Grasping onto the Curtails of Hope

It is a new year, 2014. Of course such designations are arbitrary, but that by no means makes them meaningless. On the contrary, the beginning of a new year can mean a great deal. It represents a common paradigm essential to the human condition, namely the possibility, the necessity, for a second chance, for a clean slate. We all need to believe we can be better, we all desire to know that we can change; hence the “New Year’s Resolution” on New Years Eve; complete with drunken parties, a giant falling ball of light in New York City, and promises to go to gym; to lose ten pounds; to stop eating junk food; or even to stop drinking – as the drunken parties we attend laugh along at the irony. But beneath all this pageantry and flash lies a kernel of truth; the miraculous ability for the human soul to change – those familiar with the infamous T.V. Dr. House may now scuff at my naïveté. Yet saying people can change is quite different than saying people do change. I admit most do not, at least not in any significant way. True we grow; our bodies alter with age, reach their prime, than slowly or rather abruptly break down. True we learn; our minds expand or wither with the many experiences of life. But whether or not any of this affects the soul is another matter entirely.[1] Just because our bodies change does not mean we grow stronger, just because we experience and learn, does not mean we grow wiser. To grow stronger and wiser requires more. It demands perseverance and self reflection. It insists upon that drive, which martial artists call indomitable spirit, the will to persist through perceived failure and pain. Because when one thinks deeply and breaks through the shackles of thought, which bind our minds. One realizes a simple truth: failure in its common form does not exist. It is merely an illusion born of fear, bent upon inserting its limitations, and stunting the growth of our soul.

Look at the feeble New Year’s Resolutions we make, a goal that is either too high for us to reach or too low for it to matter. But of course that is because we defeat ourselves before we even get started. We are defeated by our own failure. No one meets their goals all the time. However, as we fail to reach them again and again, we become discouraged. The longer we persist it seems the deeper we dig ourselves into the belief that we can never change that we are stuck just as we are.

Dear reader I hope you believe me when I say you are not stuck and you never were, not really. The idea was an illusion of the mind, but you can and will break free. We all have different methods, but allow me to offer these few words to help you on your path. First, discover the beauty of who you are. You are the product of millions of years of evolution, of complex genetics guided by the struggle and love of thousands of generations of ancestors long forgotten, but never lost. Your body is a marvelous biological machine of still unknown complexity, which incorporates trillions of cells working together in an intricate network of organ systems and feedback loops. And yet in this ocean of complexity, in this miraculous universe of interacting atoms and forces and physics, your life has been made quite simple. It consists merely of choices. But, my dear reader be not afraid, for it is not just one choice you are given, no. Your life consists of countless experiences and opportunities to make all sorts of decisions. Make no mistake, you are a beautiful person, a wonderful and gifted person. Many of the flaws you see are where you fail to live up to the expectations of society or even yourself. You would do well to examine them, and see if any of these expectations are worthy of your persistence or your effort, in other words if they are worthy of you. If they are not, change them. Choose the person you wish to be and go be that person. At times you will stumble, you will fall, and then you will rise again. Hold true to your ideals, there is no such thing as failure here, only setbacks, obstacles to be overcome. Let go of your fear of failure and open your heart to the possibilities of hope.

You are not alone. My friend believe these words because in them lie a truth that can change the world. What I am speaking of are your fellow human beings.[2] We all live in this world together. In our pursuit of a better life we have stumbled and we have fallen. With the dawn of 2014 we see a world ripe with war and hate. A world filled with fear and terrorism. A world of disease, and death, and pain. But, it is also a world of love and of kindness. A world where each of us everyday has an opportunity to make a small difference in someone else’s life; a smile, a hug, even a brief nod of acknowledgement. And then there are the big differences we can make; an altruist donating to charity, a surgeon removing cancer and saving someone’s life, a fireman pulling a person out of a burning house. You see my dear reader, though the human race has stumbled and fallen, so often throughout our history, we can and will get up time again. Because whenever one of us falls, there will always be many others standing by and all it takes is one to reach out and extend a hand.

So in this year 2014, do not allow society or your own fear of failure curtail your hope. Release them and rise again to each challenge you face. And when the chance comes to help another, plant your feet firmly and extend a hand, so that no one will be left in the dust. Together we can build a world worth living in, but first we must start with ourselves; by forging the people that we are all capable of being. What I am saying dear reader, is think not how you can change the world, but how you can change yourself. You can never fail, so long as you keep rising each time you fall. And you may see that as we all begin to develop ourselves the world will start developing too.


