stores, more buildings to get in our way, from which we could collect the things we've made. When the truth is, God supplied everything we need. No wonder we are so utterly lost. We are no longer in touch with reality in any way, shape, or form. And I, who has always existed on the outskirts of this "reality" anyway, now live in Southern California, probably the furthest spot from true reality that exists on this planet. And I am lost. I feel apathetic because this life I live makes no sense at all to my soul, to my humanness. My brain is filled with nonsense, because all of my filters are clogged with it. My eyes see man's creations everywhere I go. My ears hear man's creations. My fingers touch man's creations. My tongue tastes man's creations. My nose smells man's creations. And all sense of true reality is lost. No wonder I'm confused. None of this makes any sense to me, because there is no true reason that it should.  
Day #10,407 in the Life of Suzi All I do is babble on and on about philosophical subjects. Well, this post is no different. I woke this morning in a very philosophical mood. That's because last night, for the first time in my entire life, I had a conversation with someone who does not "believe" in evolution. STOP. How is this possible? How is it conceivable for a seemingly intelligent human being to not "believe" in the concept of evolution? There is nothing to "believe"! Evolution is a fact, as much as the fact that water flows downhill. Inconceivable! I just kept saying, "Wow." I could think of NOTHING else to say. Wow. I had to leave. My brain couldn't even grasp the concepts that this other brain "knew" to be true. Wow. I still can't think of anything to say. I believe in God. My own conception of God, certainly, but a higher power nonetheless. To me, the bible is a collection of stories meant to interpret the world around us, meant to guide us morally through life. Of course the bible mentions nothing about evolution! When the bible was written the earth was flat and the sun revolved around it! Wow. I believe in God, the father (or mother!), the almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen. But do I believe that God created the earth and everything on it in 7 days? Do I believe that God said, Poof! and created humans? Do I believe that God created woman from Adam's Rib? Hell no! How could I? I don't profess to know what is true, or what is right. If I knew it all, I think I'd be dead. I search relentlessly for truer truths when it comes to life and God and purpose. I can't imagine having such blind faith as to say the bible was literally written by God and that every word of it is true. I was told last night by this "friend" that I have an evil spirit that prevents me from believing the bible, and that if I'm not "for" God then I'm against him. Then this person, whom I believed before last night to be a very good friend, told me he never wanted to speak with me again. Does it say to do that in the bible? I think he truly believes I'm possessed by Satan. Poor chap. I don't think God wants you to cut people out of your life who have different beliefs than you. And I think God wants us to search for even greater truths, God wants us to have science, because when you get even as far as we've gotten with all of it, we still can't explain the fundamental elements that hold us together, or that create life. We still, as far as we've EVOLVED, can't explain everything. God wants us to have this knowledge. As much as possible, or we wouldn't be creatures who search for knowledge. How can anyone believe that knowledge is evil? Wow. I'm still at a loss for words.
Is it live, or is it Memorex? The funny thing about wisdom is that the more you have, the less you know. I used to believe life was about experience, learning, acquisition of knowledge. I might still believe that--I'll let you know later (see last post). So that's how I've lived my life. Tried to learn as much as possible. Tried to experience everything I can. Good, bad, really bad... all of it the same. Equally important, equally vital to my quest on planet earth. Quest. That's a good way to put it. A quest for what exactly? I've been a thinker for as long as I can remember. Only now, I've made a discovery. In studying everything I can get my stubby little hands on; in challenging people with my own form of the Socratic dialectic; in microscopically examining the world's religions; I've only discovered one thing: I don't know shit. That's right. I said it. I don't know shit. Crazy. It seems the more knowledge you attain, the farther you get from any answers. Perhaps the answers are so simple, so insignificant, so intrinsically woven into our daily life that our feeble little minds can't wrap themselves around the concepts. There must be more than this, your brain constantly tells you. What if there isn't anything more? What if this is all there is, what if the answers are something we wouldn't believe if God herself came down and shouted it in our ears? And, what if that's perfectly okay? Maybe we've been spending all of our precious time and energy looking for something that doesn't really matter. Maybe the journey really is the most important part. And everything else is obsolete. But then again, I don't know shit.
