Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Blind Spots

Everyone has blind spots, ignorance, naïveté, flaws. There isn't a single person on the earth who is truly and fully immune to such things, though some do seem more prone, and others resistant. But the fact is that there is no perfect individual in existence. And where I believe most people fail the greatest is in their blind spots. Even the smartest, wisest, most perceptive individual has a blind spot here and there. They may be small, but they're there, and when something falls within that blind spot, it can have disastrous results. I must admit that I have some pretty significantly large blind spots in a number of areas. Unlike with a car, you can't just trade in your very being for a new one. You can't just miraculously remove all of your blind spots. Just like with a car, however, you can make adjustments, and learn techniques, for avoiding many of the potential detrimental effects your blind spots can have. Sadly, I also must admit that I fail horribly in that area as well. What can I say? - I look but I don't see. I search but I don't find. This largely applies to my relations to... er... the rest of humanity. I'm somewhat of a sponge for academia, and yet so terribly clueless with things in the natural world.

For me, academics - particularly those which I control, and which are not dictated by some sort of institution or other individuals - is like a portal into another world. It's a world where logic lies in an endless ocean of abstraction. Clean lines and solid colors can live harmoniously alongside blurred and indefinable shapes and cornucopias of intermingling colors. The accumulation of knowledge flows eternally through and with the riptides of abstraction, forming thoughts, ideas, rationales, concepts, and a myriad found only in the mind and soul, but reflected in the world, if not reflecting the world. I can calm down and focus in the meadow of numbers and mathematics, or become exhilarated in the deep libraries of records. Records can be of all things, meaningful and seemingly meaningless, often merely and so greatly a reflection of the recorder. And while I can get lost in this wonderful world of knowledge, quite benign to those around me, others exploit and darken this world. Knowledge can be a dangerous thing in the wrong hands. Even mathematics can be dangerous and powerful. Most academics have relatively benign, if not beneficent, intents, but time and time again their work and abilities are exploited, and my world of solitude poisoned.

But no matter how much knowledge I accumulate, my life never becomes more fulfilling. It's like having enormous wealth with nothing to spend it on, or copious amounts of food that you're unable to eat. It's there, craving a use and a purpose, yet such uses are lost on me. No amount of literature could ever truly teach me how to live. I cannot read my way into a cure for my social awkwardness and anxiety, nor my variable moods, nor my difficulty with interpersonal relationships, nor my inability to lead a truly productive life. No amount of words and carefully researched and studied essays and articles could ever teach me wisdom. Without wisdom, knowledge is useless, and if knowledge cannot bring about wisdom, what does? Simple: experience. Life experiences, spiritual cultivation, faith - of most all sorts, and... failure. In three particular years of my life, I gained perhaps a decade's worth of life experience, I practice spiritual cultivation most every day, and I have faith in a number of things - even if it wavers from time to time. But, of all of these, I think that the most important is failure. I believe that nothing teaches wisdom greater than experiencing failure. Even then, some just don't have what it takes to gain... much of anything from their failures, while others may not have had the chance.

While failure is a very vague, and poorly defined, event for most people, it can often be defined by the very individual who experiences it in some way. If nothing else, it is simply defined as failure. Knowing that you have failed, with or without an actual distinct definition, and accepting that failure is the greatest step one can take to gain wisdom. So... why have I failed so miserably at experiencing failure? I don't expose myself to it - or rather, I avoid it at all costs. How do I do this? I do nothing. How can you fail when you leave nothing to fail at? If you don't even try to begin something, how can you lose at it? It's like standing on the sidelines of a race, right? You can't possibly lose (or win) if you don't even participate.... Or so my rationale goes. Funny thing is that it's a rationale with little rationality.

