My Preoccupied Mind

Every so often I hear this voice, it is filled with desolation, this voice it tempts me, lures me, it is the desire to fall, of which, I am terrified, so I must of course, defend myself, and I do.

My mind has been an over-stimulated mess since the holidays. There are many contributing factors, I started a new job and it has affected my daily routine a lot more than I supposed it would. I am just now starting to get all of my ducks back into their respective rows and consistency is becoming a reality again. My son, who will be turning four in a few weeks, swallows up any extra energy I may find from time to time to sit down and write. I, of course, mustn’t disregard his feelings or growth for my own; his routine is even more out of whack than mine, of that I am sure.

I am starting to realize that every year this decompression stage that follows the holidays has a detrimental effect on my self-organization process. I find myself moving from one means to the next without much of a groove. It is a vicious cycle and one that I intend to interrupt in the years beyond.

All excuses aside, allow me to explain why I haven’t felt the sense of direction I often need to know, insofar as to which way my attention is headed. It is in the explanation of knowledge that knowingly twists my tongue around the knots in my stomach until my hands have tied themselves together. The use of “hands” here is meant to be a metaphor for my creative prowess, or lack thereof. It is intellect that moonlights as a dagger—one that discerns and rifts its way into the enigma of my thoughts. It is knowledge that divvies man into two separate beings. One being for the better, the other being for the worse, either way is not at all in the essentialness of a bad thing.

It is my instinct that pushes me to the edge, and as scared as I am, I must make my way to it. I must peer over the edge and overcome my mishandled fear. It is the only way that I will ever find balance. If my writing is the way to this or not, I do not know, but I am not going to sit around with idleness waiting to find out.

If I could borrow a few moments from your day to allow me the chance to litter your mind with my mental waste, I would forever be indebted to you and will always be around to lend a helping hand with whatever cerebral chores you see fit..

So if you would like, feel free to join me on this penned and splendid adventure. It is with diligence that I must advance caution towards you, the reader, before going any further—the woods are thick in this lush and uncharted wilderness of words that separates the head from the heart. It is a journey that stretches a meager ten inches in distance, but it will take a lifetime or two to navigate. So if you wouldn’t mind, please allow me the time to get a “head” start?

Almost a year ago, I published a blog post that pertained to the “Mechanics Of Change.” I recycled a quote from the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, it was he who said, “and no man shall ever step in the same river twice.” In the sense of nostalgia these words alone were the inspiration for that post and while I would rather not dive into the schematics of the past, those words do ring with more truth and value to me today than they did a year ago, not only because I understand them more today, but because I have watched the same river change its course without heed or warning. I have seen its flow go from a patient trickle, to a raging flood in mere moments. More important than any of those, I have seen the serenity underneath its surface become agitated by an outlying disturbance, only to settle back in to the same serenity that was once so still.   It is the wisdom I have gained since that post, that I understand that I am the river. You are the river, we are the entire river and whomever we were yesterday, or last year, we have changed, whether it be with heaviness or lightness, it is in its simplest and most ambiguous form, change.

It is in the reconciliation of change that reveals the moral perversity in a society that breathes essentially on the nonexistence of return, for today everything is absolved in advance and therefore everything is cynically acceptable.

This is where my thoughts tend to go awry. I do not know what to make of the outlying or inlying change that surrounds my family and I these days. Whether you believe it or not, our democracy is being threatened by a malignant tumor that festers in greed and has an endless appetite for the comfort of the bourgeois and would rather feast on the destruction of liberty than make whatever it is great again.

I try and not allow the things I cannot control wrap their fingers around my being but I sometimes cannot help it, call it an empathetic flaw if you’d like, I call it absolute love for all that surrounds me. I spend more time worrying about the future of my child than I do myself these days and I know it is not healthy for the mind but it makes my heart thump with more purpose than ever before, so on we go.

It is when I start to think about the things that are heavy and those considered with lightness that I stumble upon a vacuum of thought. Could that which is heavy be deplorable and the lightness be glorious? Beneath the sunset of dissolution everything is illuminated by the aura of synergy.

