“Only the present exists.” Believing it is one of the best ways to move on after a painful memory. It is true, but from a certain perspective. All the truths about life cannot be seen in a single perspective. The full picture is arranged like in a kaleidoscope. That’s because we are arranged like kaleidoscopes. So I’m not saying you ought to pick out the pieces you like best and stitch them together into a patchwork of the world you’d like to see. No truths change, but some are true only to parts of you.

There may be universal truths as well, I suppose, but they don’t tell us what we need to live. Perhaps we’re all based on the principles of science, both those we have and those haven’t figured out yet. I don’t think so, but even if we are, we are simultaneously unable to process those truths into something with the insight and humanity of simple common sense. And even in the most concrete science, complex phenomenons need their own explanations different from the basics. Everything has its scope. That is why the apparent ambiguity of truths about life never troubles me. We are glued together by so many different complex workings, their scopes will not overlap, and they cannot understand eachother. But we can understand all of them and act on each of them where it is valid.

So, only the present exists, but here’s another turn of the kaleidoscope that makes the next point clearer. This turn resonates deeply with other actors in the great scheme of my being, and it says: “only through the past do we exist.”

The point is about growth. I came into this world with some parts and a machinery ready. Then I grew and became what I am through interacting with my surroundings. I involved myself, dealt myself out; I spread my roots, and they brought back nutrition. On that, I grew, reshaped, created myself. I still do.

Inevitably, I became what I fostered on. I didn’t just take and exploit wherever I went; where my roots are, I am. This is how nature designed me on many levels. In the vast principles of nature, giving is taking, living is dying, and growing is shrinking. We are allotted no more than what is, and so is everyone else, before, during and after us.

I am what I am. But not all I’ve fostered on, is physically present. My roots go further than this world, because this world wasn’t the only one I grew in. Effectively, I’m not entirely of this world. My roots cannot be denied. If it wasn’t for the vitality and life that definitely courses through me, some parts of me would be just as real as the stories they were created in. This has provided me with a unique insider perspective.

Aren’t stories real as well? Their conflict with our science is irrelevant, for the value of a story lies in the emotions it brings. All that stories are, all the wonder we envisage through them, is concieved right here, in ourselves. So perhaps the only difference between wondrous stories and real life, is that real life happens to have chosen a seemingly boring configuration. We’re able to be so much else, we can life and feel in so many other ways. Without the stories, I might not have been able to know that. Knowing the stories, having the imagination, I life with the frustration of what is and what isn’t real. My own extended existence, incompatible with the confines of our concrete cave.

I despair because I’m a dreamer trapped among scientists and businessmen. But in moments of clarity, when I can break free, I realize that stories have seldom been so prominent, so numerous. I’m definitely not the only one existing around here. Many of us know what we are deep inside, and how much more that is than what we have been able to be in real life. That is the very reason we have stories in the first place.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9juntKKY0kY

I will always have one foot in other worlds. It’s what makes me, me. These worlds, and the past, is one and the same. For all the stories I have grown in, I found in the past, and the past is also but an imagination, now that it has gone. It might not exist physically any longer, but mentally, the past is a very real place, where we find many of the things that define us. Whatever we are.

What does the world really feel like, and what is the most true way to feel? In the next paragraphs, I conclude that this difference in feeling, this paradox of the human soul, disappears when we realize what is really going on.

Not so rarely, I find myself engulfed in some specific emotional landscape. It can be the set of emotions found in a specific book, the strings pulled by a certain album, or even the emotions brought forth by the nature around me. While in this landscape, the similar emotions within me stand out more clearly and are easier to access. I all but settle down in the surroundings and become a part of the experience.

Like all works of art, emotional landscapes have an array of emotions, some more present than others, and put together in a unique way. So while no landscape relates to one single emotion, different landscapes can take up wholly different sections of the great continent of emotions. Also, just as a musical piece can be complete in and of itself, so can a landscape feel complete and un-lacking. In effect, two completely seperate landscapes can both feel like the “most real” one.

But, as human beings, we answer to the continent as a whole. That doesn’t mean that the “most real” emotional landscape is the one you see when you strap onto a rocket and hitch a ride into space. Even if this, too, is an emotional landscape. No, the continent cannot be felt, and so all the different variations of scenery are equally real. Such a conclusion might not be true for scientific perspectives, but human emotions are different.