Paradigm Shifting Loss of meaning. When everything you've held to be true is suddenly brought into a new light. That's what I'm experiencing now. I thought I had it all figured out. God, life, my purpose, reality... I thought I had all the answers. But, obviously, the wise man knows what he does not know. I was a fool. The archaeology class I took last year destroyed my ideas of the evolution of the soul as independent from the body. The lovely "mind-body problem." How could it be possible for our bodies to evolve, as they clearly have and do, and our minds to evolve, as it appears they have done, independent of each other? Not possible, right? Logic clearly gives into this reality. So, are there no "old souls" or are we old, but simply by-products of the evolution of the brain? The philosophy class I took this semester has made things even more confusing for me. If I try to synthesize my former beliefs with these new facts and theories, I come up with something like this: God is energy. Energy is God. The "force" that people refer to when they speak of God, a Higher Power, the Universe, the Force, the Matrix... it's all energy. Oh yes, it exists. It has seemingly always existed and will theoretically always exist. It is the nature of energy to exist. We have Newtonian physics to back this up. But then of course we have quantum mechanics, which says that this shit only works if things are big and slow. In the world of the very small and very fast, none of that shit necessarily holds true. Think about that. Sometimes it's true and sometimes it isn't. Huh? Quantum mechanics tells us that, perhaps, every possibility actually exists, until, some melding of space and time chooses what is "real". For example, there's a cat in a box. The box is closed; you can't see or hear anything inside it. Is the cat alive or dead? You won't know until you open the box. Quantum mechanics says that the cat is alive AND dead at the same time. It's not until you open the box that one or the other must present itself and take over for you to perceive. Another example. A tree falls in the forest and there is no one around to hear it. Did it make a sound? Did it really fall? Was there even a tree? Bingo. God's very nature. Don't question, just trust. All right... on to the next paradigm. So, if God is energy, and energy is God, then the world is probably more like the Buddhist line of thought than the Western metaphysical theories. We're all interconnected; there is no separate "I". We're all God, and God is us. Without us, there would be no god, and without god, there would be no us. New insight into the biology of the brain (thanks to good ol' western science) tells us that our brains operate a half-second before we're aware of what we're doing. Put more simply: we operate on a half-second delay. Much like radio broadcasts are on a 7-second delay to edit out bad words before they're aired, our brain edits our reality for us. Maybe we'll be allowed to know about it; maybe we won't. Our brain has a half-second to decide. Which, for a mega-super-processing center like our brain, is a long time and a lot of data. Wow. That explains why you get such a blister when you touch the heating element on the stove or something. You think it just happened; really you sat there with your damned hand on the thing for a half-second before you were even conscious that your hand was there. Nice. Brains have processing "modules". There are many different modules carrying on many different tasks simultaneously. No one module seems to be in charge. Think about the implications of this for a minute. If you think about the modules as members of a team, then the team plays games together. The games are played well and won in the hopes of winning the championship. The championship itself, many neurobiologists believe, is akin to consciousness--to the soul. It is the product of winning and losing certain games, but without the games, the teams, or the individual players, it is nothing. What would your soul be without your body? What would your body be without your brain? How is your soul connected to your brain? Are we truly just energy? And, if we are energy, if we are all one as energy is one, if there is no separateness except in our experience, then here's the next logical question: Does energy want to exist in a form? Does energy want to be magma at the core of the earth, gravity to hold the planet together, rocks, mountains, trees, water, animals, viruses, insects? Why does it do this? Which, I'll be damned, brings us right back to the same questions which began philosophy. What is God, what is life, what is real? What am I? Why am I here? I think too much. I need something else to do.