The heaviest of burdens can crush us, we sink far below it, it pins us to the ground, and we fall. But in the sense of love and all that is poetic, the woman longs to be weighed down by man’s body. Therefore the heaviest of burdens is portrayed with an image of one of life’s most intense fulfillments. The heavier the burden the closer we come to the earth, the more real and full of truth everything becomes in the light of synchronicity.

On the other side of converse, in the absence of burden, a man becomes lighter than the air he breathes; he soars like a winged creature towards the heights of heaven. He takes leave of the earth and his movements as free as they are insignificant.

What then shall we choose? Shall we choose to be burdened by weight or to float through life with nothing of significance whatsoever?

For today I am burdened by the lack of love in the world and therefore choose to be weighted down by the purpose of what little inspiration my words may choose to inspire.

Love embraces a hint of an empirical tendency within it. Love after all is said and done, is like an empire, when the idea it was founded on deteriorates, it too, will fade away. Like all of us, love is also a river, one that we should all be satisfied to stand upon its banks and look with longing and hardness upon its waters, for it is soothing and can heal even the most tortured soul.  It is a shame that the simple things like love and water have become more and more scarce throughout my life.  Love, nor water is either a privilege or a right, it just is.

Love is, as it were, is the universal vital energy capable of converting the passion of evil into a creative force of goodness. Hmmm. Somehow I gather that this thirst for knowledge is love directed in a certain way, and the same should be said of philosophy, which means love of truth.

Love can only transform evil passions into creative ones if it is regarded as a value in itself and not as a means of salvation. Love in the sense of good works is useful for the salvation of the soul—it can give rise to a creative attitude of life and be a source of life-giving energy.   Love is not only a source of creativeness but is in itself creative. Hence love does not pass judgment but gives life, receives life, heightens the quality and the value of life’s contents.

I am approaching the edge, this is where the fear starts to set in, and of what it is I am frightened, I do not know. Sometimes I want to give up from fear of sounding batshit crazy, from fear of losing myself, from the apprehension of not being able to come back from the depths of my own mind—then my heart beats harder and the chill bumps that sprout upon my arms like seedlings on a Spring day—can only mean that something inside me begs to keep driving down this track in the direction I was meant to go.

Then I see it, the optical illusion that love has become in modern day society. This illusion has become its own entity, it breathes falsity, and with each exhalation it pollutes even our children’s minds. It is an illusory train that must be stopped and I aim to do just that, but first, I must engineer my thoughts into the equation of where they need to be.

I once believed love to be an optical illusion, this should allow me the needed experience to conduct a train of the same magnitude. I hop aboard and take over the responsibility of leading this train into the promise land.  I envision myself steering the train through these mountains of purpose carrying enough dynamite behind me to rewrite history with its own antiquity.   I rummage through these mountains annihilating my way through the masses of granite with the sole intention of the discovering new caverns of wisdom and maybe something in the schism of myself.

This train that I must conduct, I will call it knowledge, I must then divide this knowledge into a couple of different parts, those which are thought be in the nature of classic and romantic. It is in the term of comparison that classic knowledge is taught by reason, and should be considered as the engine. Romantic knowledge is little more abstract to the herd-minded eye, one must be aware that this knowledge taught by the mystic is not static but endless in its own creative nature and the purpose it serves, and one must be willing to embrace the change before one can fathom it.

Romantic comprehension isn’t any physical part of the train; it is the mechanics of the classic engine that keep the train moving somewhere towards change. Romantic knowledge is the vigor that pushes or sees the train along the track of life and then onward to the edge of experience. It’s when we begin to understand this that we no longer divide the train into parts since all this really does is impede the train’s momentum and creativity becomes stuck in a particular moment.

Knowledge in the sense of wholeness is not static and cannot be stopped and divided. The train of knowledge always has somewhere to go down life’s track. The train and its cars of classical thought do not go anywhere without the direction in which it is pointed by all that is romantic. It’s not that this train is lacking romantic qualities but most people just choose to ignore the fact that there are two ways to look at all things, including life, and those ways belong to two wholly different dimensions of existence. The quality of romantics is the hidden force behind the train that takes us all down the same track with the same final destination.

