28.12.07

Unfulfilled promises

...being taken care of. The penultimate one from this post.

***************************************

It gets easier to stay away the more you stay away.
The more you don't have a reason to be sitting in front of a computer eight hours a day. The more you stop watching the news or reading the paper or listening to the radio or surfing. The more you focus only on the next meal, or the book that you're reading, or the stack of films you want to go through. The more you stop accepting there's a world out there that will continue to exist whether you believe in it or not. The more you stare at the sky and realise you don't know how to tell how long it's been since you've been staring at it, except to be able to say that it's now morning or evening or night.

And such little things, and the lack of such minor skills, make you wonder again what sort of life you're leading - that we're all leading. Make you look closely at the little blocks on which we base our lives, and when you realise you do not understand what they were based on, make you look closer and closer, till you're squinting so hard that you get a horrible headache, but you keep peering, determined that if you ignore the pain long enough and hold out for a little more, it will all make sense...till suddenly, the pain breaks through to a level where the pain really doesn't affect you anymore (because pain only affects you when it's localised, when it shows up as one point of variance on a wider canvas of equilibrium; and this is a level where you are all pain, and pain is what you are) but you still lose focus and suddenly everything seems so unnatural.

And you draw back and look around, and for a few brief moments, everything that you accepted seems so...bizarre...that you wonder how you didn't notice it before, and how you've been carrying on all this while. Where you notice all the little incongruities and discontinuities and paradoxes that make up life, but which get brushed aside because "that's just how things are".

And the feeling soon fades, but it stays longer every time you return to that state; and getting to that state gets easier each time, till one day you realise you can see the world as it tries to be, and also as how it really is. And you walk around, and go through the motions, and you feel as if you're tapped into a different network, watching another picture, hearing a hidden symphony. And the two yous watch each other in their world, but do not look into the other's eyes.

And you wonder if everything exists simply because you believe in it, and not because it truly is.

8 comments:

Sukhaloka said...

Well said. More thought required by both you and me.

And as for the previous post, bravo. It's your blog, do as you wish.

Renovatio said...

Happy new year love

km said...

Great post there!

Tabula Rasa said...

umm, have another drink.

Space Bar said...

hny and all zat.

??! said...

suki/km:
thank you. one tries.

ren/sb:
and to you two too.

tr:
could make matters worse no?

Arvind said...

That was a great post. Had a lot of thought in it. The state that you have described is something similar to state you attain when you meditate yourself to blankness. The sense of realization you spoke about also resembles something I know. Great post overall...has a great depth when looked at properly.

??! said...

Arvind:
Welcome, and thank you. It gets easy to describe something you've been living with for so long.