Feb 17, 2017
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A shaken individual may find it difficult to find their inner peace. Because of incessant searching, the nervous man finds nothing. His nervousness hinders him. He can no longer think of the simple things, can no longer perform simple tasks, can no longer see what is right in front of him, because he is blinded by the magnifying glass he has put over his life. A magnifying glass, a seeing tool... it can blind when used too viciously. When man searches too hard, he will find nothing for he distrusts the natural order of his life. I am someone who deeply questions. Often times, I am perplexed. How? I always ask myself. How can I be sure of anything, and thus how can I trust in my decisions? This is my own mistake. For it is only an illusion that any choice we make is our own. When we find our oneness, our anxiety is lost, because we realize there is no use in our nervousness. It saves us from nothing. Life will continue as it always would have. The universe knows nothing of our nervousness. It can not respond to it. It only knows to do what it has been doing for all of time, and time itself is a created concept. The universe only knows how to be. Your nervousness has no use. The rain comes down and everything is only as we perceive it to be. Even our own perceptions, they are constantly warped, yet our failure is in trying to correct them. In seeing the truth, there is no trying. For the truth just is, it is already there. Our seeking is the skewing of our perception.
How long can we slave over textbooks, incessantly jotting down formulas and other patterns of memorization when formulas are not necessary? How long may the professor stand in front of the classroom, relying on theatrical hand gestures and the varying tone of his voice to entertain his aloof guests? His aloof guests, who are none other than the students who have come here to "learn" -- or so they say, as they lose themselves in the 1 hour and 50 minute session where the professor is simply a lunatic. How is he a lunatic, may you ask? He is a well educated professor who has spent years in deep study, in critical analysis of ideas often mind boggling to us. Well if we have developed the notion that talking to ourselves is a marker of insanity, then is it not more insane to desperately speak to a room full of people who have withdrawn? No one is listening to this fiercely educated man. The students have clearly withdrawn, and found solace in their cell phones, because Twitter and Instagram and what our neighbors have done today is more interesting than nuclear fission that produces atomic bombs. "I would rather sit here and shoot with sling-shots at angry birds rather than drool over cumulonimbus clouds" the weary student might say. Yes, while professors draw up their mighty equations which teach students how to calculate the probability of a false positive on an at-home HIV test, students write down the man-made figures with no comprehension occurring. As brain dead as we become watching Television, these students do when they mentally vacate the classroom and experience dull adulations about how good it was of them to come to class and how very responsible that was of them and how much further their education has developed due to their physical presence in the classroom today. But this is NOT enough!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We can not stand for this. And it is not only the students, but the professors, who have either landed at this job as a last resort or perhaps they even have a passion for teaching, and have lost all ideas on how to engage this classroom. There is not even a worthwhile paycheck attached to this job, this job which is to PLANT A SEED IN OUR YOUTH and GIVE THEM DIRECTION AND THE SKILLS THEY NEED TO DEVELOP US AS A SOCIETY. Perhaps there is no paycheck to it because we all know it is not working. If the students are not learning, then how can the professors be paid properly for teaching? Or is the system backwards and is it the lack of monetary investment in our education system which has led to it's crumbling, now close to deceased? I do not know the answers, but I beg other students and professors to ask themselves so we can make a crucial change. So the professors... they stop the theatrical hand gestures, they no longer commit to creating inclinations and declinations of the tone of their voice; they are tired, as tired as the students in the classroom with every desk filled to the brim with apathy. So they show videos, and pass out worksheets, and add up points, hoping to change the amount of interest in the room. But sometimes we are left trying so hard and it begins to seem like it's for nothing, so we give up entirely. And we have a very basic lecture with very minimal outside resources that capture the student's eyes, and so knowledge is indeed LOST instead of GAINED in the classroom due to the poor relationship between professor and student, between communication of these ideas to the students -- everything is lost and so the purpose of the system has become lost. I can not stress enough the importance of an education. Humanity is in bad shape. For when education loses it's value, and the encouragement of the development of new ideas ceases to be, then we have lost our purpose as human beings on this planet. As humans, we are blessed with the ability to critically think. Oh yes, if we really want to, with the proper education, we can solve mysteries to no end. We can expand our horizons, we can live life as we have never seen it. The tunnel of education is endless, the things that we can learn to do are endless, and the power is in our youth but we are losing them to a broken education system which influences our students to memorize their answers for the exam, with no application skills in mind at all, and proceed to dump out this information afterward - like trash, instead of the gold that it could be. We do this and we lose the greater meaning behind school. We are meant to understand these ideas and concepts, this curriculum is failing us, we must speak out and tell educational administrators around the world that we are tired of this -- this is not working for us -- we want to learn! We want to learn and we simply cannot do it this way! But we have stopped caring. And so our education has ceased to develop in a way beneficial to it's educators and it's students. WE ARE BOTH AT FAULT.
