Try, fail and try again. Trial and error is the basis of evolution. But is the concept limited to biological workings? I want to divulge my own perspective on evolution and its siblings, who as a family relentlessly brings the world into states of greater complexity.

To do this, I reuse the term evolution and let this new evolution have two characteristics

1. For each version of evolution, there is a group of subjects that manifest and disappear (live and die).
2. Transcending those lives, is a concept which is made more complex by this process.

The eternal evolution

Take stars, for instance. Brown dwarves live long lives, blue giants short lives. They all explode eventually and spread dense matter that ends up in other solar systems. That is their interaction. The concept that evolves, is the distribution of elements. Our solar system is of the third generation, which means the elements we are made out of, have been involved with two stars before. Otherwise, there’d only be hydrogen and helium. This evolution of matter made life possible.

On our own planet, then, you eventually got the biological evolution, the prime example. It started out as evolution of structures: inevitably, only the stable ones remained. Then, when life was truly starting to form, producing bodies and movement, competition took over. The changes that evolution made on its subjects, varied greatly as the complexity rose. At first, you would see genes multiplying, forming two body parts where there used to be one. In time, the genetic “programming language” was extended, and changes could happen in more ways. More interestingly, they could surface as preferences, desires, feelings, things that were previously unknown and irrelevant for early evolution.

Entering ideas

A lot later, with the introduction of communication, evolution could work on ideas.  Human beings introduced complex language, and soon, the new lives  of evolution were governments, empires, religions, and art. Ideas have been growing and multiplying beside us humans ever since we started having them. At some point, they started acting on their own and having great impact on our short lives. Our ideas have long since outgrown us.

Sure, we designed them and we keep them alive; but the systems, functions and institutions of our society move us around like puppets at times. Evolution can only work so fast to change them, and the momentum of these titans is undeniable. We enter into these abstract organisms and take on roles that are different from our own nature, working for their cause because they, in turn, give us the food we need to survive. Sadly, with no central consciousness, it is hard to let these lives be subject to the ethics we ourselves live by, as they seem to exist in a more brutal environment than the one they have provided us with: our safe, wealthy society distant from nature. In time, the evolution of ideas might change this.

Other ideas stay in the abstract realm and give birth to small, curious lives. Science is one of these; like ants on an anthill, we swarm over it and add our little correcting bits, planting new seeds, resulting in all kinds of technology and knowledge.

The idea of art

The ideas I find most interesting, are those of art. It is the most broad and varied, the most changing and the most impacting of all our ideas. All art borrows subconsciously from other art, configuring it in new ways and adding as much new as the artist can manage. In effect, most art is greater than any one human being. It is the best parts of many. But more importantly, it survives them and it survives the artwork, waiting for the next artist to pledge his alliegiance to the cause of artistic evolution.

Still, what art does and has ever done, is to show us what we are. So it should have an upper limit of evolution. We like to deconstruct, and we love to rediscover old and “lost” art. The later years have seen a change in art and its expressions that is due to science’s evolution, and not art’s own. Furthermore, whereas the evolution of science brings us far beyond humanity, and into the depth of things we can never fully understand, the evolution of art would have to converge. Its evolution is to give gradually better insights, lessons and explanations of ourselves and the things we know.

But no two days are we the same. In a changing world, what we are changes as well, as we become ourselves through interaction with the surroundings. Thus, art is given more to express. Possibly, one day the evolution of other ideas will have given art the power to keep up with that change. What would that mean for us?

A whole darn lot, I daresay.

“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.

I was born nine years ago. I lived another life before that, but nine years ago, I became something more and something different altogether. It was no grand occasion, no event at all. I just know it, looking back, that my current life started around that time. When I was thirteen.

In the beginning, I felt good. I quickly learnt to know my new life, and I was joyous about myself. But I wasn’t alone. I was a symbiot. Not with anyone else, but with myself. I was one, but I was different and new, hosted in the old and slow. I had come from elsewhere, but I had been here a long time already.

