Old friends passing through...

Recently a deceased friend visited me in my sleep.

Isn’t it funny how these things can happen in a dream and not feel at all out of place? She was right there with me talking to me as if it was perfectly normal for the dead and the living to converse in a normal manner. I do not find it strange to be visited like this anymore, the memory of deceased friends has come to me many times before and I accept the visits graciously. But what do they mean?

A lot of people will say the dream state is nothing more than the ticking away of our subconscious, stray thoughts with no meaning… at most a symptom of anxieties or unfinished thoughts. Yolngu I work with have a very different opinion of dreams and will often become very interested to hear about dreams or visions. Somewhere in the middle is me. I’m not confused by the events and don’t have any sense of foreboding about being visited but know better than to pass it off as nothing. Something inevitably happens to connect my dream to what is going on in the material world. 

Lately my kids have been fascinated with Ghosts, zombies and skeletons. They are working through the information available to them to create their own understanding of the lore of the un-dead. We discuss it regularly and they have determined that Zombies must be killed, my boy has a stick designates for this purpose, Ghosts aren’t necessarily bad, are like shadows and cannot be killed and if a skeleton ever gets up and walks around it will be treated like a zombie! My son was at first scared of ghosts, he wanted to kill them like zombies but is now content to talk to them without fear. Although not un-dead Aliens (from outer space) are also on his hit list…  We’ll need to discuss the possibility of not all Aliens being  bad guys.

Zombie killer... (Even so called zombies have a story to tell. I wouldn't class Frankenstein's monster as a Zombie)

 

I am not sure why my friend would come to me now or what will come next but there will be something.  My friend died last year, hit by a car as she crossed the road. I still don’t know the exact details of the incident and was never satisfied with the answers given. I tried to find out more but at the time I didn’t want to do anything that would cause distress to her family. 

Every weekday on my way to work I ride past the place where she was hit. I often wonder how it happened. Was she careless on the road (it was suggested she rode against the flow of the traffic, but where is the evidence?) or did the driver simply not see her? At the time it was announced that the driver wouldn’t be charged and there was a lot of speculative comment in the media about the cyclist being negligent but no facts to back-up these opinions.  People got all self-righteous about helmet laws and bicycles on the road etc… but we never heard what actually happened.

Maybe I need to find out… Maybe I will.

The day after my dream I received an email which mentioned the friend from my dream, a request for help for her family…  I cannot help them in the manner that was requested and I don’t necessarily need to interpret my dream to mean that I should but the message was another one of those coincidences that reminds me something is waiting to be done.

My Yolngu friends get a bit nervous when the spirits of the dead are not dispatched. Nobody sleeps easy until everything is cleansed with smoke. The dead must complete their journey… They cannot be left wandering their old haunts, tormented and confused.

It might seem odd or even disrespectful to be talking about the life of a friend who has passed away in the same conversation as kids imaginings about 'monsters' but seeing the peculiar goings on of the world through the eyes of a child can help put things into perspective. The kids are playing with ideas and concepts of things. The world of the spirit and the material blend, fantasy is not necessarily fiction it's more like a philosophical sand pit, until they discover for themselves what is true or untrue every idea, every story or crazy idea could be true. They understand most physical boundaries but to them so many things are still possible. I like that. 

ABSURD!

Today I had an awakening. Thought I'd better post it before it disappears down the crack with the socks, the key to my bike lock and the USB flash drive I needed the other day!

Being compelled to look for meaning in the world and being constantly confused or even disappointed by what I discover one word keeps appearing in my mind (well only when I'm capable of being philosophical, other times I just feel sorry for myself because I'm convinced that nothing makes sense and the point of it all continually eludes me and so on). The word is: Absurd.

