The Uses of Turpentine

I have no idea where I am heading with this blog entry, it is such an abstract idea that I don’t think I can bring anything to the table. The topic I am talking about is dreaming or dreams. It is really far out there, I know! But it has always fascinated me how a thing like dreaming works and the automatic answer to that is “it’s your mind processing your thoughts, emotions and memories” okay granted that makes sense in a scientific sense and closes the door on it. I don’t want to leave it at that, I mean I am not totally debunking that idea, I agree with it but dreaming is such a…cool thing!

How many times have you been walking down the street with a friend and you were like “I had such a weird dream last night”? A lot. And there are the times where you can’t remember a dream, you only remember the emotions felt when you awoke, fear, happiness etc. I don’t want to make this a biology lecture so I won’t go into great detail explaining why this happens. I just want to put across my thoughts on this subject.

The last dream I had was a ‘want’ dream. I use this word very loosely, but basically a dream where you hope for it to happen in reality, but the thing is when you are in it you think it is real, I am starting to sound like I am quoting from ‘Inception’ so I will stop there. Anyway the thing is you wake up and it is still stuck in your mind, and worst of all you wish it would come true and you feel like you must do something to obtain this ‘glimpse of possible reality’, that or wish you could dream it again, but you never do. What I am angling at is why these types of dreams happen, is it your mind saying “buck up your ideas and get to it!”? Because it has such an influence on your thought process you feel compelled to take action, so this seems likely.

So maybe the mind is as complex as people says, it could even be sentient in its own right, like a passenger who controls you. This does confirm Eckhart Tolle’s idea that ‘You are not your mind’. I am just postulating this theory, I don’t want to convolute the subject by saying “This is right. That’s wrong.”.

Back to dreams. There are things called ‘lucid’ dreams, dreams in which you can control and shape to your will. This is a very interesting phenomena. I personally have never had one and I heard they are particularly tricky to have. Going back to the idea of dreams being memories, thoughts and emotions being processed, if this indeed true where do lucid dreams fall into? If you are able to control a dream, which is just already established information being processed, what are lucid dreams? I think it is when your thought process isn’t fully shut down, you are asleep but your mind is still working, thinking making decisions and emotions, but you are still in dream world which you are aware of so you are able to control it. It’s like being a self appointed God in a world which is yours, you can do anything. Probably a poor simile but I don’t really know how to simplify it.

Have you noticed in dreams, especially the ones where you are running away from something, you can’t actually out run your ‘monster’ it always gets you and you wake up. My interpretation of this is that the monster is a manifestation of your fear, be it failing a job interview or an exam, and because you worry you bog yourself down, stopping yourself from outrunning that monster. In lucid dreams you can always outrun that monster because your mind can calm itself down and therefore speed you up.

Well I’m out of steam for this post. I hope it had given you some food for thought and i will definitely revisit this topic. Peace out.

I’m wondering what happened to that highly entertaining not to mention extreeeeemely scary TV show ‘Supernatural’…I am very aware that it is still going, I mean I’m still following like an avid fanboy, but more than a few times while I’m watching I think so myself “Why? Why Lord am I wasting my time watching this crap?!”. I know it’s pretty simple just to walk away from it, jump ship, throw in the towel, cut the cord, but I feel that I’m obliged to get hyped every Thursday and tune in, in the evening, to watch The Winchester boys latest adventure. I mean it did give me and my older sis something to talk about related to TV, which is a very rare topic between us. Supernatural gave me chills and thrills when it was in its prime, so I must keep up with the legacy, even though it sucks something fierce now.

I’ve gone on and on about how much of a let down it is but not really explained why. Well before I can do that I just gotta tell you about its previous greatness! Well basically the story is about these two guys who are brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester, and they are paranormal investigators, well less of the investigating more like hunters. They go round the US of A, in their very cool set of wheels, hunting demons, ghosts, monsters all manner of fucked up things and vanquishing them. Simple enough, but it’s not just mindless violence, as camp as it sounds there is this ongoing moral about loyalty, trust and sticking together whatever happens, even if you have a flesh eating roogaroos breathing down your neck.

