growingupintheuniverse-blog

[growingupintheuniverse-blog]

Dealing with Boredom

Other people will advise you to open your cell phone and check Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. They might equally ask you to turn on TV, listen to music, call a friend or go for a walk. These things might work for you, if they are novel and not routine in your life. However, if you have been doing theose activities and I can bet that you have, odds are that your mind will still be bored after those activities. So what is the solution?

Bungee jumping, Packing for an unexpected trip to a city nearby. Getting lost in your own town. What are the common elements of these experiences? Not knowing the results - a characteristic which will bring back anticipation and probably surprise to your life. You can start with that. Do things which are outside your comfort zone and which very often lead to surprises and unexpected results. 

The second way to deal with boredom which is probably cheaper but more dfficult to do is to stay with your boredom without doing anything in particular. This will prove to be extremely difficult at certain moments but it is a more profound way compared to mere escapism above. When you stay with your feelings of boredom, they will gradually change and melt into calm, happiness or simple joy . 

A third way of dealing with boredom is mere acceptance of it as another human feeling. You can accept it as you accept happness, pride, excitement, fulfilment, etc as a human emotion. You never desire to change your positive feelings . The same goes with your less than desirable feeling of boredom. It is a state of mind and like any other state of mind, it would change and give its place to other forthcoming feelings. Once you accept boredom as a human feeling, you will have no further problem with it. Problem solved.. 

[growingupintheuniverse-blog]

Change and rhythm

Everyday the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. That's how the day begins and ends. And it is followed by night and a starry sky. Then the sun rises again and thus the cycle of day and night continues. The succession of the day and night has been going on since the Earth formed and it will last until there is no Earth here anymore. It is one seemingly eternal rhythm made up of distinct notes: one bright, the other dark. And while certain areas of the Earth do not experience this continuous beat, the majority does.

And yet no single day and no single night has been the same. Each of them has been unique and never to be repeated. Each counted as a stage in the lengthy lives of the Sun and the Earth. As the Sun lives out its life and as the Earth continues rotating around it and itself, the clock has been ticking for both. The sun is not the same sun as the day before and neither is the Earth. But since the span of change is unimaginably vast and the changes are extremely gradual to our senses, it gives an impression of stability. In other words, gradual changes spread over vast time spans create the illusion of stability.

Change and rhythm, however, are not confined to the celestial events. On our own planet, the original rhythm of sunrise and sunset, the day and the night have created a subsequent rhythm and regularity. Many animals, including ourselves, go through constant cycles of awakening and sleep. They spend either the day or the night sleeping and going about the business of living on the other half. This has created a certain beat to the life: it's a repeated cycle and many animals go through these cycles living out their lives.

In some parts of the world, we have the rhythm of succeeding seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring again. This music of four major notes has in itself created a wider variety of rhythms among animals. Consider the mating season for instance: many animals mate in spring when the food resources become plenty and survival pressure of eating and staying alive subsides increasingly so that there is time to be spent for mating. Or consider the migration and the hibernation.

From the rhythms of the Sun and the Earth, life acquires it own rhythm and that's why repetition is built into it. Hunting, eating, sleeping, mating, migrating, hibernating and everything else has its own specific time and place. Cycles are created and continued and that's how we get change, rhythm and continuity in the world of flora and fauna.

In our own more intimate world of human life, we not only have biological rhythms but also the cultural ones. We have cycles of weeks, months and years. We don't go to work on one Sunday and then stay home on the next. Our lives are spread out in rather neat succession of weeks and months. On this bedrock of continuity and cyclical time, we put down our own unique events and celebrations. Our baptism, our marriage, the birth of our kids, etc. Soon these events are also merged into a rhythmical pattern with the anniversaries we hold year after year.

And this is perhaps where this text intersects with the last one on boredom. Boredom is created when life becomes synonymous with a boring, monotonous repetition. We get bored of going to work day after day doing the same chores. We get bored of wearing the same clothes week after week. We get bored of meeting the same people everyday. Whenever the changes are imperceptible and we are exposed to the same events, people or things on a daily basis, boredom is born. Boredom is the mind's cringe for novelty; the desire for something novel and unprecedented.

