Personal Blogs

Been listening to a lot of 'In our time' podcasts about religion. They have been educational about the origins and beliefs of many of the religions in the world today. I am not a religous person myself, I do not know if there is such a thing as God or creator. I tend to be more atheistic in my belief, but not completely. I am open to changes in perception, I try not to keep my brain stuck in a filter bubble of creed/opinion. There is a mystical element to my psyche that no matter how logical I become, still exists, a part some label the 'God-shaped hole'. I find myself drawn to the mysterious, like a hungry leaf turning towards the sun. I wonder if sometimes it is a yearning for hope in a dark and troubled human world and a feeling of powerlessness to change anything.

I am aware everything I see and experience is relative to me. Nothing is set in stone, each of us experiences this world in our own way and thus form our opinions of it based on those experiences. That is all any one can do; and so noone can ever know everything or what it is truly like to be another. We are organic islands interacting through brief expressions of matter, rotating at 465 metres a second on a planet orbiting a star in a universe of countless, possibly infinite stars and big bangs.

Makes all the life on this planet all the more precious I think, and we should be doing everything we can to preserve it and if that involves changing ourselves to become a more altruistic species then so be it.

I've not been at my best lately. Energy levels low. Studying has been a mission. Learning slow. Clear day today with some hazy blue in the sky. Working on assignment with a cat sleeping next to me and a jackdaw hopping about on perches by the window. Had a problem with a leaky hot water bottle and now have a wet elbow when I accidently leaned on it. Lots of little birds about in the garden just now. I've seen goldfinches, green finches, bull finches, chaffinches, sparrows, two robins, one wren, lots of blue tits, great tits, long-tailed tits, coal tits, and another kind of tit that I don't know the name for. There's also blackbirds and two song thrushes. When I go outside I can hear them all chortling away in the background, it feels sometimes like an aviary but one without cages where the birds are free.

I think I better get on now, I keep procrastinating with one of the questions it is one of those ones where I don't know where/how to start, I know once I start writing it it will get easier, but that initial start can be tricky sometimes. Glad to have written this blog post though; is like a warm up before I start writing for the assignment.

Tired, cup of coffee, grey hazy damp day. I wonder how many tired expressions of me contemplating a grey hazy damp day there might be in an infinite universe/s - an infinite number perhaps? 

I alone cannot change society; but I can change myself. Transform my own consciousness. Overcome the conditioning that limits me. We can all do this, if enough people do, then we can change society from the inside out. 

Strange day today, woke up with a different head on than normal, lost my other one in a wierd world where urban streets and pavements, roads, fences and houses had become organic beings that had been genetically modified into different shapes, they were the living structures of our civilisation and helped keep the air clean. Life thrived around them, insects, birds, mammals, all kinds of different species happily co-existing in this alien Earth world, It was very beautiful and peaceful. I remembered in the dream that I had to go to one of Saturn's moons on a mining expedition and I didn't want to go.
   It was a long journey to a human colony built inside a moon, a strange beehive of subway layers, each with shops and underground train stations. Everyone there was different than on Earth, they weren't so friendly, they were well grumpy and cold and hard like the subways they lived in.

I was thinking about stuff I have written in the past about my sadness for the plight of the natural world. Today I became so frustrated by these thoughts I concluded it was an impossible thing to fix. This then seemed to cause the gears of my mind to slow and grind to a halt and I lost motivation for anything.

Then I remembered about the strange phenomena of faith. A writer, unfortunately I cannot remember his name, said he acted as if there was a muse even though in his mind he thought such things were nonsense; and so he turned up to write at his desk every day having faith the muse would be there, and strangely his reality became as if the muse was really there.

Got my window open, strong winds from earlier have died down now to a gentle breeze. In sky, seagulls glide by sailiing the air currents. A jackdaw I call 'Blue', because he has a blue sheen to his feathers, comes into my room and helps himself to some food I left out for him. It is cool, I don't mind, I've known him for years. It is like the garden is extended to my room (when the window is open). Helps my mind feel at ease, peaceful inside. Although it gets bloody cold sometimes, think I will go make a coffee to warm up my hands and then get back to the studying and thinking.

