(Follow-up to The Infancy of Science.)

Some people chase extraordinary meaning in the world around them, just to end up lost and come back disappointed. Meanwhile, those who consider themselves down-to-earth sit contently and preach about the lack of inherent value in the world. We simply need to acknowledge this lack, to stop looking and be happy with what is, and all will be better.

So what is? Who can tell us; what instance has the authority to set the standards for what we can allow ourselves to believe in? Well, if we have been let down by spirituality and religion, is seems only fit to turn to science as the supreme authority of answer-providing. I don’t know about you, but I have a problem with this solution. A big problem.

When running from a liar, is it more fitting to move in with a psychopath?

It took me many years to finally learn that scientism – believing that science has or will have all the necessary answers – is a fundamentalist attitude. Before that, I thought it to be true. Rather, I thought I had no choice in the matter, because science, after all, was running the world whether I liked it or not. That was before I realized that scientism denies the validity of our emotions, of anything that is different from true and false.

We may think that we ourselves are not misguided by the illusion of false worth, but indeed, we can never escape our own subjective attitudes to everything around us. We can never experience that fundamental part of the world that is without coloring, that is only true or false. And even if we could, we would no longer be human.

Because there is more to the world than the science that is common for us all. Our emotions are thoroughly real, and they make up the entire content of our lives. Whatever we do, whatever we say and however long we live; nothing of this has any meaning whatsoever without the emotion that gives it meaning. But to follow the ideal of “only what is”, you cannot have this meaning, because “meaning” has no place in science.

There is one limitation on our emotions: just as science works only in facts, emotions work only in other ways. That we have an emotion can be called a fact, but this is second-hand, and it is useless unless the one reading the fact knows the emotion. So if something has meaning, it can never be proven as fact, but that does not mean it is incorrect. It is neither, simply because it is an emotion. Being an emotion, it is as real as anything else.

We don’t build walls to keep them blank. Everything is what you make out of it, and it’s the whole point that you do. It might not be visible to everyone else, but as long as it’s there for you, it really is there.

The modern opinion is cynical towards the world, expecting to recieve no compassion or meaning — because after all, the universe is a faceless machine, its gears the cold logic of physics and probability. I battle this opinion under its own terms, showing that emotions like love cannot merely be explained by their apparent purposes, but must have been present since the conception of this world.

Humanity. We live and we persist because it is inevitable. In this world of change and peril, only that which persists, lives.

Our highly developed consciousness, our imagination, made us persist. Our hope in better days, in great wonder, made us persist. Because of them, we still exist to this day.

And because they made us persist, these parts have persisted in us. That is the only reason we have them. If the world had challenged us in different ways, we would have developed different abilities. In another world, we might be unable to learn to swim, climb trees… or feel happy.

So how can we think that there is any meaning to our emotions? That is, beyond their effect upon our actions, and leading us to our survival. How can we ever claim that emotions are anything else than our naive imagination of the world, our colouring of what is truly neutral, a machine?

By questioning how they are even possible.

If emotions are in us alone, then they are part of us but not of the world. This would imply that emotions come through us from somewhere else than the world we know. Which, of course, is a rather uplifting thought.

If this seems unreasonable, then the other logical option is that emotions have got to be a part of this very world, inherent in it without the need of our presence, and made possible by the very laws that govern it.

Great, so our emotions exist. That’s fine and all. But how claim that the very emotions themselves are any more than gears and wheels, pulling our strings? Love is just there because we survived when we stayed together, right?

That doesn’t matter. If I want to put a nail into a wooden box, I get a hammer. But if I lived on a planet made out of jelly, it would be no use. Likewise, if we lived in a world without love, there would be nothing we could do to stay together and survive. Our emotions are seperate from what they do for us, as the hammer is seperate from the need to nail wood.

So evolution might have given us all we have, and that explains why we have it, but not why those things work. It couldn’t have been given, had it not been there to give. All of our abilities, all of our emotions, all our imagination; they are all tapping into the big picture of all things.