You wouldn't believe me, but I used to be a terribly fun person. You read that and think, but you're only 19, how much more mundane could you have become? You're only 19, you've got your entire life to be mundane -- why choose now? Except I never really felt that I made a conscious choice. After all, the best thing to be is young and ignorant. I wish I would have remained that way. I used to have vitality in my eyes. I was hungry for adventure. The night called to me. I was excited to see my friends, to escape into the night and be free of responsibility. It has been so long since I've had a time like that. It's 1:18 AM and I have oil in my air, my body is exhausted, the night is crisp, and my mind has been harassing me for weeks. I've felt more in touch and more disconnected with the world in these past few weeks than I ever have in my whole life. My soul is a Phoenix, in the midst of rebirth after a very mournful death. I can feel it inside of me. This changing of the page, it is catastrophic and almost tragic... but I believe it is a predecessor of greatness.
Late night thoughts
I imagined myself in a place of veracious grace. With one taste of a feeling, I became the greediest creature on earth. I became the epitome and the embodiment of rapacity. I sought like a ravenous animal. Everywhere I went, I pursued said feeling. Like a young man chasing a skirt, or a young girl seeking affirmation (and one results in the fruition of the other, a mutually acceptable agreement). I looked for it everywhere, and in everyone: in the azure colors of the sky, what an assortment… in transparent oceans, the eyes of the poverty stricken, the eyes of people with wealth acquired, in ascetics seeking freedom in restriction. I sought, within the entire world, one feeling… of all the elements on earth, of all the money, of all the celebrity. I wanted nothing.
I wanted nothing else but the feeling.
One dose of it… I had imagined it was better than drugs, better than sex, better than material wealth, better than emotional wealth. This feeling was the feeling of oneness which overlapped all other feelings. Which overlapped all other things. Everything became one: myself, this earth, the vegetation among it, the oceans within it, my brother, my teachers, my friends - were one being - and we all existed in the one feeling. And there was love. Enough love to fill levees and break dams, enough to heal all of the violence in the world, to crumble up hatred and diminish it like collections of dirt. It was enough to quiet this earth, the earth that has never stopped weeping.
But how can one draw something they have never seen?
Of all things I experienced, I imagined this feeling to be the most absolute… more real than the existence of pain, more real than happiness. I do not know this feeling. This feeling, however, knows me. As it knows all things. It observes, it says nothing, it can not bring itself to you, or you to it; it is always there, but it is a change of a channel, not something one can take a path toward. There is no advancement toward it or deviation from it. It simply is. I have imagined this feeling; I have looked into the eyes of unaffected beauty and waited, patiently, waited for it to come to me… like an old man waits for death to take him… for this feeling to take me, and submerge me within it. I have wished for it; I have hoped for it. It is this, this is the feeling that will omit me from grief. It knows no grief.
I hope with all of my heart that this feeling omits me from grief. I have grieved for too long, too subtly, too silently, and whilst all this time even in my silence my lungs are sore from what has felt like incessant screaming. But there is no selfishness. For what is resolved in me, must resolve in all other things. The pain is corrected within me–myself, but also everyone else and all other things. The pain that has enveloped me, became me, and I have become it.
I can not dream anymore. I can not hope anymore. There is nothing left in me. I am but a shell of what I was, drained by experience, and erased by pain. I have known great happiness, and great pains. But what happens? When each feeling has numbed, and the primary feeling which exists in the heart is a dulling numbness which gnaws into the spirit which it inhabits. I am what I was, and nothing more than a memory. It awakens me in the night. It asks me to seek. It asks me to wish it out of existence. And I do, I seek, I wish, I work. When one becomes one - with everything, they escape the gnawing, the dullness, the screaming that is so silent.
But there is no selfishness. And one can not draw something they have never seen.