When trying to describe the unusual things that happen in an average day at work the only word that I've found that truly describes it is Absurd. Today after one or two Absurd incidents, but not enough to create any great agitation or distress I had time to contemplate the general situation. Absurd lept into my head and just danced around on it's own as if it was at home in there. I pondered it for quite a while. I remember reading the word somewhere in a book I was into... or maybe it was one of those damned Jed McKenna audio books. I don't remember and it doesn't matter! The point is that when I consider situations to be Absurd my reaction to them changes instantly. My consciousness shifts I become free of judgement and expectation. 

I move from trying to apply logic to an illogical situation to complete acceptance. 

"Of course it doesn't make sense... It's Absurd!"

I looked the word up online

Here's a definition of the word:

Absurd

1. Ridiculously incongruous or unreasonable. See Synonyms at foolish

2. Of, relating to, or manifesting the view that there is no order or value in human life or in the universe.

3. Of or relating to absurdism or the absurd.

n.

 Then I found a reference to the word 'Absurdism' on Wikipedia. Now we're talking about a philosophy! I read on...

 ...In philosophy "the Absurd" refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any...

Line by line the entry describes all the thought processes I've experienced while pondering the seriousness of 'Life the Universe and Everything', it goes on to quote Soren Kierkegaard and Albert Kamus and they describe so many of the concepts I am continually wrestling with... and they wrestle with them and come to different conclusions... or maybe temporary positions. I'm blown away by the familiarity of it all. Maybe because it's the eternal question that is hardwired into us all, or maybe because I've read some Kamus and his writing is laced with the same propositions. Or maybe it was that bloody Jed McKenna fucking with my head! Probably a combination of all really.
Or maybe I was subliminally programmed with it years ago when I was reading 'Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galazy'.

Reading on...

...As a philosophy, absurdism thus also explores the fundamental nature of the Absurd and how individuals, once becoming conscious of the Absurd, should respond to it...

A solution! Awesome! And the solution is intuitive when confronted with the idea that Absurd is not a defective position but actually the reality of the state of our very existence and all that we've done and all that we are... and didn't Pink Floyd already write about it in their song Eclipse (The Dark Side of the Moon)? 

I start thinking about Kamus and how his books left me feeling too much of the empty depressing, It's OK to know about Absurdity but how do you live in a constant state of Absurd awareness?  Then I read the conflicting perspective of Kierkegaard and how he felt a belief in something beyond the Absurd such as religious acceptance of intangible and unprovable thing could transcend the hopeless state that perpetual awareness of the Absurdity of life can cause. A legitimate escape from the, too heavy truth. And I realize I've discovered this myself through my own experience and I know it's true! Far out! This is freaking me out!

I can't believe it's taken me so long to discover this! 

Absurdity, a cosmos without meaning and God consciousness can coexist! Just don't forget at the end of the day that it is absolutely Absurd! 

I'm gonna go and listen to Bob Marley singing Three Little Birds and sleep like a baby tonight. In the words of Napoleon Dynamite's brother Kip... "Peace Out!"

...an unflinching gaze on the world...

The book Sam is currently reading 'We all fall down' by Peter Barry has an interesting blurb on the front cover.

'A novel that speaks to the heart of our culture, and a gripping account of one man's fight for his soul. Both honest and compassionate it turns an unflinching gaze on the world in which we try to find meaning, at work and in love.' This post is not about the book... or even the blurb really. It's just a bit of a rant about an idea and nothing much came of it. (Oh and she said the book is pretty good if you're interested)

When Sam read the blurb to me my first response was to dismiss it as cliche' New-agey rubbish. Overloading a statement about work and love with overly heavy focus of finding meaning in the world... (I think I cringed most because sometimes when I think I've written something OK I read it and it sounds like that)

I thought about it a bit more and the first part played on my mind. Then I started to wonder...

The bit that caught my imagination was this. 'An unflinching gaze...', '...on the world in which we try to find meaning...'

I just started thinking about sight, seeing, vision, perception, reality, truth and illusions, beliefs, religion and lies.