The romantic reality of your dream, that is the sharpest edge of experience—it is the momentum behind the train of knowledge and it keeps the whole train on the track. Classic reality is nothing more than the collective memories of where experience has taken us before.

It is upon this edge that there are no subjects, no objects; it’s only the dream and the spirit that guide us. If we have no way of evaluating or acknowledging the quality of life—then the train has no way of knowing where to go, which is fine sometimes. The voice of reason is not pure reason if you do not know where you are going it is considered reiterated confusion. The edge of experience is where all of the action is. This edge it contains all of the infinite possibilities of the future, as well as containing all the history of the past. The edge of experience is where the value of existence rests waiting to be rescued from the clutches of torpid thought and brought back to the presence in which we all belong.

As I come to the reality of myself, I am the only thing holding me back; I am the one that allows my daily demeanor to be interrupted by the things I cannot control. I am the goodness in me; I am the darkness in me. I can also control my balance with enough gumption to push the vertigo away from me, and into it’s own dizzy spin, but every now and again will allow vertigo the chance at manifesting itself. Call it a test of strength, if you will.  It is my choice to choose what I do. I will always rise from it’s fall and I know that it is by the grace of God that I am living and it is by the grace of God that I will die, but I cannot speak without skeptics about love and the grace of God. Unless I were discuss the fact that my heart is clapping with a thunderous beat as we speak, so maybe he hasn’t given up on me just yet. But if the gospel in which you preach confines its attention to love with commands and laws then you fail to grasp the meaning of parables and the call to freedom—for you have sought only what is revealed and not what is hidden. Freedom should not be repressed but enlightened with love. Look for what it is that is hidden within you and you will find yourself.

With that being said I must go, a child reckons my attention from his afternoon slumber.

I am not sure how far we made it on the journey, in the reality of time, about twenty minutes has passed and we haven’t even touched the surface.   Until the next time.

A time must come in the life of a man when he will take upon himself the burden of freedom, for he will come spiritually of age. It is in this freedom, that life may appear harder, more tragic, and full of responsibility, such is the austerity of freedom and the reverence it demands.

Good Night.

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Musical Emotions

Music is often sung as the language of emotion. Some maintain that poetry portrays emotion more so than music. Some would also contend to the end that writing is the maestro of all emotive outlets. I feel that all of them are measured with equal parts of creative pattern and emotional baggage, and all are resultant upon pleasure and that of pain.

All channels of creativity move beyond emotion in their own way. It is my opinion that emotion is merely reactionary; it is how we react towards the outlying energy that surrounds us. All of these separate channels all flow from the same spring of sensation, which feeds the rousing river of passion. The pleasure sustained from these artistic agendas is most often derived from the feeling of our own pattern. It is how these patterns feed off of our experiences and the emotion of the art we create that seems to have mixed-up my attention span as of late.

I am going to stick to the emotive pattern of music when it comes to the arrangement of this poignant performance. It’s in the mystery of music and the emotion it creates, as to how pleasure and pain can perpetrate the patterns of our life. Music must be regarded as emotional in the sense that it transports us to the furthest extremities of emotion, these being toward the likes of exuberance and melancholic.

We tend to think of emotion as a grab bag of moods filled with rage, angst, and delight. Emotions are as primitive as the man who wandered through caves his life’s entirety. Over the last couple of decades, cognitive professionals have started rejecting the older notions of emotions. It is still acknowledged that man will always carry with him the primeval mechanisms of fight or flight. Emotion has been recognized as being critical to reasoning. With this emergence of newfangled thought in the direction of reasoning, the old school notion of emotion is now perceived as irrational.

Many theories have been born since the inception of emotion as critical to reason. Emotion could be seen as a means of weighting the attention one is given to an incoming experience; others see emotion as directed and instigated thought. There is one theory that fits music’s emotional experience so well, that it should in fact, prove that music alone is postulated by the confirmation needed to give the theory validity. It is called the “discrepancy theory,” which regards emotion as a reaction to an unexpected experience. We will discuss how it works later.

