Thursday, March 12, 2009

Doris and Friends

After some timely help from my partner George I am now full steam ahead again with my novel The Strange Occurrences at 83 Mulberry Avenue. It is a comedy of sorts and is going very well at present, doing much of my writing in the evening and even on the train to and from work (which gave me an extra 2 hours today). I think that the first 5 chapters are pretty much finished (except for polishing which will come later) and I am already making headway into chapter 6. Writing is very liberating when it is going well but can also take you into a dark spiral of despair when it isn't! What they call the Long Dark Night of the Soul I suppose.

So wish me look and a bon voyage, I shall of course update everyone as it progresses. Hopefully this mean there will be fewer soul searching rambles for a while as I have something very solid to concentrate my efforts into

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Musings on the spirit body

In regard to the spirit body, how does it perceive the extra dimensional realms? If we are to believe that it is indeed separate from the physical body. The reason for this query is thus: Our perception of the material realm is due to a very specific biological process utilising the various parts of our eyes. Therefore we know what something ‘looks’ like due to our ‘seeing’ of it. But if this was completely true then how is it that artists can draw out of their imagination fantastical creatures and landscapes that are not based within reality. Could it be that each of these incredible fantasies are still ground within reality, just taking colours and shapes that can be seen to exist around us and morphing them into something else… are dinosaurs the basis of dragons, goats and men the basis of satyrs etc.

If this is true then, how does a bind person perceive, and if they have no knowledge of material things how do they conjure these up in their imagination? If s blind person was to leave their body and enter the spirit realm what would they ‘see’?

This raises yet more questions, such as how much is imprinted on our spirit bodies through the medium of our physical selves? We know from reincarnation that memories of entire lives can be retained in certain cases when in a new physical body. The goal then is no doubt to retain this apparatus of memory upon death and separation, so that the knowledge of a lifetime is not lost. Initiates who have prepared themselves for the moment of death, so that they are aware of what is going around them, and do not despair as the demons tear away their earthly sins, are surely a more evolved form of being that we should aspire to.

Going back to the original point, should we also ask how much of an object are we seeing, just from our visual perception, and how much of that object is hidden, during this process, certainly vision is not the only sense that has been given to us when we were created, we can also smell, taste, touch, hear and also which is most likely pertinent here: feel. So does a blind person purely ‘feel’ the spirit realm, is this how we would also perceive it? I may even hazard a guess that a blind person finds it easier to reach this state as they have less ‘material’ baggage to cloud their perceiving. The rest of us mired so deeply within the world of the physical must find it harder discount the billions of images bombarding our vision on a daily basis. Whenever we are told a story, or use our imagination we instinctively try to associate images with the words, overlay visuals within our dreams to give us some grounding in ‘reality’. Yet it is this ‘reality’ that stops us from seeing the truth that is around us.

When we are children we are told that there are no monsters. Even though as children we do not believe this is true because children have a more innate sense of the other worlds that flow through our own. Children have yet to be completely filled with lies and images, having more of a capacity for belief in the extraordinary and an immense ability for wonder. Therefore we must be as children again, regress to that state where all things seemed possible, where the thought of a man standing on the moon seemed incredible and impossible, when the small laptop I am writing this on could barely hold a thousand words in memory! When Gods and monsters were simply accepted as being and why not?!

My spirit body is a part of me and not a part of me at the same time, a contradiction for our adult brains, but when we can convert sound to waves and images to streams of numbers that travel down a cable, why is it so hard to believe that other dimensions, other beings, other ways of perceiving, are a viable part of human nature as well? Existing but invisible, known but unknown, seen but not seen!

