Thursday 14 August 2014

Duality (Poem)


Darkness comes to those that hide,
Extinguishing light, clears path to pride.
The fallen ones have given their souls,
To their greater cause of ages old.

Destruction bringer, has raised it's torch,
Darkened shroud hides gaze set forth.
Piercing soul, render fallen burned,
Cursing, thrashing, screaming, scourned.
The fallen prisoner clings to their cage,
Burned and scolded, heart of rage.
Imprisoned they are, guarding lock and key,
Tormented by devils, they cannot see.

The angels look down from their heavenly seats,
Sorrow for those enduring such heat.
Angels they are and songs they do sing,
Beautiful sonnets, but not all that they bring.

Destruction bringer, pauses tirade,
Glancing to heaven, leveling gaze.
A grin does erupt, a darkness there in,
The fallen have suffered destructions sins.
To heavens angels, will be a great sorrow,
Sharp and deep, rendering hollow.

Suffer darkness well and equally light.
For to choose one side, brings destructions torch bright.

Duality and Perception








Philosophy has helped me to see many things in a different light.
Thinking philosophical thoughts, often takes one outside the boundaries of the current paradigm.
But what use is this?
For one thing, when you challenge a belief or view that you yourself currently hold on to, it can result in a pause in conviction.
Why would we want to pause our convictions? Surely our beliefs are based on experience, which is real and true?
Let’s ask the famous 19th century philosopher, Nietzsche.
And from you too they require a Yes or a No.
And woe to you if you want to set your chair between For and Against.
Do not be jealous, lover of truth, because of these inflexible and oppressive men! Truth has never yet clung to the arm of an inflexible man.
The experience of all deep wells is slow: they must wait long until they know what has fallen into their depths
.” - Friedrich Nietzsche.

Basically Nietzsche is saying here, that to rush to a conviction is to risk missing the truth. The longer we consider things, the greater the chance we will come to the right conclusions.
“The experience of all deep wells is slow: they must wait long until they know what has fallen into their depths.”
 The greater the chance we will know WHAT we are “looking” at.

Also mentioned in the full quote above, is the idea of being flexible in our thinking.
“Truth has never yet clung to the arm of an inflexible man.”
Sometimes we need to bend to reason or risk losing our footing and falling from grace.
Or as others have put it in the past, “There’s no point in flogging a dead horse”.
I just remembered, as an aside, the act of witnessing a man flogging an unfortunate horse, is exactly what pushed Nietzsche himself to madness.

Anyway, I think I have gone a small way, to justifying the notion of challenging our beliefs and taking our time in choosing which way to lean. Or if to lean any way at all!

Duality

When I write of duality here, I am referring to the Chinese philosophical notion of duality or dualism, the concept of Yin and Yang.
Yin and Yang can be considered as two complimentary parts of a dynamic system, where the whole is greater than the individual parts.
Over the years, in dealing with conflicts, I have considered them only based on how they made me feel. A lot of the time I had a negative view of conflicts. I thought if something brought me negative feelings, it was bad. If it brought me positive feelings it was good.
This may seem to make sense on the surface. But let’s look a little deeper.
When we are young and building references to the world around us, it helps us to navigate better when we associate things like hurting ourselves as “bad”, something to avoid for our safety.
When we have an encounter with a bully, we understand after, that avoiding this conflict can keep us safe.
This again seems to make sense on the surface.

Now to apply some duality to these situations.

What would happen to that child had they no experience with hurting themselves?
They might cause themselves more pain at a later stage right?
I have a clear memory of my mother asking me as a young child to check if she left the cooker on. Having no experience with cookers, I walked into the kitchen and put my hand up to check if it was on.
It was....
I can say now with confidence, I have never burned my hand since! Oh I’ve hurt my hands yes, even seriously enough to spend time in hospital. But I have never burned them again. And of course, I can still clearly remember that horrible moment and the rest of the day with my hand in a cup of cold water.

Here is another personal anecdote, somewhat related to bullying.

Just last Christmas, I was walking through the city, on my way home from a late night finishing a college project.
I have a habit of taking the same route going along various streets.
As I looked to cross the road to the other side of the street, I noticed a group of five guys in their early twenties, who appeared to be drunk and rowdy.
But I am a stubborn fellow and decided to cross the road and take my usual route.
This brought me in direct contact with this group and they didn’t really appreciate a lone man disrespecting their presence, by not being afraid and avoiding them. 
The result was that after I passed them, the most aggressive of the group ran up from behind me and attempted to knock me out clean.
Thankfully I heard this and started to duck my head and shoulders, which meant I took the full force of the punch straight to my nose, instead of my chin. Anyway, long story short, upon realising that I was still standing and looking straight at them, they backed off and I stepped away to see how bad the damage was.
My nose was broken and pumping blood.
Right after that I managed to get a lift to a friends place, who was expecting me to visit that night.
It didn’t take me long at all to rationalize the whole thing.
My stance was that this was actually a good thing.