I will talk about dealing with boredom on the next post.

[growingupintheuniverse-blog]

Boredom

Boredom in our own time and age might be thought of as a ridiculous topic. The advent of the internet, computer games, sophisticated mobile phones and TV create all types of escape from the routine. Just turn on the TV and you can channel-hop the whole night. The options sound endless. There are so many different channels for every taste : comedies, news, debates, travel, history, science, biography, space, westerns, sci-fi, shopping, weather, learning,  etc. And as if something were missing, we now have Netflix - a new type of TV. The internet is a whole new game in the town: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Online chat rooms, YouTube, Reddit as well the new online games niche. Add to this the myriad apps we can install on our cell phones not to be bored while commuting.

So why am I writing about boredom? Basically, because all the entertainment industry above has not managed to efface it. It's still there and pretty common actually. We can have all the fun programmes on screens that we want but we don't feel fully satisfied. Our minds become accustomed to the level of entertainment it receives and always craves for more. It becomes similar to an addiction. The former level of excitement does not satisfy our minds and it needs something above and beyond that. Just like the same amount of alcohol consumption or drug use is not enough to satisfy us. That level becomes a given for us and does not excite us any more. Gradually, it rolls into something routine and commonplace and before we know it, we are already bored with it.

And what do we do when we get bored? We turn on the TV again, watch something mindless on YouTube, read haphazard Twitters and go through our mail, in the futile hopes that we can get something satisfying out of that. But the end result is being interested for a short while before getting bored again. We get trapped in a never-ending re-cycle of these sources of entertainment.

What is the cure? Where do we turn to? Religion has been a source of meaning and purpose for countless past generations. People were born with it, grew up with it and died with it. Baptism, marriage vows and funerals were the hallmarks of religious lives. And these were not merely empty rituals;  people firmly believed in them. They seriously thought that the rituals brought along blessings for them and their joy, solace and comfort depended a lot on their belief in religion. For the past 500 years or so, however, the Western world has seen a gradual decline in the importance and significance of Christianity and along with it of religion in general. These days the majority of people do not take religion very seriously. Look around yourself and you have to try hard before finding a person who is practically spending his days for a blissful afterlife. Few people attend Sunday ceremonies and fewer people study the Bible on a daily basis.

However, even though religion has been fading all along the way, the issue of meaning and purpose in human life has not. We still desperately yearn for it.  Fredrick Nietzsche once said : "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." That's the missing part of our puzzle. We have lost the whys in our lives. Sheer fun cannot replace it. Going to cinema, watching games, drinking beer, using drugs, getting hook-ups cannot replace that essential part of our lives.

Fun has its own place, of course, in a balanced life. However, life cannot be all about fun nor can it be a mere succession of job and leisure without any overarching aim. We get bored down to a cog in the machine, a mindless part of a soul-less system. We need a why and purpose to give an orientation to our life because instead of a 9 to 5 job, we need a vocation. Instead of intoxicants, we need books to awaken us. Instead of mere surviving, we need thriving. We need to find ourselves noble purposes for our lives. We need to find something more than having fun because purposeful lives don't have much room or space for boredom. 

Think of the lives of any one with a burning purpose in his or her life. Examples could include Mahatma Ghandi, Albert Einstein, Leo Tolstoy, Dr. Luther King or Leonardo Da Vinci. All these people had devoted their lives to one single overarching aim: social reform, understanding the cosmos, inventions, etc. Do you think there was much space left for boredom in a life of Da Vinci for instance? Definitely no. There is room for frustration, sadness, failure and many other negative feelings. But such people are never bored because they are living to achieve an aim and every single moment is devoted to the pursuit of such an aim.

What could be one single aim to devote your whole life to?

[growingupintheuniverse-blog]

Human Zoo

People often go to zoos and watch the animals in cages or behind the fences with fascination. They are interested in how animals look and how they behave. They look carefully and with curiosity at the particular behaviours of each of them, trying to understand how they eat food, sleep, interact with other animsla and among themselves. 

That’s a pleasant and rewarding experience. Most people have and continue to put a lot of faith in the cage or the fence though. They think animals and humans are totally different creatures. One created by the almighty and the rest for him. Strange reasoning yet widespread. 

