I’ve been thinking quite a lot recently inbetween commuting and what ever else I tend to get upto. Mostly about how someone starts or struggles with grasping.. what it means to be human? to be alive? I’ve had the situation stuck in my head of a human from birth brought up in a completely neutral or unimpressionable environment.. for some reason in the wild. Of course the more I thought about it the more I realised how stupid it sounds, no one starts with a ‘clean slate’ and I do not think their is a default position for this hypothetical exemplar human. From birth we all have bias or ‘pre-judgements’ (prejudice) formed by our character as social beings.. as creatures which interpret meaning and in posession of a supremely unique spark which puts a spin on a situation which is a sum of a whole number of things I have no real knowledge of.
A small part of me still and I think perhaps increasingly less so thinks that the soul or the human can be reasoned I doubt it more so now because to be honest I do not think there ever has been a single truly reasonable person who ever existed.. I could be wrong of course, but this is just a thought regardless. Our hearts bend towards things, like plants to sunlight as we grow.. we find things to grow towards.. the one thing I think we cannot do is to stop ourselves reaching out or indeed to instead shrink away from everything or anything.. what makes us different from plants.. or indeed other living things I think.. is that we have a choice in that which we grow towards and that sometimes this choice is admittedly clearer for some than others. We feed on it, define ourselves by it and indeed take meaning from it. The problem I find then is this notion of “unbearable lightness” which some might be aware of. In it’s original context the phrase I think is touching on liberation of a sorts.. that what we do has no real consequence we can make no “dent” in the fabric of truly objective being, leaving no real mark to say we were here.. we are nothing and there is nothing.. you can define if you wish.. as you must but there ‘is’ nothing.. so do as you will and be free. What I query with this is what I have discovered in my own life and this is that I do not believe we as individuals belong to ourselves, we need others.. for some this might be so that they might simply master others.. and for others to serve, often with most of us it is the mixture of the two. What I question is the individualism of the “unbearable lightness”, I have a quote in my mind.. it reads “Happiness is only real when shared.” and it comes from.. somewhere within the pages of doctor zhivago or somesuch I think. This I think has some truth.. not a private truth but something which affects all of us. I could have all the money in the world, but if I was the only man in the world I would truly be a pauper.. and to dehumanise or distance one human to another I think is fundamentally harmful to all of us and leaves us like a rich lonely man that i mentioned. That perhaps might seem obvious to some. I would not think it a far stretch then to say “Ok, group truth.. you could possibly maybe be unbearably light still as a collective.. with you’re ‘group story’ but does this make a dent in being? Does make lightness heaviness?”.
I would first off say that nothing on earth will make your being heavy.. because it is nothing but a reflection of you I think in short.. or rather it might not.. but that is all you see it to be, or you might realise it for the nihilistic void that it is. For me atleast, I do not think this a private realisation but something people could share.. I genuinely believe in a bracketing of my being.. or this universe and it’s being. I thought about it at work because.. well just like any code on a website’s page.. it only means anything when it’s in the right document or bracketed in the correct fashion. Otherwise it doesn’t compute, your page breaks and design fails. I thought about it too when i designed a 3-d game for a uni project and I pulled together page upon page of scripting and design to produce a world of limited capacity.. but with functionality which followed into form.
I hope then it is no surprise then to say that for me it is not hard to find God somewhere amidst this, not just a little personal god but one beyond the environment I find myself in. I would believe him too far away and out of my reach to know of should he not have touched me. God ceased long ago to be a fanciful notion and as Kierkagaard puts it “The I-it becomes the I-thou”. The Jews claimed they worshipped the God of “Heaven” not the god of trees, money, mountains or seas but something above, God called himself the Alpha and Omega, and I think then.. in light of that to live in God’s ‘channel’ is a means to break the unbearable lightness of being. I think this is.. because we are not rational creatures.. we are social creatures.. ‘herd’ creatures.. and we need our ‘group stories’ but for it to really matter we need a group story which the entire universe fits into. I think that is heaven when people live in harmony with the environment they find themselves in and love one another as God loved them and of course to see God as he/she truly is.
The next thing for me then is the realisation that despite what I “think” I know also how I feel… here is where musing is lost.. because I feel in who I am I do not want entirely to live in “harmony” entirely, sex, drugs and rock n roll still have a big appeal, I secretly want to give the finger to society, to university, to faces I know and just disappear off somewhere and gorge myself on what life has to offer me in terms of pleasure and pain. I think I realise now though that there are two different types of… ’satisfaction’, Nietzsche provided these as architypes to his work and I will present them, dionisius and apollo. I can drink alcohol till I’m sick.. and I have, I can sleep around till it becomes nothing to me.. and I can smoke all the pot I want.. but I know I’ll always want more, I’ll never “have my fill” I might get old, but I’d want my youth back just to do it all over again.. it always has it’s hangovers too. I realise too that if I have unprotected sex with a girl theres a real chance another human could come into existence from that and in that sense part of me then has to question it’s function, I could turn it into something else.. but try as I might I can’t get that out of my head for some reason. The other side is in that too, to live accordingly to the common means the ‘deep way’, the ‘will of God’ I think is obviously one of apparent self sacrifice.. but from what I know of it, it can do what the other pleasure cannot.. it can fill me up, I can say with deeds that I do not need to enter into them more than what is my fill. We can live without sex I believe but we can’t live without love, or hope, or friendship.. or faith (whever you call yourself religious or not)
Sex I think is a good example though, you can easily pay for sex.. you can easily get sex without paying that much either if you play your cards right.. but that person doesn’t want you.. they only want what you do or vice versa. People spend so much time dolling themselves up like peacocks.. it gets to a point when you think one lot of dressed up flesh is the same as any other as long as you don’t look her in the face. The other extreme is marriage, sex in the setting to the ideal isn’t the basis for the relationship but its an act which takes two seperate people and brings them closer, it also.. if done ‘naturally’ can result in life.. so rather than dehumanising.. you’re perhaps.. pro-humanising? I know people are going to disagree with what was just said to a whole range of degree’s.. but thats how I feel and I’m not entirely ignorant on the topic concerned. I do think though that this, in being what I think is a very real reality beyond my own perception.. and me being a meaning based and placing creature needs a group story to share, what I need is to transcend the concept of the I and turn it into the you. Instead of being locked in my own head and looking at the world a some dirty glass I need to know the people around me are real. My philosophy teacher’s classroom is one I’d never forget, he literally covered the walls in the quotes of different philosophers and thinkers aswell as all this bizarre art and strange poster designs. One quote among a few stuck with me though and it’s one by Iris Murdoch which said “Love is believing another person can be real.” God I’ve read is love and I think if that is true I can connect with the people around me and the world around me properly.. not dysfunctionally.. when I was in India I was taught the Hindi word ‘namaste’ which meant “I recognise the prescence of the holy one within you” I think thats what love is.. I think we define ourselves in God and other people.. or the two might be the same thing Jesus said “whatever you do the for the least of these you do for me” and “when I was hungry you fed me, when I was naked you clothed me”. I think the more we give ourselves to the shared story, the more we see what it’s all really about.
Umm.. so yeah… um.. bye? I don’t know if what I said is exactly fashionable or not so think what you will.