That is the basic plot but so much thought and creativity went into it, every episode was a thrill ride and many a time I was hugging the pillow weeping to myself, and I do not scare easily! Seriously that’s a TV series, one that entertains throughout and by the end of it you ate begging for more. As the series progressed it got more courageous with its mythos usage, eventually going to the heavens and making angels uncompromising bad asses hell bent on serving God, even if it meant bringing about the apocalypse. Controversial! And then season 6 came out…

So the need for more money hit the makers for Supernatural…and they fucked up a good thing with it, by creating this abomination they call ‘season 6’. This…thing! axe murdered everything that previously happened in the previous seasons and made Supernatural a cliche, a joke. Pulling shit like, bringing previously dead characters back to life, making their pivotal sacrifices meaningless. Making loveable characters more gimmicky, like in your face ‘please laugh or this feels really out of place, gimmicky and the most heinous of crimes: breaking the fourth wall! I mean what the fuck! It’s an absolute disaster I could go on but I might give some vital spoilers away, from previous series, I want to add because explaining season 6 can be done in one line, seriously, the plot is paper thin.

Anyway that’s my anger vented and I hope through my ramblings I have encouraged some fresh faces to check out Supernatural, just steer clear of season 6 it just undoes everything Superantural-esque. For me Supernatural ended at season 5 with a great, sad, uplifting and fitting ending like it deserves, I am in no way looking forward to the end of season 6, it will be like watching a mortally wounded unicorn be put out of its misery.

Quite a while ago a friend I met, quite recently, posed me a simplistic but extremely difficult question. He asked me “If you could sum life up in one word what would that word be?”. I was puzzled at this question at first as he asked me this immediately after making a joke about how being single is the way to go in life. Anyway, he expected me to give him an answer straight away and I went with the obvious “hard, life is hard”, I look back at what I said and realise there are a thousand and one reasons showing that my answer was thoughtless and wrong. Of course life CAN be hard, difficult, stressful the synonyms are endless but this does not sum up life as a whole. Unless you are a cynical, attention seeking, emo, you could just walk away with the answer I gave and not give another thought about it. However, seeing as I am not a cynic (well most of the time), I went back and had a long think about this impossible conundrum. 

I thought of many words, I filled pages upon pages with single words that summed up life each one seemed good at the time and then I realised other aspects of life were not accounted for in this words. I came up with words like ‘pure’, ‘wholesome’, ‘linear’, ‘amazing’, ‘incredible’, none of them I could look at and say “This is what life is in one word!”. So I decided to join on the chain my friend started and ask some more people I knew, close friends and my family mainly as I knew if I wanted a serious answer I would have to ask people who were on the same wavelength on me. I first asked my elder sister and she came up with ‘extreme’, at first I had no idea what she meant by this and then she gave me a paragraph explaining her answer. She said that how life tended to one extreme or the other, how we live with one foot in paradise and another in the abyss. How we experience moments of total joy and other times we experience total despair. I think what she was trying to get at is that in order to live life successfully we have to learn how to balance the two extremes. Now this would seem a bit strange as people surely never want to experience the feeling of despair, tragedy and depression, but if you think about it if people were continually feeling joy and happiness they would eventually become numb to the true feeling of happiness and therefore become bored of it. We cannot appreciate one without the other. Even though she decided on this word, she still thought that this did not sum up life for her and that she would need a very long time to think about this question. I have yet to ask her this question again.

It was interesting to see what my sister’s answer was and very insightful. Looking back at her answer I can see that it was a very taoist view with the whole ying and yang idea. After asking a variety of other people I came up with my new answer for this question. I think that if you sum up life in one word it would be ‘absolute’. My explanation for this? Well it is not as long as my sister’s, but it still make sense to me. Life is Absolute because it is full of things to do, experiences to experience, feelings to feel and it is up to you to do undergo these things, no matter how hard they may be at times. It is perfect, because throughout life what you see as potential hurt and harm makes you stronger and builds you up to perfect yourself. Everything in life is designed to make you a better person inside, just up to you to take advantage of it. This was my answer about a month ago. Looking back at it I can see that there a few flaws in my answer, but I based this on my personal experiences. Even though I am only 20, and only just learnt what it is like to live alone without the protection of your parents, I can still look back on my life and remember all the tragedies and hurt that happened and at the time I wondered why such things happened and why I had to experience them and I see now that without all those misfortunate events I would never be able to see and experience true happiness is. 

