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Life, Love and Colour thats not our own. You cannot control it, manipulate it or change it.
This means it is absolute.
A Complete Beauty.
And somthing that can only bring joy.
Whenever I do somthing out of character (like paint my toenails red) I feel like it’s a bad thing, like I’m doing somthing wrong. I feel this way mostly because of how people react to my ‘out of character moment.’ I thought about why this is long and hard in the shower tonight, I came to a conclution based on what the ‘bad’ feeling was. The bad feeling was a mixture of frustration and shame, the kind of frustration and shame I got when I was a kid for being told I couldn’t do somthing or because I had just done somthing bad. I never learnt how to deal with being told ‘no’ from Dad properly, or how to deal with being yelled at for doing somthing wrong. So my feelings just resulted in frustration and shame.
Having to make up my own reaction to all of that stuff was probably one of the more liberating things i’ve done, because I was so young at the time I was never challanged to act differently so I grew to own those feelings as my own. I get very possesive over the way I react to certain things (the things that no one tells you how you should act) to the point where I get angry if someone challanges me now and that feirceness surprises me, but it also strengthens my idea of self and I thrive on it. But somehow this certain reaction doesn’t sit well with me, Why frustration? Why Shame? These are emotions that make me think that I’ve done somthing wrong and I feel guilt for it.
Why do I feel that way when someone sais “Omg Holly, you painted your toes for once! Why did you do that?” or “Did you just go for a walk? (insert condecending look here)” I feel like I shouldn’t be doing these things because experience tells me that when I do, I’ll be questioned and judged for the fact that somthing has motivated me to do somthing different. But why do I feel bad about it? Why do peoples reactions tend to be worded so the underlying message is “Good on you, your becoming as good as me now.”?
One of my pet hates are people who put themselves above me for no good reason. The moment someone I beleive to be on the same ground as me tries to elevate themselves just so they feel good, I start to disrespect them. Scratch that, anyone who tries and elevates themselves just so they feel good, even people who are above me, anoy me, because they are doing it for selfish reasons or because it makes them feel safer, more comfortable. How come people people can’t just be happy functioning as equals? I’ll respect teachers, parents, leaders and old people because to be able to do the job they need to do a form of obedience is needed from me so that relationship works. Friends arn’t in that catagory, but I still respect them.
Treating someone as your equal is alot harder for me and far more agaisnt my nature than respecting your superiors, even though sometimes it doesn’t feel like it. To me treating someone as your equal just means treating them right, how Jesus wanted everyone to treat each other. I’m just not sure how that is. I understand loving one another as a concept, but practically it’s alot harder to do. It makes me want to understand love more. I want to experience god’s love more
C.S Lewis wrote about first experiencing grace, he felt “(a deep longing for) a scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not yet visited”
Taken from ‘What’s So Amazing About Grace?’ pg 42
(or be able to see it more clearly) and part of that is understanding grace. Because frankly, I have never actually seen it happen, so I just don’t understand whats so amazing about grace. Could someone please tell me? All I’ve ever felt is guilt, frustration and shame for doing somthing out of characture, wheather it be good or bad. First I need to seperate them, and start feeling good about the good and attatch what ever I find out about grace to all the bad stuff. I think understanding grace will help me understand love more. Love to me, is the most important thing, ever. And I’m talking about ultimate love, because every other kind of love we experience comes from God’s ultimate love for the world.
I am numb to the point of indifference. I’m not even sure why I’ve decided to write a blog about this seeing as being indifferent means that I don’t actually have an opinion on anything at the moment. I don’t care that the things in my past have effected my present so deeply, I don’t care that I’m sick to the point where I can’t do the normal things people do, I don’t care that I have abandoned friends because of my insecurities and I don’t care that the relationships I have discovered could be gone because theres no foundation of mutual need for each other. All I can feel is fear. I fear myself, and I fear other people. I fear other people not caring or caring too much. I fear that they don’t need me as much as I need them. I fear that certain things wont change. Like me never being at max health again, and then not being able to do all the things I want to. Or that I will always continue to stuggle with being numb.
Theres two types of numb,
1. Incapable of action or of feeling emotion; enervated; prostrate: numb with grief.
2. Lacking or deficient in emotion or feeling; indifferent: She was numb to their pleas for mercy.
2. Lacking or deficient in emotion or feeling; indifferent: She was numb to their pleas for mercy.
I think the second is worse than the first. Not caring is your own choice but being numb with emotion, well, it will pass. Not caring shows that you know it’s too hard to deal with, so you give up because your tired of fighting. It a defeat. Getting out of that hole is a fight back for sanity, allowing yourself to deal with emotion again even though it hurts. If your tired, getting the motivation to fight again is difficult to say the least. Esspecially when your support only provides advice and not comfort. Just one hug, just a few words to know that its alright to feel again because they are there to protect you. Jesus isn’t physicall but the words of comfort are there.