I've been called wise, an old soul, intelligent, bright, and so on and so forth. I've abhorred such compliments for such a long time with little explanation as to why. Well, I've come to believe in more recent years that my abhorrence was the result of being aware of my many, large blind spots. Perhaps in the back of my mind I reasoned with myself, "How can you be such things if you don't seem to have anything to show for it?" I often tried to convince myself that I only received such compliments because the other people didn't truly understand the nonsense that I spewed, and assumed it to be something smart. Looking back, that's quite an arrogant, lowly view I had of others, even if it was mostly just a delusion rooted in my own deep seated self-consciousness and low self-esteem. I not only often neglected - neglect - myself, but I also constantly bully and criticise myself. I dismiss or erroneously try to refute my own self worth. I see myself in relation to the rest of the universe and see a tiny, negligible speck that, in the grand scheme of things, is barely recognisable as existent. But the most painful part is that I am just so self-aware that, even when I am so hopelessly delusional, I always know deep down that I'm delusional, erroneous, paranoid, overly self-conscious, overly critical of myself, and so on. Knowing your flaws can be both one of the most excruciating things you could ever experience, as well as one of the most necessary things in all of your existence. Unlike most people who are hopelessly swallowed up by their flaws, I don't have a weak foundation with which my house is doomed to fail upon, but rather... I have an astonishingly strong foundation with a hopelessly poorly built house that's doomed to failure simply because it is. I have the foundation... now I just need to figure out how to build a better house.

Over 99% of the time, I lack anything near a bad intention, and yet probably over half the time, my blind spots cause structural weaknesses that can be outwardly perceived as bad intention. I suppose you could say that I simply lack finesse... Sure, I may have a way with words from time to time when it's written, but put me in front of another human, and one out of every two times, I'm quite certain I will slip up and cause some horribly unnecessary, and totally avoidable, backlash. It can cause the perception that, no matter what I do, it will likely end in failure... Even my avoidance of failure is fundamentally a failure in and of itself. But perhaps the failure to fail is an inadequate source to produce true wisdom. Or perhaps I am more consciously aware than subconsciously. Honestly, the subconscious mind - in my experiences - is much more influential for learning. Most people say that their failures lie in the cognitive difficulty of turning subconscious thought into conscious thought, but it's a bit muddled there. If your subconscious teaches you a bad thing, and you are not consciously aware of it, then you cannot hope to change that negative thing. However, if you are conscious of something, but it's not nestled deeply into your subconscious mind, then you cannot possibly hope to learn it. The subconscious mind teaches, but the conscious mind sheds light on what is to be taught, and acts as a doorway. And, now that I think of it, I am currently undergoing the very processes described above, as I try to reprogramme my mind to the very core, as well as teach it new, good things (by embedding the knowledge and wisdom into the subconscious mind via the conscious mind.) A harder feat than it sounds, and I think it already sounds quite difficult.

Blind spots... We all have them.

Friday, June 14, 2013

Essay of Ramblings: A Lone Nightshade

[Disclaimer: This is a 3,028 word essay of philosophical rambling.]


