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Left Brain, Right Brain – Which One Is Better?

left brain, right brainSo, you are a writer that feels inspired by a great idea to put it out there in fiction – cause if you do, there’s two of us.

You have carefully elaborated your character cards, you have designed an enticing and captivating  plot with lots of unexpected turning points and surprise reversals of situations, and your hard-worked book already feels like a page turner. You have perfectly calculated your first 25% of the book’s first conflict, you have carefully considered what happens once your book builds up at 50%, and then you have built a looming disaster for your character at the next coming turn point,  once your book  reaches into the 75%. Here it is time for an impossible situation when all is lost, or almost, and only a miracle can still save the day for your character.

Continue reading “Left Brain, Right Brain – Which One Is Better?” →

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Patterns and Lace
Visualization of the internet
The cosmos is also within us. We are made of star dust. We are a way that the cosmos can know itself. Carl Sagan

I am He as You are She as She is Me and We are All Together – after John Lenon

It happens extremely often to talk to someone and find out in surprise that his/her life trajectory is very similar to mine; I refer to life-changing moments, defining experiences, crisis situations, etc.

The name of this blog wants to imply that there are patterns of existence that we are all subject to, and that we are an organic part of an ensouled world in a continuous process of evolution.

I had my first realization about life patterns while going through some very specific situations; with some, I realized in amazement that my dreams have been dreamed by others before (I mean, to a high degree of similarity) – it was as if my own life situations having been lived by others before. I was my first encounter with the Archetype, with archetypal images and the “archetype of transformation”.

Later I found out that Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung has largely developed on archetypes. He sees them as universal, archaic patterns and images that derive from the “collective unconscious” – that’s how he explains the fact that they are manifest in all humans, throughout history and across all geography. Archetypal images and motifs flesh out our myths and stories, our literature masterpieces; we encounter them in all forms of art, as artists seem to be more sensitive than the rest of us.

We are moved by art because we unconsciously recognize the archetype represented and resonate with it -. this is why people have the religious figures so deeply “embedded”.  In fact, all the great themes of humanity are inherited by us as archetypes: the Mother archetype, the Father, the Child, the Christ, the Devil, the Trickster, and so on.

Jung sees archetypes as the psychic counterpart to instincts. If our biological survival and evolution has been ensured by instincts, mentally and emotionally we are evolving through archetypal models; that’s why I like to call them programs, more than just phenomena.

Seen from an evolutionary – historic perspective, we are ourselves processes in evolution, far from being just ephemeral points popping in and out of existence,

Our ancient philosophies and our religions mention that we are spirit and soul, and astern religions tell us in addition that our soul keeps on evolving  together with the world around us. If we can view things this way, we can see how the human spirit – which is mind, human consciousness (to distinguish it from Consciousness, the intelligence of the universe) is on an evolutionary trajectory. Our society as a whole is far smarter than any previous generation in known history .

We are far more informed and more communicative in ways that are really significant and that regard us individually, not necessarily for professional reasons, and we can only anticipate  how things are going to look five, ten years on, now that the phenomenon is growing exponentially.

Intelligence, as an effect of the internet and technology, is seen to take such accelerated, ascending trajectory that it has made many “luminaries” today fear that in maximum twenty-five years human mind is very likely to have attended its limitations, and then … we will step into the “transhuman era” and will implant nanocomputers in our blood stream to access the internet (sic) and download the cloud into ourselves or upload ourselves to the cloud – as you wish you will be served). But this is another story.

 

Talking about blogging here, I still see it is amazing how we have all met across continents and distances  because of the internet – thing unimaginable only twenty years ago.

Watch how close things look in this visualization of the internet, in the neuronal network in our brain, and in a map of the outer space: could it be just a difference in scale??

Visualization of the internet
Visualization of the internet

neuron network

mapping-space
mapping space
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Can You Read Existentialism Upside Down?

In response to the daily prompt “Which question do you hate to being asked?”, I would answer: there is no question – absolutely no question to which I wouldn’t be disposed to answer. On only one condition: that the question springs from a desire for knowledge and meaning, therefore elicited by a somehow intelligent being.

