A Storm of Revelations / In the Storm and in the Stillness / A Hundred Ways to Feel Alive
My mind is a storm of revelations, it stirs at any hour. There are moments of calm, peace, but then I realise it is just the eye of the storm passing over me and then the winds begin again.
Often I lead myself to thoughts of drastic actions and grand gestures. But often they are only ‘drastic’ or ‘grand’ against the backdrop of the dull and predictable world around me. Life is about doing the things that make you feel alive, and this hyper-civilised, nauseatingly convenient world offers little to trigger the survival instinct.
The mind is not of this world. We make the mistake of trying to fit the mind into boxes of intellect and rational but the true nature of the mind is far more complex, and far more beautiful than rationale of intellect alone can ever grasp or summarise.
Some of us come with new ideas, and it is us who suffer most. We came to forge new paths in these concrete jungles dense with ignorance and corruption. Those of us who are ‘different’ are belittled, ironically, exactly by those who our differences shall one day save.
Revolution of thought cannot happen overnight, it is like the tide. The pull of the moon is undeniable, a physical inevitability, but the oceans are vast, and it takes time for such volumes of water to succumb to it’s influence. It is the same for humankind. Though every one likes to think themselves an individual, we are more interconnected than many would like to admit. Take away the perceived individuality of consciousness and imagine that we are in fact like fish, swimming in the same great big ocean of thought and perception. Over ‘there’ may look a different shade of blue or green, it may feel warm or cold in different parts, but it is all the same ocean, and we may each move or live in different parts of it throughout our lives, pretending ‘here’ is someplace different to where we once were. But it isn’t. Cast no judgement on those with different beliefs, they are simply a product of their ecosystem, as are you.
Just how many apples can Adam eat before he makes himself so violently ill? Humankind have been foolish enough to believe for too long that they were separate from the world around them, and now the human world is run by violently ill Adams, drowning the purity of the human spirit in verbal diarrhoea.
Each day, I could just sit and write my thoughts on the world, it’s bound to go somewhere, a book, perhaps. I have wonderful insight and a way with words for sure. A gift to rediscover. My lucidity, in dreams and in writing.
When I was a child, I was a lucid dreamer. Lucid dreaming, I have now come to believe, is a symptom of someone for whom the veil between their conscious experience and spirit or energy around them is thin. It happened in my childhood because I was not yet clouded with the conditioning and hardships of life. ‘Well if this is true, then why doesn’t every child lucid dream?’, is the question that would naturally arise from this suggestion. We are not all energetically open at birth -
A seeker of truth, who eventually found a teacher, who found many teachers, until life itself became the teacher. How to distill the truths of a life spent seeking desperately for a way out of discomfort and misery?
People are nauseating. This is how I feel throughout the vast majority of tourist season in the small surf town I call my home. I’m not proud of it, but anyone will tell you it’s an all too common symptom of living in a place like this; a small and conscious community
There’s something alive about people who live by the sea, and in fact all who live in close proximity and relationship to nature. There’s something a little more, switched on.
Tourists on the other hand, when they come down for their annual holiday, they come to do the exact opposite, they come to switch off. It’s like Coke and Mentos, the tension is palpable, it becomes impossible to decompress, and, depending on your work environment, you may see people start popping left right and centre.
It’s easy to start feeling this way when you live in a popular place. The sad thing is, that ever since moving to a popular town, I can no longer visit any other popular towns without assuming this same disdain from other locals towards myself, it’s a karmic cycle. So how do I reset my mind?
This was the only line that looked back at me as I glanced down at my journal which, otherwise, was as blank and dull as the grey mid-summer sky. Where did it go? All that life and inspiration I once felt, all the ambition I still feel inside me, it tied itself in knots and now seemingly can’t speak for asphyxiation.
The pursuit of feeling alive is perhaps one of the greatest there is. In an endless search we take drugs, chase waves, jump out of planes, explore the world, make love, make food, plant trees…all in a search for connection. It’s connection that makes us feel alive, whether it’s through the removal of inhibitions with drugs, the connection with water on a wave, connection with another when we make love. Making love, I would argue, is a misleading and inaccurate term. We are already love, we always were, but there is so much in the way. When we ‘make’ love with another, we are entering into a state made possible by the connection felt with another, the something about that person which allows us, if for a fleeting moment, to pass through all of the heavy veils we live beneath each day and be love. Therefore making love isn’t the act of making anything at all, but rather being, but being what we are, in a rare moment that we are no longer pretending to be something else.