On any other afternoon, she would have walked down to the park. It was her primary choice for a place that would initiate deep contemplation. Here, her queries about life would spring into being. The park had been around for ages. The swings, often unaccompanied by any children at all, were rusted by a dark orange color. This made them resemble a setting sun, a suitable metaphor for the obsolete swing set. She preferred to think of those swings as the end of an era. The slide was covered with leaves and sap from the oak tree overhead. Teenagers, bored and confused, had made it their own work of art by decorating it with graffiti. In a world where they were silenced, here in this park, they found their voice and wrote themselves into existence. “Forgotten Youth” is the phrase they chose to imbrue onto the old slide where they might have played together when they were younger. When their souls were less tortured, and they found consolation and freedom here in this park. That, however, was another lifetime ago.
Today she chose to travel a different route. Today, she wanted her contemplation to spring from a background different from her default. The park was filled with metaphor, and it was beautiful, but today she wanted her pensive thoughts to erect from a place less inspiring. So she wandered down roads she had never seen, saw faces she never knew existed, and felt a calm never otherwise experienced. Her exploration led her to a foreign sequence of thoughts, and so it proved that with a new place came newer contemplations:
If we grow from suffering, and we develop far less without affliction, then is the tragedy to not experience any tragedy at all? If with great inner wars and turmoil, we are bred from that very chaos, then it is the ones who have never known upheaval who are lacking in emotional and spiritual development. And so poor them. We should not pity the suffering, but pity the prospering, for they have never known a tear stain on the cheek. They have never questioned their very being. They have never felt that they were rotting like a corpse, while fully alive, pulse and all. And so poor them. They are the ones who have suffered by not suffering at all.
She convinced herself, a thousand times over, that these were not bitter thoughts. She caressed the scars on her mind and told herself that they were beautiful; they were inspiring.
But what was it? What was driving this inner need that she had always possessed, to seek the truth about what existence was? She examined every lavender flower, every clear raindrop from the sky, and she asked it what it’s purpose was. Deep down I think she wanted to know herself. She was desperate to know why everything was born into this world, in hopes of somehow finding out about why she herself was. She was a flesh and blood girl. But she felt her soul was not intact with the figure she saw in the mirror, the figure that was her body. She felt transparent within herself, and she was her own ghost, only haunting her own singular mind. The girl wondered how her experiences hadn’t caused her to collapse like a Mockingbird shot in mid flight; wondered why her skin wasn’t scarred with holes from the war that was her life, because the pain was too sharp and vivid to be anything but bullet wounds. Sometimes, when her life was bordering on horrific, when everything was too tragic for her… She would find solace in a bench by the beach, and she watched the ocean. The waves crashed forward, drew themselves back, and this phenomenon occurred every day from sunrise to sunset. This was the only time when she was not absolutely perplexed. She asked the water no questions, she did not ask why it was what it was. She only knew that it was great. This was the time when the lavender flowers would exist without question, when the raindrops could fall without her dissecting their purpose. She wasn’t looking for an answer in science. She was looking for an answer to the endless suffering she had dwelled in for so many years.
If she could write this herself, I am sure she would write that she is tired of tragedy. If she could find out why flowers flow in the wind like they do… their bodies bending with the current, in perfect flexibility, and without the strain of bones tearing them down… if she could figure out why a raindrop can fall so restfully into the earth’s atmosphere, without fear for it’s life to enter this daunting place, with every atom in it’s being in perfect unity with all of the rest of the world… then maybe in this searching, she could find herself. She could detach herself from expectations, she could stop being a martyr, and simply live without suffering.
But was she a martyr or a masochist?
I realize I have let go of something. My soul aches with a dulling intensity. My thoughts are not organized anymore. I used to sit in front of a page and look at it as though it were a canvas. I wrote and wrote and somehow in the end, it all made sense. Every idea presented itself in perfect clarity, and then pushed on to the next… And to the next. Until before I knew it, I read what I had produced and with every sentence was able to experience that feeling which I felt the second I wrote it. All of the pain in my life, all of the deep conjectures which perplexed me; I could reread and it all made sense. I feel a twinge of anxiety at the idea of not being able to do that again. It scares me to think I won’t be able to reach that far into myself, my soul. It scares me to think that if I stop thinking more deeply about these fleeting thoughts that used to initiate my writing – that there will no longer be any depth in me. I will have become a surface, a facade; I will have lost any authenticity that once existed inside of me. My depth is something I don’t want to lose. I don’t want my intensity to dull. Yet everything I think and feel is starting to become a rusted mess again. I think I have lost my way.
J.K.S