Just once I would like to feel welcome in someone elses life instead of having to weasle myself in. People keep telling me, it’s alright, you should see them, they like having you there, they don’t mind that you call them all the time… blah blah blah. Once, just once, I would like to see someone offer me somthing instead of me having to do a sing and dance about wanting to see them. Ok, so I’m numb and angry. I guess thats better than just being numb.
I had an epiphany in small group tonight, that society tells you that to get what you need as a human (emotionally and physically) you need to work to supply it for yourself, in other words, to fufill yourself you need to be self serving. Jesus taught that to fufill your needs you have to trust that they will be provided and stop worrying so much, get on with the day. What else is there to do if your not selfserving your needs? (I’m not saying that you stop caring about your needs, it’s more that you deal with them when the time is right, not worrying so much about it all until you need to) I guess you serve others… The strange thing is, I care so much about others that I forget about myself. I think thats why I’m numb and indifferent, I just don’t care enough about myself, theres no balance between caring for myself and caring for others… How am I ment to trust god that he will provide the care everyone needs and provide for me also? How can I trust him at all?
Better Together - Jack Johnson
There’s no combination of words
I could put on the back of a postcard
No song that I could sing
But I can try for your heart
Our dreams, and they are made out of real things
Like a, shoebox of photographs
With sepiatone loving
Love is the answer,
At least for most of the questions in my heart
Like why are we here?
And where do we go?
And how come it’s so hard?
It’s not always easy and
Sometimes life can be deceiving
I’ll tell you one thing it’s always better when we’re together
Mmm, it’s always better when we’re together
Yeah, we’ll look at the stars when we’re together
Well, it’s always better when we’re together
Yeah, it’s always better when we’re together
And all of these moments
Just might find their way into my dreams tonight
But I know that they’ll be gone
When the morning light sings
And brings new things
For tomorrow night you see
That they’ll be gone too
Too many things I have to do
But if all of these dreams might find their way
Into my day to day scene
I’d be under the impression
I was somewhere in between
With only two
Just me and you
Not so many things we got to do
Or places we got to be
We’ll Sit beneath the mango tree now
Yeah, It’s always better when we’re together
Mmmm, we’re somewhere in between together
Well, it’s always better when we’re together
Yeah, it’s always better when we’re together
I believe in memories
They look so, so pretty when I sleep
Hey now, and when I wake up,
You look so pretty sleeping next to me
But there is not enough time,
And there is no, no song I could sing
And there is no, combination of words I could say
But I will still tell you one thing
We’re better together.
There’s this little person in my head who likes to figure everything out. Absolutally everything. He likes to work all day and all night until a fuse blows, then he takes a few days off work, just when I actually need him. Go figure. I have a feeling he might be taking long service leave at the moment, he just never gave me a reason why. Was it because he’s over worked or because theres no work to do? Or maybe even because he thought leaving would benifit me. I feel like a tool at the moment because every time I go to have a conversation I forget what I was going to say… So nothing I actaully want to say gets said. There’s that and then there’s the fact that i’m refering to my brain as a small person. Which makes me more of a tool. So I guess i’m the persona non grata and my brain is the country… Which means I live in my brain. *cough* tool…
I am sick of having to consolodate my memories, it just seems like a pointless waist of brain usage. I could be thinking about all the important things that have been happening and trying to nut a few of them out (or even having a real conversation for once), but no, I’ll be consolodating my memories. I’ve experienced it all once so why do I have to think about it all over again. Grr.
I wish I knew why I feel so wrong about wanting to have a good time in between trying to figure out all of the other crap thats going on. Why I don’t feel guilty for all the stupid things that i’ve done and why I’m still so scaried to speak the words that I know will break down some of the walls I’ve put up. I’ve started pretending that everythings alright, or maybe some of it is really alright, but I can see how much of a hypocryte i’m being at the moment by putting up walls and pretending everythings fine. I’ve forgotten how to sing in the rain. (again)
I re-read all of my blog postings and it was amazing looking back on this month and realising how much I still agree with myself. Which probably isn’t a good thing, cos it means I havn’t actually found awnsers to any of the questions i’ve been asking. Though it has re-affirmed and strengthened my resolve for how detirmined I am to figure out the awnsers.
