Tales and Journeys

We’re living in a world where information is power, where art is commercial and everything is analyzed based on its usefulness to our mundane purposes. Here, a weary mind remembers the falseness of this and tries to look for more.

What is grass to you? What about your room? Christmas? A bottle of water?

If all your answers are equally logic and explainable, if you were able to define them all, you might want to hear me out.

Sometimes I wonder.. what if the things I treasure — fantasy and its beauty — will some day mean nothing to me? What if I will one day picture a dark, enigmatic castle in front of a magnificent stormy sky full of roaring dragons and fire.. and feel nothing? It could happen, such things do happen to many people. They lose the magic, the touch, for a while at least. Fact is, even the most wonderful image you can ever imagine, is nothing at all without the feeling that comes with it, a feeling that is not part of the image but of your mind. The magic of the image. But what the heck is the magic, and why can’t we keep it?

I asked what things mean to you now. But what was christmas like when you were a small kid? And you room, grass, even the water? It wasn’t the same, was it? For your sake, I sure hope not. Was it something different, or something more? For me, it was definitely more, much more.

Today, you look at the bottle of water, and you see and think of water and plastic, or glass. You probably also think of the company that makes the water, perhaps you think about where you bought it, where you’ve brought it, what you want it for and what you’re gonna do with it.

When you were a kid, you didn’t really know what plastic was. You didn’t know who made it, or at least you didn’t care, and if you did something with it is was only a spontaneous action. You didn’t know the definitions you know today, the words you use now. Yet, you could define that bottle of water just as well, you were in no confusion about what the thing was. How come? Because as a kid, you don’t define things with words and relations, you define them with feelings. You felt that it was a bottle. It was what a bottle meant to you. Such definitions are not at all explainable with words.

So why, why did you throw away this magic in order to define the bottle with emotionless symbols like ‘water’ and ‘plastic’? No reason to defend oneself, because we all do this for some reason. Most likely, it’s the society that teaches us to do so. And what is the human society, except a product of experience alone? What I mean by this is, we’ve built it on logic and reason, through neutral and emotionless thought. Such is an ability of our minds, but it is not something we are limited to. Hence we start our lives thinking in wholly different patterns. We do this by running on the only thing we know yet, which is instinct and subconsciousness. This, our BIOS if you like, cannot define things using the words we do not know yet, or the definitions we won’t learn in many years yet to come. The only thing it can use to make us see any difference in anything, is an infinitely advanced piano of the heart and mind, merging thousands of factors to form an extremely complex set of emotions.

That is the wonder of the human mind. But we, our own consciousnesses, cannot be aware of how this wonder works. If we are to think in our own ways, if we want to understand things and learn, we have to form our own primitive definitions based on the limited possibilities of the conscious mind. Sure, it’s a great ability to achieve such freedom, but we are blindly ignoring what we are forsaking. We leave the keys of the piano to hopelessly try and study it from a distance! It’s like you stop moving the muscles in your leg in order to use your hand to do it instead. And we do it because we thirst and thirst for knowledge and power and freedom and happiness. But we never do get the last one. And we don’t understand why. And we are forever lost because we’ve long forgotten the crime we did upon our own minds, because we’ve walked away for so long we forget we’ve moved.

Perhaps you’ve been standing still for years and years. You might have fallen into the same routine day after day, with emotionless definitions surrounding you on all sides. You know everything well now, you know all the definitions of the world, so you don’t need to think them over. It’s far too easy to fall into such a trap. Try to look around, try and remember where you have been, look for your tracks. It wasn’t always empty, dull and directionless like this, was it? Then why now? It doesn’t have to be like this, you know, it’s actually something you’ve chosen. You take everything for granted now, you know it all well, but at the same time, you don’t know anything anymore. But you can still move, never think you can’t, for then and only then, you never will.

This is why I don’t do like everybody else just because everybody else does it. This is why I analyze and search and see what’s beyond, find the whys, the meanings. This is why I want to know at all times just what I’m doing, and its consequences, and why I rarely do something new. It enables me to see before it’s too late, to know before I’ve forgotten. Sure, it’s not like noone has the same ideas, once every so often you always hear the typical ‘oh, don’t waste your youth, stay young, keep the mind of a child’ — but have you ever thought it through like this, have you ever stopped and really tried to confirm it and not just accept it as wisdom? In today’s socitety, there’s rarely any time for such. It engulfs us is what it does, eats us bit by bit if we’re not wary.

But we are all still able to define by feelings, define my magic, no matter how much we’re crippled by the ignorant ideas and attitudes of today’s society. Later definitions, conscious definitions based on relations and observations, lay piled up like a mountain in our minds and heart, but we haven’t lost the old ability. It just takes a little shift of mind, a change of attitude. Don’t look at surfaces, don’t think with words. What do things really mean to you? Never look at objects, look into them, look beyond them and search. Forget their words, forget what they are, define them with feelings and they shall mean feelings to you.

I’m not saying you can go pull a lever in your mind and then see wonders in everything. It was once said ‘happiness is not a place to arrive at, but a manner of travelling’. It’s not about doing, it’s about trying and believing. This subject isn’t about happiness alone or any other feeling, but it is however about all of them. Most of the feelings we define by words are mere points along the line of feelings. You can pinpoint an infinitely accurate point anywhere on that line. And any two points on the line have an infinite other points inbetween, no matter how close the two points are. Thus, the few pinpoints we have made into words are retarding, to say the least. Never try to define anything and everything with them, for every single mood and every single object and every single anything has its own unique feeling, and the less you can define it with words, the better.

Yes, this is a reminder, a little wake-up call. Wisdom isn’t good enough if it’s just there, it matters not how many times you hear it be repeated if you never think it over. Do not let the opportunity pass when you can do such. Don’t forget. You might never hear this reminder again.