    I read article upon article, individual word after individual word, taking it all in like some mad supercomputer. I was almost subconsciously absorbing it while merely consciously knowing that it was absorbed. And as it become absorbed, images persistently produced in my mind of some sort of liquid, slimy, grey creature made out of not cells, or even a single cell, but the tar and muck and grime that it squirmed in. It was almost horrifying, and yet so stunningly captivating. It moaned without a sound, the melting expressions evident yet constantly morphing and sliding away. It was the culmination of centuries, millennia, of strife and bickering, of suffering and pain, of ennui and anger. It was the culmination of the legacy humans would most likely leave behind, masking all the greatness. It was disappointment.
    Certainly, it is easier to make judgments and speculations from atop the hill, while looking down upon the battle from afar. Certainly. And I believe it difficult to say whether it is more honorable to make such speculations and judgments at such a vantage point, than to make judgements and actions while in the thick of it. Hindsight may be 20/20, as the saying goes, but why is it time and time again that mistakes are merely pointed out, but seldom, if ever, learned from? Another adage goes that history repeats itself, which, while not conflicting with 'hindsight is 20/20,' certainly suggests that there is some inevitable, yet logically avoidable error in human judgment as a whole. And a few may learn from the mistakes, and may in fact try to create change and enlightenment, or simply avoid recreating the mistakes of the past themselves, but humanity as a whole has some fundamental flaw.
    That moaning and groaning, slime-borne, mute creature of humanly Hell personified (which is quite redundant, yet seemingly necessary), in my mind, was spawned of the spats back and forth between people of such similar minds fighting over one of many details. "It is a very important, central, pivotal detail," one might say, but it doesn't change the fact that the bickering and fighting and, many a time, slaughtering was beyond unnecessary. How many souls faded from the early by the hands of another over a detail? Out of thousands of various ideals, beliefs, and concepts, one single idea could be different, and wars might be waged over it. Mental illness does not lead to outrageous reactions, to fighting and slaughter, to death and decay, to evil and darkness... Some... core, fundamental quality, nature, or susceptibility in humanity does. Some attribute it to demons or otherworldly evil spirits, some to nothing more than humans, some to free will, some to fallacies. A combination of all such things, or perhaps merely some, may be the root cause. But then I think about those individuals who best this susceptibility, this weakness, this flaw, and I wonder, 'If they can do it, why doesn't everyone?' Free will. A double-edged sword.
    Free will is an extraordinarily frequent theme in many philosophies and religions. What is free will? It is the idea that each human can act in whatever way they so choose. This certainly does not mean that they can achieve any goal that they wish, necessarily, or that things won't stop them from either committing to that action, or succeeding in carrying out the action. Surely, if a man with a knife from a hundred feet away charges at a man with a gun, there is little doubt that the man with the knife will probably be shot and possibly die before stabbing or slicing the man with the gun. But the choice to pursue the action of attempting to attack the man with the gun was completely the knife-wielding man's own, made of his own free will. He may not succeed, it may be futile and self-destructive, but it was his own choice. Many feel trapped or chained, while forgetting that, inevitably, no external restriction can truly take away their free will. They can try to get out of the chains, out of their prison, whether or not they will succeed.
    Time and time again, man is witness to man's demonstration of free will where free will may even seem unlikely. A convict tunnelling his way out of prison, a militia thrusting themselves at their enemy in certain doom, a pilot travelling some hundreds of miles across vast, isolated mountains from his crashed plain in hopes of finding rescue. In the face of hopelessness, man either breaks from delusions of having no options, no cards left to play, or they embrace their free will and take actions, however unlikely the goal behind that action is. And free will is obviously, and not-so-judiciously or minimalistically, utilised in lesser matters that may very well escalate to vastly consuming matters. Everyone has opinions, beliefs, thoughts, ideas, perceptions, views, and so on, but free will is the catalyst behind acting upon those things. Often, they are thought to be our identity, or they are argued (perhaps even with some ferocity), that it is not our identity when others believe it is. And whether or not it is our identity is irrelevant to me, at this time, if nothing else. The fact is that everyone with a conscious mind has them, and often enough, individuals take actions in regards to them.
    And this is not to say that one should or should not take actions fuelled by beliefs and whatnot, some beliefs even dictating that one should take action regarding the vary belief that is dictated. I am not about to argue for or against any personal beliefs, and dogmas or philosophies, any major concept in human history. I myself have never utterly agreed or meshed with any one set of beliefs, abstractions, et al., nor have I utterly disagreed with many, or most, that I have come across. An image comes to mind of the modern sniper, proficient in becoming one with his environs, clad in a ghillie suit, crawling slowly and steadily, while occasionally attaching and assimilating foliage from his surroundings into his ghillie suit. By taking the actual flora and making it a part of his camouflage, his is able to seamlessly blend and become one with the nature around him. Now, I'm not meaning to imply that I simply take fragments of everyone's ideas and beliefs, assimilate them with my own, and then blend in with what of humanity surrounds me. While I may be more of an observer than an agent, while I may prefer to generally stay back than jump up front, while I generally avoid attention than strive and seek it, while I'm generally introverted and not extroverted... I do not simply assimilate to blend in. Rather, most who have met me find it quite hard to imagine me 'blending in.' While I may not pop out to the masses, I am also starkly different from those who surround me (sometimes creating the very strife, the avoidable mistakes that I've been describing, wrought from incongruent views and thoughts, or misconceptions.)
    If I were to try to describe myself in relation to my surroundings, to the world around me, while trying to avoid self-centric, narcissistic, self-praising, or any other such or similar adjectives, words, I would say that I am like a lone nightshade in a field of lilies, dandelions, roses, petunias, violets, and most any other flower imaginable, sans any other nightshades. Out of a sea of flowers, some similar, many different, some grotesque or appalling, others wondrous and enchanting, I am the lone nightshade. So, while none or few of the other flowers necessarily blend in, or are completely unique, while there is a myriad of colors, shapes, and sizes, I still remain the lone nightshade. Perhaps there is a lone lotus, as well, who may or may not stand out, who may or may not look out of place, but that does not change that I am a lone nightshade. And yet, do you know what is interesting? I repeatedly point out what is different about me, as many people do about themselves, or their beliefs, or whatever else goes on in their head. People want to be different somehow, to stand out, or they want to point out the contrast in an attempt to make others assimilate to them. But I don't just want to point out my differences in this metaphor. You see, everything I described was a flower. Everything I described was flora. Everything I described took sunlight and converted it into sugars and other usable resources through photosynthesis. Everything I described has relatively similar genetic material and structures. And something interesting is that I can list more similarities than differences about my metaphor of being a lone type of flower in a field of other flowers, and yet any two humans are more similar to one another than any of the various flowers in the field. Sans organisms that utilise asexual reproduction, humans are perhaps some of the most genetically similar creatures.
    Race amongst humans doesn't exist, yet we wage war over it. For all of the seemingly radical ideas that come from the many human minds out there, and throughout the millennia, there really isn't a whole lot of true uniqueness, novelty, or extreme in any one idea, relative to the ideas of many others now and past. In away, ideas are simply one more brick, one more plank of wood, building upon previous ideas, and creating a singular structure. What that structure is or will be... I could never tell you. I have not created a single original thought in my life, but I certainly have taken many thoughts and ideas from others, I have learned from experience, from history, from texts and others, I have accumulated knowledge and wisdom, and the very specific combination of those non-unique thoughts and ideas is what is unique. No one has experienced exactly what I have, no one has learned the exact combination of things I have, no one has thought the exact lifelong string of thoughts that I have. It is not any one thing that makes anything or anyone unique. No atom, no molecule, no organelle, no cell, no organ, no gene is truly unique, and yet every individual ever born to the world is unique through their individual wholeness.
    With so little, yet so much, uniqueness, it becomes harder and harder to grasp what we fight about with one another. It becomes harder to even comprehend war, strife, and struggles between other human beings. Sure, if some sci-fi movie came true where some previously unknown alien race chooses our very own planet to exterminate of all native species, it would make perfect sense to war against them. There are also many movies, stories, games, and even religions centred around 'battling demons' or 'destroying evil.' It dehumanises these concepts, and makes them something totally different. And yet, humans see these things, compare one remotely similar quality to another human being, and decide, "Well, you must be evil, so you must die!" What kind of rationale is that? Or the idea of killing all who don't believe in your faith? Say someone - 'Person A' - believes that someone else - 'Person B' - is going to Hell because Person B believes something different, even if only infinitesimally different, does that give Person A any - ANY - right to kill or harm Person B? If Person B suddenly went on a murderous rampage, then sure, if you can't detain and/or get them under control, Person B probably needs to die. They did, after all, decide to go on a murderous rampage. But if Person B wasn't causing significant harm to the people and world around them, especially if Person B wasn't causing any more harm than Person A, in what way could Person A ever have the right to kill Person B because a thought in their head is different?
    The amalgam of all negative emotions, of all darkness and - perhaps - evil, of all the wrongs in the world and all of the lives cut down unjustly... in my mind creates this screaming, moaning, groaning, crying, voiceless slime that constantly melts and slops and reforms and morphs... It gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it seems impossible to see anything else. How can one not see the accumulation of such torment and gloom over the entire course of human existence?
     