If we truly can create something that is original, then we must also entertain the idea that thought can arise before form, and if we consider that then we must also consider the possibility that thought came before all matter in the cosmos, and if this is true then there had to be consciousness to create the cosmos!
Most of us will have heard the phrase, ‘In the beginning there was the Word’. Now that we can consider this in the above way, we can see why this statement is true. For consciousness to have thought it needs to have a way of describing that thought, whether unspoken or not, this infers what we call language. Most people will be able to describe what they are creating before they have created it. I can tell you that I am going to paint a dragon, with a long spiky tail and green scales, and you dear reader will be able to ‘imagine’ what this would be like before I have even placed a single brushstroke. You may imagine something slightly different to what I paint, but the fact is you can have the ‘idea’ of a green dragon without me having to paint at all. However if I did paint my picture and title it a green dragon, everyone who then looks at that painting will collectively understand what I mean by a green dragon. Many things in the cosmos may exist but because we have yet to perceive it and so we do not collectively understand it, we can only think that we know it exists (that old chestnut - seeing is believing). Therefore one of the reasons that we may not realise something exists is because we don’t yet have language for it yet. People believe in angels, demons, spirits and any number of beings, but that does not mean that even more entities are not out there, created in the minds of individuals and sent forth into an invisible plane, but because we do not have the language for such an entity and the creator of that entity has not described it to us, as far as we collectively are aware it does not exist. Even stout believers cannot describe God, instead using phrases like endless, boundless, omnipresent, all, does this mean that God does not exist, not at all.

To cast off the physical is to cast off a lifetime of corrupt thinking, and lies based on the ‘truth’ of our seeing. It is certainly not an easy path to walk down, fraught with uncertainty and not knowing. Be not afraid, though madness stalks but two feet behind, we must keep moving forward.

Monday, March 09, 2009

Esoteric Mysteries not so Mysterious?

The more I read about the secret teachings of the mystery schools and various secret sects, and even mainstream religions the more and more it becomes obvious how alike they all are, based on the same underlying principles. You don't even have to read too many books to realise this, not so secret then?! This is a subject that has fascinated me for years but I have only just started to really get my teeth into, originally as research towards a fiction piece I am writing but now also because I find it just so damn fascinating.

I am also becoming more and more interested in the magical side of these teachings and am trying to work towards some more practical research. I have yet to be able to detach my spirit body from my physical one, and I have tried a number of techniques, but I feel sure now from all of my reading that this is certainly possible. One of the biggest secrets that was supposed to have been kept from 'normal' people is the secret of reincarnation, but for this to be true then the spiritual body HAS to be a separate entity from the physical. The real 'I' in 'Me'.

I'll keep trying I suppose and if I reach any kind of breakthrough I will be sure to post it here. When I was a lot younger I followed shamanic teachings for quite some time and it was possibly the happiest period of my life. The problem at present is the temptation to go down a darker route and use these energies and spirits for personal gain, but of course who knows what punishment I am setting myself up for, if the soul is indeed immortal.

Back to the books for now, reading at least isn't that dangerous...

Sunday, March 08, 2009

Some Random Things

Been playing around with a few things today, finally got a beta invite to Daytum (link on the right) and have spent far too long playing around with the charts I can make. The idea is to collect statistical information on your life - sounds pointless and probably is - but I love numbers, so it has me hooked for now. Remembering to keep it up to date will be the difficult part.

Checked in on my Flickr account as well, haven't posted any new stuff, though one of my photos is now in a group called 'decorated animals'! I still can't believe that the 2 most viewed images on there are my picture of a tram in Kolkata and the back end of a bus :s

Been quite depressed today, yay thanks fibro, unfortunately the brain is also a muscle and so it isn't immune to the effects of my disease. heading to bed very soon to do some more reading, maybe even write something if I am lucky, though not feeling terribly inspired in this condition.

I've decided Facebook is a 15 minute phenomenon. I don't mean that's how long it will last, but have you noticed how you become friends with someone and chat to them for about 15 minutes and then never speak again? At first everyone thinks it is going to be great to chat to people they went to school with and then suddenly you realise that you don't have anything in common with this person you haven't seen in 20 years. Or those that you do want to talk to, end up being the ones that never get back to you. Oh well that could be the depression talking.

I'll hopefully have something more positive to say tomorrow.

cleaning house

Recently I have been cleaning house, not literally but metaphysically. Trying to get rid of past addictions, maybe for new ones, but hopefully ones that spiritually are much better. The writing has been going ok, but I still feel that, in order to write the words that I really feel I need to reach a new level of consciousness; mired as we are in this material world, it is hard to disassociate yourself from the hardness of the physical and tap into the vastness of the spiritual. My struggle is far from unique, it is no doubt the struggle of all creative people, I guess that is why so many artists and writers from the past have turned to drugs or alcohol to free their minds of the shackles of the mundane and soar across the vast oceans of the imagination. This ramble only goes to show even more the difficulty I am currently facing. Anyone who says that art is easy has obviously never created anything wondrous.