It was the old life that made me possible. I wasn’t aware that it also impeded me from being myself. I gradually realized the truth of this, and it made me sad. Ever since, I have lost several hopes, dreams and feelings to that sadness. Disillusionment, some would say. That was one of the things I was taught to believe.

Oh, there were promises. Promises of relief from the sadness. That is the only reason I sold off my illusions. Stop believing, and then do things this way, think that way and feel this, and everything will be okay.

And it really does work, it’s not that.

It’s the cost: forsaking the new life. Problems really do go away when you ignore them, as long as you never look back. But that’s what I’m doing now. I understand now, what the true illusions are. I didn’t sell them. I bought them. I bought into The Real World™, and I moved into the emptiness. It was all that existed. I had never really existed in the first place.

But I do. I do exist! The past years, I have gradually fallen asleep. Answering to the expectations all around me, I have focused on shaping the old, dead life — the holy Machine, my body and mind — into something they like better. Since nobody would respect that I was actually alive, I forgot that I was. I thought the new life — my eternal soul — had died. I sought to claim somebody else’s soul to be my own.

Now, I don’t think it can die. Now, I am disillusioned. Now I know what I am, not based on what others say I can be. I simply know it. I find I can finally believe this. I am my own master, my own friend, my own self, and I alone can decide what I believe.

So say what you want, but I don’t come from this world. I don’t know why I’m here, but since I am, I’ll try and try again to do the best out of it. Knowing what I am, and only that, has opened up the channel of feelings, the bond between the lives, that is my love and life force. I am, at last, a little more whole.

Some things, we do have in common. Rough shapes and rough details of your self, others can pick up. Throughout our lives, we communicate. It is just that sometimes, it doesn’t feel good enough. And that is what gives you access to the feeling. And the feeling can be so strong and clear, it is as if the things we have in common, are but contrivances. That the significant bits lie elsewhere. That what makes you exist, is the very bond between your mind and soul. And nobody else can feel that. Nobody can feel that you truly exist the way you do.

Sleep is invoked to douse the loneliness. In sleep, you don’t know there’s something more to yourself than what others see. You feel understood and complete, and content. I do this and I find I gradually forget what I am. In time, only a select few moments tell me otherwise. This is one of those. Now, I know. Now, I care. Later today, I might have forgotten myself again.

I wish to be awake, always. That is why I care about art. That is why I must write stories. To make sure I remember, that I am sometimes awake and aware. To feel life that is actually my own flowing through my veins. Before I come entirely undone.

“Are you saying love and evil are made of the same elements?” “With a palette, you can make any painting. By itself the palette is not art. It is the configuration of colors that makes all the difference. I am saying you have to choose what you believe in, because nobody can tell you what is right and wrong. That is the depth of your free will, and the concept of faith.” “What does faith have to do with any of this?” “Faith is to dare to acknowledge that you believe in something not because someone else told you to. Instead, you believe it simply because you know it is true. Only such a belief can be worth fighting for.”

“I want to be saved. I want someone to come and give me all the joy and, even more importantly, all the good and special emotions which I still get in glimpses: the meaning of life. Vitality. Art in pure form. Nature’s gift. Everything else falters compared to these dreams, these promises, whose mere existence I only realize in a rare moment.”

“And in that moment, every single time, it is like a revelation. All of a sudden, everything is fine, I am not alone – I am not even myself, I am merely the emotion, taking pleasure from its own existence. I am the frost, I am the birds, I am the white-rimmed leaves waiting to drop from the branches. I am the air, chilly and full of memories of past times when the emotion existed. I am the earth that waits, the deer that grazes warily by the trees, the fox that sneaks past looking for things to eat. I am my self, and I am something completely different. I am free, in focus, but without thought.”

