Friday, June 01, 2012

In the balance between 0 and 1


Two delicious looking Kiwi Fruit are sitting on my desk at work… they’ve been there all week while I stuff some kind of sponge cake filled with hand whipped cream into my ungracious gob! Leftovers are always set aside for me in the fridge at work. Everyone knows never to throw food out when I’m around. My budget’s tight and to waste food seems criminal so I eat it!

It’s the dry season and people are beginning to roll into town. Old friends have turned up out of the blue so on Wednesday I stole some personal time, went and ate lunch with them at the Casino. All you can eat stuff yer guts, there’s half price vouchers at the back of one of their dry season pamphlets. Personally I hate casinos but have no qualms about taking advantage of the misery subsidised meals they serve in their restaurant. I walk past stricken gamblers joyfully anticipating a full lunch… (Usually all I tend to eat is stale peanut butter and jam sandwiches… I don’t really like them.) What a weird sensation to be sitting down to eat lunch with friends… I couldn’t avoid the guilty feelings as I thought of Sam at home looking after our youngest and recovering from a terrible episode of Shingles (Or so the medical report has finally diagnosed and the centre for disease control confirmed when they called later the same day). Guilt passes over me… I think about her for a moment and then head back to the food bar for some Chicken Korma with rice!
Early last week we had a terrible episode. After a week of considerable neck pain Sam collapsed in the shower, (Overdose on painkillers) and had to be taken by ambulance to hospital. She was a mess, with sores all over her right shoulder, neck and chest. Dr’s thought it was a chemical burn from Tiger balm but swabbed her anyway and called just this week to say it was actually shingles. Shingles, apparently come from having had Chicken pox and usually affect elderly people. The condition can be brought on by stress and I’d have to say that stress is definitely the culprit! STRESS!
We don’t have many real causes for stress in our lives but the mind can be a dangerous thing… sometimes the greatest enemy of all! An obsessive mind can fixate on a problem and before you know it you’re stressed out!  
So the problem appears to be Stress or Tension and what is the opposite to this? Well obviously it must be relaxation. Now this got my brain going on an idea that I can’t put down. We’ve been discussing matters of religion, God the universe and everything and several experiences just seemed to fall into place… (These may be obvious to everyone else but an authentic realisation should not be sneezed at no matter how many people may already know the same thing already. Here is the basic concept I’ve been contemplating.
Tension vs Relaxation – Ego vs God consciousness – 1 vs 0



Tension & relaxation
-          There’s a basic principal in the martial arts which utilizes the energy created between alternating Tension and Relaxation, conservation and concentration of energy combined with good timing can produce a powerful result.
-          Significance of the play between sound and the absence of sound in music. Tension the finger strikes the key producing sound, relaxation the tension or pressure is released the hand rests and is then able to be reapplied to the next action. Sound…. No Sound…
-          All actions require a period of no action in order that the body can rest, rejuvenate and be ready to be applied again to a new action.  

God & Ego
-          This may press some buttons if you have a concept of God that is not compatible… I haven’t checked this with God so can’t be 100% sure if it is correct but when I think of myself or at least who I think I am… or basically Ego… I am reminded of the Will. We exert Will, it is an agent of action, driven by basic instincts but subject to our intellect to some degree. In this physical world we simply must, ‘get shit done’ and without Ego we wouldn’t get much done at all, what would motivate us to act. By my reckoning Ego = Tension. To seek to become closer to God it is necessary to deflate Ego… For most of us (Well for me at least) There isn’t enough room for Ego and God to be in charge at the same time so one must give way to the other. When we want to allow God to take charge we say things like ‘Hand it over’, ‘Surrender’, ‘Submit’, ‘Let Go’. I have to clarify that this theory won’t work too well if you think of God as a Super Ego in the sky who can Make Shit Happen. The idea I guess I’m working on is that as opposed to the Ego which is Tension, God is without Ego and therefore to all intents equal to no-thing or no action and therefore Relaxation (Well in terms of physical transference of energy) 

0 & 1
-          OK so because we’re in the computer age and I’ve been told that computers work on Binary Code (I don’t know how it works but apparently that’s what it’s called). All the information we view is basically transmitted in a combinations of Zeros (0) and Ones (1) on and off. Now this is easily translated as Tension - Relaxation. Or Ego – God. OK I know it’s all really obvious but it’s the kind of thought process I have to go through before I understand anything that can be explained to a 4 year old and accepted on face value.


So where is this theory leading me? Nowhere really. It is obvious that if Shingles are brought on by stress then the solution to reducing the chances of getting shingles is to avoid stress.
But to learn to walk the middle road you’ve sometimes got to ponder… ;) 

Oh and Sam is slowly recovering now... this illness really knocked her out and she's trying to de-stress as much as possible. 

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