    And yet, life would not be life without it. Why? I can't answer. I don't have the answer. No one does. But, even then, I accept it, however reluctantly. Time is an illusion, or so appears to be the more likely of two unknowable things in my mind. Everything has happened, and yet, at this moment, we have not experienced it all. We are finite, infinite, singular and numerous, like a point that is a line, or a line that is a point. A line, a ray, a segment... Time is all at once. Or so goes the Einsteinian belief.
    I have faith, beliefs, opinions, ideas, thoughts, and yet accept many of the philosophies of the so-called 'Sceptics,' those who followed philosophical scepticism. But I do not simply reject what I don't know; I just know that I don't know anything with utter certainty. Certainty seems to be a very human concept, anyway. All words are human concepts. And certainty does contradict faith, and so how can one have faith with utmost certainty? Thusly, why would a philosophical sceptic reject faith if faith requires uncertainty - the inability to know? If such a sceptic were to every do anything in their lives, to simply not be dead, would they not have to have faith that whatever they do will result in something that they intended, whether or not it does? We invented words like certainty, absolute, and definite, and yet we cannot say with certainty that there is certainty? It is merely an estimated meaning of an estimated thought. But language is constantly used to convey logic, when language is at its very core not logical, but abstract. Creating a logical language, as many have tried to do, is then a functional contradiction. And then it's hard to understand the truest meaning of contradiction, when contradictions often combine to create the world as we know it.
    I know much, and yet I know essentially nothing, conceptually. Reality is a matter of perspective, as is existence, as are beliefs and experiences, and so on. Your brain reacts the same to a dream as to real-life stimuli. Randomly firing neurons can create hallucinations that are no different from reality aside from the fact that no one else can corroborate it happens, and yet we humans often experience things that others can't corroborate that, as far as we can possibly know, were in fact real sensations. But why is one sensation real and another not? We have a name for what is apparently unreal, a hallucination, and we can often explain its existence. So these hallucinations that are apparently not real are therefore a real phenomenon.
    These mind benders that we often get caught up on... They truly prove how little we do and can know. And yet, if we can't know, how can we prove it? Contradictions, paradoxes. And we get caught up on something like skin pigmentation, bone structure...? If we were all blind, I doubt skin color would've ever even been conceptualised. If we were blind and couldn't feel, I doubt that bone structure would've been thought of. Take away the senses, where we get our information, then we take away reality. And if dreams are processed the same as 'reality,' then at any time, we could be in a dream and think it was reality. Oh, so rarely does an individual truly realise they're in a dream before they wake up. And heard of dreams within a dream? There have even been ideas that dreams are our souls essentially experiencing another life, making the life we are 'awake' in, the equivalent to a dream in the other life, or what we call a 'dream.' And some people lose touch with reality to the point of just wishing to wake up from the dream, while they are already awake. Some think that you can wake up through suicide, but for all we know, that person just killed themselves and that's the end of that. But the idea that if you die in a dream, then you die in real life, means that trying to wake up by killing yourself doesn't wake you up, but simply kills you no matter if you were actually dreaming or not.
    The fickleness of reality, of thoughts, ideas... of everything. Makes bickering between humans, even wars, seem so... so... idiotic. And yet the inevitability of idiocy, of the bickering, of the wars, makes the bickering and the wars necessary. If one tries to destroy a people, in order to avoid that destruction, one must destroy the destroyer. It was done in World War II, the Allies versus the Axis. Hitler wished to destroy peoples, to dominate, to dictate, and so it created the necessity of warring against him. Conflict is always unnecessary before the conflict, but almost always necessary after. As long as there are initiators, there will be people trying to end what they initiated, for better or worse.
     
