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.

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.

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?

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.

And I would stop all I do wrong: all I am expected to do, but that I deep down know I shouldn’t. All for the sake of comfort, I risk resignation, I risk forgetting, I risk dying in life. I would stop it, and I would travel. To rediscover the forsaken, remember the forgotten. I would travel to visit my soul.

Not to find a path. Just to walk.

We are sometimes afraid of ourselves, conforming to what feels safe just to lessen our anxieties, our fears of the unknown, however good.

Why do we all hinder ourselves? Why do we hold back, in favor of being gray? Is is because we are afraid of loss?

Even when we know what can be, how life can be, why oh why do we still do nothing? Why do I do nothing?

Humans can be so special. Relationships can be so special. But we.. no, I. I am so afraid. I cannot hide behind mankind on this one. It’s childish, it’s introverted, it’s straight-out stupid, but I am afraid of letting anyone close. All my life, I have kept more distance from others than I can honestly say I’m happy with.

Why doesn’t matter. Whys are not just excuses, they are shields; shields of lies that you can hide behind and believe it’s okay that you’re doing something wrong. Psychology is an elaborate shield that lets us be gray with a clean conscience. I will not ponder on why I am afraid and distant, and then be happy with the reason I find most likely. I will not be happy with being like this for the rest of my life, with not being as I think people ought to be.

Difference starts somewhere. And then it spreads. We would all do best not to resist the kind of change that this movie inspires in us.

Why ever do we care, when all the castles we build, fall down eventually? Perhaps the point isn’t a happy ending, but a memorable adventure.

Life isn’t fair. Life hurts, stings, cripples. Life is a bitch and you can’t deny it. All our fights will be in vain, all effort will be erased, all will fall back to mercilessness. Cold logic is the way of it all, and cynicism is the way to accept it. There is no other option.

So goes the words of a dead man.

So what if resistance is futile? So what if there can never be a paradise on earth? So what if good things don’t last? At least they’re good while they do. It’s not the end result that matters, but what happened underway.

No, not all damsels in distress are saved by knights in shining armour. Kids die in accidents. People are murdered. It’ll always happen. It’s the way of the world, and it’s horrible!

But humanity resists! We make a difference. Many of us keep ideals and principles. We don’t live by experience and accept the world for what it is. We don’t go with the flow of the external world, but sustain the idea of a better one, and when given the power, we try to shift the external world towards that idea.

The world will always win. Whatever great feat you do, time will forget it. Fuck that! It is not the single feats, but the continuation of humanity, the continuation of the fight, that sustains it. The meaning. By fighting, by not accepting, by not growing cynical, you do not only do your part in creating a better world and making a difference from the wickedness of the world. You also gain a purpose.

Don’t do what others do because they do it. Think, and understand what ought to be different. Then practice that difference. If you manage to ignore your instinctive fear of being different, then congratulations, you’ve created something that’s you! Ignore those who don’t accept it, and gain friends in those who do. You just gained some real friends! Join them on adventures and save the world together. You just read the recipe for having a life.

Look at an object close to you. Pick it up, examine it. What do you see?

And what more do you see?

What does the object mean to you, beyond its mere shape and surface? Our heads don’t know the world when we are born. We gradually learn how to understand it, how to chop it into pieces our psyche can comprehend. So how is it you really interpret the object; what tools are used, and what is the object decoded into, in your head? And your heart?

Okay, so it’s not always that easy to know. But you do have a special decoding process. It’s unique to you, and it’s been fine-tuned throughout your whole life. And it’s in no way limited to individual objects. We all live in the same physical world, but to each of us, everything means something else than to everyone else. So when we think of what the world is, the decoded version is all we know, and that’s what we think the world is. That is not a correct image of what the physical world truly is, but it’s not fiction either, so what is it exactly?

It’s your world.

Many things in the total physical world will never exist in your own. In today’s society many people know about most of the world, but we will never truly understand and feel all there is (hopefully!). We will only ever live in a slice of it. We all have our own separate laws of nature, our own beliefs, truths, ideals, and feelings. And it’ll all be true — per definition — in our own world.

Because of the size of this physical world and the amount of people on it, it can contain numerous individual worlds whose truths are pure contradictions (even ignoring religion). And we may often catch ourselves thinking: “what is right?” Which is because we so often assume that we all live within the very same world, and that all truths are common. The question might even send us into an existential crisis: “have I had it wrong since the beginning?” We might end up being someone else than we were, thinking like that. It’ll mean we’ve effectively changed our own world into something else. It’s possible and perhaps even for the better sometimes, but generally, it’s not necessary.

There is no one universal truth, no one true common world all our minds live in. We all have our own take on the world. In it we’re never misplaced and we’re not mistaken. We can shape our own worlds and decorate them however we please. We can fill our worlds with happiness, or we can fill them with sorrow (and then I don’t mean what happens, but how that affects us and makes us think). Neither is more true nor more right. For what is right and true is also a part of our own world.

Of course, you could say that’s taking it a bit far; perhaps beyond moral, or beyond the limitations of the human psyche. And you’d be right. Because there are limitations to what your own world could and should be. Where the limits are, depends on who you ask, but more importantly it depends on what you’re capable of. Your world has got to reflect your own identity (preferrably including your conscience). And most of the times it will, if you’ve never thought about it. I’d say it’s even possible to find your own identify by realizing what your own world is like. But you might also change your own world to something that’s not you (however paradoxal it might sound, I still think it’s possible), and that might be bad for you. But personally I believe that most of us can live in many different worlds without this problem.

And as if things aren’t complicated enough: nobody can live isolated from everyone else, so there are a whole lot of other worlds we’ve got to pass through each day of our lives. There can also be collective opinions shared by many different individual worlds, and there’s also this monstrous, shapeless, vague lump of billions of individual worlds that one can choose to put to represent the common mind of the whole world. In short, this is a whole science (which has probably been science’d lots of times already).

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.