Theres just been so much going on, that I’m really not suprised about how overwhlemed I am about everything. It is surprising though how lazy my mind is because it’s been really hard talking to people about all of this stuff because all I want to do is tell them to go read my blog, it’s all written down there. Though there is alot more clarity to my thoughts on here than when they’re all swimming around in my head. It was also amazing to see how much of the stuff I had forgotten, but had reiterated through out my postings. Like the song lyrics in Lyrics and Life that say “You pretend to create and observe, When you really detach from feeling alive.” Which is true to the point were I use my postings on here to elaborate what I think, but once they’re written I don’t have to deal with them because it’s been made into a hard copy and not just my thoughts so I don’t have to think about it. I do that with my art too, using it to express what i’m thinking or feeling and also with talking to people about my issues, I give them the opertunity to help me but I never really take responcibility into dealing with them. Theres always an outlet, theres always a way for me to make myself feel numb.
So whilst i’m talking about blogs and elaboration I thought I might put out my ideas on perennial philosophy, which I mentioned about in my first post.
“The notion of perennial philosophy suggests the existence of a universal set of truths and values common to all peoples and cultures.
According to the tenets of the perennial philosophy, people in many cultures and eras have experienced and recorded comparable perceptions about the nature of reality, the self, the world, and the meaning and purpose of existence. These similarities point to underlying universal principles, forming the common ground of most religions. Differences among these fundamental perceptions arise from differences in human cultures and can be explained in light of such cultural conditioning.”
I love that explanation because it outlines the idea of history experiencing the nature of reality, the self, the world and the purpose of exsistance. How easy is it to get confused about these things becuase of the limited amount of information, the limited amount of relevance to the way you perceive the world or the fact that society has conditioned everyone to become selfserving. “Society has little to do with serving the individual, so any happiness you have you’ve created for yourself, which leads to having to rely on being self sufficent to survive.” This pretty much shows that societys direction is to make you the most comfortable, not nessecarily the most happy. It’s not about whats good for you, it’s about how comfortable they can make you so your easier to manipulate and won’t complain about it. This way people stop quesioning things.
History shows that even though peoples perception about the nature of things is intierly subjective to the way the indervidual perceived them, they still are the same in there (universal) truths, and thus comparable. The only reason why we perceive them as being different is because of cultural conditioning, in western society it’s about serving the individual and the individual making a whole. Eastern society is the opposite, there is the whole and the individual serves the whole. Also I think that relidgion is formed from how the individual is formed, enviromental and external influences creates certain personalities that mesh better with cerain relidgions, though that only goes as far as the person is willing to take control of there own life.
“Among these perceptions are the following assertions:
+ The physical or phenomenal world is not the only reality; another non-physical reality exists. The material world is the shadow of a higher reality which cannot be grasped by the senses, but the human spirit and intellect bear testimony to it in their essence.”
All I really need to say is that every one comes to an understanding of this by there own experiences. I descovered it by realising the concept of infinity was more complicated than I could ever imagine, but it exsists inside our own bodies. Read the last paragraph of Models, Moaning and Waiting for more.
+ Humans mirror the nature of this two-sided reality: while the material body is subject to the physical laws of birth and death, the other aspect of human existence is not subject to decay or loss, and is identical to the intellect or spirit, which is the sine qua non of the human soul. In the modern West, this second or other reality has been frequently discounted or ignored.
This one is a doosey. I had to look up “sine qua non” in the dictionary to reall understand what it all ment. Sine qua non: an indispensable condition, element, or factor; something essential. I think the reality of a soul today is somewhat steriotypicalised, mostly because the roles of being human, and being a man or a woman are so stylised that figuring out the basics of what it means to be a man or a woman, or even a human in general, is lost. I’m just beginging to take the initiative on figuring out what it means to be a woman. Not a woman in todays society, but what it is to really reflect what god made women to be. I’ll be sure to post on my findings later.
+ All humans possess a capacity, however unused and thus atrophied, for intuitive perceptions of ultimate or absolute truth, and the nature of reality. This perception is the final goal of human beings, and its pursuit and flourishing are the purpose of their existence. The major religions try to (re)establish the link between the human soul and this higher and ultimate reality.
Ahh the ultimate goal, whats at the end of the univerce. This kind of amuses me because they way it’s worded suggests that there is a beginning, a middle and an end to life. It’s true physically, but you must remember that the mind and thus the spirit (or what I like to call the heart) is a relativley infinite thing. It’s more about the fact that we do have the capacity to make reasoned judgements about what is the absolute truth and the nature of reality that gives us our purpose. Then faith is played into it because infinity is put into place and our concept of reality cannot justify infinity, so faith is needed to establish infinity into a finite thing.
These worldwide perceptions are thought to be amendable with one another and reliable in themselves because of their internal consistency and due to the similarities among them, in spite of their often independent origins.
Well in other words, through out history people have talked about all of these points in there own understandings, and what was consistant about all of these perceptions was the basis for perernnial philosophy. Just like my understanding of life correlates with all of these points. Does yours?
