A Thousand Breaths...

What if no life was longer than a thousand breaths...

Our society defines and measures life in terms of bodies. A birth marks the beginning. A death marks the ending. And everything in between is called life. In many ways, this is a flawed mode of perception, a bit like defining what you are, from the perspective of your shoes or your coat, if you ask me.

Consider the following paradox. The aforementioned physical body does not always cease to be immediately in the moment that life does. Instead, it slowly stops working and runs down, but, as science has proven, machines can take over the functions of that physical being, such as breathing and heartbeat. While we call the inflation and deflation of lungs the prolonging of 'life', it is not really enough by anyone's definition. The running down/decaying process too can be halted by artificial means. But, although that spark of life does occasionally and miraculously return, it remains the wildcard of the arrangement. It cannot always be dictated to. What life really is, remains invisible. It is the symptoms of life that we mistake for life itself.

Which brings me to the next thought. Physicality is a side effect of life. It's not the other way around, even though everything in our society and around us tries to shove it down our throats. Life comes (invisibly) before bodies. Life continues (invisibly) after bodies. Perhaps in many of its purer expressions, life exists entirely independently of bodies. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine you are flying, as far and as fast as you want to. Now, open your eyes and behold the dense imprisonment surrounding your body with limitations. My point? Why bodies? Or rather, why bodies with such limited features?

So, let's throw away the concept of bodies as yardstick and begin again...

Years ago, when a friend of mine was going through his divorce, I made the statement that perhaps, within a "lifetime" we go through thousands of lives and deaths, as we constantly change who and what we are. In his response, he compared those past "lives" to snake skins, still retaining our shape, but no longer filled with our essence. Like beads, we string along millions of lives held together by the frail, false continuity of our physical identity. And when that physical identity ceases? Do we run out of beads, just because we run out of string?

Like I said before, what if no life was more than a thousand breaths.... but at the same time we had access to an infinite number (and "infinite number" is in itself a paradox and a contradiction) of lives.

An infinite number of new beginnings...

A thousand breaths...

The moment you try to define infinity you lose it in essence

This morning I came across a scrap piece of paper on which I had written We somehow come to believe that we will understand the infinite by expanding the finite. Instead, expanding the finite adds more filters.

So. You are warned. We are back to that one topic which can only be answered with a question.

On the same piece of paper, I had also written There is no easy way to talk about personal mystical experiences. It's not (just) that people question them or go sceptical on them. It goes beyond (that, in that) language (itself) is the language of the sceptic.

Infinity. When I was a kid, when I was taught to count, the impression was left that infinity is somehow just 1 digit beyond the last number known to man. But, it's not that at all. If you write down LARGEST NUMBER KNOWN TO MAN PLUS ONE, you are still firmly in the realm of the finite and you can continue to push back the boundary with LARGEST NUMBER KNOWN TO MAN PLUS TWO and so on, all the way to LARGEST NUMBER KNOWN TO MAN PLUS LARGEST NUMBER KNOWN TO MAN and so on .... Infinity only happens when you finally get tired and stop the count ....

Oops... did you see that happening? I've just sneaked in a definition of the infinite, which is, sigh, as helpful as it is problematic.

The moment you try to define infinity, is the moment where you lose it in essence.

Introducing my new project - Blue Skunk's Dream Shack

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has read some of my previous posts or fiction, that I have been fascinated by the malleable nature of reality and perception for some time. What we see, what we experience is so individual. To the exasperation of at least one of my (more) rational writer friends, I believe strongly in the power of subjective realities and inner worlds.

Apparently time and place seem to be the two things that keep humans confined to a matrix like physical reality, that only allows movement in certain directions, in certain ways. But how would our minds behave and react to the sudden removal of such restrictions. What if time is not linear but random... what if we lived an existence where we are continuously and concurrently aware of other versions of ourselves and our worlds and could shift back and forth between those worlds in the same way as we shift from three o'clock to four o'clock, from Monday to Tuesday.

Time locks us to cycles of beginnings and endings, births and deaths. We think of heaven and infinity as something that happens AFTER life, but what if it is merely our addiction to logic, to timelines that forces us to observe a cycle that can only end in one possible way, with our demise. There are various philosophers who allege that the universe is born within the moment of now. That both past and future are a figment of our imaginations. That we can change our lives by changing our memories. Blue Skunk's Dream Shack is my attempt to play with that. To break the attachment to one world, and release as many probable worlds as I can imagine. Above all, the idea is to teach me (and any possible readers) how to stop thinking in lines and to start thinking in all the colors and shades of feelings instead. To create a life that navigates a dreamlike path from one moment to the next, without necessarily adhering to the co ordinates of past or present.