What’s more, we have somewhat of an obligation to know ourselves. And here comes the last piece of the metaphor, too: the continent is an individual thing. There are variations between us: some mountain peaks are taller or shorter, some lakes shift, forests come and go and lands vary in size. We need to traverse it all to truly know who we are. How we travel and how long we stay in each place, will determine the colors of our lifespan, the richness of our lives.

There will be landscapes in life that we prefer over others and in which we spend much time. Then times might change, and emotions become different. Is it growing up, is it being led further into the truth? No. It is travelling. Not into truth, nor from truth, just elsewhere. I will not pretend otherwise; some things (perhaps all things) in life will change the face of the continent, and you might travel back to find forests gone and mountains moved. But this is just the more reason to travel — so you will always know what you are become. If a land suffers, it can make alliances with friendly lands on the same continent, and many things can be rebuilt.

When travelling from a landscape to another, do not think you are leaving something behind or denying one truth to replace it with another. You are simply travelling, because all the lands need attention and acknowledgement. The human soul is many-faceted, and any face can grow lonely. Don’t just know yourself. Come visit yourself, too.

(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.

This is the inconvenient truth  that sometimes, bad things happen, and if you don’t realize it, it will only get worse. Sometimes we even have to save ourselves from ourselves. That is when we must stand up to our own feelings and relieve ourselves of involuntary torments. That, or live our lives in fear and distress.

Throughout life, people bond. Not only with eachother, but perhaps even more so with all they experience. We bond with memories, with emotions, habits, norms and with ourselves.

Bonds form, and bonds break. Many break because they were weak, and they make space for greater bonds, and we do not even notice. Meanwhile, some bonds are much stronger, and will become a background for our life for a long time to come. New bonds will be made on top of these strong bonds, and rely on them to hold.

They do not always hold. Even strong bonds can break; and whether they connected us to other people, to a daily life we used to have, to our place of birth or even to a scent or a color — the feeling is much the same. The difference lies only in the nature of the bond and what we can do about it. Naturally, the death of someone we know is hardest because we have the strongest bonds with them, and nothing can bring them back.

Parts of us die along with the ones we love. Parts of us also die along with other bonds. The truth of this points out a rather revelatory fact:

We are the sum of all we hold dear.

I have already written about the importance of making new bonds and the courage to let go of what you have already lost. Today, I wish to inspire the ability to see bonds clearly and understand them.

This does not come from my heart, for my heart would not agree. But sometimes, you make bonds that turn against you. It can be an unrequited love, a mistaken norm, and it can even be a direct bond with destructive emotions like melancholy.

Sometimes you cannot even see the fault. And even when you do, you still do not wish for change — because of the bond, because you feel and know that a part of you lies in this bond. And you don’t want to die. So you keep the bond.

Under other circumstances, the affection from the bond would conquer the force of truth that would sever it. Would not a courteous soldier spare the life of an offender, was he bidden by the man’s infant daughter? But we’re talking about circumstances where the girl, mistreated by her tyrant father, obeys him yet in blind affection, whilst rotting within from the corruption of the situation.

The tyrants I wish to denounce, are those inside the girl’s mind. Instead of her father, it can be a depression, a bad habit or even a memory (most likely all of them combined). There are many inside tyrants, and they are cunning in their manipulation; so cunning that we can’t easily see their reign over us.

With open eyes, however, it is possible to face the demons. And here’s the catch. No less than in a real battle, your safety will be on the line. You might return defeated and weaker than ever, and you might return victorious, but not unharmed. In any case — I will not hide it — you will lose something of yourself, something that will never return.

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.” (Ambrose Redmoon)

And then you will be free.

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.

Time and thought can be dangerous tools. I love it when things make sense, so as time passes and sense doesn’t present itself, my mind paints sense. Just like those speculations. As more time passes, I’ve thought about it so much that it’s irrelevant whether I believe it’s true or not. It’s become part of my horizon, and my involuntary trust in it will make it true. I daresay that this really is how some of us grow up.

Through a misconception and a loss of hope.

I will not blame the world for my own shortcomings. I will not close my eyes to all that lies beyond. Through a recent twist of fate or coincidence, I’ve been given the chance to face my worst fears — people. It does wonders to my self-image, and I feel that fallen parts of myself are rising up.

I just lacked somewhere to use them.

But it creates a heck of a good view being just where it is.

Without the horizon, I do not know which way to go, and even if I go the right way, I will wonder why I did so, without any sense of purpose.

Here I am again, talking about attitudes towards life. I lost faith for a while, but now I’m back. I believe I created something of myself through this journal, and leaving would be forsaking that. Now I choose not to.

