When the Ink Turned Into Birds

There’s a part of me that’s always tempted to talk about what’s going on in the world right now. That’s human nature, to be interested in fancy, absurd, unimaginable, and horrible things. We do it because we want to be entertained. Sometimes we want to be shocked out of our slumbers, out of the routines we’ve come to rely on, and out of our safe but predictable lives. That’s the only reason our attention might go to world events, our countries politics or leaders, catastrophic incidents in far off places we’ve never been to, scandals or shocking discrepancies that later come to light, and all that stuff happening on the stage of life. There’s always more than enough to choose from. You could never run out of things to focus on that have nothing to do with you or your own life. Some people are so outward focused that in the end their memories are only the things of this imaginary nature, not themselves.

“The world is suffering.” Many icons, philosophers, and awakened beings have said this. Some think it’s the fact that we must die in the end that maybe causes all of it. This one idea scares us so much we are unable to reconcile ourselves to this Truth and so spend our lives desperately trying to find a way to either overcome the act itself or our fear of it. Of course, we can’t. It’s the one thing about life that no one will ever avoid but this one fear is responsible for so much more than an ending, it is the very reason most never begin to live at all. Instead of coming to terms with the terms of our engagement in this realm, our attention goes outward to anything and everything available large and small to distract us from it. We therefore want to believe in stories, no matter how outlandish they are and most of them are. Most human stories not only make zero sense, but given the fact that we will one day have to exit, are merely escapes and fantasies of such a bizarre nature, it’s a true wonder and feat that they become believed in at all. But they do, a single belief might travel around the world a thousand times in a thousand different ways, in a thousand different eras and never be questioned once by anyone with a mind for questioning.

The human imagination is truly a wizard. It’s a magic making illusion creator and we each personally have one but also collectively. The more a belief is believed in by many, the more it folds itself into the common ways we have of living out our lives. Since the advent of newspapers, books, and now social media, ideas and concepts flourish along thought channels that anyone can become aware of. Now we have it at our fingertips through the internet that we might find out about anything we want to and we all do just that. Where once oceans and mountains used to separate peoples and the stories they learned, it’s no longer the case.

When we’re hearing, reading, or listening to stories now we usually consider the source as to the accuracy of the tale itself. Everyone has their own preferred network which they deem is telling them the Truth. Perhaps it’s a source that they’ve relied on a long time or even one their parents passed on. If you have one you instantly believe or take in as fact anything it says. This is nothing new, in fact the most popular or widely esteemed sources have gone so far as to shape not just our cultural values but our own personal worlds. Usually no one questions their authority to know the Truth or their credibility in telling us what it is. Humans in their laziness of thought and mind would rather have someone tell them what’s going on or what to believe far more often than figuring anything out for themselves. Often as cultures have it, our lives might keep us too busy for such deep questioning or thought and besides, if no one else is doing it then why bother? If you need to know anything vital to your life or way of living you figure you’ll find out when you need to know it. And yes, you can live this way, obviously you can since most do. It would be unusual if you didn’t. You might even seem odd if you wanted to figure anything out for yourself. That’s what the experts are for, right? They do all the hard work so you don’t have to. Disagreeing with anyone who has more credentials whether as experience or education is very much frowned upon and you’ll just look stupid if you do. When everyone agrees that chocolate ice cream is the best desert saying you think pistachio ice cream is far superior is not going to make you popular or well liked in most circles. It’s best to stick to the most popular opinions then, just to be on the safe side. Offending others just makes enemies and you don’t need that. Even now, I’d say if you want to think something different, then keep it to yourself. Contrary to social opinion and modern behavior, others don’t need to know your thoughts and opinions since they have their own and therefore don’t need yours.

It’s long been said that humans are social creatures and that’s how we like communicating with each other so much. We love an audience when we’re telling our tales, for what good is a story if there’s no one to tell it too? Humans have a need to be heard. We have a need to be validated and we get this by having our friends and families agree with us when we talk. That’s what most of psychology thinks these days but I’d disagree. I think ego seeks these things because it is afraid and needs consoling. It’s not that we are social creatures but that we are inherently insecure and fearful creatures. We don’t want to face ourselves so being alone is now called loneliness and not just introspection. We don’t really want to know ourselves then because we’re deathly afraid of what we might find if we delve too deeply into our own minds. Everyone is trying to outrun their own fear, to subdue the grey murky areas we somehow know exist within us but just can’t face or even fathom.