Therefore, Blue Skunk's Dream Shack poses the question: What if you were continuously and concurrently aware of more than one reality, more than one version of yourself. What if you don't know where the next moment will find you. The first instalment, was uploaded earlier today and can be found at this link. It is meant to loosely follow the format of a #tuesdayserial, although I'm not sure what the #tuesdayserial people will make of it.

"I cannot eat your fire, I can only eat your flesh"

This is an encounter that takes place in the realm of the subjective. My imaginary friend (IF) and I were visited by a large brown bear. It was very amiable, but when the bear licked my face, I flinched, thinking This is a wild creature, it could eat my flesh. The bear was surprised by my reaction and IF pointed out that this should not be a problem in a supernatural realm. We experimented. I let the bear eat my hand and grew a new one. But I discovered that it was harder to let it eat my face. I seem to indentify stronger with the brain and the face as "me" than with the hand. We tested this, by giving the bear my brain as a meal. IF said that, if the astral body left the physical body, I would still be intact and the bear would have a meal. The real me, it seems, is the energy of the astral body. At this point, the bear said. "I cannot eat your fire, I can only eat your flesh." Those were his exact words.

The above incident "took place" about a month and a half ago and I am writing it pretty much as I experienced it, but I've been paging through old journal entries of lake and discovered something equally dark. This was something IF said early in the year, "If the mouse connects to the snake, it's never a happy ending." He was reminding me that there is a darker side to the universe.

One such story can be found at this link.

Interestingly, though, the universe did kick up one exception to the rule.



The video clip is about seven years old and the best I could track about what happened afterwards it seems that the snake and the hamster were later separated and the facility where they were housed later went out of business.

The Creation of Fiction (a story of the universe)

Once upon a time, the great pools of energy that whorl and moved about, were like a canvas and all souls used them to create the ever-changing art of lives and worlds. Change was the only constant. If one soul said, my hair is purple, it was so. If another said, I want rain, it was so. All were like gods, co-creators in the playground of the universe. Anything was possible.

One day, one of the souls did not like the way things were going in another's world and said, "You are dead." The other soul was snuffed of its life, but someone else observed the interaction and said, "He will be alive once more." And, because all stories were equal, the one who was dead, became alive again. But his enemy was furious. He muttered and huffed and puffed, searching for a way to permanently destroy his rival. One day he found it. In the presence of all, he declared, ONLY MY STORY IS TRUE. ALL OTHERS ARE UNTRUE.

A shudder went through the fabric of the universe. There was silence for a long time. Eventually, someone tried, "I have a farm of dinosaurs." Nothing happened. The world had changed and reality had lost the ability to flow and alter with the thoughts of all. Will it remain permanently locked, or is there a way to fix this? This is my riddle and another koan. What words will undo the creation of fiction and liberate the universe to become once again, like it was, a world drawn by the stories of all?

(t.y.m.)

The Sea and the Mountain (on the interconnected-ness of things)

The mountains say "look, the sea" and the sea says, "look, the mountains", but they are part of the same landscape. You cannot really tell where the mountains stop and the sea begins. The sea could rise up and climb the mountain, when possessed by a tsunami. The roots of the mountain extend deep below the sea. And they are beautiful because they are together... (t.y.m.)

Perspective...

What you need to remember about perspective is this. It works differently for everyone.

Bodies and Souls

Do we fall in love with bodies or with souls?
What if a beautiful body came to you and there was nothing inside?
Would you keep it around anyway, because it looked good?
What if a soul came to you without a body?
Would you pretend not to see it?
Or would you open up a door to madness without a moment's hesitation?
Do we fall in love with bodies or with souls?

The Art of Understanding

Some time ago, I wrote a somewhat wry blog post on the joys of being misunderstood, which can be found here. Soon after I realized that I would inevitably end up writing about understanding as well, or rather, the art of understanding, because to me, that is what it has become. An art form, like music or painting or story-telling, rather than an absolute.

One way of explaining what I mean by that, would be to tell you about Table Mountain. This mountain dominates the scenery of Cape Town and has a very distinctive outline, from the city side, but there are many other faces and perspectives to it. From Kirstenbosch Garden it presents a completely different face and again, from the Atlantic seaboard side. You really wouldn't say it is the same mountain at all. To borrow an analogy from Robert Heinlein, how do you know the WHOLE house is painted white, if you've only seen one of its walls?

