Of Happiness, Faith, and Fulfillment
Beethoven runs through my head, tingling the synapses and creating more intermingling joy and sorrow, because that's life - intermingling joy and sorrow. I tire of routine, I long for adventure. I need creation, the melding of creativity and innovation. A part of me just wants to make things and never stop - just draw, paint, construct, to manifest my ideas into tangible form - forever and ever.
If God were a true artist, he wouldn't have stopped after only 7 days. He would have kept going - and creating, and joyously adding, subtracting, and changing things. The sky wouldn't always be blue. He would feel the need to perfect his work, perfect and revise his art; however, if God were perfect, how could he create this, a thing so, so distanced from perfect? I wonder. I entered into this space so bewildered, bewildered at the state of life itself, bewildered how we've gotten so far from our original happiness. The core happiness, the happiness in living, the joy of every sunrise, the happiness only found with those you love or in doing that which you love. It is not now absent, but rather estranged - estranged by modern ideas of personal fame and wealth. We are beyond, far beyond stringent - every baby is born with greed in his blood, myself certainly being no exception. I crave for what is well beyond necessity. However, I also long for the simplicity which is long past; the closeness of truth, love, and the knowledge of personal significance, the attention to the important, and the concentration on living, living and living for oneself, living for what is true to the soul and what is needed by the mind for sanity, for ultimate consciousness, and for happiness.
Why is depression so significant an affliction in modern society? The Republicans will tell you it is the lack of faith in God these days. The Democrats will tell you it is the lack of medical understanding in the past. But I will tell you it is because we have lost ourselves in this world of haste, business, schedules, promiscuity, and love for that which does not matter. Purely working for someone else's gain, slaving for your own barebones existence, trading hours, days, years of your life for - what exactly? Stimulation in the form of actually living - release from these "responsibilities," from the prisons of our own making, is needed to enjoy true fulfillment. No, not an anarchy, not a society just geared toward pleasure - no, a society who, as a collective, understands what human is and what governs human thought. Greed and want of more, of new, of frivolous - want of pleasures many, want of the sadist, want of the glutton - no. Reserved, yet outspoken. Unknowing, yet eager to learn. Weathered and experienced, yet not bitter. We want things, but do not need them. We are unhappy, motivated by lust - lust for money, lust for possessions, lust for power. And when we get a little, we want more. You see, money, possessions, and power are not evil in themselves - but when overdone, overused, used as a singular motivator, seen as a singular goal...
All we really want is power over our own lives and the balance that power could bring. A balance, so the sorrow and the happiness come together in a union of knowing and content, so we can put our sorrows behind us, having learned from them, and now our contrasted happiness is full of wonder and glory. Why can we not all have the beautiful and the wonderful? Why is our world covered in filth and grime of our own making? Why do we overrun nature, both our planet's and our own? We dissolve from the very things that cause us unhappiness only to be called "crazy" and "unrealistic." We deviate from the vicious cycle we are born into and we are rejected, unlistened to. We find joy in what joy truly is - knowledge and the company of those with it. We need to understand, understand precisely why people continue with their rigors, their straight lines and and categorized lives - their jobs and their unchanging routines, their surly dissatisfaction but placation of it using ancient stories and the primal human hope of a higher power. People feel better about life if they believe everything happens for a reason, that things are under some sort of control. Faith wards away despair, but it also summons ignorance. Ignorance of acceptance, of the failure of humanity, they are content with a Creator instead of attempting to to solve the real mysteries of life. But I digress - the knowledge that there is not, in fact, an ultimately powerful Being would undoubtedly cause many people distress and depression. Therefore, the problem is innate in mankind - knowledge may not cause happiness, but instead offers a sort of fulfillment. Which would you rather choose? Ignorance is bliss, after all. We must think around Mankind's barriers and through His institutions. We must create what He has not created due to His ignorance. We must attempt to make Him see - no, we are not crazy, we just value the things which should be valued: truth, knowledge, and the ongoing quest for what happiness really is, instead of stalwartly defending "the answer" of an omnipotent being.