What I accomplish in life has limited meaning. It is how I live my life that is most essential. What I choose to use as a background setting for whatever my life turns out to be. What I put my hopes in and what I choose to believe is true. When I have faith in something, I create a new section within myself. And this section can then give me the guidance and the answers that I need to achieve meaning in my own life.

So what do I believe in?

Love. The unconditional caring of other beings, that we all talk of yet never seem to understand.

I used to blame love for my hurts and wounds, but it was never love that hurt me. Love does not hurt. Lust and envy, however, does. Sadly, we all tend to believe in these things as well. But that does not mean that they need to be on my horizon.

True love is an ideal — we can always do better — so it is a perfect setting for a horizon. We can get infinitely close, but it will always be ahead to drive us further.

Or perhaps I’m wrong.

But I really like the view.

The past holds all of our dearest memories. But beware of forgetting yourself. This post is about finding the courage to stand on your own feet, as the result of your past, instead of looking to it as all that is good and gone.

For many years, perhaps since my birth and until some years ago, I had a very grim outlook on change. Change means an ending of something you’ve been a part of. Change means letting go of something old and heading into an uncertain and scary future. And if you look into it the wrong way, like I was good at, change is melancholy. However small a change, change is death itself. Change means that the world and life gradually parts from you, and leaves you alone.

That detachment doesn’t hurt just superficially, it lashes out to your very soul. It is a pure form of loneliness, and it has a beauty, as most emotions do. In reasonable quanta, it’s an important part of life. It should be accessed sometimes, I think, for the same reason that we need to preserve machinery. But loneliness is a brittle bridge over chasms, and shouldn’t be taken lightly or made a habit out of.

It is some years past, now, that I started having a more positive outlook on change. That is because the world started acting friendly to me again, and I became more independent and self-confident. Because as a first, the world didn’t just race past. Some bits stayed with me, and evolved with me. Before, there was mostly just me, and old, ended stories I’d been fond of — by this, I mean video games and books; now, there were also friends, and stories I shared with them. Instead of being a lone figure in a raging river, there was now more of a structure.

But despite that, or perhaps because of it, I kept a fondness of the past. I’ve kept records of so many things (digital files, for the most part). After all, what is there to fear of the future when the past is always there to relive? Confronted with the thought of deleting such records, I’ve relived the sensation of change.

I now realize what’s been going on. What the loneliness really is, and why. It is insecurity. It is the fear that, in absence of your surroundings, there’s nothing left that is yourself. It is the subconscious belief that the past is all that lets you tackle your future, that there is no constant you with any worth of its own. It is the anxiety that nothing is certain, that everything you hold dear might, at any time, disappear, completely without reason. It is the lack of hope and of faith; in the world, and in yourself.

Overcoming such insecurity has several stages. You can gain control of change, and gain confidence of your control. But though it might help you further on, that control doesn’t really change things. If your fingers slip, and records vanish, is the past really gone? Will it leave you anyway, despite all your effort? The truth, the way I see it, is that the past is always gone.

We’re forever stuck between the past and the future. You are a part of the world, and some parts of you will stream by seamlessly. They will linger in the present, where you forever stand, in virtually no time at all, before they’re gone and away into nothingness.

But the trick is, I believe, to see the present for what it really is. See yourself for what you really are. There is something constant in us. In the previous paragraph, I presented the past, the present and the future as sections of a timeline. There, the present is but a point. But it is just a model. Another one can be, for example, a bird flying in the rain. Rain pours on the bird. This is the future. It trickles down the bird’s feathers and falls further down, away from the bird. The past. In this new model, the passing of time is just generic drops of water, whilst the bird is something way more concrete. The bird is the present. Or you. Whichever one you please.

What I’m trying to relate, is not just the importance of confidence, but the (abstract and alternative) understanding of it. The confidence I’m describing, is the realization that there is always something resisting the flow of time. For once, you have what some might call a soul, which stands outside all time and guides you. Its shadow in this world, on the present, lies beneath the conglomerate of transitions, beneath your dropping feathers, and it will not leave you. It does not grow and change like the rest. All it does throughout your life, is to get to know the rest of you better. If your conscious self allows that, of course.

Through this perspective, I find myself becoming able to let go of the past, to let go of the control. The subconscious fears it because it thinks letting go lessens what you are, but the opposite is fact. The past has made an impression on the present, and the present shapes the future. All time is thus encompassed within that singular point in time, and it’s all you need.

This note in other words: today, I went through my things and threw away a lot of old stuff. It felt good.

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.