Interesting article:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/what-would-happen-if-everyone-truly-believed-everything-is-one/

Research seems to support the idea that believing everything is one and connected changes people's psychology to make them more inclusive of others, including different species of animal. The article seems to suggest this belief could be beneficial for human society. (*N.b. no belief in God required)

Back to the study, feel like I've been hit by a train in my sleep. Moving about is difficult and tiredness in ma bones. Trying to maintain a positive vibe in my brain. Put on some tunes to encourage these hands of mine to move and get into the rythm of study. Head feels foggy and thoughts don't come easy. Still in my pyjamas, feel a little on the rough side, nothing feels smooth and lush internally like I wish it would. Sitting in front of my computer, eyes stinging, body aching, grumbling at movement, (going to need a painkiller I think,) like a hungry wraith trying to grab hold of some ethereal motivation to bring this mind back to life. I had an intense dream, but no idea what it was about now, the memory of it has gone back into the depths of my unconscious neural ocean. But the feeling it has left behind still seems to linger a little in my psyche, like ripples on the surface of a pond.
   Watched a TED talk on motivation, about positive thinking, but none of what was suggested seemed to resonate with me, I don't find training my inner neural network is as simple as this suited smiling fella seemed to suggest. I guess I must be an outlier, one of those folks that statisticians rub out to make their data fit whatever model/theory they are trying to sell as the next great insight into human psychology. The brain consists of something like 10 - 100 billion neurons on average with each one of those neurons having 1000 - 10 000 connections. The mind is an incredibly complex thing. There will always be outliers. Everyone is different, nobody on earth has lived the exact same life. Each one of us is truly unique, our DNA a unique combination of switched on phenotypes, and our brains are not exactly the same, no two people on earth have had the exact same experiences in life that shape those connections and neural networks in our minds. In a sense every person really is an island, we've all experienced this world in our own unique way. And we can only percieve the world based on our own experience of it. Nobody can fully understand what it is like to be someone else, we can only imagine what it is like to be another and theorise, but never truly know. There never will be one size fits all. 

sleeping warrior

scattered pictures of life data

network of mind space

a connected neuron weave 

tapestry of night

invisible vacuum threads

what universe? Sing

humming its drone

I see its patterns in my sleep
where my other self

lives in dreams

Got my headphones on just listening to some sweet tunes. A bit of insomnia but I don't mind. Music is an amazing thing. Sometimes I like writing to the beats, feeling the rhythm and unlocking some hidden or normally inhibited part of my soul through the combination of words and sound. Stories are weaved in the dead of night, some forgotten past where everyone feels at home. The night surrounds the glare of my dimmed screen. There's a curious moth, it sits on the screen for a moment and then flutters away. An artificial focal point that different insects and my brain are drawn to and I sense their life and wish them well. Feel a sense of deep connection to the earth, probably the music, but that seems to just be the key to uncover deep hidden memories of a time long ago when the earth was first born. Maybe those memories are deep in our DNA, and sometimes things unlock them and we remember stuff. Do we carry the memories of all our ancestors? Each of us holding the knowledge of millions of years of evolution, perhaps it may even be possible to go far back to the first single celled life-forms, could the memory of that time be buried deep inside that double helix strand somewhere? We are all related, all creatures great and small, all the different species of life on earth are our kin; if we go back far enough we can all trace our ancestors back to that very first organism.

Feels like some of the jackdaws see me now as part of their tribe. They'll come and hang out with me when I sit outside. Not for food, just cause they want to, which makes me feel honoured. Hope the neighbours don't mind. I also seem to have made friends with a flock of pigeons. Their eyes are so gentle, and their feathers look beautiful when the sun catches them, the colours on their chests remind me a bit of peacocks. There's also some very tame blackbird chicks about, one follows me around, I worry a bit though cause it's a little too tame and needs to understand cats aren't friendly to birds.