Choice is what separates humans from other animals. We have choices to make, and we make them. Our choices are then judged by none other than the Majority and they tell us what is right and what is wrong. We can play the System and hope to win or evict ourselves from its grasp, its tendrils supported by the routine and unthinking lives of billions. What is humanity's collective if it is but a mass of the repetition of the previous generation, with added evils, more powerful weapons, and progressive technologies? Politicians try to save the world, but they try to do it with paper and enforcement and a system no one truly trusts anymore. Artists try to do it, creating paintings and sculptures and films designed to express and educate - but not enough people understand or appreciate. Writers try to do it - but books are rapidly becoming a thing of the past, and many people take the attitude of "who the fuck reads books anyway?" Our world, now, so far gone and dug into its self-created rut, is now only doomed - less people are living for themselves and the glory of life, instead brainlessly mimicking their neighbors and fathers, working, slaving away for - what? Money, possessions, power. Continuing an ignorant, unchanging generation. We have no Masters - lest it be money. Money governs what we can and cannot do, it determines our way of life and we'll do anything for it. We have no beauty. We have no shame. I only fear our time - this generation, now - may seem the future's Utopia. So, in the end, what can we do but watch, adhere to that which we hate, forced into a life of servitude and lack of adventure, lack of creation, lack of knowledge - raising another generation to repeat our lack of progress and lack of innovation. We are no longer fulfilled, simply "happy" - a blind happiness, caused by our overwhelming hope that this is not all there is. I wish to search for what precisely we missed - where it all went wrong, when we deviated from our simple lives of friends, family, and knowledge. When we stopped working for ourselves and instead work for the things we loathe. What do we really need? What really makes us happy? Not the self-deceptive happiness that we have created for ourselves but instead the happiness that occurs to us on our most wonderful days, when everything is beautiful and we are surrounded by the comforting blanket we call love, the world's mask of filth completely absent - until we notice it again. Why does humankind create ugly things? Practicality and aesthetics should run hand-in-hand; aesthetics is simply practicality to the eye, and it is just as important as useful function. Why is everything not art, everything a representation of our inner selves and thoughts? Why do people "express" themselves in sameness, in angles, in lines, in blankness? We combine lines with routine and blankness with thought. If architectually represented, mankind would be a large, square room, vastly white, with sharp corners and a black and white horizontally striped carpet with small, brilliant explosions of color in remote areas. We are uninterested, lost, and subject to the majority's will. Children in elementary schools are ridiculed if they are intelligent or express a wish to learn. Even institutional learning, now, has become mechanized; we only learn to regurgitate, to get that degree, to acquire that job. We learn for what we get in turn on paper, in numbers and letters and percentages, but not expression and knowledge for the sake of knowing. We do what everyone else does because we are "supposed to." We do not stop to consider if this is what will allow us to get the most out of these years, if this is the only path to learning the answer to "Why," if this is the only way that we are able to live our linear lives. We do not experiment, consider libving in a manner the Majority does not. We listen and regurgitate. We learn and follow.
I have had enough following, enough unhappiness. I have had enough ugliness and enough ignorance. I am finished with society's clamoring institutions and its narrow-mindedness. I am finished with society's God and their wish that life is under His control, so things will turn out satisfactorily in the end. The way things are conducted in this day and age are simply not satisfactory. I refuse to enter, or take part in, that which I hate. And so my journey begins.
If God were a true artist, he wouldn't have stopped after only 7 days. He would have kept going - and creating, and joyously adding, subtracting, and changing things. The sky wouldn't always be blue. He would feel the need to perfect his work, perfect and revise his art; however, if God were perfect, how could he create this, a thing so, so distanced from perfect? I wonder. I entered into this space so bewildered, bewildered at the state of life itself, bewildered how we've gotten so far from our original happiness. The core happiness, the happiness in living, the joy of every sunrise, the happiness only found with those you love or in doing that which you love. It is not now absent, but rather estranged - estranged by modern ideas of personal fame and wealth. We are beyond, far beyond stringent - every baby is born with greed in his blood, myself certainly being no exception. I crave for what is well beyond necessity. However, I also long for the simplicity which is long past; the closeness of truth, love, and the knowledge of personal significance, the attention to the important, and the concentration on living, living and living for oneself, living for what is true to the soul and what is needed by the mind for sanity, for ultimate consciousness, and for happiness.
Why is depression so significant an affliction in modern society? The Republicans will tell you it is the lack of faith in God these days. The Democrats will tell you it is the lack of medical understanding in the past. But I will tell you it is because we have lost ourselves in this world of haste, business, schedules, promiscuity, and love for that which does not matter. Purely working for someone else's gain, slaving for your own barebones existence, trading hours, days, years of your life for - what exactly? Stimulation in the form of actually living - release from these "responsibilities," from the prisons of our own making, is needed to enjoy true fulfillment. No, not an anarchy, not a society just geared toward pleasure - no, a society who, as a collective, understands what human is and what governs human thought. Greed and want of more, of new, of frivolous - want of pleasures many, want of the sadist, want of the glutton - no. Reserved, yet outspoken. Unknowing, yet eager to learn. Weathered and experienced, yet not bitter. We want things, but do not need them. We are unhappy, motivated by lust - lust for money, lust for possessions, lust for power. And when we get a little, we want more. You see, money, possessions, and power are not evil in themselves - but when overdone, overused, used as a singular motivator, seen as a singular goal...