So…

What is music, really?

Still, I have often contemplated on having missed out on several years of my life. Years I could’ve learned what all the others did, years I could’ve understood them and the world better. Instead of being alone in my room, I could’ve been in the company of good friends, doing something we all liked doing together. And in the presence of these good friends, I could’ve grown more as a human being.

But no. Since humans were so clearly different from what I knew in myself, I didn’t want to be like them. I wanted to be other things. Like a dragon, or a unicorn. That was what I dreamed of growing up and becoming: a being of integrity, purity, and great ideals. Something I could not see in humans.

A misplaced child, hidden from the variety that is human nature. With my dragons and my dreams, I survived — no, I flourished. Imagination was my realm, seperate from reality.

As time passed, the very ideals I believed in made me certain that I shouldn’t keep on believing most in what is removed from the world. They also made me believe that the world of humans can contain things that might challenge even my love for this pure imagination. So a transition began.

Things have since changed. I have faced challenges, and hinders. Delving into the uncertainty of life can taint you, mislead you, and it can even kill you. Sometimes you want to give up, and believe that what you thought to be true, really wasn’t.

There are many ways to imagine the world. Cynicism is the lousiest of them all.

Now, I take a minute to look back. Where was I heading before, where am I heading now, and what is really the wisest? Some time ago, I wanted to become a dragon. Lately, I have tried becoming more human.

Do the two really conflict?

I used to think humans were limited and weak. Now, I have come to see what potential really lies in us. All we can see and feel is a part of us. If we feel great things, then great things can be in our life.

The way I see it, I have three choices. Either I can live with the happiness of imagination and the anguish of its lack in the physical world; or I can forget and suppress the imagination and try and see the physical world as more bright; or… I can see the imagination as my palette and the physical world as my canvas, transporting the inspiration of imagination, and letting magic into the mundane realm.

That is my dream. That, and the ability to fly, of course.

Photographers find the exact angle and composition where the beauty is the clearest, and then they doll up the scene in Photoshop afterwards, making it into something that can’t even be found. Writers also give us prime examples and leave out the mundanity that truly fills our lives. And musicians hog the well-used beats and harmonies of the rare moments in life. Art, in effect, makes us disappointed in the world.

The world has no beauty.

It is all a fantasy.

But, then again…

What isn’t?

Artists don’t show us the world. It is not what they do. They show us ourselves. The art invokes thoughts and emotions and unnamed things in us, and that is what they want us to see. What we experience through the art — and now I’m not talking about abstract sculptures and the stuff that only a niche of pompous pricks gets, but your own favorite stories, music and images — is not the art itself; the experience isn’t inside the art. The art just accidentally brings it out in you. And in that moment, you are the artist. Only to yourself, perhaps, but still an artist.

All art is about the human spirit. All that we can feel. If something doesn’t feel any special at all to us, then why, it’s not art! So art isn’t out to show us the world; it picks only the best because it’s there to teach us about the extreme possibilities within ourselves.

Art is example. Each piece, a mere slice of a greater connection, a glimpse of the infinities. The infinities that are present, not out there, but within us.

We are thus the most beautiful things in this very existence.

Remember that when you interact with others.

I remember when magic was a day-to-day business for me. I’m talking about my childhood, of course. Sure, you could say that whatever magic I imagined was just that; imagination. It never existed, I was only fooling myself. But then I’d just shake my head, because that’s not the point. I still know magic.

Because the real magic is the moment itself, when magic and wonder really does seem real. Magic is when you can actually picture a world where heroes always win, where deceases and accidents don’t exist. Magic is when you really feel like there’s something more out there, something wondrous and curious and impossible. And magic is when the real world allows wondrous things of other worlds to happen here, too.

The last kind will happen only if you believe it can. If you don’t, the same might still happen, but you will discard it at coincidence, and your world will forever be boring.

I really look forward to the day I’ll be able to make magic happen for someone else.

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.