Ego or the false persona a person wears like a mask would rather fear the other because then the attention is going outwards. It can never choose to go inwards, because inwards means death, or as Nietzsche once wrote, “when we look too deeply into the abyss the abyss stares back at us.” What then is really inside of us? What are we made of that scares us so? Is it that we are empty? Are we afraid we won’t find anything? Is it that the masks we put on to live out our lives aren’t actually real but mere faulty fabrications, even happenstance? Is there a lie within us that dictates the living out of our own lives then? Why don’t we look? Shouldn’t that be the most interesting thing in the world to a person, their own inner workings or non working as the case may be? I always wonder what could be more interesting to me than myself since I will only be here once and for such a brief time. I think I ought to know. I guess that’s how I never stop looking. I can never know beforehand what I might know. Knowing as with life is a fluid process. All this writing is just a way of bringing the inner up and putting it here where I might look at it. I never stop wondering what my own mind will think about when I come to this blank page. What will come up? I’m so curious. I could literally sit here all day long doing just this and often have. I never get bored of discovering what comes up for me here.

I once tried to interest others in trying this writing thing. I think I liked it so much myself that I wanted to share this gift. I wanted to say something like, “Come here and look what you can do? You can find out so much. Once you start you won’t need any help at all in figuring out your life. You can finally cut out the middle man. You can come to the page and figure it all out all by yourself. Whatever you want to discover is right here at your own fingertips. You no longer need take another word or thought over your own. Basically you can become fully independent in your knowing.” I didn’t have any takers which was fine in the end. I wasn’t totally sure I could teach anyone how to do it anyway. I thought I could encourage them to try it but that was about it. What you do doesn’t need any influence, because strangely that’s always a hindrance, not a help like we always think. Each person’s journey is unique, so there’s no milestones, nothing at all to say yes or no to the direction it takes. I definitely think people overlook writing as a tool for self enquiry though but that’s because most people aren’t really ready to go exploring even when they think they are. That’s probably how the silent message became so popular. Don’t explore your thoughts just end them. It’s all nothing. This became the basis for the whole enlightenment movement. Does it work though all this suppressing of thought? If it did then much of the population would be enlightened and I don’t see that. I think what happened is fear came in and said, “Nope, don’t you dare go there. Finding out what you really think will not do you any good and besides, you already know what you think, and it’s not good. Much of the time your own opinions or thoughts already haunt you, you’d like to hide them from yourself so they don’t bother you but they are already always bothering you which is how you need to keep hiding them.”

So basically, as is usually the case, we can’t face ourselves. Why? Because if we do then we have to face not only our own ignorance but our own death. We can’t ignore the inevitable ending of our existence. This immutable fact just won’t go away, because you can dream and speculate while you are alive, using imagination you are allowed to make up anything but when it comes to death you can’t. It’s the one fact about life that no one can change or even explain, though many try, this can only ever be more imagination. And we don’t want to see that there’s something we don’t know since we can never actually know what happens then and there. It’s the one thing we must continuously hide from ourselves because when we don’t, what do we face? The real source of all fear, the fear of fears, total annihilation, the zeroing effect. That’s where it resides, and to go poking around in it, will unleash it. Actually, what will usually happen is life will rush in with all sorts of other stuff to focus on so your mind can’t maintain its focus. The writing is what maintains the focus so if you’re just thinking, your thinking has no real direction, it just flies out in all directions, focusing on this thing that came up, then over there to that event you heard about, then it tells you take a break and the TV comes on and you dive into some other fantasy, what’s for dinner, or is this vitamin good, on and on like this, and we wonder how the world seems so chaotic? That’s always how we create system after system to try to contain all the straying parts of our minds. What humans are really trying to control is imagination without acknowledging this one little annoying fact: imagination isn’t controllable. A person is only brainwashable to a degree, because our systems don’t allow us to become fully predictable or under control. A person who is forced to comply with too many rules will usually become depressed or perhaps angry. Each one has a unique design when it comes to how the attention will be dispersed and expressed but suffer too much too long and it will invariably look for a way out. From the minute we are born our lives move in one direction and one direction only, towards death. The spiral starts then not in old age like you’d think and our fears takes us all over the map, just like it should. We feel an inner urge to do as much as possible, experience as much as possible because we know what’s coming. Why wake up just to stop living, to say oh let’s just sit peacefully through the rest of it? You’d see this life is for doing, because silence is the end, not the beginning or the middle. Instead your inherent capacity to create your own life the way you like it best will emerge, but that’s not a boring nor silent thing at all. It’s dynamic, because what you find is that it was always your beliefs that were creating it and once you find there’s no limit to what you might think and do there, you’re off. It was only fear that made your life static and predictable.