[1] Let me qualify this word “soul” as it has a lot of religious connotations. For now let us describe it as merely the essence of an individual, the emergence of consciousness. No faith in god is required here, but nor is it excluded. 

[2] If you are religious you may also believe in a higher power. This is helpful in that the idea of inter-connectivity is already planted in your mind, but it is not absolutely necessary to understand the point.

Sailing on a Sea of Thought

Imagine going back to a time when the Earth was relatively unexplored by man. When we built large wooden structures with great sails that harnessed the power of the wind to take us to places unknown. Of course this is mostly from a western civilization perspective I am writing and so hopefully you will forgive me the bias of my upbringing, but looking past that can you feel the excitement? The wonder, the uncertainty, even fear? Exploration is a tantalizing concept, a seductive and unforgiving pursuit. It is far from safe and does not make any promises of return or glory, though it has no qualms with offering these succulent morsels of temptation. Can you feel it reader? The cool ocean spray on your face, as the waves break on the dock. The steady sway underfoot as you walk the boarding ramp of the looming behemoth. The great white sails seamlessly stitched to capture the forces of the air flowing around you as you move towards the horizon. Oh and that sweet horizon, a glimmering jewel of freedom, priceless, for its worth is measured in the countless new experiences it has to offer. Yes to embark on an adventure like no other.

               

Well I will grant you that even I don’t believe such things were ever so glamorous. Indeed sea voyages must have been rather brutal affairs, away from solid land and fresh food for weeks, even months on end. The only company, your fellow male sailors, who likely don’t want to be there anymore than you do, but are nonetheless coerced by circumstance to climb aboard. Still the idea of exploration rings clean and crisp in my mind undiminished, nay even invigorated by reality.

True, we still do explore new territory to this day. Science allows us intrepid explorers to embark on all sorts of interesting experimental journeys and in many ways these journeys are much more comfortable and fruitful that the ones of old, if slightly less romantic. Yet there is a problem with science and indeed with any real institutionalized thought or belief system, including most religions. Namely, all of these systems run the risk of and often fall into the whirlpools of dogmatic thought. Which take us round and round, until we’ve been going in circles for so long there’s no clear way out. Now, to be fair I believe science has better safeguards and methods of extraction from these dark abysses then religion for the most part, but that doesn’t make it any less guilty of steering into them, nor does in ensure that we will alter our course. 

Behold another grand illusion: the everyday experience of reality. It seems like for as long as humans have been sentient we have sought to establish and explain the world and universe in which we inhabit. We have only so many tools for doing this, namely our senses. And thus is born the everyday experience of our lives. It has become our nature to fall into a level of acceptance. That is to say we accept certain things about reality based on what we see, hear, touch, smell and taste. Whether this tendency of acceptance is evolutionarily or socially derived is not entirely clear to me, but suffice is to say that it exists. Let me give you an example. When I am typing these words I accept that they appear on my computer screen as words. Now, through my knowledge of technology I know that this is not actually true at all. In fact, each of these words is made up of hundreds if not thousands of pixilated dots, which appear on my liquid crystal display screen based off a complex interaction between the hardware of my computer and the word processing software along with, I can only imagine, numerous other computer programs, which position the dots on the screen just so. We can even go further than that and discuss the electromagnetic emission of light that my eyes and mind receive and interpret into an image, or why not discuss the interaction of atoms and molecules at play here. Well obviously I can go on and on, but I cannot very well live my life constantly thinking on all these levels, it is enough for me that I type and “poof” the words are there. So perhaps I am living an illusion of sorts, in that I can only see a small fraction of what’s really going on.Which, as it happens, is incredibly fortuitous since it allows me to see things at a level where I can affect them in a meaningful way. However, here is where dogmatic thought can become harmful (by dogmatic thought I am referring to any entrenched or well held idea or belief, that is for all intents and purposes unassailable from the perspective of the collective or institution that holds this belief or idea)While this is method of viewing the pixiliated dots as words is very practical and I can go about living my life just fine typing away at the computer, if I didn’t allow myself to understand what was happening at a deeper level, I wouldn’t be able to create anything new (not counting my writing of course). That is to say, if I and everyone else just accepted that when we typed computer keys, words popped up on the screen and we forgot everything else about understanding why and how this happens, than we couldn’t very well make any new computers. Indeed we would be stuck just using keyboards, screens, and word processors without ever creating any new ones, or improving current ones, or even fixing them when they broke down. In a similar way dogmatic thought leaves us stuck and unable to create new ways of understanding our universe, or even improving or fixing existing ideas, simply because we cannot get past the current level of understanding, the entrenched belief.

