Work and Play.

Three things.

In all, there were three things:
the certainty one is always beginning
the certainty one must go further
and the certainty that one will be interrupted before finishing.
From the interruptions, to make a new path,
from falling, a dance step,
from fear, a ladder
from dream, a bridge, from search…the encounter.

On coincidences and Deja vú

I take comfort in the fact that there are two human moments that seem to be doled out equally and democratically within the human condition—and that there is no satisfying ultimate explanation for either. One is coincidence, the other is déja vu. It doesn’t matter if you’re Queen Elizabeth, one of the thirty-three miners rescued in Chile, a South Korean housewife or a migrant herder in Zimbabwe—in the span of 365 days you will pretty much have two déja vus as well as one coincidence that makes you stop and say, “Wow, that was a coincidence.”

The thing about coincidence is that when you imagine the umpteen trillions of coincidences that can happen at any given moment, the fact is, that in practice, coincidences almost never do occur. Coincidences are actually so rare that when they do occur they are, in fact memorable. This suggests to me that the universe is designed to ward off coincidence whenever possible—the universe hates coincidence—I don’t know why—it just seems to be true. So when a coincidence happens, that coincidence had to work awfully hard to escape the system. There’s a message there. What is it? Look. Look harder. Mathematicians perhaps have a theorem for this, and if they do, it might, by default be a theorem for something larger than what they think it is.

What’s both eerie and interesting to me about déja vus is that they occur almost like metronomes throughout our lives, about one every six months, a poetic timekeeping device that, at the very least, reminds us we are alive. I can safely assume that my thirteen year old niece, Stephen Hawking and someone working in a Beijing luggage-making factory each experience two déja vus a year. Not one. Not three. Two.

The underlying biodynamics of déja vus is probably ascribable to some sort of tingling neurons in a certain part of the brain, yet this doesn’t tell us why they exist. They seem to me to be a signal from larger point of view that wants to remind us that our lives are distinct, that they have meaning, and that they occur throughout a span of time. We are important, and what makes us valuable to the universe is our sentience and our curse and blessing of perpetual self-awareness.

Douglas Coupland.

Happy 2016!

Persona- Carl Jung

“The persona is a mask for the collective psyche. A mask that pretends individuality so that both the self and others believe in that identity although it is really no more than a well played role in which the collective psyche is expressed.

It is a complicated system which mediates between individual consciousness and social community.

IT is a compromise between the individual and society as to what a man is supposed to be.

A theater made to make a certain impression on others and to hide part of the nature of the individual.”

 

More on this article:

“The persona can be understood as the personality we choose over the personality with which we are born. The persona is an expression not necessarily of our true selves, but of our egos: how we wish to see ourselves and for others to see us, as opposed to who we truly and wholly are. As Jung pointed out, to have a persona is not the problem. We all need a persona, as we all need an ego. But the trouble begins when we become overidentified with the persona or ego, believing that these artificial creations totally define our identity.”

Black Cloud-Carlos Amorales

“Sometimes, seeing one of these moths that have met their end in my house, I wonder what kind of fear and pain they feel while they are lost. As Alphonso had told him, said Austerlitz, there is really no reason to suppose that lesser beings are devoid of sentient life. We are not alone in dreaming at night for, quite apart from dogs and other domestic creatures whose emotions have been bound up with ours for many thousands of years, the smaller mammals such as mice and moles also live in a world that exists only in their minds whilst they are asleep, as we can detect from their eye movements, and who knows, said Austerlitz, perhaps moths dream as well, perhaps a lettuce in the garden dreams as it looks up at the moon by night.”

W.G. Sebald

This past weekend I saw this beautiful piece in the Contemporary cultural center of Barcelona.. thousands of black butterflies surrounded the place.

And in this video you can see the motivations behind the piece and a few glimpses of the installation in another place.

You are not depressed. You are distracted

(by Facundo Cabral)

 

You are not depressed, you are distracted, and distracted from the life that inhabits you. Distracted from the life around you: dolphins, forests, seas, mountains, rivers… 

 Do not end up as your sibling did, suffering because of a human being when there are more than 5600 million human beings in the world.

