An individual and social experiment

We have all sorts of strange, small, arbitrary actions in everyday life. Strange scenes of pre determined social interaction, where you already know the answer to the question you’re about to be asked. “No, I don’t want a receipt, thank you”. When walking, one always walks with a purpose, one always has a destination in mind and regardless of the path they chose to take their eyes become blinkered as they strive towards their goal. We impose boundaries upon ourselves by creating a path from A to B which is a perfectly straight road, no detours, no twists or turns along the way. Are we so encompassed in fear that we dare not stray from the path we create and look into the infinite number of potential experiences that await us?

This life is ours alone, each alone, each individual. We have the ability to make it whatever we want, not only can we act physically but we can alter our perceptions as well. We can bend reality, whatever that is, on both the physical and mental plane. We’re God’s fucking children, and do you know what that makes us? God! Consequently we’re terrified, we’re seriously scared witless. So we construct safe little communities, friendship groups, networks of acquaintances. All made of a stockpile of people we deem to be good because they don’t judge us. I ask myself, should I really be making relationships based on other people’s judgment, or lack thereof? If I’m really happy in myself, living the life that I know I want to live, then why should the judgement of others, good or bad, be a factor in my life at all? That’s just the problem, I don’t know what I want my life to be and in the absence of this knowledge I’m unhappy. So if I don’t know what I want to change my life to, why should I change my life at all?

The irony comes with this; the only way to figure out what you want out of life, is to try it out. The reason we don’t know is because we’re so scared of everything around us. Ask yourself, out of everything in the universe what do I have knowledge about? What topics does my wisdom cover? If the universe is infinite then your answer will be closer to nothing then it will be to something. And amongst that tiny slither of knowledge you do have, how much of it is actual real truth? “Well nothing of course! Objective truth is impossible.” Then what of subjective truth, of all the wisdom you spout how much of it is your own? How much is grounded in real personal experience, where you were fully encapsulated in a moment, with no concept of past or presence, just complete awareness of the now? I know, for me at least, not much, not much at all.

I love to think about “being in the moment”, because I think that’s the only truth we’ll ever have. Those real, intense moments, where everything happens at a thousand miles per hour but when you tell the story it replays in slow motion. I think this is the greatest truth in life, listen to anyone tell a story about their own life, is it one of those stories where you look into their eyes and regardless of what their saying you can see that, for them, it’s one hundred percent true? These are the real moments in life.

In the film Waking Life, it’s called “the holy moment” and it’s something we should constantly be looking for. It’s something we should actively seek out and constantly try and be aware of, whilst at the same time being lost within it. Like really good sex. How do we find a holy moment? By letting ourselves drift off the path a little bit; speak to that stranger on the train, express a real opinion of yours to someone, stand up for yourself and speak up, throw yourself out into the immensely diverse aether that pervades this planet and wallow in it like a damn hippo.

I’m gonna try and dedicate some time to holy moments. To moments of simple but real interaction with all that’s around me. I will enjoy the tiniest pleasures of nature and find the most real of human emotions in the most abstract of places. What more is a movie scene then a moment filtered through the perception of profundity. Your whole life is profound if you choose to see it as such. And I figure that here, I will write about them. Here I will type up, document and digitise my own holy moments. More for fun than anything else, not to set an example, this is just an experiment. A way of getting myself to think about being lost in the moment, to push myself outside of my comfort zone and fulfil the tiniest bit of the lingering potential that haunts my waking life.

...Merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

We so often talk of “reality” as if the word has a true definition. We use “reality” to refer to the “real” world within which we “exist”. The word “reality” in itself has such a limiting effect. By stating that certain things are real, we must therefore be stating that there are certain things that are not real. The question then is how do we define real? Is it simply the physical world, if so then what about thoughts, surely they are real, what about language? Emotion to a human being is the most real thing of all and to many it is what makes us really human, yet what is emotion? Partly a chemical reaction, partly an electrical impulse to the brain, but beyond that what is it? A state of mind perhaps, a temporary sway from a neutral state of being? Is a mere feeling real? The ultimate problem with discussing reality is that for us to be able to define what is real and what is not real we must have criteria. No such criteria exists.