Sometimes adults tend to ask thoughtlessly, like little children when they just love to practice their newly acquired sense of manipulating words:

“Why do I need to go to sleep?” “Because you need to rest and grow”, you would say.”Why do I need to rest and grow?”, they’d ask. “Because you feel great and happy when you are rested; because you just said you wanted to be a ‘big boy’, like your brother Sam”, you say. ”Why is Sam a big boy?”, he would answer.

As much as you can find it cute (with some effort, I know, not that easy after having spent the last drop of energy on the never-ending tasks that you have to take home and finish at the end of a ten-hour-long working day, after a long commuting time, bad traffic, bad day, etc,etc), it is not that easy to make the same effort for an adult. Because some of them, by force of being lazy at using their God-given neurons, become obnoxious.

I once had a neighbor. She was all-knowledgeable, of course, like all neighbors are – no matter how qualified, how many degrees you happen to have, it so occurs that you always fall quite short of some knowledge relative to your neighbors (or some relatives, why not?).

I was enjoying the early spring sun, with my little baby-daughter in her trolley. Life was good, the sun was warm,the baby was peaceful, I was enjoying reading some Sartre. But the baby didn’t want to be peaceful for more than she had set her mind to, so she made me put down my book and tend to her needs. Then, heaven happened once more ….  I grabbed my book again to continue my reading, but the atmosphere was such, that reading existentialism felt more like a loss than a gain – so I just re-placed the book on my knees and got lost in thought.

My afore-mentioned neighbor happened to pass by; we exchanged greetings, she complimented me on the baby, then, with an expression of horror, she looked at my book: “Oh, my God, that’s how you read?” And, as she must have seen in my eyes that I didn’t make any sense of her aghast expression, she explained it to me: “It’s not this way that you hold it: your book is upside down!” And, very dutifully, she even helped me to correct my mistake: she set it back on my knees, the way any literate being should keep his/her book if he/she wanted to read any.

I agree, this was not a question in full-right – it’d better be called an exclamatory question: more of an exclamation than questioning, looking for an answer. But it’s all the same:  I chose it because it makes a good example of how insulting and thoughtless, without any consideration, or rightly stupid some people can be; she  asked me only a couple of weeks ago if I could tutor her kids with their French.

I chose this example to illustrate how people can be unmindful and insensitive at times, addressing others with thoughtless, hurtful questions – just for the sake of making noise. “Do you have watches in your country?” someone asked my husband when he was a training doctor (“that” country was supposed to be Lebanon, where Europe was abducted by Zeus disguised as a bull, where the oldest attested city in the word, Byblos – Jbail, is still alive and going, where the first Law university in the world was founded, where the origins of the alphabet we are currently using are – the Phoenician alphabet, etc, etc). Has it ever happened to you too??

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The Myth of Eternal Return – 3 – Why The Chaos?

I would rather throw a look around me and try to make an objective, logical analysis of what I can see. When I’m in the middle of the turbulence zone, I tend to believe that adversity surprises mostly me, like persecuted by a blind destiny.

But this is only my subjective view; when I step back, take a deep breath detach myself a little, I see that the phenomenon of turbulent zones regards way more people than my own precious person – sometimes even in more disruptive ways. Disasters, plane crashes, natural calamities, bloody wars and terrorism, and the list could not be ended in one single page if I wanted to, make, sadly, almost daily headlines.

But humanity has seen undoing and met with debacle and chaos many a time before. It happened all along history (incidentally, debacle comes from French debacle, meaning to unbar, to clear ), and, guess what, after every major calamity and war, humanity, as if it purged of its negativity, reached deep into the reconstructive forces of creation and  cooperation and helped advance culture and civilization more than it was never imaginable before.

Behind us is a trail full of bloody wars and revolutions, of chaos and then of reconstruction, and the cycle repeats itself, invariably, every time: from chaos and disasters, we seem to have built all this culture and civilization of ours in an ascending curve of waves and troughs.  As if the humanity in us could never reach and access those strings and gears that make us good and beautiful, creative and generous unless after it saw the beast coming out and showing its teeth in a mighty roar; only then we would fight tooth and claws for ideals like love, growth, order and peace.  Chaos represents the confusion or disorder brought to us by events and changes that surprise us and over which we have no power of prediction or control.