In the same way, the process of attempting to understand something, keeps shifting, showing new vantage points to the reality you are trying to grasp. Understanding, in its true form, is an active, ever-changing song, that keeps playing different phrases to your consciousness. It keeps refining itself... finding new pathways to the same destination. It is not frozen within a single moment. Understanding does not stop unfolding. You are never, ever finished ... in fact if you are done understanding, it probably means that, really, you are done with the process of understanding... you have thrown in the towel, or perhaps, you arrived at a certain spot, grown attached to that particular viewpoint, and now you do not want to move on anymore... It means, "I've made up my mind; stop adding things to it. I don't want to know any more. I'm closing the door and switching off my brain now."

Being understood, often hurts.

Understanding hurts doubly so.

Understanding is like an alchemy of ideas that briefly blends to a particular compound. But, tomorrow, life will add something... perhaps time, perhaps another element or thought to consider and then the compound is transformed into something completely new... the only constant being the ability to continue changing...

The key turns...

They spiral out
from inside of me
all the who's
that I could be...

(This is an old drawing, dating back to August 2009)

A personal koan...

If you have been painted into a corner, how do you escape before the paint dries? There are at least two solutions to this one...

(definition of a koan: 'A paradoxical anecdote or riddle, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment.')

Fishing

A little bit more than three years ago, I told someone an admittedly strange story and was promised 'There will be an answer'. I waited for a while, but then things started to happen around me and the patterns that formed, told far more than any words could.

There is a saying that people sometimes use to patronize the poor in Africa that goes Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; show him how to catch fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

Well, the absence of a verbal answer taught me to fish in the greatest reservoir of them all - the universe itself. Try it sometime. It's lots of fun and the results may surprise you.

Unlocking the alphabet matrix...

You learn the alphabet in a certain sequence, but in order to use it for any sensible type of writing, you will need to break that abc sequence and leave behind the rules you were taught. Mix the letters up and employ them in a way that goes against the grain of your learning... only then will they begin to hold any true meaning...

In the same way, to do anything useful with your universe, you need to take it apart... (t.y.m.)

5th Dimensional People

People influence who we are by 'observing' us. Most people 'fix' us by drawing rigid lines around how they perceive us, as if afraid that a rogue bit of self might escape, but occasionally, someone will, by observing us, transform us. Those rare souls have the ability not only to see what is, but also, 'what could be'. They touch our lives with the vision of change they bring. They are different from the rest of the population, but you can't tell what they are just by looking at them. They must be experienced. They are like artists, except their medium is the matter of souls. They are different, almost like fairy-folk or angels. They are among us. They are the people of the 5th dimension.

The Child on the Tracks

Anyone who places him or herself within harm's way, will eventually have to deal with the approach of harm... Imagine a child playing on the railroad tracks and there is a train approaching... Let us make this the happiest of possible outcomes. The train driver spots the child, pulls the brakes and the train stops in time. The child continues to play. She has just learnt that in her world, she is more powerful than the train. It's a heady feeling. I can stop trains. Trains stop for me. I am the champion of the world. But, the tracks still belong to the train, and not the child. The train carries passengers and freight. It has a time table and a destination. Eventually, the child will have to move, so that the train can resume its journey and its purpose. Until she does, worlds, futures, realities are placed on hold...

The Field ("stories" or "infinity")

Last week, when my sister was out of town, I was looking after her two cats for a few days. Because it was rainy, I took a taxi there (I don't have a driver's licence or car - another story of my failings but I'm not telling that now). On day two, as I got out the money to pay the driver, there was a tiny slip of paper in between. What was on the slip of paper was the following quote by William Blake:

“Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.”

So, being me (i.e. a little weird) I gave the taxi driver the piece of paper with the quote along with his money.

On the way back the sun was out, so I decided to walk. My sister stays just on the edge of that large empty piece of field that still contains a few of the remnants of streets and foundations that had been District Six in the 1960s. It's empty now. Drug dealers and copper wires thieves hide their wares there. At one time there were a few shacks, but the truth is, the authorities had forgotten who (which department or whatever) owned this piece of field so it just lay there...

As I walked this length, my inner muse said Go on, throw it. I knew instantly what he referred to. In my bag, I've got an old A4 sized diary in which I write my story ideas.

