Sleepless nights for limitless beings

Today someone asked me "where do you start and where do you end?"

How big am I? How old am I? Am I really only fifty-five kilograms?
I wasn't always this heavy.
I wasn't always this light.

But I always was, regardless of my dimensions. How old will I get before all traces of my existence are smudged into the surface texture of the universe? How soft is the transition? Aren't I really just the concentrated mass of the sexual prowess of my predecessors? Didn't I start whenever it was that whoever they were first fucked?

Just exactly who am I? How many pieces of me are there? Am I like potassium - present in different places at the same time? Where have my words, ideas, opinions already gone? What am I doing there? Having a holiday?

How much of me is there to go around? Am I a finite resource like this body? Or am I infinite like the architecture of thought? How many questions can I fit into my lifetime? Is that a sadistic question?

How am I going to get around? Should I be a teacher or a carpenter? A potter? An illustrator? Am I going to be generous? Considerate? Passionate? Compassionate?

How fast do I go? How fast should I go? Isn't it nonsensical to rage through life at break-neck speed? Isn't it best to live slowly? Won't time seem longer? Won't life seem longer?

Why aren't I tired?

Happy

Happiness isn't an outcome, it's a skill. You don't at some point reach happiness and you don't get happy by working yourself into the ground trying to achieve happiness.

You can't give happiness to someone. Happiness isn't a gift, it's part of your identity. Unlike limbs, transplanting a state of mind isn't possible. However, your happiness can help other people to recognise what happiness is, and start them on their own search for happiness.

I don't think happiness comes from ideas, the past, the future, money, food, sex, education, objects or power. In my experience happiness comes from working conscientiously and consistently, being flexible, making decisions, pro-actively caring about something larger than your own life and being part of a family.

               I am giving you happiness in a box!                                        Oh. What does it look like?       

                                                                                                                

              A lot of work, flexibility, altruism, an 

             ability to make your own choices... 

            I also put your whole family in there, 

           friends included, just the way they are!
           The whole kit and kaboodle!                                          

            

A poem on rage and confusion (perhaps stemming from the collective consciousness of Australian culture post 2013 national election?)

Well whaddaya know whaddaya know

There’s a face at the base of my big toe.

And I know I am not dreaming,

Cause that person’s face is screaming.

Yelling shrill and brittle and bright -

“RAGE! RAGE AGAINST THAT SOCK SO WHITE!”

"Broken and broken again on the sea, the moon so easily mends" - Chosu

I've been in a period of aloneness, but it hasn't been lonely.
You are so subtle that you can't be seen, heard or touched.
You are so present that a search for yourself leads away from your self.
You are so still that if you move to try and find yourself, you disturb your self.

I am talking about the self beyond your mind and heart. Beyond thoughts, beyond feelings. The quest for "self knowledge" isn't a quest at all. You need not look elsewhere. Wherever you go, there you are.

I want people to know that they are so much less than what they think they are. I want people to embrace the simplicity and peace of simply being - instead of going through the race of always becoming: becoming an adult, becoming an individual, becoming emancipated, becoming wealthy, becoming accepted... There are as many kinds of "becoming" as there are people. Becoming is literally always going to be coming. Living in a state of becoming is living in the future before it's present, and often living in disappointment and haste.

If you're always seeking to become, you can't really see yourself for what you are now.

And now, I see my self almost as a location I could call home, almost like a planet with gravitational pull, almost like a lover but with no separation, because the love is fulfilled. I love my self and my self loves me.

self portrait

God is design

God is the ball and socket joint in the knuckle of the middle finger of an aye aye: a freakishly flexible spindly finger used to procure juicy grubs tucked under the hard bark of Madagascan trees.

God is a double helix, or the surface area of a palm tree. God is a chemistry kit, a magical trick, in which 20 amino acids can brew the eyeball of a bull and your pubic hair and the smell of wet dog.
Such long recipes take millennia to write. God the witch whose cauldron is always boiling.

the enlivening stench of God.

Externalise

There's so much STUFF out there that it's become an essential part of living to make choices about the possession of stuff. In particular there is an obsession with using stuff to externalise your beliefs/values.

