musings by Donna Williams
Humans are so capable of manifesting magic, collectively and individually and investing in belief and I have been there for sure. They are also capable, if they are lucky of seeing the magic in the seemingly ‘mundane’… the ‘God’ in all things perhaps. Like the possum on the moon (I did a painting based on it actually and its fab!)
The pure rationalist can usually not see the magic perhaps, or maybe it is simply a different magic for them.
I am both the rationalist and the romantic, all about logic, and about art in life. This is what it is to be human for me. Yet I see many animals also have this. Perhaps even the blade of grass on its simplest level has the rational and the sensual response in a dance between internal and external realms of life.
I don’t need to seek a ‘purpose’ in life though I may have found myself within one, woken up to it, moved forward with it with or without struggle (perhaps both).
We eat the fresh block of cheese in the fridge merely because it is worth having, valueable, useful and useless to waste (feel free to translate if you are dairy free hee hee).
Life is the same. We live it because it is there, because we had no choice in being here, we were simply born, because we are something valuable, of worth, worth more than simply wasting our uniqueness or potential in whatever package we find that.
Death is the ending of neurons firing, of the brain receiving messages which is the essential source of experienceability. When it ceases, we have reached death and have ‘let go’. What we feel and experience, without neurons firing, without brain functioning without mind to translate or experience feelings, is the equivallent of being a concrete telegraph pole, we are still, nothings moving, nothing is relayed, nothing received. Such is death. Where we go is that we decompose and feed the earth, the worms, the trees and the nutrition we become is what we pass on along with the nostalgia so powerful in touching all left behind. It is this nostalgia that is our ghost, our soul and it is for others now to experience, not us, it is in their beliefs, their projections, their magicalisation and religion that we are now in heaven or hell or stuck or or or and that is made possible by them being alive and having firing neurons, with working brains and minds which can relay and translate, even exaggerate, and create rapture in nostalgia caused by feelings. When people ‘pick up’ experiences of the dead, they pick up this nostalgia hovering among the living and collectively this is perhaps someone’s ‘soul’, so the soul is not our possession at all. It exists in the world of those we leave behind.
I have no need for dogma or mainstream religions but I respect that others do. I am quite at peace with the idea that I will live either heaven or hell or be stuck in between and be remembered, imagined, projected by others into similar.
I feel no let down, no regret, no fear, no terror, that in death I will be mere tree food and the experience equivallent of being less than a telegraph pole.
I feel ok that I will not experience my own soul after death but that some sense of me will linger for those who have known or imagined or needed someone ‘like me’.
I feel ok that they may project me anywhere they like through their nostalgia or imagination for whatever reason or need that that may be and that collectively they may even gather and come to some cultural agreement where they think my ‘soul’ has gone or ‘lives’ etc.
For me I need no ‘purpose’ in life if I have motivation and movement.
If I progressively block the experience of life, I will embrace my ‘death’ instinct in extinguishing motivation and movement.
Then in this void, I will wonder ‘what is the purpose of life’.
I have chosen to chase life, not to extinguish it within myself.
For me, the only question about the gift of life is ‘did I waste it’
or did I spend my life dynamically, enjoying it as if I were devouring a fresh and wonderful cheese left in the fridge (ha ha the old days, but yes I don’t eat such cheese these days… so I find such things elsewhere) no matter what adventures, good or seemingly ‘bad’ came my way.
So is ‘God’ good or vengeful? Does ‘God’ condemn us or save us? Am I cursed or blessed? Will I go to hell if I am not baptised?
These questions exist in the frameworks of those with beliefs different to my own.
I expect no good or vengeful God, I face merely what life’s patterns bring and think, feel, react or move on in accordance with my own dance of life (which is perhaps a dance with ‘God’, the life force, within ourselves).
I expect no-one to save me and blame no-one for my feelings of being condemned to anything. It is for me to dance with this, come to terms with it, perhaps painfully adapt or handle my own stagnation if it comes to that, before deciding I wish instead to change and seize life in some new way however foreign or challenging that is. If life threw me the gauntlet it is up to me to ignore that or take up the challenge and live with the consequences of either choice.
I accept that I am cursed and blessed and that I would not appreciate light if I didn’t know what being in the dark was. Why would I judge such a privelege of knowing both in order to better appreciate each when for me it is merely ‘life’.
Will I go to hell if some scholar of religious books has not said some words driven by a culturally inherited OCD ritual passed down by superstitious people a few thousand years ago? Well, who knows, but I don’t feel the dinosaurs went to hell and they weren’t baptised either.
As a well known person, I have had many write to me offering me their religions, all of them offering me their prophet, telling me only theirs is the route to God and heaven and the saving of my soul. I respect them and their idealisation of their prophets and their God and I respect that they felt compelled to ‘give’ but to ‘give’ without controlling is merely to offer. To offer is to accept a persons right not to take.
Religion perhaps is for minds more conscious than mine (in my preconscious ramblings in which I have no awareness of thought till it hits the page but it seems to read fairly coherently after all these years of sleepwalking). I could take one on but perhaps forget it by next week or tomorrow. Instead I follow all I can, a sensed inner map, and navigate my world with as much religion as perhaps a horse or a bird or a tree, but surely more than a telegraph pole.
I recently had a book published called Not Just Anything with www.jkp.com for those who are interested in the musings of someone who lived on the edge, fell off but climbed back on a thread to join the rest of you, more or less.
Ever, the naughty Autie… Donna Williams…
www.donnawilliams.net