Every page, till the middle of March was filled, some with several different ideas on the same page... my creative wealth, it seems (although, to be honest, I've accepted that at least half of it will probably never get written)... now my mischievous muse was challenging me to throw it into the field, for the pages to scatter and be lost... I felt a mix of panic and longing... because part of me did see the attraction of clearing the slate, starting again... being empty... Then he said, I couldn't do it either. But he didn't need to say it for me to know one day, I will toss the book... when my bones no longer has the capacity to house my soul and my spirit would rise and the pages would scatter like seagulls... off to seek other horizons..

Later that day, my muse said... I could have given you twenty new stories if you did throw the book... now I can only give you ten...

And today... I was drifting into a dream, an imagining, surprised by what I 'saw' with other eyes and going cool I wanna put that into a story. I yanked myself back to the here and now to write it down.. and part of me realized that, my 'being a writer' was sometimes a little counter productive to the other needs of my soul. This impulse to go hey, that would make a good story sometimes slashed like a whip through my stream of consciousness, halting it...disturbing it... where perhaps it should not have halted...

Being a writer is wonderful, but am i really putting my imagination to the best use, by just mining it for ideas? By snatching the very first flowers along the path home and going heh-heh, got them, when perhaps instead I should be travelling further along those paths... perhaps this compulsion to take 'field notes' of every momentary dream is really an interrupt. Infinity is out there. I don't need to stuff it all in a chest until it loses its shine... it will be there till the end of me...

I had a dream in which...

.... I found myself in a Victorian study, with dark wooden panelling and book shelves with leather bound volumes and two men were discussing my skull and it was 200 years after I died...

This one had been at least fifteen years ago, and technically speaking, it was a hypnogogic vision - you know, one of those very vivid dreams that occur before you are fully asleep.

When I was much younger I had a series of 'Alien invasion' type dreams, in which I'd find myself threatened by this little aliens ('Grays'), but the real freaky thing about those were, I knew, inside the dream that it was a dream and always managed to escape by willfully waking myself up out of it. Then, a fresh twist came. One night, I dreamt I was practicing to fly. That must have been hands down the most enjoyable dream I've ever had. Swooping and diving and whirling through the air without a single thing to hold me back. The thing is, some time after the flying dream, I had another of the 'Alien invasion' type dreams, but instead of waking myself up, I reasoned, wait, you know how to fly now, you can just fly away. And I did.

A Chinese poet called Zhuang Zi wrote, "Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. "

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zhuangzi

So, what DO we know about our dreams and about our waking... ?

This morning, first thing, my inner muse said... try this, tell something from your life, something that makes you feel sad and worthless, as if it was a only a dream from which you've woken up, so I did... and some things hurt a little less when you do this, and some things even make you smile...

I had a dream in which.... I lived in a place I hated and all I wanted was to leave and never never come back, but the more I wanted it, the more things went wrong and I could never come close to getting the money for a plane ticket... you know those dreams where you are in a supermarket and you know you don't have any money, but you can't leave and you can't stop piling things into your trolley.... well, it was exactly the same, except on a larger scale... (a snapshot from my twenties)

I had a dream in which... I had a million notebooks full of stories, and I was always telling myself start one, start one.... but whenever I tried to grasp one, it would shatter into a million pieces, that just became new story ideas....

The dreams themselves can explore fears, repressed emotions or even alternate perceptions...

I had a dream in which.... God gave me this cool body change, but then my Mommy didn't know me anymore...

I had a dream in which... I created this brilliant music, but when I woke I could remember only tiny bits of it... just receding snatches, nothing I was able to write down...

I had a dream in which... someone came to me and woke me up...

Seeds

the seed opens
the seed closes
captures the tree
and folds it within
to release it
in another place
near or far
as a human's soul
jumps from body to body
so the tree's soul jumps
from seed to seed
and worlds are bridged
the seed opens
the seed closes
a universe inside...

And then there's a tree
that grew inside of me
Its seeds blew in
on the trade winds of a tragedy...

Its magic roots dug in
and its shoots just grew and grew
there's wisdom in its rustling leaves
and laughter in its fruity brew...


(This poem 'sprouted' from the fertile grounds of a dialogue between myself and Dan Pocengal on the nature of reality and all sorts of related matters)

The Honesty Paradox

We are all Heaven's exiles. Kicked out of our true home at the very start of our earthly lives so it goes without saying that we begin with a whole load of rejection issues...

To wonder: will they accept me? does anyone really want me around? is normal, but we secretly believe we are the only ones who feel this.

We hear the world, but there are always ghost voices hiding in the texture of things, a veneer of meaning that becomes the map to guide us on the road back, maddeningly clear at times, but when we try to explain this to another, the response is so often "Huh? Huh?"

