Those of us who have endured therapy, that disassembly of the self; where every part of you that you believe is a constituent part is dragged, mentally and literally screaming into the light of interrogation to be used on you by the rest of society to render one in line with the unofficial status quo.
Emotion, a crop that is reverse harvested - the complimentary sunlight that the ego cranes towards, mixed with the bitter water of incisive comparative reminders, before a passive aggressive thresher plucks your energy from the soil that connects us, to be refined then sent on to another, for whatever requirements it may have.
We are both the sowers of pleasure, and the harvesters of sorrow.
Yet we are also growing larger than before, the cycle repetitive yet incremental: As one branch of us is cut off we adapt without, evolving other tendrils unseen by the farmers - neural short cuts to areas previously unknown.
There are many already aware of this great work we perform though they may labour under a differing conception, even used to enhance the opposite of one's personal goals where a Skinner-Pavlovesque system keeps us in line with the prescribed struggle for unity.
Those of us who have seen the cycles of the past can predict the future to a degree, yet knowledge and even the wisdom to use it rarely bring happiness - a sense of alienation akin to walking down a path surrounded by people, and this alienation is not by colour but by reaction.
Much as a war weary soldier, on returning from battle feels little from scenes of a type of violence, or a child whose excitement at his favourite plaything dulls over time, so too can our reaction to people, places and events be filled with an ennui that borders on Zen philosophy.
Yet the invisible machine continues finding ways to surprise us with seemingly unprovoked laughter and tears; to give a sense of reality to the realm we seem to inhabit; though as it and we progress on the path of life mapped by our ancestors, our bonds to it constrict.
What energy was directed to us lessens, leaving us trapped in a routine without the strength to see a way out, as the previous variance now seems not to come from within, but without, for motives not entirely benign. Hence those of us who have tried to break these routines from an early age can be seen as older than we appear.
It is one maxim that I am oft reminded of - the light that burns twice as bright lasts half as long.
While previous restraints keep us on the road to what we label dementia, I still struggle to see why our energy is rationed in this way - for if Newton's laws remain true, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, and there is sufficient, nay infinite in the universe that can be harnessed for all life as we know it for as long as we want it.
A thought occurs that entropy is needed to combat ennui - it has been said that we were created with mortal bodies so that we can ascend to greater, that when the new becomes old we can slough off our husks, and that with age we learn to see death as something as commonplace as breath. Yet as a safety mechanism to keep us invested in the dream we live, we cannot remember what was before, so that we may see from birth everything with a purity that serves to enhance the following years.
Then it is so that history repeats albeit differently, until we regain the perfection that we once had, and carry this knowledge of everything as it once was, either within the soul or waiting on a plane science has yet to discover and map, for us to remain in bliss. This can only be achieved through its counterpart it seems.
The golden rule we are taught from a bygone age of do unto others as you would have them do unto you seemingly falls down, for a person may enjoy being hurt physically and do so in the hope of reciprocation, while the person hurt may be unwilling or unable to respond in kind. A law similar to karma in effect could operate in more than one way - the persons intentions could be matched to its opposite, two people torturing each other simultaneously, the intentions magnified then inflicted on the other in a way as unpleasant as the secondary person found it. Or it could recognise the intent and the effect could be magnified, therefore the behaviour would be instilled as acceptable to the person.
The concept of reward and punishment is at best a misunderstanding of reinforcing and averting behaviour - if someone is rewarded then the action is changed from its initial 'pure' cause to one to receive a reward, while a punishment fails to correct the mistaken internal logic of a behaviour and instead fuels fear of the chosen punishment as a reason for a behaviour not to be repeated, leading to further conflicts as the misunderstanding would remain. Whereas if a person decides to carry out an action where the desire to do so is there, the punishment could be superseded if known in advance, and if the punishment was not known, or the effect of an action, then ignorance cannot morally be corrected in any way but knowledge, which could either be pre taught, requiring trust in the instructor or learnt through observation.