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The Devil Has Two Horns…

The Devil has two horns, two hooves and a tail. He is hairy and his tail ends up in a trident. How do I know that? Well, everybody knows it, like everybody knows that God is good.  Did I ever see him? You mean, the Devil? Well, I haven’t quite seen him, but I did suffer the sharp blows of its horns – or maybe it was a kick from his hooves, or a whip of his tail, or a punch with his pitchfork – or all together. The Devil is a very energetic, well armed entity, as I could see for myself. I never really considered the stereotyped fellow with red cloak and pitchfork until I got his mighty blows once in my left elbow, once in my chin (I still wear the scar), and another one in the arcade of my right eye – and I consider myself lucky, because it could have been much worse. What’s more, it rendered me infinitely grateful.  For all my skirmishes with him along the years, I can swear, even though many of our human fellows may not believe me, that he is an intelligent, sensible fellow. Far from being the “darkness incarnated” of  the urban legends that made people see an alleged diabolic image taking shape in the smoke of the burning twin towers, and which many have blamed for being behind the mind of the reckless authors of the crime, the Devil means no harm.

All this is true: my skirmishes and final pact with my own demons is just an allegory for the process of transformation that was sort of being forced upon my psyche, helping me to finally grasp and come to terms with crippling, life-long issues of anger and pride – among many other ones, of course. By virtue of some natural mechanism, I slipped gradually into a crippling depression, only to discover years later that it was to become my greatest blessing. I was forced to confront myself with my deepest fears, struggle against my fiercest demons, shed light into my darkest corners, only to uncover my grace. This helped me see the beauty of the realm inside, of which I had no idea it existed, in first place. Our inner demons, condemned by our religions as sins, potentially render us blind and insensitive to the meaning of existence

In fact, we should be honest with ourselves and  brave enough to confess, not only in the secrecy of the confessional, but admit it openly in our social media profiles our (so far secret) indulgence for the once seen as “deadly sins”, lust, greed, sloth, gluttony, envy, anger and pride. 

The fact that  Fifty Shades of Grey has been making tsunami waves lately is speaking stories. One hundred million copies in a three-year lapse of time is an unprecedented figure in sales. But here’s the facts and figures: “Fifty Shades of Grey has topped best-seller lists around the world, including those of the United Kingdom and the United States. The series has sold over 100 million copies worldwide and been translated into 52 languages, and set a record in the United Kingdom as the fastest-selling paperback of all time”.

Maybe this is our society’s new way to purge itself?? When it is about passions, the solution nowadays seems to be: “go with it, burn it into cinders! before it burns you! It’s either you, or IT (read it: ID).

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Oneness – Not A Christian, Neither A Muslim, Nor A Jew, Neither A Hindu….

In these confrontational days of intolerance against religion in itself, against others’ religion, and against Islam in particular, I find it opportune to bring up here this fragment of a poem – meditation by Sufi Master Jalal ad-Din Rumi. Sufism is the mystical branch of Islam – a concept that scholars define as the inner dimension of this religion. Sufi Masters have always sustained that Sufism is purely based on the teachings of Islam, the way that Prophet Mohamad and his cousin, Imam Ali Ibn Abi Talib has meant it to be understood.  It is not a negligible fact that religion, be it Christian or Islam, has had a long history of being used for ideological, political and military purposes.                               

“Why think O, pious men that I have returned to sobriety. I am neither a Moslem, nor a Hindu; I’m not a Christian, a Zoroastrian, nor a Jew. I am neither from the East, nor from the West; neither from land, nor from the sea. I come neither out of nature’s workshops, nor of the revolving heavens. I am neither from the earth, the water, nor from the air or the fire. I am neither from the divine city, nor from the (material) dust, neither from the being, nor from the essence […] I’m not of this world, but of the other one neither, not of the paradise, neither of the hell. I am neither of Adam nor of Eve, nor of the Eden or Eden’s angels. My place is the no-place, my trail is of that which leaves no trail; it’s neither the body, nor the soul, since I belong to The Beloved’s soul. I have abdicated from duality; I have seen that the two worlds are one. It’s One that I seek, One that I contemplate, One that I call in. It is the first, it is the last, the most exterior and the most interior. I know nothing outside “Oh, You”, or “Oh, You that Are” I am drunk from drinking the cup of love, the worlds have disappeared from my eyes. I have no other business than the banquet of the spirit and the wild drunkenness. If only one instant of my life have I spent without you, from this hour and this moment I want to be sorry for my life. If I can gain in this life just an instant with you, I will trample under my feet the two worlds, dancing in triumph for the eternity.”  

