"Living is easy with eyes closed, Misunderstanding all you see" - The Beatles
If you haven't noticed, I like starting MyTakes with a song quote, cause I think songs are the closest we can get to expressing truth. Misunderstanding is something that lays between and around everyone that I know and probably everyone I don't know. It's part of being. But what's interesting about this is that most of us aren't aware of why this is.
I don't want to say I am very wise, cause I certainly am not. I'm just someone who's spent the best part of my life thinking and reflecting on my actions, my words and my surroundings. I'm just someone that has been a hermit in my head.
So, misunderstanding: why? If you look closely, and listen closely, misunderstanding is created because of our eagerness to explain what we experience. We constantly try to say, to explain, to tell, what we experience. We constantly want to qualify what is unqualifiable, and want to conceptualize something that is in its purest form, simply not a concept!
Language's pupose is not to facilitate communication - its purpose is to facilitate thought
It's mostly supposed that language's function is to make it possible to communicate. However, if you think about it, (tatadada!) how would you have a thought, without language?
Okay, so this is good an all, but here's the catch, and read this carefully, cause it's very important:
Language makes thought possible, which makes all thoughts based in language. But just because that is true, doesn't mean that everything is based on thought. In other words: thought is just a infinitessimal part of what life is.
What does this have to do with the strange nature of humanity? Well, in a way, everything. We seem to take words very seriously, and silence as just futility and even offense! If someone is silent, we automatically assume that there's some kind of judgement involved. And it could very well be true! But does that mean we should close our mind and just assume?
Also, this assumption that everything that is possible lays in its ability to be expressed through language, leads us to an incredibly immoral fallacy: we become who we do, not what we say we do.
Morality - A Mask, an Excuse to protect Ego
Here's where it gets tricky. I'm going to keep this as simple and non-academic as possible. It's not a critique of morality as such, because morality has had a very essential and needed role in the development of societies and communities. So hurray for morality, but there's there's an argument to be made, which can be connected to the first part of this myTake. Morality and ethics and philosophies of virtue and so on, are trying (and to a large extent, do) to make explicit something that is implicit. Some examples:
Human rights are fine and all, and should be defended, but since when did human rights become an excuse to invade countries and patronize the entire non-western world? And since when are human rights something we have to state explicitly? The short answer is because we try to analyze our way through problems, instead of experiencing, feeling. I'm sure that everyone would be able to find intuitively, feeling for themselves, the way we are all one.
If 99.9% of people you ask on the street say they don't want war, then why are there wars? Again, we think that by forcing the explicit expression of some kind of law or truth is more viable than teaching how to experience said law or truth implicitly. And of course there are mentally ill people that probably would have a hard time being able to experience this for themselves, but is that a reason to give up? I would like to show a poem I wrote a few years back, that I think sums this up pretty well.
"The act of loving someone that you don't understand, and doesn't understand you,
The love you feel, is your love for the untouchable,
it's your love for the uncomprehensible
Timeless motions, parentless devotion, to a feeling that can only be attributed to connection.
Truth is far too often spoken, unintentionally,
Laying corrupted in our disrupted minds.
She tried to tell me something, so she did not.
The impossible laid within her but she tried,
hopelessly, to take it out and show it to the world.
"Fortune" - she said , "it is nothing but an illusion embedded in the deepest crumbs of our heart"
We try to no try, and believe to not dream, and dream to not awake
Understanding lays beneath the layers of forceful intention, hidden.
Fantasy hides in plain sight, truth exposes itself in the deepest woods.
Will truth and sincerity survive the storm?
I survive to stay alive, a day to understand what it means to understand.
Thoughts become beliefs, things become thoughts
The prevention of discovery will only make it attack you,
Clutter you, after finding you in your naked glory, if such can be called glory.
Words are taken seriously, and silence as futile numbness,
But it is the numbness we feel, that is real, for numbness shows how unreal we are,
for all we do is speak.
Tell me, what happens when the forest sings though the leaves,
the earth breathes through our feet,
and the sky overshadows through millions of birds' wings?
What makes us ignore the silent, genuine,
And give our attention to the aimless, and tactless?
Affection
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