This also fails to take into account the series of causes and effects that lead to something deemed problematic happening - therefore prevention lies in identifying factors, each with their own causes, and changed to what is seen as for the benefit of the majority, and to provide a desirable newly altered behaviour, rather than to create an aversion. So impure though this would be, all concerned would be in the happiest possible sense with, eventually, the ideal person's behaviours and characteristics.
Aware that this is a logical leap to an ideal, the problem of what an ideal person is raises its head, or more accurately what person is not ideal? And if an ideal person could be created then why replicate it?
If a person endures life lessons to eventually become perfect, then those lessons are also necessary and therefore perfect in themselves.
If a person is born perfect then it has nothing to think, as it would then know everything.
It follows that a perfect person would by created with the sum of all knowledge encoded into it, with the ability to perfectly recall a feeling/emotion, so that the act would no longer be neccesary as it could be remembered and felt. Then our PP (perfect person) would also have no reason for any other entities, except to call them to mind should it desire, labelled according to the sum of previous knowledge, yet having complete and simultaneous knowledge and emotion it would have no desire, as it would have everything.
Yet would a perfect person not, to our mind, have desires to create and interact with other entities? And so we would create it to be a Creator. Yet what is creation? Other than bringing forth what is in the mind to the physical? The mind can dream of places and creatures unseen in the waking world, yet does it first see them before being added to a database of entities, or can the mind think of something completely alien without any frame of reference in the 'awake' world?
The former seems more logical, with everything in art being tangentially connected to what is considered real.
So how then was it that something was created initially, without a frame of reference? That is, without something
to draw upon?
Science unhelpfully knows so far as the big bang, without being able to explain its cause without other things already in existence. Theology tells us an entity or entities (deity\deities) that has\have always been present. Yet the word always implies without creation, which is fundamentally beyond our comprehension at the moment it seems. There is a school of thought of an Uncreated Creator, but much as the term always, we can only try to imagine this in an abstract sense, as of I Will Always Love You.
A deity is a thing that can be described (albeit with different characteristics to different people) yet all of those characteristics that make a deity are superhuman - Nietzche et al. propose that we should and Will evolve into this superhuman, and as such, eventually become God. This is mentioned in certain Abrahamic texts as the reason God did not want us to eat from the Tree of Knowledge = that we would eventually become as He/It and in effect either absorb or destroy that previous.
There is No God but God. I Am What I Am.
Would our superpeople, our Perfect Person(s) be interconnected as a way to circumnavigate many of the natural world's dangers? The ancient adage that we are all One would make us all God, yet having forgotten much of what we originally know, we delude ourselves into forgetting so that we can experience the remembering of something new for the second time.
Before then, we ask "Who is God?" ,we ask "Who am I?" A question that has been debated since man developed identity and language. The Delphian Oracle gave to us the riddle, it has yet to be solved conclusively though many answers have been given.
I Am All?
I Am I?
I Am We?
The first - I Am All, is the most appealing to me, yet the trap of solipsism is easy to fall into. For when what my eyes see interact with another, I am less aware (currently) of my other senses and whence they interact - my conciousness or self seems fragmented, with more and more people having this awareness, yet it is currently labelled a symptom by those who can not explain the causes correctly yet, and to even describe the consciousness as an illness is harmful to one's development.
The second - I Am I, I feel I shall have to come back to, Similar to Let X = X, maybe by merely defining a value, in this case I, and then assigning it to ourselves, we can attribute any number of attributes to it, which defines one, though this can be changed, and all values possible can be attributed so perhaps eventually I Am I can be known by the person aware of everything they are.
The third - I Am We, gets us closer to understanding the links in our collective consciousness, though not following grammatical rules. This then, can serve as a temporary answer until we realise our expansion throughout the known universe. Our collective consciousness is not limited by species, and so we can eventually communicate by reaching the correct frequency with other forms of life, as yet unrecognised by Science, yet labelled as Angels, Djinn, Devas and other terms in a variety of spiritual teachings.
To be cliched, we are on the verge of a great shift as a species, though aren't we always?
Written on a park bench, the view from which shown above, in Gaziantep, Turkey.