People who try to escape tragedy may see it as the easiest thing to do but it really isn’t, it is not until you are in complete darkness and despair do you really see the true value of happiness and life itself. I must admit I have been in complete darkness a few times where I felt that there was nothing else to look forward to, but I kept going and got through it. Now I look back at it and see that it has made me a much stronger person. All the people, pointing my fingers at the emos and complainers, who say that their lives are awful and that it is not worth living have no idea what absolute despair is, where you feel alone in the dark with no way of escaping it. It is funny to see that most of these people have stable well off families, I am not saying all, but most of them are. I think that the main reason is that they are bored, they are bored of their daily routine of having fun and enjoying themselves constantly, so they create this façade that they are the most down trodden people in the world, that their lives are so awful that they should give up and sink into so called ‘depression’ and what they do is that they continually remind everyone on how their life is bad. One thing I learnt in life that the people who are vocally depressed are the ones who are just thrive on your attention, no matter how many times you say “Cheer up, your life is great, everyone loves you” they just go back to the same old loop. It is the people who are quiet about their depression, the people who walk out of their house with a smile on their face. Ironically most of the time the ACTUALLY depressed people are the ones who are comforting the so called ‘depressed’ people. Obviously I am really over generalising, but this is what I think and have actually seen in life. But my advice is to avoid people who always have something to complain about when you talk to them, you know the type of person who goes on FaceBook and posts “FML, teacher told me off today, my life sucks!”. First reaction is always, “that person is trouble I must help them” and that is the first pitfall. Continually depressed people will ALWAYS be depressed and there is nothing in this world that will stop them from being depressed, not even winning the lottery or having everyone in the world doting on them hand and foot. They just LOVE to be depressed, it is how they work. The only thing you will accomplish from trying to cheer them up is getting depressed yourself, trust me, I have seen and experienced this many times. So in general AVOID EMOS!! 

The other extreme is the always up beat happy and fun person. In my opinion these are worst than the emos of the world. I am talking about the kind of people who float in and always have this positive view on life, saying that everything is “Hunky dory!”. Now at first glance you would say ‘This isn’t a bad point of view, I mean life is great!’ but what these people fail to realise that it is not ALWAYS ‘hunky dory’ and you may go on and on at them until you are blue in the face telling them this and they will just turn back to you and say something like “You are suffering from depression, seek counselling” and that’s when the brain aneurisms set in. What you need to realise is that the reason why these people are so happy is that they avoid every tragedy that may rear its ugly head. Think of it as skipping merrily down a road in the glorious sunshine, blue sky and everything, then suddenly a dog jumps out and barks at you, you turn left to avoid it and then walk a bit more and a man with a knife comes out, you turn left again, then your nagging relative comes out complaining at you so you turn left again. You get the idea…so these people they keep avoiding tragedies they encounter and end up going in circles, in the glorious sunny day and they enjoy it, they find it fun, comfortable, enjoyable, but overall they are still going round and round the same bit of road, they are not developing, they are not learning, they are not experiencing life as a full, just the part they like. It is not until you kick the dog in the face, stab the man with his own knife and club to death your nagging relative that you can actually carry on down the road and experience life as whole. Eventually the tragedies will catch up with these people and even though they seem like tiny matters to us, they will be huge titans to the rosey coloured spectacles people because they have no idea how to face it, get over it and defeat it. They live in a fantasy world, built on ignorance while everyone else lives in reality. I somewhat feel sorry for these people as they look down on the ‘normal’ people seeing them as ‘party poopers’ who need to relax but they will have no idea how to deal with the metaphorical tidal wave that will eventually hit their false paradise. 

After reading that paragraph I am sure you will think I am a huge cynic, but I am not, I swear! My sister was right, life is definitely extreme and there are people who try to stay in each of the extremes of life, they will eventually see that this is not the way to live life, it is all about balancing it delicately between the two.