                       Rumi, Diwan – my translation after Jack Brosse’s original translation – Le Livre des Sagesses, p 1584

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Out of Depression – Time to Start Swimming

I have been through a number of blogs that are dear to me, here and in other places – and I cannot remain unsympathetic to those who share stories that are so similar to mine. I’ve been through years of depression more than I can count my years without it, but it’s long buried now and (almost?) forgotten.

From what I have seen in my own life-story and in people far and near me, to overcome depression and neurosis, a “bilateral approach” is needed: self-effort firstly, and only secondarily specialist’s assistance (which I didn’t get in my own situation – or, shall I say, my only specialist was my Indian Sadhguru?). It is extremely hard though, to face it or undertake it alone, while it is also true that nobody else can do the work for you – not any one person, not any one medicine, etc. What I mean is that you will need years of sustained self-effort in order to realize that the strength that you crave for, the balance and serenity that you crave for, the self-worth that you crave for, the validation from others that you crave for – and, above all, access power and realize FREEDOM,  are already there within you as a given: you are born with all that (it took me years of practicing a specific aspect of yoga). If you cannot see that yet, is because the veil of dust over your eyes has been accumulating thick along your life, and cemented already (with me, it was). This is why you’ll have to accept to die, allow your ego to shatter into a myriad pieces, in order that your Self may get space and be born. Without this key requirement – accepting your ego’s death – you risk, at best, to remain for the rest of your life dependent on your psychoanalyst, medication, etc. Additionally, you may think that you need support, love, comprehension from others, just to make it easier on you – but, trust me, sugar-coating a bitter pill is not absolutely necessary. The journey is not so easy – but it’s the journey of your life, the only one worth taking. For the while. Cause it’ll take you to another, more worth-wile than the one before.

I’m 55 now. I used to believe that my life purpose is to be a good daughter; then a good student; then a good wife; then a good mother, in parallel with being a good employee. All these cards have fallen one by one like blown away by a gust of wind, to let me see that my only life purpose is be ME. If I don’t accept that, if I keep running after the common things of life, there is a higher authority UP THERE (I guess, my being a non-believer has considerably hindered my journey) that keeps calling me to order; and it’s hard… and it gets harder every time.

Only after all these years – I’ve been a slow learner – I finally think that I know why. What is increasingly evident to me is that I am a cowardly person, not daring to accept and show myself for who I really am in the deepest of my heart. I’m nothing of the things behind which I’m used to be hiding: I’m  not the daughter, I’m not the wife, I’m not the mother, I’m not the teacher. I’m Mirella. And I know that time has come for me to throw myself into the river of life (of a different level than my ordinary) an start swimming. Live behind the excuses, like: “I donno how to swim”; “I can’t swim! “I’m afraid of swimming”; I’m going to swim, yea, sure, but not now, later”; I’d rather not swim alone, I need co-swimmers”. Meanwhile, wave after wave keeps washing away the sand under my feet, while I keep grabbing a board, a twig, a pebble, a mole of sand, a leaf, a dried shell, just to keep clinging to the sand and not let myself being dragged into the water… eventually, I’ll have no other trick up my naked skin, than start swimming. Finish that memoir – in all honesty and artistry, say it out loud, say it all.

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Is 2+2 Always Four??

Having a vague suspicion that I may find one more confirmation to my theory: that things are never that axiomatic, I googled:  “mathematics [blank] is 2+2 always 4?”