All we really want is power over our own lives and the balance that power could bring. A balance, so the sorrow and the happiness come together in a union of knowing and content, so we can put our sorrows behind us, having learned from them, and now our contrasted happiness is full of wonder and glory. Why can we not all have the beautiful and the wonderful? Why is our world covered in filth and grime of our own making? Why do we overrun nature, both our planet's and our own? We dissolve from the very things that cause us unhappiness only to be called "crazy" and "unrealistic." We deviate from the vicious cycle we are born into and we are rejected, unlistened to. We find joy in what joy truly is - knowledge and the company of those with it. We need to understand, understand precisely why people continue with their rigors, their straight lines and and categorized lives - their jobs and their unchanging routines, their surly dissatisfaction but placation of it using ancient stories and the primal human hope of a higher power. People feel better about life if they believe everything happens for a reason, that things are under some sort of control. Faith wards away despair, but it also summons ignorance. Ignorance of acceptance, of the failure of humanity, they are content with a Creator instead of attempting to to solve the real mysteries of life. But I digress - the knowledge that there is not, in fact, an ultimately powerful Being would undoubtedly cause many people distress and depression. Therefore, the problem is innate in mankind - knowledge may not cause happiness, but instead offers a sort of fulfillment. Which would you rather choose? Ignorance is bliss, after all. We must think around Mankind's barriers and through His institutions. We must create what He has not created due to His ignorance. We must attempt to make Him see - no, we are not crazy, we just value the things which should be valued: truth, knowledge, and the ongoing quest for what happiness really is, instead of stalwartly defending "the answer" of an omnipotent being.
Choice is what separates humans from other animals. We have choices to make, and we make them. Our choices are then judged by none other than the Majority and they tell us what is right and what is wrong. We can play the System and hope to win or evict ourselves from its grasp, its tendrils supported by the routine and unthinking lives of billions. What is humanity's collective if it is but a mass of the repetition of the previous generation, with added evils, more powerful weapons, and progressive technologies? Politicians try to save the world, but they try to do it with paper and enforcement and a system no one truly trusts anymore. Artists try to do it, creating paintings and sculptures and films designed to express and educate - but not enough people understand or appreciate. Writers try to do it - but books are rapidly becoming a thing of the past, and many people take the attitude of "who the fuck reads books anyway?" Our world, now, so far gone and dug into its self-created rut, is now only doomed - less people are living for themselves and the glory of life, instead brainlessly mimicking their neighbors and fathers, working, slaving away for - what? Money, possessions, power. Continuing an ignorant, unchanging generation. We have no Masters - lest it be money. Money governs what we can and cannot do, it determines our way of life and we'll do anything for it. We have no beauty. We have no shame. I only fear our time - this generation, now - may seem the future's Utopia. So, in the end, what can we do but watch, adhere to that which we hate, forced into a life of servitude and lack of adventure, lack of creation, lack of knowledge - raising another generation to repeat our lack of progress and lack of innovation. We are no longer fulfilled, simply "happy" - a blind happiness, caused by our overwhelming hope that this is not all there is. I wish to search for what precisely we missed - where it all went wrong, when we deviated from our simple lives of friends, family, and knowledge. When we stopped working for ourselves and instead work for the things we loathe. What do we really need? What really makes us happy? Not the self-deceptive happiness that we have created for ourselves but instead the happiness that occurs to us on our most wonderful days, when everything is beautiful and we are surrounded by the comforting blanket we call love, the world's mask of filth completely absent - until we notice it again. Why does humankind create ugly things? Practicality and aesthetics should run hand-in-hand; aesthetics is simply practicality to the eye, and it is just as important as useful function. Why is everything not art, everything a representation of our inner selves and thoughts? Why do people "express" themselves in sameness, in angles, in lines, in blankness? We combine lines with routine and blankness with thought. If architectually represented, mankind would be a large, square room, vastly white, with sharp corners and a black and white horizontally striped carpet with small, brilliant explosions of color in remote areas. We are uninterested, lost, and subject to the majority's will. Children in elementary schools are ridiculed if they are intelligent or express a wish to learn. Even institutional learning, now, has become mechanized; we only learn to regurgitate, to get that degree, to acquire that job. We learn for what we get in turn on paper, in numbers and letters and percentages, but not expression and knowledge for the sake of knowing. We do what everyone else does because we are "supposed to." We do not stop to consider if this is what will allow us to get the most out of these years, if this is the only path to learning the answer to "Why," if this is the only way that we are able to live our linear lives. We do not experiment, consider libving in a manner the Majority does not. We listen and regurgitate. We learn and follow.
I have had enough following, enough unhappiness. I have had enough ugliness and enough ignorance. I am finished with society's clamoring institutions and its narrow-mindedness. I am finished with society's God and their wish that life is under His control, so things will turn out satisfactorily in the end. The way things are conducted in this day and age are simply not satisfactory. I refuse to enter, or take part in, that which I hate. And so my journey begins.