Recently I have been reading a book, well this is less of a book more of a guide to life. Nowadays people hype any old books up as guides to ‘A New You’ or ‘How to be yourself’ and rarely do they actually work. Most of the writers of this kind of subject matter are only in it for profit, they give you a tiny bit of helpful advice and then demand more and more money for various books which easily could have been all compiled into one. However this book is the real deal. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, I picked up a copy of it for £5, after my friend raved on and on about how it changed his whole outlook on life, it wasn’t really out of desperation for life changing reading material I was merely just curious. When I first started reading it I expected that I was going to be preached at by some Richard Gere wannabe, but it never happened. Sure the introduction explained what was in store for me and how most people’s thinking is all screwed up but it didn’t demean my intelligence or go into rocket science of the mind. So I continued reading it and the more I read the more I started nodding along to it, agreeing with each sentence. Now before you think I’m just some regular empty headed, gullible reader, I am not. I have my own opinions and I was expecting fully to disagree with what Mr. Tolle had to say, not that I was looking to be purposely pedantic it’s just that I find most Spiritual Enlightenment exercises are instructed by money grabbing bastards who neither care about the reader nor the actual thing they are writing about, But I digress.

Anyway I am currently halfway through the book. It’s not that I am a slow reader (I actually am a slow reader), it’s just that after reading one or two pages I needed time to actually let the concepts sink in. The writer puts across a lot of concepts in just a few sentences, so it is really hard to keep reading and reading without feeling the need to stop and ‘reflect’ on his teachings. 

I really was hoping that this topic would make a very meaty blog entry but I am lost for words when describing the subject matter. It’s just so…abstract. The main message I got from The Power of Now was that constantly thinking in the future and the past gets you nowhere and just brings about depression and worry, which feeds the ‘pain body’, this is the…demon…in search of a better word, that brings you down and stops you from accomplishing your goals. I know right now you are probably thinking this is all very stereotypical spiritual jargon, but I think even Eckhart Tolle finds it hard explaining the different aspects of the mind. Basically where I am currently at in the book is the explanation of where all the worry and doubt comes from and the results of letting them overcome your mind.

I am not going to go through each line from the book and give you my spin on it but I am going to share with you the things I have learnt from this book that has really changed my view on how I look at the world. Before I was pretty much a cynic, I still am but not to the such a degree where each day was filled with negative thoughts about people, the world, even myself. Also I must admit I do enjoy being cynical about things, it’s kinda like a comfort zone. However this is so unhealthy, don’t get me started on the reasons why, the biggest one I guess is that you get nowhere being a cynic, you just sit at home watching the world go by criticising it and getting more and more embittered which ultimately impacts on your health. I don’t want to get all preachy about this so I will try to refrain from the ‘Important Life Lessons’ speech. Anyway, after reading each section of the book I started reflecting on it and nowadays I am much more laid back about things, not to the point of where I shirk everything off but at the fine line between being mad worked up about things and being down right lazy, I know it’s going to take some practice to get it absolutely perfect. There are still days where Uni work gets to me and I just feel like curling up in a ball and shutting out the world, but the ratio of good days to bad days are more favourable to good days, nowadays…days. 

My usual mind frame is to just live in the now. Not to get too wrapped up worrying about the future or burying my head in the sand about the past. I am by no means a master at this, there are so many things in life that you can’t help but worry about and then there is the worry that if you live in the now you get nothing done. I usually tackle this by just glimpsing into the future…but then again there are things in the future that are god damn scary and worrying. I know I’m sounding very contradictory to everything I say but believe me having the mind frame of not worrying about things too much and not feeding your hungry ‘glutton for punishment’ brain with all those negative thoughts and ill-fated scenarios works wonders. You wake up with a smile on your face and each day doesn’t feel that bad.

Well I think I will wrap this up as I might start repeating myself and that would be very unprofessional of me. I wasn’t really sure where I was trying to go with this, probably just putting my thoughts down about this subject. It really is a fascinating one, but I definitely recommend ‘The Power of Now’ if not for a simple life changer maybe just to see how this guy sees life, always interesting to see people’s different points of view. I’m probably going to revisit this topic again as even after reading through it three times I am still not satisfied with what I wrote. It’s such a vast thing to write about, wouldn’t you agree?