After one or two clicks I understood that 2+2=5 is also right:

“As any self-respecting engineer would agree, 2+2 can sometimes yield 5, for large values of 2. 🙂 –  Lucian Jun 25 ’14 at 17:38”

Going into it a little bit more, to my amazement I find out that also 2+2 sometimes equals 1:

“In Z3 it is still true that 2+2=4, it just happens that 4=1 as well. –  Asaf Karagila Jun 25 ’14 at 17:41”

Now, I cannot pretend that I understood a thing as for why are these values: I’ll just tip my hat with British elegance and give credit to specialists. I remember though learning, a number of years ago, to add up 2 apples with two other apples, and my teacher insisted that I could not add up 2 oranges and 2 apples (unless I changed their name to “fruit”).

This, among many others, was part of my life baggage of axioms – we have an existential need for absolute truths and things that are immutable. Well, reality, it so turns out, is not that axiomatic, precise and immutable, and 21st century science begins to openly acknowledge it; but this applies to our personal experience as well as it applies to sciences. It has never before been so obvious that society and individual lives are in upheaval, with old norms, institutions and taboos overturned – and it seems that this is just the beginning.

Life experience puts us in contact with things, people and experiences only to bring us to see, sometimes with pain, sometimes with relief, that clinging too hard to fixed concepts is unrealistic, and we risk to break our necks in free fall through the void of our misconceptions if we don’t give up on heavy, rigid beliefs.

With the insights of quantum physics we find out that reality doesn’t really exist, that it is just a matter of our perception, as particles shift between wave and particle under the eye of the observer. I can see that light can be only wave and vibration, but it’s hard to conceive that physical matter can, too?? The commoner like me can only wonder: how come that light and matter can be at the same time both wave and particle?

Science nowadays is discovering things that were thought impossible or unacceptable only a short while ago. We were convinced that our skies show a fundamental “emptiness”, pointed here and there by stars and galaxies. Only a couple of years ago, in 2011 became public the most recent view that all what we see, distant and near planets, stars, galaxies and all, make up just 4.9 of our universe; the rest of it, and of which scientists had no idea that existed, is dark energy and dark matter (dark, meaning non-reactant to light, invisible) that constitute 95.1% of it all. Pretty  much unknown for scientific pride, who praises itself that it can send space missions outside the solar system.

So, what is mind, after all? The picture changes here, too, so that the firm belief that human mind is just a mechanism comparable to a computer is slowly shifting, as neurologists come ever closer to the understanding of the mind as more than just brain: they start seeing soul also.

To bring just an example, Neuroscientist Christof Koch, chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, is as close to expressing his belief in an ensouled world as anyone could hope for: he thinks that consciousness is not dependent on brain only, but that it arises in any sufficiently complex, connected information-processing system – from cells, to worms, to animals and up to humans; this can be a scientifically refined version of ancient panpsychism – a philosophical doctrine asserting that all there is, it is part of the God-Mind, or Spirit. Of course mainstream science is not yet ready to acknowledge the existence of a Universal Field of Consciousness, but I can see that it is slowly getting there.

For this, and many other reasons too, I began doubting that the world is just the one described by the science that I have studied at school, as I learned to doubt that 2+2=4; at least I know that it doesn’t always hold.

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You and I Are More Alike Than You Think – “In our quest for security, it turns out we all think alike. “

Security Blanket – the image above shows a quilt digitally printed with most frequently used passwords.This word cloud represents a thousand of the most common passwords for a social application and gaming website called RockYou.

( The illustration is by LORRIE FAITH CRANOR, from CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY – “In our quest for security, it turns out we all think alike. “, says Lorrie) 

“Oh, no! Another password!” Does this happen to you when for the millionth time you are being asked to change or register somewhere with a new password?? Well, it does happen invariably to me – because I have to think one more time of a smart sequence of letters (and numbers) that I’ll have to remember when asked again, maybe in a few years’ time. But chances are that I’m giving myself all the trouble for nothing: whether I think a lot or just a little, my password is very likely to look similar or be identical to the one you thought about.

 

The story of this image  began with the hackers who stole information and passwords from the site in 2009 and published a subset on the Internet. In 2013, researcher Lorrie Faith Cranor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, decided to randomly analyze one thousand of the 32 million users’ passwords hacked from the site, to see which ones were the most common.
The results are digitally printed on this quilt – the more prominent, the most frequently used, like “123456”. I must admit, though, that these too simple ideas of passwords may have been common during the more “primitive” years of networking, while they are way less these days. However, this is just a simple example of how, in matters of things of everyday life, we share common patterns of thought in our choices, likes and dislikes – and industries like advertising and marketing know how to put it to good use.