Changing your life really amounts to what you’re capable of imagining, and that will depend on more than just one factor, like what you’re thinking. More than thinking, creation itself depends on emotion, not what you’re capable of thinking but what you’re capable of feeling and therefore believing. Of course, are you in control of that? Have you ever truly conjured up a feeling or do they conjure themselves up in response to not just your thoughts but your situation, maybe physical health, environment and what you’re seeing? It’s not a matter of needing to feel what we think are the “right” emotions. Without a hint of fear or reaction left in your system, you’d instantly discover your feeling would just naturally be a whole lot different than what you’ve always been used to. You see what we’re really good at in terms of thought is lying to ourselves. We either exaggerate negativity or we do the opposite. We love to tell ourselves or we try to, usually we’re not successful, that shit is better than it actually is. We want to believe in fairy tales even when the situation doesn’t call for it. We usually have zero capacity to even detect what we’d be feeling if we weren’t consciously or unconsciously trying to somehow manipulate what that was based on what we think or learned was “appropriate.” Now there’s a word you’d do well to get rid of. I’ll tell you this much, no one you’ve probably ever listened to in terms of advice even came close to letting you know what that actually was because no one could possibly tell you that. No one else has a clue in hell of what’s “appropriate” for you, literally impossible. A better term would be “natural”, something that is a part of your inherent natural functioning. Then you’d know you’d never need to manipulate yourself in any direction for if you be what you are it’s no longer necessary nor desirable to do so. In fact, manipulation of any kind would instantly not only feel ingenuous but unnatural. It’d feel wrong on some level. Your body would feel and register it immediately. It’s actually already doing this. To be in your most natural state could be anything, but here’s what it won’t be, stressed. That part of your life could be over.

I’m not saying I’ve got it all figured out. Personally if you do, then you’re not even going to be able to write about this part. No I think it’s more like you see the Truth and you just acknowledge it. At the start, your mind does a full mid air backflip between the Truth, and something like, “What the bleep is all this other shit?”. Yeah, there’s some serious gasp there, where you realize that all other things are not only totally unnecessary but idiotic on a level that’s really hard to comprehend at first. It’s like, one part of you is thinking, “Why didn’t you just tell me I was going to die?” and the other part is trying to piece together any sort of logic as to why anyone is doing any of the stuff they are doing, and you’ll never be able to find any. You just see that life really is insane on one spectrum and something else on the other. Then the mind flip flops between the two for a good ten years, and at the end of that realizes that even this was totally unnecessary because it doesn’t find anything. I mean really, if you think about it, why doesn’t anyone realize that whatever they think happened yesterday has completely vanished and doesn’t actually exist anymore because a memory isn’t something real? We can’t even get that far. We have zero ways of proving that our own memories are anything more than fantastic hallucinations and yet, we basically live as if they were indisputable.

Maybe think of a mountain. Even a mountain isn’t all that solid until you’re right up on it and about to trailhead your way to the top. Maybe we realize that things become tangible only when we truly focus on them and take action for where is the mountain before you’ve traveled to it, you’ve gotten in your car, driven all the miles to it, or however you get there. Your actions now make it believable to your mind that you are standing on a mountain, before that, the mountain is only an idea in your imagination and you’ve taken it on belief of stories and snapshots that it is real. Once you’ve experienced the mountain, you’ve felt the earth under your feet, walked under its vast canopy of forest, seen the rushing streams, you become a storyteller of the mountain. We take experience for reality and this is true for everything and that’s how some things become real and others don’t. A person who says the mountain is unreal and only an illusion will not be believed and I suppose rightly so, otherwise there’s no more experiencing of mountains, for if we didn’t believe in them, there wouldn’t be any. I’m sure you think that’s absurd because you think there’s always been mountains. Of course, we don’t know that, we believe it. The ancients saw a lot of mountains, and passed that on, good for them, now humans see shopping malls, suburbs, endless roads and barren freeways, stark contrast, but it goes how it goes. Imagination is very pliable. Your whole life is imagination whether you know it or not. That’s good news if you ask me.

I think you might imagine anything you want, if you only realized it was within your capacity to do so. I’m still exploring this. I don’t think I’ll ever stop exploring, for what is life but our one adventure, to do with what we will? Or is it your hassle and burden to just bear? The choice is always only yours. What you do doesn’t actually affect anything. No human has ever changed reality, not for better or worse, but they’ve imagined a lot of shit and usually drag their children and others into it. Well, you’ll die in the end, basically who you are will be absorbed back into the vast cosmic consciousness and disappear forever. I’d live now as if the world was your playground because once you really get there, you’ll find it is.

A word to the wise, don’t believe in just anything, you can make this up all by yourself, in fact, you’ve always been doing this so make it beautiful. Make it interesting but above all, make it yours. That is your actual birthright if you’d only claim it. Of course, it’s a process or a living that happens through you and I don’t want to say how that will go since I’d rather not put ideas in your head. You’ll find out your own ideas soon enough on this journey if you actually take it. No one can really help you with that. I don’t think so. All I can really say is some things seem realer than others and doing what’s necessary to dismantle the illusion is always only a personal endeavor. There’s no map outside of the map of you and your life. That means every path is and must be totally unique. I can encourage you to take a different trip but I can never confirm or deny what you’ll find by doing so. That’s always for the best otherwise I’d influence you according to my own crap and you don’t need that. It’s enough I think that I had to deal with it.

Happy travels then or as the apt saying goes, “May the road rise up to meet you” so you might find out there isn’t one. Any way is a good way to go then.