I survived the encounter first of all.
I now know what it feels like to have my nose broken (something I have always feared). I learned that my habits and stubbornness can get me into situations I could just as easily avoid... by being flexible.
I learned that if I am to be in a dangerous situation again, I should try to make sure I am under a CCTV camera. I learned quite a lot from that overall. The result is that now I am more aware. 
I don’t fear this happening again because I fully accept that it was a series of events, that I took part in, to lead me to that meeting. Sometimes we just don’t consider these things, until we experience them first hand.
I was lucky. Another time it could have been a group with weapons and more intent than a drunken “young fella”.

In the past, I would have felt anger and hate towards that group.
I would have felt sorry for myself. And I am pretty sure I would have been a lot more nervous walking the streets.

With my updated perception though, I was fine, you could almost say relieved and grateful for the experience. I was not even afraid at any time during the encounter.
This positive frame of mind allowed me to brush it off and shake any irrational fears that might have come along with that encounter.

Here’s another quote to sum up this idea of embracing the negative.
“What does not kill us makes us stronger”- Friedrich Nietzsche
A funny reply I have read to this is, “Sometimes what didn’t kill you probably should have”.

Conclusions
How we perceive any “thing”, can dictate the impact it has on us.
With a strong sense of duality and a good imagination, you cannot be hurt mentally or emotionally, as much as one who has a singular stance. You allow yourself options. When you practise this exercise of switching the bad for the good and even the good for the bad! You become skilled at choosing your emotions and fears through rational thought at any given time you remember to do this.
 With practice you may find it automatic. A sense of brushing off as you pause for those few milliseconds before emotions kick in and all thinking and rationale goes out the proverbial window.

You can rationalize anything good or bad, to be it’s counterpart.
And I hope you will take up that challenge in your daily life.
It may be argued that this is a dangerous philosophy, when people can choose what is positive and negative using their own rational thought.
And I will try to cover that at some later stage , if I get a chance.
Until then, I trust you to remember that all actions have an opposite and equal reaction.

 Or more simply put...... Karma can be a bitch.











Tuesday 12 August 2014

Introduction


Who am I?

Greetings fellow human!

My name is Rob and I live in Ireland.
 A small island country, on the western edge of Europe.
I cannot say I am any one thing ,and so, to fully answer the question "who am I?", is to give my lifes story.
That is actually an interesting story, even to one who has lived an uncommon life( I may one day share that story with you here). I would think any other who cared to share their story, would yield some interesting surprises too.

For the most part, I am an introvert and an intuitive. These things have not ever changed and they are quite dominant traits in my personality.
I am in my early to mid thirties as I write this beginning post, of my first and only blog.
Over the past 4 or so years, I have been forced to come to terms with many things that have enabled me to reflect on myself and life, in a way that brought irreversible changes in my thinking and perception of people, reality and so many other things.
I will say I have a wealth of experience with depression and illness. Just those two factors in my life alone have made an impact so strong, I am very much defined by it.
Between that and other experiences in my past and future dreams too, I have become very much interested in learning and improving.
It should be noted maybe, that I am fairly sure I have at least two different types of dyslexia.
The regular commonly known type, where I mix up letters and numbers. But also another type called auditory dyslexia, where I have major issues listening to someone speak and thinking at the same time.
The former may affect my typing on this blog. I must constantly reread my posts everywhere and fix typos. So I will do my best to keep it tidy.

I have a great love right now for philosophy. In the past I was a lover of psychology and NLP(Neuro Linguistic Programming).
Reading and writing seems to be in my blood. Up until this moment, my main form of online communication and writing, has been through forums.
Philosophy, Psychology, Conspiracy Theories, Anthropology, Game Design, Humanities are the forum tabs I have saved on my browser for quick access every day.
So this should give a rough idea of where I am at right now :)

Why did I make this blog?

I have had enough....
There are too many people suffering from themselves. I cannot help them all.
But I see them as I walk the streets. I see them online. I do not have time or energy to befriend and lead out of the same darkness I once lived.
This blog is an attempt to express myself and share my ideas and perceptions on many things. I have no clear goals. I want to share myself, in the hopes others will begin to consider things anew and open for themselves new doors.
That is my greatest desire maybe! To give everyone the key to themselves. To master themselves. To free the bonds of slavery. I am and will always be a student of life, I don't claim to have all the answers.
In fact, I would more likely claim that nothing is true and nothing is false and so is everything else :D
But I can be sure I have an opinion ;)
And that will change with many things as I open new doors for myself.

So....
I hope you find this blog of use. If nobody does at all, I will have enjoyed expressing myself as a form of therapy and meditation. This is my diary I suppose. Those things I ponder and want to get out, which I hope will make people think and question. I don't enjoy agreement for it's own sake and I don't enjoy arguement when it is not with an open heart and mind.
 I enjoy honest curiosity and an intellectual challenge to my perception of reality and all things there in.

The greatest question we can ask ourselves is "Why?".
Remember that. It's very important!