One of the reasons for the ever-changing view of emotion is the congregating evidence that victims of emotion-related mental damage lose the capacity for self-organization. This is true when the right frontal lobe is injured—the part of the brain closely concurrent to the system that is vital to emotional value.  It is proven that people become emotionally impassive when this part of the cortex is impaired. They do not notice their infirmity, or they just don’t care. In comparison, someone with left frontal lobe damage retains emotive response and reacts with despondency.

Why are these frontal lobes imperative to emotion? They are fundamental for planning elongated sequences of activity, but in the end, these lobes demonstrate themselves as the disciplinarian of the brain. They carry the torch for the rest of the brain, without them, other parts of the brain would meander in their activities, going the direction of least resistance, and trending towards habit.

The frontal lobes are very active in the construction of short-term memory. This is achieved in cooperation with the sensory mechanism. When we keep an image in our imagination, it is constructed with a visual but sustained by the frontal lobes, which inhibits the image from waning away. In the sense of similarity, these frontal lobes act upon the auditory senses, which allows us to hold the anticipation of music for many seconds while we wait for the resolution.

These frontal lobes are also the main control center for our attention, deciding which path to take, which direction to look, or what kind of music shall we immerse ourselves in today? For brevity’s sake, it is the damage done to frontal lobe by of emotional distraught that almost always results in short attention span, or the inability to…..

Planning. Short-term memory. Attention span. These functions seem like diverse activities that just so happen to be packed into the same region of the brain. But if you take a closer look, they are facets of the unpretentious phenomenon called restraint. Planning restrains our brain from wandering off the chosen path. Short-term memory restrains the senses from moving on to a different image. Attention constrains the infinite amount of senses from cluttering the sensory mechanism.

It is in any given moment that our brains can only process a slither of the torrent of experience that comes our direction; the body can carry out only one action of the hundreds that are possible; our intellectual response can model only one fragment of reality amidst infinitesimal possibility. There is no point in trying to possess the marvelous resolving power of our visual and auditory senses, if these mechanisms are applied to trivial ends. The nervous system must always be on the lookout for the most significant activities to which one should dedicate themselves. This is the definitive purpose of emotion.

Emotion could be considered as a special case of motivation. We carry out plans by anticipating desired results and seeking to satisfy those anticipations. Let’s use money as an example. Let’s say you have twenty dollars in your wallet, you pay for something with that twenty dollars and go about your day. First you anticipated its existence and then moved on from it. But anticipations are not always met. You may find that the twenty dollars is missing and become annoyed, or even furious. Or you may find that you have much more money than you thought, and will be pleased or even ecstatic. The state in which you find the anticipated twenty dollars draws no particular response and is motivation in its simplest state. The other two cases exemplify stronger responses because there has been a discrepancy between anticipation and reality. These discrepancies are the basis of emotion, of e-motion (from the Latin word exmovere, or to “move away from anticipation”)

All emotion is either positive or negative. There is no such thing as neutral emotion. Negative emotions arise when the anticipation of experience does not meet your expected reality. Positive emotions come around when the experience exceeds the expectation of what you anticipate. Most anticipation is small in the grand scheme of things, and most discrepancies are minute and barely register a beat on the Richter scale of surge and outburst. Emotion mostly bobs up and down in the sea of motivation. We are inclined to experience a feeling of well-being when these little pieces of positive emotional events occur with persistence, and we become dejected or ill-tempered when a train of trivial and adverse events steadily accosts us.

It is in these principles that we see how easy it is for music to generate emotion. Music sets up anticipation and then satisfies it. It can withhold its resolution, and heighten anticipation by doing so, and then it satisfies the anticipation in a flood of resolve. When music goes out of its way to violate the very expectations that it sets up, it is called expression. Musicians breathe feeling into the arrangement by introducing minute deviations in timing and loudness. But it is a composer–or in this case–writer that builds expression into the composition by purposely violating the anticipation that he has established.

See you soon.

BeLove © 2018

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