Let us abandon this notion of “reality” where some things are real and some things simply aren’t. Instead let us assume that everything simply is. That is the problem with the physical realm we constantly feel the need to define, to expand, to know more and more as if we will one day know everything. We spend our whole lives trying to discover what is and what is not, what is true, false, real, good, bad, right and wrong. We have been lead into the illusion that knowledge, thought and information is finite. That it can be captured and known.

In the physical world we are contained in what we can do by the laws of physics. I for instance, cannot fly as I do not have the physical appendages required to successfully propel myself up into the air. However, I can dream that I’m flying, within that dream I will experience every sensation that I would imagine flying entails and I wouldn’t question how I got to be flying, nor would I think that it broke the laws of physics and was thus impossible I’d simply be thinking “Arrr hell yeah, I’m flying!”.

What we call “reality” is a finite existence. It is governed by certain physical laws and well established precedents upon which our perception of the world is derived from. Because the realm in which we dwell physically is finite we assume that our existence is finite. We therefore behave like this is the case. We pursue knowledge under the illusion that we can fully “know” something. We set goals to attain and drive towards. We regiment ourselves in a very fixed route through space and time. Space and time which we see as real, due to it’s effect on our physical being.

However I contest that our true nature and our true existence is infinite. The mind when allowed freedom to roam and is not shackled by the finite perceptions that the physical world creates does extraordinary things. In our dreams we are free to do anything. What’s more, is that in our dreams we never question the origin or the purpose of the moment we find ourselves in. Within that moment everything that happens is what is real, we don’t define what happens upon our perception of what is real.

Meditation is the art of not thinking. It is said that the ultimate goal of meditation is to be at one with everything around you. This, to me at least, does not me physically. It means being part of the stream of ideas and thoughts that surrounds us. We don’t need to consciously think about them because they are innate, they are us, pure raw streams of consciousness. The true nature of infinity is not endless space, it is an ocean of consciousness that we float in, where there is no right and wrong, no judgement, just experience. Just the one ever changing, forever evolving moment. Dreams and meditation are simply a way of tapping into the greater infinity we are a part of.

Nothing is fixed. Nothing is “real”. Moments of peace, moments of love, moments of beauty are simply us tapping into the infinite. Individuals are all part of the one infinite consciousness. Dreams are us tapping into this stream, within this infinite realm anything and indeed everything is possible, our dreams could take us into someone else’s world, for the time we dream we could create new worlds, breed new civilisations and destroy galaxies. We are but character’s in a play within a play within a play.

So what about the physical world? What about the reality we are part of everyday. It’s all very well thinking these things and coming to these conclusions but what does it actually mean. It means that the world literally is just a stage, we are the performers, artists with unlimited creative potential and we can put on one hell of a show.

We were never in Kansas.

And it wasn’t that I felt it
It was that I was
Her breath was my skin
I was her exhalation
With every breath she took she exuded life after
As if dragging slowly on a cigarette and puffing out smoke
The words she spun and spluttered choked upon and spoke
Jaggered pieces of incomplete puzzles
Being whispered into the forget of the night’s air where
Profound ideas escape as mere passing comments
I stand facing her like a mirror of
She keeps warming the glass and fingering out letters
Form eludes me
Because she finds incoherence more exciting
A limbo between creation and imagination
Quotes and jokes and lies and lines
Anecdotes drinks sex and aquaintence
I am the best book she’s ever read
Just no narrative

I am only real in eyelids
Her vision makes me disappear
Platoons of me conjured over long evenings
The first ball of clay moulded at dusk and
So it rolls on
We all retreat by day break
With dawn return sensibilities
The wretched responsibilities that quell the quill
Sometimes I question my sentience
As if it was mine to ask
Am I the imagined false image or am I the truth come to pass

Sometimes we lay in bed together
She grazes her fingers up my back
Every night I sleep inside her
She stays tapping at the window pane
Like a child in the snow looking for a family
She rubs my lamp when she cannot sleep
And grants her own wishes
She stares for hours at stars and the moon
But only has eyes for me
Standing, waving, howling, screaming, marching, parading, pervading, lying, crying, persuading, debating, bartering, betraying, delaying, ranting, bathing, decaying, musing, alluding, folding, burning, freezing, raving standing in front of her
I need convince her of nothing
A flick of the air with her tongue
Spirals me into a human shape
I stare at her as I take my leave