“I have sought love, and I still do, but I am not fully a human being, a social creature. When I am my self, in harmony and peace, I am immaterial. This meaning and value can be brought forth by love, but love is not it. I can follow it alone. Back to the soul. Depths of my heart that doesn’t concern other people. I want those emotions back, and I can have them back without having to seek love first. I need my self. Me without biological limitations. Love could help me, but I… I have to seek other ways.”

Music is just one of the things. Ideas pop up in my head frequently, around moments of inspiration. Those are moments of strong emotion; not necessarily intense, but clear. I can picture elaborate movies and dances while listening to music. Dreams are also interconnected into this complex construction. The core part of any inspiration, to me, is an atmosphere of another world, a subset of this world’s extremities gathered into a package. I find deep meaning and vitality in dealing with these packages — gathering,nurturing and creating them.

I even apply the abilities to my own future. When I am in love, which is one of the highest states of inspiration, I can’t help but picture special moments, somewhere in the future, that would make my life more complete. A touch, an exchange of emotion, a display of deep love, a fundamental understanding. Things I know I need and long of, things I understand the workings of, but things I have never experienced or managed to produce.

So perhaps inevitably, it comes coupled with a longing, and that longing turns into a sadness. Then I try to make these things happen, but I find my abilities cut short, like in the playing of an instrument. I see what could be there, but am unable to create it. This all boils down into a fear, the fear of failure and insufficience. This I deal with daily, sometimes, and it is the dark side of the coin that is my dreams of love.

My greatest joy lies in the pursuit of colors, the collection of sensations. I gather seperate universes and marvel at their exclusiveness. The sense of awe I recollect from experiencing vast changes of perspective, tells me clearly of the sheer size of the world of colors. Whereas all of the physical world, which could once fit inside a marble, can be overwhelmed by a daring imagination about a greater infinity, there is no trick of the mind that can envelope the world of colors. Whereas the passive forces of the tangible universe can be harvested by science, the exploration of art has never been able to bring the greater worlds of color to heel. Whether it be that we have been gifted poorly, or that the colors are truly unruly, the result is a humbling yet fantastic wilderness that ever allows new journeys, never taking hurt from the traffic.

Nobuo Uematsu – A New Origin

For a long while, I successfully suppressed the angst in myself, because I had become able to do it, and I knew that angst was stupid emo business. But I’ve changed my mind. Now I try to seek my sorrows, because they are there for a reason. Either I should resolve them, or I should at least acknowledge their existence.

The following text is made the way I prefer to write. It is not an essay, not a message, but a description of a fleeting chain of feelings, written while those feelings are strongly present. This is the kind of thing that makes me feel alive.

“One can’t expect too much from me. I’m no average person in an average state. Wounds have formed in me, and I need to heal. This is no illness, no fault in me, but a fact. I am depressed at certain times. All that has come to pass, has set its mark on me. The sorrow is part of me now, I let it reside in my being, because that is how I turn it into something meaningful. Because of this, there are now paths I must walk, phases I must pass through.”

“It is hard to do alone. I stagnate. Years have passed, and I am still not free from myself. Still I am impatient and anxious, but I am learning, the hard way. One day, things will be very different. Yet some emotions will never go away; I have responsibility for the sorrow, now. I must take care of it as I take care of myself.”

“The situation would be different, had I taken another course through time. There would be less sorrow. But that is not how it is. I am what I am, I have what I have, and I must start from there. Not from the level that the expectations of others would have preferred. They must understand this, respect it and help me to walk my paths. Without this, I can go nowhere. Without friends I keep on shrinking. To make it even harder, I have not been blessed with the ability to form close friendships. I retreat into my own sorrow rather than share it with others. I just don’t have that confidence in those around me.”

“And so I wait for the one person that I can truly confide in. The one person that can save me; set me free; turn me into myself; open my heart and stay with me. It is the only way I can feel, the only one that feels right. This is what my heart seeks, and if I do not listen to it, it will stop talking to me, as it has before.”

Sarah Brightman – Deliver Me

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.