It is known by “magicians”, especially by mentalists – a great number of their guesses (you know, when they ask you to think of a number between 1 – 100.., etc, etc,) are based on this particularity – or, rather, “generality” that we share.

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Have You Ever Wondered? This Writing Here, Has Originated Here: Neuron Lacework

 

What I am writing right now originates in some “sparks” between my neurons that are happening right under my skull.

 

 

Here the connections are denser (not in my brain, I should say )

neurons1

 

 

And this is what we do right now, networking across the planet – is there any similarity?

Whether you are blogging – writing about food, or art, about picking flowers, or about the twenty ways to cut your nails, or  you are tweeting, or facebooking, or contacting a client, or a lover, or posting a scientific article, or sending a CV, with each action you create lines that criss-cross the planet. Maybe that Mind has been continuously creating connections and evolved the individual brain to arrive today at this collective brain – what makes today a Global Mind.

 

 

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New Year – The Myth of Eternal Return 2 It’s Been A Rough Year

(this is the second part from the Larger theme New Year’s Myth of Eternal Return)

Like the E Coyote in Fast and Furry –ous, I, ever mindless of the anvils dropping on my head, cannot but turn it all into a questioning of the why of it all – what is the underlying meaning. It is not hard to notice that I am not the only one targeted these past few years – just watching the news on any channel in any possible country around the world brings enough evidence. Hardship, mishappenings, disruption and undoing seem to be the share of almost anyone, high and low, and difficulties seem to pile up over the heads of the famous and of the anonymous, of the wimp and the zilch and of the unaware. I cannot miss seeing that, wherever there is repetition, there is pattern, and, precisely because I choose to be a rational being and never insult my intelligence, I cannot allow myself to dismiss as just coincidences the things that show some hidden meaning.
It is the things that I see happening around me, around others and around the world that force me to admit that there is a plan in the adversity that makes us reach out, and, like Job, give out a loud cry: “Why, God, why me??” While I am not religious myself, I can’t understand the why of all this rage that atheists show against religion (but I can understand anyone’s stand against religious fanaticism). Sometimes it becomes so passionate that I ask myself, would’t this be the jealousy of the “don’t have’s” in confronts with those who have it? I, personally, have tried hard – but really hard – and yet haven’t arrived there, at the faith of Job, or at least up to the faith of my grandparents.

 

I have always envied those with a steadfast belief in God, whatever the religion – this makes their lives so much easier: in whatever enterprise we take, (and life is by far our biggest and longest) the whole difference between meeting with success or with total failure is that of knowing the rules, how to act and how to play – and, maybe, having some idea of the why of it all. It is this core belief, or knowledge of his God, which, undoubtedly, helped Job. It helped my grandparents all the same. It helped my grandfather cope with being dispossessed by the communists of all his property and assets he had inherited and accumulated along the sixty years of hard work; it helped him cope with authorities’scorn and with the humiliations against himself and his family, and, later on, when he was eighty, with the loss of his unique son in a car accident, and, along his ninety-something years of age, the list is endless.

 

It helped my grandmother – the most recent example I can remember of was when a fire started at a major electricity pillar a few hundred meters down her home – with all the commotion from the fire-fighters’ intervention and the panicked people, she just held her calm, never rising her eyes off her Bible. When we asked her how come, she just said that nothing is more important to listen to than the words of God.
For much thinking and trying to find some meaning, I can see how my grandparents and all those people who have faith find in it the spinal bone that keeps them standing. For them, life has meaning and has purpose, all like it did for Job,for whom this explanation was good enough: God has tried him and “performed” “what is attended for him”, because “affliction doesn’t just sprout out from the dust and the ground”, but “there is a purpose for it”. The parable is intended for us all, believers or non-believers, no doubt; its sense is that there is purpose in exploring life, particularly if we probe into hardship, that it is good for our own sublimation, in order for us to “come forth like gold”, that is, pure and shiny, essential and noble.
Easier said than done – I am not made of the hero stuff. What’s more, as I don’t live in Job’s days, I have a crave for things to be rational and to appeal to my logical mind. I guess my need for rationality started long ago, with that unanswered question that my grandfather, “the man who knew everything”, left unanswered.
As I was his first grandchild and we got to spend lots of time together, he felt it was his duty to teach me the things of the heaven and of the world; he taught me about God, the saints, and, from his religious-structured worldview, he resumed to me the universe : “God made us and everything there is”, he told me.