    I just want to live my life... I just want to... make my strife and struggles, my empathy and compassion, the best parts of me in the worst, mean something. And everyone wants to mean something, somehow. Free will... The double-edged sword. Or perhaps more like a rose... with so many thorns. If you can manage to enjoy the rose without getting pricked by its thorns, it'll have some benefit. But if you aren't careful, if you don't handle the rose correctly, you most certainly will get pricked, and if you continue to misuse it, continue to handle it correctly, you just might get entangled in the bush like a bunch of barbed wire. Such a beautiful, delicate thing... with such harmful potential.
    Free will...

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

A Bolt Loose, or a Wire Frayed

I wake up in darkness. I think to myself, "I fell asleep well enough before noon; why's it so dark?" I check my phone beside my bed to see what time it is. 22:16. How'd it get that late? I want to get up, but I struggle. I feel paralysed and my body just wants to lull me back to sleep, but my restless mind keeps me... somewhat awake. I think. Think about all sorts of trivial things, and I think about why I can't get up, why it's so dark, why I slept so long... Why? Finally, I muster up the willpower to reach for my phone again. 22:45. I breathe deeply, somewhat like a sigh, but mostly just to get oxygen to my brain. After more paralysis, more cyclical thoughts, more mental agitation, I finally build up the willpower to sit up. I reach for my phone again. 23:01. Okay, time to get out of bed. Finally, I slide out of my bed, seeming as though I hadn't used any of my limbs in decades, like I had been in a coma, and I walk out. The hallway is mostly dark, but some light shines down from the stairway to the main floor.