Today, we can know better. We know that we are merely another animal on this planet, having no significant place or position. We are a bipedal ape with rather larger brains, tool usage and a symbolic language. In this we are unique as every single other animal is unique in its own way.

Next time, you go to a zoo, don’t think you only are looking at the other animals. Other animalsl are looking at you too.And while you may think that you live outside the zoo, the fact is you have been living in one all your life. It is merely a human zoo. In that sense, the whole planet is nothing but a gigantic zoo. 

[growingupintheuniverse-blog]

Toronto

Bad surprise of 

1950s buildings and broken down streetcars

heralded as modern and ultra-fast 

***

Black and white and yellow and in-between 

Babbling in so many different tongues 

Living a very “normal” life

***

Developed world as it is 

Its streets host the homeless

and countless beggars

***

Among its many gifts:

Stress, competition and body management 

[growingupintheuniverse-blog]

A letter from the future

23 Aos 19

I found this book in the basement of the library. Its cover was like this:

I took a look at it. It talked about strange times and people. I remember one of them: Reanissance. There were also drawings and photos but I did not know them at all. I wonder if this writer was inventing something new in his fiction. The writer is strange because he mentions many historical things but I think he has just gone insane because they were not in our history books. His dates are weird: 1853 or for instance 1775. We don't have these dates. We are now living in the year 19. I think that only confirms that this is a work of fiction. Our history starts with The Grand Experiment and that's it. People are there and no one knows how it happened. It perhaps happened in a lab because people are born there.

I don't know what to do with the book. Perhaps I just show it to OLIVIER. He is very interested in anything new or special. It can take a look at the book and then perhaps take some photos of it and tell me more. OLIVIER knows a lot of things. He might be able to explain this book to me. He is now in the kitchen. Of course, he does not eat anything but he often prepares the lunch for me. Today, I will probably have some water and potatoes as it is Linsday. Yesterday, it was eggs. And the day before it, it was ....hmmm....I forgot it. I have to ask OLIVIER. Funny thing, he always knows what to prepare for me and it is always delicious without ever asking me.

OLIVIER might just take a look and give it to GSA. They know these things much better than we do. It's perhaps the second time that something is found like this. Unusual, bizarre and strange. I have heard that there are other races in the sky who might do these things. Perhaps one of them wrote this and then left it here on the Earth. Very exciting. In this case, this must be very precious. I must keep it or at least sell it.

[growingupintheuniverse-blog]

Mental Blind Spots

Take a look at this picture below: 

Now cover your left eye and look at the dot. Move back and forth towards the monitor and you will see that at a certain distance, the plus signs disappears as if it is not there at all. Now at that distance, cover your right eye and look at the plus sign and you will discover that you cannot see the dot either. This is your blind spot: at a certain distance, you simply cannot see what is there. This is called the blind spot. 

Many people are already familiar with this interesting phenomenon. However, few people might know what I term “Mental Blind Spots”. These are actual phenomena that exist around us but we either do not see or do not want to see due to the discourses we have accepted. in other words, we are blind to some real things out there because we think in a certain way. 

  One vivid example of such mental blind spot concerns this fundamental question: Are we an animal? Go out and ask any guy on the street and he or she will look back with anger or astonishment should you ask them this question. However, if you check any biology book, the answer is already clear: We are indeed an animal, nothing more and nothing less. This has been clear since decades ago with its major underpinning going all the way to Charles Darwin. And yet, we don’t want to see ourselves as animals. The evidence is all there and yet we run around blind in a weird vista of imaginary beings populated by angels, demons, spirits and how are related to them through strange stories. 

Another important and related example is our connectedness with other animals. DNA analysis leaves no doubt that we are connected in a grand tree of life to every other creature on this planet. Yet we think of ourselves as having a special place and the other animals as being inferior to us. The roots of this view go back to the idea of the Great Chain of Being in the medieval times. However, the great majority of people still follow this wrong idea which is the basis of our specism and much of our cruelty towards other animals. We don’t want to see other animals having the same rights to life and liberty as we do. 