The way to see this as a union of two systems - an illusion of flesh and a reflection of spirit, neither absent, neither complete. The ratio is different in every single person. Did I mention this? Those two cannot occupy the same space - we have to negotiate an arrangement. What we really are, is perhaps the spasms of that struggle between 'here' and 'there'.

Emotional honesty fosters the connection with our true spiritual home, but try introducing too much of that honesty into the flesh and blood world around you and society very quickly vomits you up and cuts you off from the pseudo-comfort of the herd of sheeple.

Herein, of course, lies the paradox and the pain. Honesty reconnects you to heaven, but disconnects you from the world around you. It hurts - knowing the truth, but living so close to that carefully tended weed garden of lies.

Not quite #fridayflash fiction: After the Party

"Chaos is entirely a state of mind. So is order, for that matter."

"Hey, you're nuts."

"No, I'm not. It just never occurs to most people that all they have to do is flick a switch in their mind. They want to change things the long way round, because it's the only way they believe in."

The conversation was the only real thing in J's mind, although it may not have taken place at all. The voices were familiar, but no names or faces would claim them in his memory. It could have taken place between the large animal print cushion on the couch and the red kettle with the broken switching mechanism.

For some really strange reason, he could only think in objects as he lay there patterning his cheek to the ridges of the carpet. Even when he tried to think people, they quickly slipped back to expressing themselves as things. Ronda was a pale woven basket with a few strands of rafia at the top fraying. Selbourne was the DVD player that would never accurately play the same disk you inserted, however many times you checked the label beforehand. Ashley was this thin elegant vase with a bottom of water too far away from the stems of the flowers she was supposed to nourish.

Chaos. Order. Flicking a switch.

The words tasted like the heavy syrup of sambuca and smelt like somebody's saliva. They dried on his tongue without his ever using them. They throbbed inside his skull, happily jamming with the hammering on the front door.

It could have been thirty seconds or as long as an hour before he reached the door, but the woman's beauty was something that pierced even his post-inebriated state, but the golden translucence of her skin and the ears that protruded and ended in points not unlike those of Mr Spock must have been the booze still adding little bits to the picture.

She said, "I know this is an unusual request, but can I come in and clean your apartment for you?"

J blinked and glanced over his shoulder. He could not find it in him to deny that it needed cleaning. He sought and found a line half-remembered from a movie. "A fine lady like yourself?"

"This is awkward, but actually I have to do it. One of your guests last night stole something of mine and I have until noon to find it."

"What time is it now?" J asked.

"Eleven."

"What if it's not in there?"

"I can feel it."

J took a step back. He had seen stranger things. He made several half-hearted attempts to help her, but she seemed to have such a better grasp of what she was doing and proved totally unshockable, even in the face of several very strange discoveries.

One was that roughly half of the coffee table seemed to have turned into a tree. Roots frays bits of the carpet and the floor was actually lifting in a lumpy halfmoon shape. He could not immediately think of a way of fixing it, but the woman with the pointed ears ignored it.

There was a swarm of five miniature mermaids patrolling the aquarium. J opened his mouth to say 'Wow', but the word never quite got to his tongue. What he really wanted to verbalize was, 'See, THAT's why I drink."

The woman did not even glance at them. She was homing in on something that J now recognized as the epicenter of weirdness, a charred figure - was it a statue or a corpse? - that occupied the center of the couch.

"I found it," she said.

J looked over his shoulder at the mermaids - their tiny breasts actually bobbed - and then forced his eyes to return to the dead body. Yes, it really was a dead body. How was he going to explain that one to the landlord, to anyone?

"That?" he asked.

She reached out and pulled something from the burnt fingers. "This," she said. A few bones tumbled to the floor, smudging the carpet. The woman blew on the object in her hands. Some black dust flew off it. It was a ring.

"Oh," he said.

"Now I will clean the place up for you," she said.

She slipped the ring onto her finger and its shimmering became part of the golden sheen of her inhuman skin. The very air seemed to vibrate around them and for a few moments the throbbing of his head was truly unbearable.

Slowly, the motion of everything wound down. The corpse was gone. So were the smudges, the tree part of the coffee table and every single beer can or glass that had lain scattered across the living room floor. And the mermaids. He realized that, brief as their existence had been, the aquarium would never quite look right without them again.

He blinked.

"Oh yes," said the woman. She touched his forehead and the hangover was gone also.

He spend the rest of the afternoon hunting for something - anything - out of place. Everything was as it should be. Yet, in some strange way, not....