Delirious from lack of sleep, yet again, my mind tripped across what it might mean to have an 'unflinching gaze' at anything... Recently most of my interactions with people I know regarding matters of spirituality, community, truth and the abundance of flimsy facades in their likeness etc... have lead me to consider that most people, nearly all that I have spoken with, are incapable of seeing the world in any other way than through the filters they have chosen to view it. I suppose there's nothing wrong with that, actually I think that's how reality is created.

Stupidly I recently made the enormous social error of holding people to account for the ideals they espouse. What a stupid thing to do! (A bad idea considering I may be the worlds greatest hypocrite!) Of course I have discovered that there is a big difference between seeking truth and claiming to know it. I should have known that challenging the position of people who believe themselves to be right would only anger them. Rule ONE... Don't ruin people's illusions! After all reality is subjective but nobody wants to have their reality deconstructed in the vain and useless search for Truth, which may only be someone elses illusion anyway! 

If we are expected to live our lives grounded in reality, and reality hinges entirely on our perception, then it only makes sense that regardless of the falseness of our beliefs we would defend these illusions with all our might! So it's no wonder my dear righteous friends would rather I left their company without explanation than have their virtuous philosophy questioned. (And I did)

Seeing is believing.

When it comes to human vision I've heard there is a phenomenon of the human mind which prioritizes and sorts the information received from the eye in terms of relevance to the needs of the viewer. Gestalt theory explains how our minds are programed to sort visual information. The kind of programing that allows us to spot friends out of a crowd or identify potential dangers at a glance, while the mind sees, assesses and then ignores other information that it deems insignificant or predictable. Another trick I've heard our minds tend to do is fill in the blanks... i.e. at a glance we may build a mental image based only on glancing part of an object like the front of a car protruding from a corner. Peripheral vision is fairly limited but I've heard that the brain fills in the edges. Cool eh.

"The hand is quicker than the eye". Magicians have learned how to exploit our selective vision and have created many tricks that still baffle their audiences, even tricks that have been used for many years continue to confound. Even though we are able to admit that a magician got one over us, most of us would prefer to believe that what we perceive is the world as it is, rather than as we choose to see it. I know I do. I can't help it! When I studied to be a Park Ranger I had to learn scientific names of a book full of local plants. Pretty soon I was seeing the world through the eyes of a botanist (I've since forgotten most of them). I exchanged my naive romantic concepts of trees shrubs and flowers for a more scientific view... But was that Truth? I like to ride my bicycle to and from work. I travel along the same roads as 100s of drivers every morning and afternoon but my experience of the journey is very different to theirs. I see the road differently and I view other cyclists differently. When I read the abusive comments made about cyclists in the newspaper I read them from my perspective as a cyclist. People will often claim to know what is real and I guess they are all correct, at least until they change their mind.

I've always liked Bruce Springsteen's twist on an Edgar Alan Poe quote. In his song Magic Springsteen wrote the lyrics:   "...Trust none of what you hear

                            And less of what you see..."

(Now that's Magic!)

What is so interesting about this 'unflinching gaze'?  Well as I thought about just the two layers of interference between the eye and the consciousness it's likely we rarely see the vaguest outline of Truth in our lives. We are so convinced by what our brain has conjured, filling in the gaps and selectively ignoring what our own eyes see that we are unable to recognize Truth when it stares us in the face! It's possible that we simply just can't do it! So as I pondered this inability to perceive without judgement or prejudice I wondered what it would be like to 'Gaze Unflinching' at the world without trying to 'find meaning'. Then it sunk in. HOLY SHIT!

Who would willingly have their heart burned out through their eye balls for the sake of finding the Truth? Better to live comfortably in our reality, complete with doubt and confusion, fed on flimsy constructions of false promises and half arsed rationalizations; clinging to the barest bones of hope and trusting our superior intellect than to face Truth. Sorry guys I should never have questioned you. Please go back to cut and pasting all the meaning you can stick together and float peacefully over the horizon into paradise... There's nothing wrong with that after all.

But I have to say as far as honesty, truth, love, beauty go I'd rather spend a week looking at a 4 year old's finger painting than listen to 5 minutes of your rationalization.

Peace.