A third blind spot we entertain is that Earth is our only home. We don’t see this as a fact in our face. We probably think there is somewhere else can we can move to soon. Wishful thinking for the foreseeable future. We are polluting our Earth at an astonishing speed, bringing so many of other species to the edge of extinction and creating countless crises for our own on the way. On our highway towards our doom, we run blind around forgetting that there is nowhere else we can live and breathe. Earth is all we have. There is no second home for us out there. May we open our eyes in order to cherish and preserve it. 

[growingupintheuniverse-blog]

Drinking Tea

I sit down at my table

And I take the warm cup of tea

It’s cold outside - as cold as it could be 

And I look at my tea

Brown, sensuous whirlpool 

And outside - a car goes by and a 

woman walks nigh

And a cat meows and a dog barks

And a cloud stops high

And the winds blow

As the planet cycles around the Sun

with all its oceans and mountains

And the comets whizz about

And the stars are born and die

As the galaxies turn around

Milky Way, Andromeda and BILLIONS of others

I am lost in the cosmos

But somewhere, somehow I am 

Sitting at a table drinking tea in the universe

Knowing that we share the same origin and destiny

But it happened to be tea and I happened to be me

[growingupintheuniverse-blog]

Contemporary Man and the Screens

Walk about any major megapolis in our world ( whether it is NYC or Bangkok) and you will not fail to notice the vast number of people looking at a screen. That screen could be their laptops, mobile phones or the old TV. Walk in a Starbucks and you see people glued to their screens, oblivious to what passes around them. Some of them are  listening to music with their earphones as well. You drink your coffee, people barely notice you and you step outside. On your way to the subway, you look around and most people are walking and checking their smartphones : either playing games, texting, listening to music or browsing in addition to talking to their friends on their phone.  You step into the train and it is the same scenario: people interacting with their phones. You arrive home and your mates are watching something on TV or their PC.

Screens are becoming omnipresent. And the new image of man in the developed world is the one looking at a screen. The screens inform us about the world when we are reading a news website for instance. They entertain us as we watch a video. And we use them to interact with other people. In one way or another, screens are satisfying some of the needs that were formerly met through interaction with other humans. Gossip, jokes and verbal communication were our older ways of meeting the same needs. What is happening as our human interaction is decreasing and we are more and more interacting with screens?

Well, one no brainer is that we are getting isolated from each other and that is fairly easy to see. As we look at screens and interact with them, we are not any more interacting with other human beings around us. The natural consequence is that they are getting a bigger portion of our time and attention. We understand machines much better than the humans. We become accustomed to a linear relationship rather than the rich, multifaceted and at times delicate shades of human interaction. Our minds on the screen get bored down into  logical, algorithmical relationships which are often predictable. The maze of human interaction would be more difficult to navigate successfully; our expectation of human interaction less realistic and our understanding of  people's reactions less solid. We yearn to return back to our simple-minded machines which in effect creates a loop.

Push the "enter" button on your keyboard or tap an icon on your smartphone. It always obeys you. If it does not, it needs some type of repair. Screens and machines obey us. They never retort or disobey you and our mega screen time simply makes us very much accustomed to being in charge: to ordering and being accepted and obeyed. It's such a good feeling to have the control of everything in any interaction and screen interaction provides us just that. Being in control is satisfying. And this creates an illusion: that we are indeed in control of the other situations where in fact we are not dealing with machines but with real, living people. This illusion can be really dangerous as people might take up a grandiose vision of themselves as being masters of their other interactions along with having the right to be obeyed.

The third consequence is that human interaction satisfies our needs of belonging, self-expression, being understood as well as blooming of emotions such as empathy, love, tenderness and so many others. Interaction with a screen barely satisfies those deep needs. Yes, we can join groups online, we can exchange ideas and emotions, we can fall in love with others who use internet, for instance. But that can never replace the human presence. As biological beings, caressing, kisses, hugs touch us at a core level and lack of all this despite having a relationship with another person leave us drained and lacking energy in the long run.

More self-entitlement, less empathy with our fellow human beings, being more attuned to using machines, and further space among ourselves are some of the results of our increasing screen time to be seen in future.