But this only left me thinking: who made God, then? And his answer was that these are the greatest mysteries of the world and that I shouldn’t try to go there. But, without my knowing, I did – or, rather, it was life that took me there – this chaotic life that makes no sense, apparently.

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New Year – The Myth of Eternal Return – 2014, One of Those Years…

New Year’s Myth of Eternal Return This is intended as a series of posts grouped around the idea of the New Year as a theme for cyclic change; in tackling this theme, I relate to famous religious and mythology scholar Mircea Eliade’s work on showing how traditionally, man has found meaning and strength in his relation with the sacred, higher dimension to life – man is not an accident, but his  existence wobbling in between chaos and order is sending ripples and impresses, affects the cosmos. Having forgotten this seems to be modern man’s “capital sin” – from here, the overly materialistic and technologized world without humanity of our days is throwing us into personal distress and social chaos – we live in the best of times ever, but depression and neurosis have never been so high.

Starting from a series of personal, real-life events, I intend to go deeper into the “why” and the “what for” of it all – without sense and meaning life would lack the salt and the pepper that keep us going…

(1) A Farewell to 2014 – It’s Been A Rough Year…

Two days to go – ugh, what a year it has been! It started with my grandmother’s death on April 11, the day of the 77th anniversary of her first-born son (my dad) – and what a gift it was to my dad from his mother! Then, on May 11, his name day, Sts *Constantine and Helena my father was taken to the hospital with a serious CVA – the next day he was to be diagnosed with lung and colon tumor and metastases.

Then it was my turn for a birthday gift: he passed away on Juy 13, two days after my anniversary. The next month my husband had a car crash that smashed two concrete light poles and tumbled the bullet-proof concrete cabin (used as a shelter for the army) some five meter away, and we had to gratefully take whatever remained of the car to the junkyard.  The very next day, exactly thirty-one hours later, at two in the morning, a phone call woke me up: my son crashed our other car on a 12m-high bridge; I went right on and felt quite elated when I saw that the side next-to the driver was totally crushed, but his side has managed to remain somehow whole. The only difference between remaining on that bridge and plummeting the 12 meters down were those last two enduring bars of the side fence, only 2cm-width each that remained in place at the point of collision.

Then my brother got a divorce, then my daughter. This one came just in: breaking news at Christmas. Now, I know I only have two choices: I can remain in those moments, or I can take them as facts of life and move on. I can choose to rationalize: my grandmother was 98, she left behind eight children, and a good number of grandchildren and grand-grandchildren spread all-around the world. I could also consider how she had good reasons to be proud of all of them, when she suddenly chose to go.

But hard as I try, my mind says (shaking its head): “Nahaa, not so fast!” when it comes to my father.  Already five month have passed by, but it still hurts . .. ughh… That’s why, I’m thinking that the best medicine I know of is letting it out, sharing the goods and the bads – so I intend to write down my impressions of our last month together (the only one, in fact, for the past thirty years) and share one of the hardest moments with which, sooner or later, life would want to confront us with.

About the other events, it’s somewhat “easier”. With the first accident, I lost a car, but I got to keep my husband –  whole and scathless. For the second, I’ve lost a few thousand dollars, but the Higher-Forum-Up-There decided that I deserved the immense favor to gift me with a safe, “not-even-scratched” son – for which I’m immensely grateful. What’s more, if I stare a little more into the bright side, it’ll become quite obvious that actually, things are more beautiful now than before, when I used to take them for granted in my life.

About my brother’s divorce – deep sigh – I’ll have to think that at times a separation is better than staying in sentenced for life. So, I guess, the same should be valid for my daughter too. And, secondly, it is because it hurts so much – I just realized that, by writing about it, I can work at and exorcise the pain.