Let me offer an example from the world of physics. Now must physicist, believe it or not, think they’re pretty hot stuff, they know their way around the universe so to speak. In the beginning of the twentieth century it was widely accepted that the major physicals laws had all been fairly well established, and all that was left were measuring things to the fifth decimal place. Enter Einstein with his theories of Special and General Relativity, followed closely by the discovery of quantum mechanics, and it turns out the physics community couldn’t have been more wrong, they had only a very, very limited understanding of how the universe really worked. Now in this case we were lucky in that the dogmatically held belief of the maturity of the physical sciences did not have the power to keep these new theories at bay forever. Indeed, it would seem that eventually, given enough time progress will overcome any resistance. But, my point is, why does their need to always be such great resistance?

If we could let go of our tendencies towards dogmatic thought, if we could allow ourselves and each other the freedom to question the foundations of our beliefs without fear of the changes it might bring, then we could open ourselves and our species up to potentially limitless possibilities. We could become superconductors of thought, with no internal resistance. I know that we fear the unknown, and because of this we fear change, but it is high time we muster our courage and embark on a voyage. Not necessarily by questioning everything or always maintaining an open mind, because if we were to do this we would run the risk of never believing or accepting anything. Much like how I cannot always view the words I am typing at the atomic level. Rather what I suggest is allowing our minds to freely sail across a sea of thoughts and ideas, to fully explore them and go where the winds might take us into the exhilarating and illuminating unknown. 

Conscientizacion and the Wisps of Thought

This blog is about you, as it happens it is also about me. It records and encompasses the wisps of my thoughts, but truly I cannot take full ownership over them. For my thoughts do not exist in solidarity, rather they are prompted by observation, stimulus, emotion, and knowledge. That is where you come in, dear reader. It is quite possible that I do not know your name, that indeed we have never met, nor will ever meet. Yet it is far less likely that my life has not been affected by you in some way or conversely that yours has not been affected by mine. After all, are you not reading these words now? You and I have embarked on a relationship, however the beginning is an illusion, for our connection existed long before we were born. Perhaps it begin in the infancy of time and space, or maybe as our constituent elements broiled in the heart of a now extinct star. Then again, it may have started in the primordial soup of first life. Possibly, it never began at all, but always existed somewhere, somewhen, which hampered by out limited perspective we have only just now discovered. Pointless philosophical musing perhaps, but the kernel of truth lies in the intimacy of connection. Just as my thoughts do not exist alone nor can anything be said to exist by itself. Thus, it follows that the relationships which unites us, you to I and I to you, may in fact be more "real" than our very own existence.

Observe a grand illusion; the self-made man. Our society clings to this in a virtual death grip as war and poverty ravage the population. Yet, it does not exist. No man or woman gives birth to him or herself. None of us can claim we never had a guardian, a teacher, a model to which we strove. And what of our infrastructure? Do we not enjoy the comforts of electricity, of plumbing, the farmers and grocers from whom we get our food, the highways and roads which we utilize to travel, the schools and libraries where we learn, even the internet through which you read this now? All exist in a vast network of interconnection, of harmonic relationships. The song we produce together is not always beautiful. Just as an orchestra will break into chaos without a conductor or means of cooperative action, so too humankind is broken into disharmony by buying into this grand illusion that each of us acts alone. Which brings me, dear reader, to the purpose behind this blog, the raison d'etre.

Conscientizacion, or consciousness raising. Born from a radical movement by Catholic priest to fight poverty, it is a process that seeks to develop consciousnesses and appreciation for ones situation to promote change. Not by one person acting alone, but by the multitudes of enlightened individuals working together to demand a better life. By making each player of the orchestra aware of the unique and equal importance of their position, harmony may be achieved. Thus, I seek to do my part and call upon you dear reader to do yours. To challenge the backwards thinking of violence and oppression, to practice tolerance, love and forgiveness in your life. I believe in a hope. A hope that the wisps of my thoughts may act like the subtle breezes over the surface of the sea. Though one breeze may only make a small ripple, when that breeze is joined by millions of other air currents the seemingly insignificant ripple turns into many powerful waves for all to see. The waves which lap relentlessly against the shore until solid rock gives way and the continents themselves are changed.