Mar 27, 2008 00:58
For all that flights of fancy and imagination are wonderful, I find there is just as much wonder in reality. The mind is the source of all that fancy, and that is just such a beautiful thing.
I learnt last night about cave paintings, that they were the pinning down of visions had in trances. That every human, no matter where from, since the begining of the species, experiences the same basic internal images when in a trace state, or when suffering sensory deprivation. The human brain just throws them up, always the same. So in caves and on rocks, worlds apart from oneanother, the same patterning appears. And if we close our eyes for long enough, and expose them to the right outside stimuli, we can see the exact same images that people saw tens of thousands of years ago.
To see those paintings, and to know that they were painted so long ago, before buildings and farming and the idea of 'art', and to see how beautiful they were, how spiritual and otherworldly - it inspired such awe.
The world - nature, animals, plants, flowers, water, rocks, weather, the sun, the moon, the light they bring - it's all so incredible, so simply beautiful and so there. And the brain, and all it has created, is just the same. Is part of that basic, fundamental reality of the world. There really is so much harmony in life. I will never cease to be amazed.
And all the beauty we can make, all the places, the art, the literature, the poetry, the sentiment, the emotion, all of that, just takes may breath away sometimes. The brain gives us all that. The ability to create it and the ability to appreciate it. To feel it and to be it.
It's fascinating.
I love art, and I love psychology, and really, they are much the same thing. I tend to call this type of writing that I do sometimes whimsy, to say that I drift off into flights of fancy. But that's not entirely appropriate - what could be more grounded in reality than what my own brain generates? Whether I'm happy or depressed, excited or anxious, mad or sane, it's all happening. It's all maluable, it can change, but it is there. We can't see it, but we can feel it, which is undeniable proof that something is happening.
My mind is my own, only ever for me. But the brain is universal. But for a few quirks, this incredibly complex organ is the same in every living person in the world. And even some of the quirks are almost identical to those of others.
Sometimes, sometimes it all just hits me, you know? For all my rationality and talk of science, and for all I may experience incredible pain from what my brain and the world comes up with sometimes, I just can't quite help but be awestuck by it from time to time.
Life is astounding.
writing,
whimsy,
psychology,
i fall in love so easily now,
analysis makes things better