The symbolic value of stuff is supposed to say something about us, it's supposed to make a statement on our behalf... yet often this consumerist culture undermines it's own values. I fail to comprehend how an embroidered anarchy symbol could symbolise the act of undermining authority when it has come to a person by way of such highly regulated and ordered modes of transaction as international shipping and the simple, lawful rules of economic exchange. Diogenes was a little more true to anarchy, living in a pot and telling Alex the Great to sod off and get out of his sunshine, but eventually the significance of his life meant his final wishes for his body to be chucked in a ditch were overturned and he was given a funeral of pompous proportions.

What a nice example that irrespective of the weight of an individuals beliefs, they may weigh little more than a flea to someone else. That's why aggression over ideologies is so absurd. The argument "If you don't think what I think is important, I'm going to clout you at military magnitude" is about as comprehensible as this sentence: shoiu ajwerk fadijso kakalimohouni.

Being highly sensitive to visual datum I notice aggressive visual information with clarity. Aggressive means ready to confront. Abnormality and sexuality are confronting. People make themselves appear abnormal or sexually overbearing in order to express a belief, and it is my conjecture that this belief is still in it's pubescent form i.e. still being formed. I think often it's the manifestation of experimentation with a belief in being worthwhile. Surely something that's worthwhile catches ones attention?
Another way to view this: cheap things are advertised with much noise and movement in attempt to affirm their value, very expensive things are advertised subtly because their value is inherent; they are made from quality materials.

However when applying the analogy to humans it is not a discussion about quality, rather it's a question of perspective. I am in no way saying that some humans are made from inferior materials - I am saying that people experience the ability to see the material they are made from in varying degrees, and accordingly peoples abilities to externalise their beliefs are varied. Often peoples opinions, values or beliefs feel like jelly and look like smoke and it's not acceptable to do the jelly walk and float around, so some other image more readily recognisable is worn. Aside from all this, it is essential to know that worth is not inherent, that it's created, that humans are creative, and that ones sense of worthiness is just like lego - you can build it up yourself. And if you want to understand what your opinions, values and beliefs are make three lists: "opinions", "values", "beliefs" for each of these domains "love", "spaces", "work" (at least that way you cover your relationships, your home and your livelihood).

I reckon it is an essential process of divulging the chaff from the wheat, the process of attaching to clothing and hairstyles and attitudes... often at the tail end of adolescence they peel away, because we notice how uncomfortable that attachment is.
Although of course there are some people who are very comfortable with themselves and who possess an appreciation for visual culture, and who use abnormality or sexuality as a tool to spread awareness of non-hegemonic ideas. Think drag.

What if you aren't convinced that your opinions, values and beliefs are you? Afterall, they change. You weren't born with them and yet you were born a conscious being, so perhaps, below those highly subjective, ephemeral - and remember, essentially meaningless (don't forget Diogenes final wish!) behaviours and attitudes that you picked up somewhere along the way there is you: a piece of consciousness.

In that case - what's the most expedient method of expressing your self? How do you "look" like consciousness? What does that look like? Maybe it just looks like you, paying attention. Yet it seems more authentic to act consciously, than to just look conscious. I mean. Come on. My brother sleeps with his eyes open.

Toast etc.

Knowledge is like a public coin-op washing machine and we all put bits in and take bits out.
When I get a nice bit I wear it for a while and then like to put it back in, so writing like this is one way of putting knowledge back where I believe it should belong - to everyone.

One concept I picked up is the proposition that anger is caused by desire.

Abuse yields anger because your desire to be respected has been ignored.
Someone who wastes your time yields irritation (a seed of anger) because your desire to control time cannot be realised.
A news story about autocratic governance yields anger because you have a sweeping desire for equality.

So if desire can lead to anger should we try and stamp out desire? Surely not, because desire is what makes things move. You think that a plane moves because of aerodynamics and whatever other laws of physics are involved, but planes move because people buy plane tickets because people desire to go places, to work and earn money, to have a better life, to see people they love, to know the world. Desire moves.

In trying to curb anger, which is essentially self-destructive, it might be better to ask if the things you get angry about are reasonable. If you get angry about things you cannot change, use reason to come to acceptance. If you get angry about things you can change, define the desire which fuels your anger and follow the desire to make change.

Butter-side-down anger can be avoided by putting more bread in the toaster.