One Day

He who does not believe that straight is straight must guard against the wickedness of good.

-Wu Ch’eng-en

A good thought to keep in mind, constantly, is that everything makes sense. It’s a very simple, powerful thought, and it’s true.

People constantly think and say that things don’t make sense, that there’s no reason for something to exist or have happened. We may not say it in seriousness, but the thought alone has power over our entire framework of mind. The thought puts up a conceptual wall between yourself and the truth; you literally obstruct your mind from taking the thought process any further. When you think “it doesn’t make sense” you’re removing it from your reality, the world that you know and understand. When you say “there’s no reason”, you’re disconnecting it from the chain of causation and barring yourself from understanding it in the future. Those two simple thoughts turn highways into dead ends.

When you know everything makes sense, everything you don’t understand is a beginning.

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Common – Retrospect for Life || 1997/One Day It’ll All Make Sense

We Are the Authors (II)

Didn’t I mention the ongoing “wow” is happening right now? We are all co-authors of this dancing exuberance where even our inabilities are having a roast. We are the authors of ourselves.

-Timothy “Speed” Levitch

In life some come across a thought – I would not exist without the world, but the world would exist without me.

This is disheartening. And untrue.

Imagine a novel. The author writes about a city, and as you read you envision the city in your mind. The words are the author’s, but without the reader they are nothing – they are ink, black shapes on paper. It is the reader that gives them meaning; it is the city of both the author and the reader. The world without the observer is but one hand clapping.

It is as observers that we enter the world, born with the tools to translate a universe into sensation and experience. Thus within every observer is a world, a world based on the same reality as others’ and also entirely separate. As we interact with the world, so do we give it meaning – humans become people, shapes become words. From the threads of the world we spin tapestries. We are both readers and authors.

When we die, a world dies – the world we saw. The world we touched, and smelled, and thought. Our world.

Many worlds exist, and will exist without us. But not our world.

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See also:

We Are the Authors (I)

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PJ Harvey – We Float || 2000/Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea

I Doesn’t Exist

Drunk posts are all the rage. Here’s one, cleaned up and published in post. Get it?

The whole thing wrong with this whole “I” business is that if there’s a such thing as “you,” and you’re separate from everything that isn’t you, then you have to accept that at one point there was no you, that “you” had a period of nonexistence. Which is of course impossible because something cannot come from nothing, not now anyways, and if you came from something then you still have to go about determining the point where you went from being nothing to being something, which again is impossible. Rather, you came from your parents, and for all purposes you are your parents, or a combination of the two, that and whatever they and you ate drank breathed and fucked for the past fifty years, same with their parents, and we could go back step by step or we could just assume you’re following along and get to the point where we’re supernovas and nebulae and then on the big bang’s doormat and we’re ringing the bell and is he even home? We’re not separate identities, we’re individual consciousnesses that are part of a whole, cells part of a body that’s part of a universe that’s part of something. Or nothing. Which is the same thing. Get it?

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Jay-Z – Cashmere Thoughts || 1996/Reasonable Doubt

Why Trip?

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us  “universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

-Albert Einstein

Ask most people if they’ve ever tripped, and they’ll say no. Shrooms, acid, mescaline – no, I’d never do that. I’d never trip. But tripping – hallucinating – is unavoidable. And not only is it unavoidable, it’s a daily occurrence; hallucinations are simply immaterial thoughts strong enough to seem material. Closed-eye-visuals (CEV’s), daydreams, and dreams are all forms of hallucination, and in a sense one could even go so far as to say that all thought manifesting itself in a sensory (audiological, visual, olfactory, etc.) manner is a mild hallucination. An example is thinking of a song – you can “hear” the melody in your head, even though it’s not physically playing. That’s hallucination – perceiving things that are not “there.”

And yet people are afraid to trip. Why? Though we hallucinate daily, our waking hallucinations stay “in the back of our head” – our outer sensory perception, though often dimmed, remains largely unaltered. And dreams, hallucinations which completely alter and replace our senses, are not a part of our “daily life.” It’s not something we experience in waking. When we wake we see things as they are, and when we sleep we experience hallucinations, but they’re cut off from the rest of the world – there’s the period of unconsciousness before and after they occur. And so we separate them from our reality, and live with a dualistic mindset, with the idea that hallucinations are somehow separate from “real life.”

Backroads

I had this theory that there’s only one backroad, and that it exists in a parallel dimension, and that it’s infinite like a mobius strip. And every time you’re driving at night and have to go through a network of little-used dirt roads in the middle of nowhere, you and your car enter the backroad. And you always think it’s different than the last backroad you were on, but as you drive down the winding, bumpy, indistinguishable and never-ending wooded path, you know in your heart that you’ve been there before. And I think you’re only allowed to re-enter the real world when you realize this.

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Everything But The Girl – Driving || 1990/The Language of Life