 

Moreover it is not so bad to live alone. I do very well, deciding every moment what I want to do, and thanks to the solitude I know myself, something fundamental to live.

 

Do not end up as your father did, feeling old because he was 70 years old, forgetting that Moses led the exodus when he was 80 and Rubinstein interpreted Chopin like nobody else when he was 90.  I mean just to allude to two very well known cases.

 

 

You are not depressed; you are distracted. You believe that you have lost something, which is impossible, because everything that you have was given to you.  You did not make a single hair of your head so you can not own anything.  In addition, life does not subtract things, it liberates you from them. It makes you lighter so that you can fly higher and reach the fullness. From cradle to grave, it is a school, and that is why those predicaments that you call problems are lessons, indeed.

 

You lost nobody; the one who died is just going ahead, because we all are going there. Besides this, the best of him/her, his/her love, is still in your heart.  Who could say that Jesus is dead?  There is not death, but only movement.  And on the other side there are some wonderful people waiting for you: Gandhi, Michelangelo Whitman, St. Augustine, Mother Teresa, your grandmother and my mother, who believed that poverty is actually closer to what we call Love, because money distracts us with too many things, and makes us apprehensive and doubtful.

 

 

Do only what you love and you will be happy; the one who can do what he/she loves, is blessed and destined to have success, which will definitively come, because what must come, will come, but will come naturally.  Do not do anything for obligation or commitment, but for love. Only then there will be fullness in your life, and with fullness everything is possible; and possible without any effort because what will move you will be the natural force of life, the same that raised me when the plane crashed with my wife and my daughter, the same which kept me alive when my doctors predicted that I would have only 3 or 4 more months of life.

 

God has put a human being under your care, and that is yourself; so please set yourself free and make yourself happy, and then you will be able to share the true life with others.

 

Remember Jesus: “You shall love one’s neighbor as thyself.”  Reconcile you to yourself, stand in front of the mirror and think that the creature that you are seeing is a masterpiece of God and decide right now to be happy because happiness is an achievement.

 

Besides, happiness is not a right but a duty, because if you are not happy, you are making miserable the lives of all those who love you. Just remember, one man who had no talent or courage to live ordered the execution of six million Jewish siblings.

 

There are so many things to enjoy ourselves here on earth and our life is so short that suffering is a loss of time.  We have, for example, snow in winter to enjoy with; flowers in spring, chocolate made by the Perugia, French baguette, Mexican tacos, Chilean wine, seas and rivers, Brazilian soccer, The Thousand and One Nights, the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Pedro Paramo, boleros composed by Manzanero and poems written by Whitman, Mahler, Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Picasso and Tamayo, among many other wonders.

 

And if you have got cancer or AIDS, two things can happen and both are good. If it wins, it releases your body from so many things that can be so annoying sometimes: I am hungry, I am cold, it is my dream, I feel like I am right, I have doubts … and if you win, you will be more humble, more grateful, therefore, much more easily happy.

 

Liberate yourself from the tremendous burden of guilt, responsibility, and vanity, and be ready to live each moment deeply, as it should be.

 

You are not depressed, you just need to be busy.  Help the child who needs you, and that child will be your child’s partner.  Help old people, and young people will help you when you be old.  In addition, service to others is  an absolutely guaranteed happiness, as certain as enjoying and taking care of nature for those who will come tomorrow. Give without measure and you will receive without measure.

 

Love till you become the beloved, and even more! Love till you become the love itself!

 

And never let some few homicidal and suicidal people distract you neither confuse you; the good is majority, but you do not realize it because it is quiet; a bomb makes much more noise than a caress, but for every bomb that destroys houses, there are millions of caresses that nourishes life.

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

Every single time I feel bad  I read this from one of my favorite poets/singers.. doing the right thing is hard sometimes and finishing something and starting from scratch is complicated.. but today I will  move and break something that will not let me bloom completely into what life has to offer…

Wish me luck.

On free love by Emma Goldman.. (Amen! )