April 21, 2008

• A nightlong meditation on thoughts

  I am not writing this to anyone.  Which is a very hard thing to do since most of the time I presuppose an audience I am writing to which then determines which of my thoughts I shall include and how I shall write them.  Perhaps I will not be able to escape this truth and merely write my thoughts just as they are.  Is there really any thought written just as it is?  I don’t think so.  Because thoughts are not words, therefore no words can exactly be a thought.  If a word or two is switched in hope to better capture a thought on paper, the thought itself has not been changed, but rather it is the reflection of the thought is what has been altered.  Thus we do not live in a world of direct contact since the reality at work, thoughts, are never directly interacting agents.  There is always some ersatz medium used to express the true content of the reality of each human, thoughts, whether it be word, drawing, or deed.  Among others we are always interacting on the secondary plane of reality since our thoughts are not engaging others’ thoughts directly. 

  We always have immediate access to our own thoughts, which is a very interesting experience indeed.  The most interesting thing about thoughts is that no one at all knows what they are.  Of course as a person I have very defineable physical contours, but that there is a dimension to me called “thoughts,” invisible ideas that the phsyical thing of me can comprehend, is quite a mystical thing.  Where are these “thoughts”?  Whence do they come?  How is it that I think them, and know them?  This is the primary experience of the human, to think a thought, and yet the very quiddity of this experience is completely inexplicable.  I know it only in doing it, and find myself quite incapable of defining it further.  How is it that I may view some situation and then generate a thought therefrom, thus adding informational content to another inexplicable invisible category, my “life”?  Of course thoughts arrive, but then they go, and I do not remember the ones that have occurred in the past every second.  But they are not simply gone.  They fall into this cumulative invisible entity called my “life,” which acts a summation of the effects of my thoughts, even though I do not constantly think every one of them.

  I want to know what thoughts are, and chase this masked man, but just as I turn down his alley I see his darting frame disappear behind the next corner.  Why so shy? 

  How is it that all day long as I live out my life you are quiet and undemanding, but when I give you my attention fully you are loud and endless!  It seems that some people are able to slip by in life without realizing this strange dimension inside them, that they control even, that is of infinite depth and eternal activity. 

  It is weird to look around at the world and to know that everything has a thought behind it.  We see the vast volume of residue that leaks from human minds into the physical world, indicating its ubiquitous presence to us.  There is plenty of static evidence that the engine behind humanity is the mind, such as books, plays, and songs.  But every day there is a more potent, dynamic realm of evidence; oh, how much the humans like to talk!  All day, everyone, everywhere, there is always incessant talking.  Whenever there is a picture of the world from outer space it is always silent; but how innapropriate is this!  There should be a loud commotion of indiscernible noise coming from earth when we imagine it, for the ocean of talking that goes on every day.  In every moment the number of words spoken far outdoes all the other statistics of humans; except, perhaps, for thoughts. 

  But this brings us back to the question of the ineffable nature of thoughts.  Are thoughts of such a nature that they can be quantified?  Humans say this sort of thing, it seems, merely for linguistic convenience, such as when we say, “I am having a lot of thoughts today.”  Are thoughts countable like trees, or merely continual and blurred like a river?  Do they merely have content, or do they have qualitative content?  They must have qualitative content, since a thought can be an honest one, more true and close to the core of a person than the others, or it can be a deceptive one, one that even our own very minds have somehow come to believe about itself.  We cannot taste, touch, or smell thoughts, but can we hear or see thoughts?  Or does the thought occur even before we translate it into an audio or visual form, as just a thing in itself?  A quiddity that is the original and most basic unit of the human mind? 

  This hidden dimension, this true state of affairs, in humans called the ‘mind’ means certain things about humans.  As has been noted, it means that, except for ourselves, we are experiencing reality on a secondary level.  We are not denizens of its initial stage.  Thus it is naturally inherently incomplete.  Other people cannot adequately express such a voluminous and qualitatively singular realm as the mind.  Some do not even wish or try to.  We learn to “know” or define the general idea of who a person is using the evidence they give us.  Who they are in the first place is in their mind, what we actually know is seen in the puppet strings their mind pulls on their body.  What they say, how they say it, what they do, and what they choose to look like all help us to know who they are when such things arrive in greater and greater quantity.  The more of these things we experience of a person the better we know who they actually are.  But if a person has a high number of thoughts (if that is possible), and a low output of evidence of those thoughts, they are relatively unknown.  The more thoughts a person has the more evidence of themself they will have to give if they desire to be known to a high degree by other people. 

  But some thoughts can be more true than others.  These are the thoughts of the soul.  How can this be?  What is it about these thoughts, and what is thing in which they stand in relation, that make them so important?  If there is the “true existence” of a person, what is that as well as these nebulous creatures that dance around our heads called thoughts?  Why one thought should be more true than another occurring thought does not seem readily apparent.  Usually a person’s last words are thought to have a status like that I am thinking of, where it means more than the average thought.  How is this?  It seems because it “means” more.  But what is the “meaning” of a thought?  It seems it is just so that some thoughts have the quality of “meaning” more than others, and that is all.  It is like why some things are funny, and other things are not.  I don’t know why when Proximo says that “We mortals are but shadows and dust” it seems to be such a meaningful statement.  It seems the only thing that accounts for this is that really, deep down, there is a locus of autonomy that is the very being of who every person is.  It is a person’s very self, naked and complete.  On the spectrum of thoughts there are lies on the border, yet closer in are thoughts that are true but not very meaningful, and as the nucleus of a person is approached thoughts become more and more meaningful, until the very meaning of a who a person is is reached. 

  It may be that not even the very person themself has encountered their very core.  People can cursorily utilize their minds for daily use without digging to its source.  It is very easy to keep one’s true existence concealed, gagged and locked up in some closet to stay out of the way.  Spending time in crowds is conducive to this effect, where the assumed norms of the crowd are accepted mindlessly, or consciously for convenience, thus allowing others to add another soul to their communal grave.  Truly, in this case, a person’s mind is dead.  You may be talking to a person without actually talking to them.  They forfeited themself long ago, to some social caprice or to join other mellowing souls in the fermenting process; perhaps necessarily unknowingly, for how can a person know they are shutting up the only part of them that is truly able to know things? 

  The consequences for this are absolutely awful.  If you not truly yourself then you cannot do anything truly.  You cannot really love another person, or enjoy a particular experience, or do anything at all.  Every activity becomes a cloud.  The person will walk into it, but nothing is there. 

  But most importantly if a person does not assume responsibility for maintaining their true existence, then they cannot face the truth.  And how terrible it is to have fled from the main event of existence.  Perhaps this is the primary, albeit subconscious, motivation for boarding up one’s mind in a dark cellar.  Because to exist is such a heavy burden.  It means to have real duties and actual consequences, to have accountability and complete and utter responsibility.  It is certainly nice to live, that is to be a breathing, moving thing, but to exist is one important step further.  And therein lies the terror of existence.  To be the part of you that is your true being means there is nothing to hide behind.  It is you and whatever there is squaring off in the ultimate showdown.  And who wants to stand naked before all that is and deal with it head on?  No one.  We are happy when through drowning in movies and stories and books and crowds of merely living things we get to spend some time away from ourselves.  Many people spend their entire lives fleeing themselves, and not on bad grounds.  But the problem is that out there there is nothing that’s real. 

  • 3:27 am
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