I begin to walk up the stairs, and my eyes strain painfully to adjust to the difference in lighting. After a few moments of pain, my eyes are adjusted. By the time I get up the stairs, I suddenly get this... wellspring of energy. I start fast-walking throughout the house, doing little things that suddenly pop into my mind. I need to get that blanket and those pillows. I forgot the water bottle. I need a tissue. I want some bubble gum. How about some TV? Oh, gotta take my pills, first. Is it really Tuesday? I'll wait until my mom gets back to ask her what day it is. I'll get back to TV. Oh, how about I pet the cat? I'll return to the TV, again. That spanned about five minutes. I literally walked to opposite ends of the house repeatedly doing miniscule, almost purposeless things. I would get something from one side of the house, then forget that I wanted to do something on the other side of the house. I would then remember I wanted to get something from another corner of the house. Up, down, side to side... My heart was racing, my head was light, I felt like a feather.

After hours of watching television, I eat, I reply to messages online, et cetera, et cetera. 06:59. The time right now. 9 hours seemed like thirty minutes. But I didn't lose time; I was fully aware of everything, if not hyper-aware. My mind was flying the entire time, the gears turning so fast that it seemed like they were being stripped and losing grip, yet rotating nonetheless, even if they didn't accomplish anything by their rotations. I analysed, I pondered, and I thought deeply. I was emotionally invested even in things that didn't have a whole lot of emotion in the first place. My mind, my body, my soul were being swayed to the current of whatever was around me. I wasn't so much defined by what happened within me, but rather by what happened around me. I was clear and transparent, allowing crystal clarity into my surroundings. If anything, I was a conduit. I channelled my surroundings, my influences, and my stressors. I may have often channelled it silently, but it was channelled, nonetheless.

Now my head feels like it's wearing a stone hat. Heavy on my spine, somehow cutting off circulation to my cranium, perhaps even my brain. My eyes are heavy and burn, my heart pumps slowly and silently, my breath is fairly shallow. Where is that energy? Will I fall asleep and then wake up temporarily paralysed again? When will I wake up, or go to sleep, for that matter. I feel like something is wrong with my entire nervous system, but I have no idea what. It feels... hmm... compressed. Other times, it feels frazzled and twisted. And yet other times it feels overcharged. Or even cut off. But at no time does it feel... right. It's off, somehow, but I don't know why or what is causing it. Is it fibromyalgia? Bipolar? Anxiety? Those are my big three. Fibromyalgia seems like the most likely candidate. Dysautonomia - the dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system. The things that are supposed to run more or less without the necessity of thought or effort. You don't especially have to think about digesting your food or breathing, or pumping your own heart. These things, for the most part, typically work on their own. Certainly, some things you can influence. You can purposely control your breathing, but if you don't do it purposefully, it usually works anyway. Anxious thoughts can certainly affect all of your 'autonomic' functions, like heart rate, breathing, and - yes - even digestion. Fibromyalgia can cause or even be the partial or whole result of some form of dysautonomia. This path... feels right. I think it's this, I think dysautonomia is causing these problems, but I don't know why. I have no real connections I can tie.

A coma sounds very good right now. Not have to think about all of these things, not have to worry about staying up too long, or possibly getting nagged at for sleeping too long, either. I mean, really, who nags at a coma patient for sleeping too long? Usually the people are just happy when they finally wake up! It would be interesting to see what the doctors could discover while I was in a coma... I can't imagine what may be picked up in an MRI or CT. If someone saw what was really going on in my brain and nervous system... I wonder if I would get answers, or just more questions. Normally, I run into dead ends or more questions, usually unable to find any definitive answers. I would love to just once find answers.


A lot of frayed wires and loose bolts in this one.