The Ramblings of a Madwoman I am mad. Or am I? People seem to think I'm nuts. Lots of people. That I'm absolutely insane. I'm out of touch with reality. I'm on a different level. A different level of what? Is it consciousness that they're referring to? Existence? Reality? Who presumes to define reality? That's the real question, isn't it? What's real? The question philosophers have been struggling to answer for aeons. What is the definition of reality? Isn't that question exactly the same as "what is the sound of one hand clapping"? It's a question without a clear answer. Is the definition of reality "being in the present"? Is it a thought or a feeling; imaginary or tangible? Why do we love television so much? When you watch the season finale of your favorite show, pay attention to your emotions. Sadness, happiness, fear, relief, betrayal, disgust, annoyance--these are but some of the feelings you might experience during that hour-long (or two hours, if your show is on ABC) episode. Of course you feel these things. You "know and love" the characters. They're people we identify with, and events we can sympathize with. My body feels exactly as if I were there experiencing it with them. I laugh, I cry, I get angry. And then, at the end, I subconsciously tell myself it wasn't real, and go out to the kitchen for a late-night snack. So similar to what takes place every morning when I wake up. "It wasn't real, it was just a dream. Go back to sleep." But for that moment, it sure seemed real. Is this experience beneficial to me in some way? If it is true that in order to know happiness, we must know despair, then yes, I suppose this was beneficial. The harder I cry at movies and television shows, the happier I'll be at work tomorrow. Hmm. Twisted logic. Look at young children. "So naive," we say. "So trusting." "So innocent." And yet, they are so happy. "Oh, to be that young again and not have any worries." If true happiness is something we experienced as children, then why do we believe that pain will make us happier in the long run? And, if we don't believe that, then why do we watch television that makes us sad and angry? No news is good news, and yet we all watch the bad news at 6:00pm, with details at 11. What a bizzare world in which we live. Yet, I'm crazy. Maybe I'm one of the only ones who actually are in touch with reality. Just a thought.
Listen, my children, and you shall hear... Heedfulness: the path to the Deathless. Heedlessness: the path to death. The heedful do not die. The heedless are as if already dead. Knowing this as a true distinction, those wise in heedfulness rejoice in heedfulness, enjoying the range of the noble ones. The enlightened, constantly absorbed in jhana, persevering, firm in their effort: they touch Unbinding, the unexcelled safety from bondage. -Dhammapada, 21-23, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu This is what the noble ones have taught me: Wherever you go, there you are. You can't judge a book by its cover. If you put all the world's troubles into a hat, you'll be happy to draw your own. If you lie with the dogs, you'll wake up with the fleas. If it wasn't for the last minute, nothing would get done. When there is no wind, you must row. If you believe in something, no proof is necessary; if you don't, none is sufficient. The toughest part of getting to the top of the ladder is getting through the crowd at the bottom. The principal mark of genius is not perfection, but originality. Whatever your lot in life, build something on it. The heart is wiser than the intellect. To be loved is to live forever in someone's heart. Seldom does an individual exceed his own expectations. Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional. Anyone who angers you conquers you. Adversity is the springboard to great achievement. Everyone lives downstream from someone else. The beginning is the most important part of the work. Contemplation is the parent of wisdom. Never ask a question unless the answer makes a difference. Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels so good. Defeat isn't bitter if you don't swallow it. To get nowhere, follow the crowd. When friends offer to help, let them. The most effective answer to an insult is silence. Teachers open the door, but you enter by yourself. The harder you fall, the higher you bounce. The way to learn is to begin. If the world seems cold to you, kindle fires to warm it. Don't ever let your problems become an excuse. The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. Trying is the first step towards failure. If you win the rat race, you're still a rat. Dawn is when people of reason go to bed. To those who can dream there is no such place as faraway. We make a living by what we get; we make a life by what we give. It isn't the mountains ahead that wear you out, it's the grain of sand in your shoe. Nothing is impossible for the man who will not listen to reason. There will be peace when we begin to love our children more than we hate our enemies. The real measure of wealth is how much you'd be worth if you lost all your money. Time, like a snowflake, disappears while we're trying to decide what to do with it. Everyone you meet is afraid of something, loves something, and has lost something. People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it. Education is very important; school, however, is optional. The most valid excuse doesn't change your performance. We did not inherit the land from our forefathers, we are borrowing it from our children. If you fear nothing, you love nothing; if you love nothing, what joy can there be in life? Following the path of least resistance makes both rivers and men crooked. We all stumble; that's why it's a comfort to go hand-in-hand. If all my friends were to jump off a bridge, I wouldn't jump with them; I'd be at the bottom to catch them. The whole world steps aside for the man who knows where he is going. It surprises us to see a rich man economize and a poor man splurge, but that's how they got that way. Life's real failure is when you do not realize how close you were to success when you gave up. Time spent in getting even would be better spent in getting ahead. Good timber does not grow with ease; the stronger the breeze, the stronger the trees. It's not falling into the water, but lying in it, that drowns. If we always do what we've always done, then we'll always get what we've always gotten. Poverty is life near the bone, where the meat is the sweetest.
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