Tales and Journeys

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. Read the rest of this entry »

That’s where I’m from. I don’t know where it is or how I got here, but I know I came from somewhere different, and simpler. Not saying that’s the truth. Truth is something we got here, in this place. I’m saying this is my perspective. Perhaps I was born with it. I don’t think that makes it any less true in its own way.

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.

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.

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Throughout my life, I have often been deviant. There are things I never understood, interests I never shared, phases I never visited. Luckily, I didn’t mind much being left alone, to do the things I wanted the way I liked.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

For some time, I have feared the loss of parts of myself. I have worried that central things like my imagination, persistency and sense of wonder are waning. “Am I growing up?” I’ve thought. Has my admit of defeat in love brought upon me irreversible changes, that strip me of the things I thought was the real me?

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.

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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.

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Having returned from an inspiring adventure, I am now ready to resume using this journal.

Drastic events and changes have befallen me since I last put some work into making an entry. But all in all I am still the same, possibly even more so, and I am now of a better and more purposeful design.

On my adventure I saw things that I thought could lie ahead of me. I sought and longed for these things, these myriads of premonitions and daydreams. But I was mistaken as to where the paths to them lay, and who they involved. What I saw exists further on through time, but I still do not know in which direction.

Actually, the dreams did not start alongside this adventure. For they were and are just that; dreams. Like all people have, like we all strive for. For years and years they’ve whispered to me hope and promises of especially happy days and moments, and for years I’ve never known how to reach them. I haven’t even always believed I ever could reach them. Tired of this state of being out of reach of my own dreams and desires, I jumped on a passing train that felt very right. Here, the dreams thrived and multiplied, and I felt my path was set. But the train brought me into unknown lands, lands where my power waned, where the columns supporting me — columns I have built and maintained — would erode and leave me helpless. And they did, for a while, and I let them. I wanted to see where the train went.

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Every time I go outside, I sense a different unique mood in the world, the nature, around me. And every time the weather changes, this mood also changes radically. The variety is so remarkable that I couldn’t possibly predict how it’s like before I go out.

Today it’s been windy with a few scattered showers, otherwise sunny. Wind of these proportions are rare here in Oslo. Any wind at all is rare here. It felt reminiscent of home in many ways. And when I finally went out to get some groceries, countless old feelings rushed through my head. The sound of the wind, the humid smell and feel of the air, the changing light from small clouds blocking the sun and countless other impressions pulled strings in my brain that led way back, and all sorts of related feelings and half-memories popped up. I felt feelings I’d felt during similar weather back in my childhood, and I could picture it, but all pictures were general and possibly even generated in my head, and not specific memories.

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When your mind changes, you move across that internal timeline. That’s how I define it. And it’s quite the opposite of the regular timeline in that it’s shortest where the regular is longest. Think about it. When you grow up, your minds develops though many stages, until you’re grown up and have about three times your age left to live. Yet, in those 3/4 of your life, your given purpose is doing the very same thing, based on the very same mind, possibly not ever changing again. So you might’ve reached the end of your mind’s timeline even before the age of 20.

Myself, I wish to counteract that as best I can, by constantly introducing changes in what I do, how I do it and most importanly, what my mind is doing. Or else I’ll be too prone to fade into the gray again and live on autopilot, never knowing what I’m missing.

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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?

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