happiness, an answer to the riddle

You ask my definition of reality? Well, in that case...

...Reality is everything that we are afraid to question.

I've gotten some great responses and questions to continue our conversation, but first would like to try to talk about my adventures in the Cinque Terre and Viareggio, with a little deja vu and a Senegalese friend I never knew I had (but should've).

So before going off and camping in the Cinque Terre I went to the grandmother's house of one of the Italian families. Easter lunch was on the menu: tortellini in broth as well as a salted bread, both Tuscan traditions, artichokes, lamb, salad, and chocolate. Before this however we were introducing ourselves while entering the beautiful apartment on the east side of the city. Hand shakes, hugs, "nice to meet you"s, the like. All real but none more than when I met Semi.

Just an ordinary man from Senegal, 23 like me, but there was an instant friendship between the two of us, something that was there, or maybe it was that we understood each other instantly. He spoke very few Italian words, and my French isn't up to par, so he mostly said "americano" and I mostly said "si". One of the most humblest people I've ever met, and I only met him for a few hours. What was even better was the hand shake as I left, as if we had known each other for years, had practiced for days, it all flowed, it all made sense. The look in his eyes, pure friendship before we knew each others names.

I don't really know how else to explain it, the whole lunch was spectacular, hanging out with a family and feeling a part of it, the language barrier almost non-existent.

In the afternoon I took a train to meet some friends in Portovenere near La Spezia in Liguria (yahoo maps will help). The first night I had to hike to them, as they had found a spot off of a dirt road to camp. Walking in the dark is scary, and walking uphill with a backpack full of rice is equally as challenging. But the stars helped, and the darkness was relatively soft and subtle, except every so often rock shadows appear to be panthers.

The next two days we camped wherever we ended up when the sun was close to setting. 26 kilometers by the time we left, with Monterosso and the beach our welcoming party. We took the train back to Florence, gather all of our stuff, and went home for the night.

The following day would have been lost if it wasn't for another friend in Viareggio. Last minute decisions meant back on the train to go back to a place we had been before. More lounging on the beach, taking in the sun, living the dream. But the train was strange. After only a half hour I got the feeling that we were still camping, that we hadn't gone back and slept in a real bed, the days turning into one, time coming together. Someone else, this time in the form of anxiety. Kept looking at the sign, at the door, trying to find our way, where we are, where we were, what was happening in that train car. "We've been here before!" And I echoed the thought with my own voice, as I turned around to see the same graffiti on the same advertisement. There had to be hundreds, but the graffiti was exact. "And there's Tony's water bottle!"

Sitting on top where bags are held, I had thought that I had brought it with me back home and had left it there, but it rested with still water in it, and that was when we all stared losing our minds.

We had to run to the train, a different track, a different day, a different time, a different space. We entered and then walked through 2-3 cars in order to find 3 seats, and when we did we sat down, paying attention to nothing. It just so happened that we were on the exact same car in the exact same seats as we were the day before, coming back from Cinque Terre, as we were now going to Viareggio. A coincidence? A very rare one indeed, we were caught between realities. We travelled through time and our brains and bodies knew it before we did!

I think it would now be a good time to continue with a rather dense and maybe even mystifying train of thought. But before that I wanted to reiterate what I thought about thought a few moments ago. It can be a form of mental manipulation of everything that we experience, collectively, as a group. This could also be a good definition of existence if we need that to be cut and dry. Our brains have the ability to group and cross reference loads of information at the same time, and I understand this as having the capacity to link all that we experience into something, maybe a circle, maybe this idea of one from many, the relationship that they have for each other (as they both are the master and the slave). More doors are opened then closed, but it's a nice place to pass by on any journey.

Freedom, from my understanding before I wrote my last email, was a sense of mental freedom from ourselves and what we think. A task of trying to break down the barriers that force us to control thought, classifications that take away from our ability to make things interact. And I saw what I was doing with this blog and these emails: trying to liberate myself from myself, trying to understand what it means to understand. Trying as hard as I could to stop thinking and stop acting the way I learn to through the use of language, ideas, and people. I don't want to sever myself, but I want to be able to realize the conditions and try to understand why I think and why I do, or why I think I do. To me ideas are powerful before they are powerless, but at the same time this power has to be taken from somewhere, has to be created, not from nothing, but from the mental manipulation of what we experience, that is to say, by thought.

So we have this thought that manipulates itself. That makes me want to bounce up and down, jumping for joy. What in the hell does that mean? Does it have to have a meaning? Do we have to put it in a box and label it and keep it from other boxes that don't look like it? I surely don't think so and get the strange feeling that I am repeating myself with different words at a different time in a different place, but if that is true then all these places and all these times are connected, from the way that I think, and that wouldn't make them different. This tells me that these subdivisions don't exist, at least not in my reality because I question them all the time. Maybe I don't want them to exist, but I find that I am much more susceptible to progressing my capacity to think when I argue with myself, strengthening those points that have strong foundations and changing those that don't. Most of them, if not all of them, don't stand the test of questioning. Which is why I think we can be afraid to do it. We don't want our realities to go away, we don't want what we think is true to not be true, so we hold on to our ideas as tightly as possible not realizing that we are keeping other ones from going through us, from passing into our brains and being changed by us. Not to say that this is a constant but rather continuous. My brain tells me it's the same thing. But only at the same moment, which would be all moments. And now I'm more confused as ever, and that makes me happy.

We create to understand, that's what I said. We take what we live, what we think we have, and we make something out of it. We call it nature, we say it does this and this, we continue to observe it and therefore trust both our observations as well as our capacity to observe, another duality if you will (even though it doesn't have to be that way). So we don't understand the universe. So we create subjects, a beautiful tool called language, from which stems many things. We change this language and make other subjects, subjects from subjects, ideas, from ideas, spinning our web to try to encompass this universe that we defined before we knew what it was. I am arguing that we have to define it in order to begin to understand it, discussing the object and not the subject, much like Plato's cave, much like I felt a long time ago writing an email just like this one.

We manipulate our creations in order to understand, and we do this by thinking. Simply by thinking. That's the change, that's the constant. Does it have to always be there? Are we always thinking? What is thinking? The circle continues...

We study the end result, forgetting the process (I see life as a process and not as an end result). We understand the end, not the beginning, and everything in between? Where does it go?

We can't separate ourselves from our ideas, this one we have nailed to the ground. We are our ideas, it's all we have: thought. Our thoughts aren't independent because they need an inspiration, something that happens with the cross grouping our brains to when they are thinking. Could thinking be a way for our brains to relax from trying to survive? Do we have to think to survive? Can we survive without thinking? What's survival? Surviving what? Because we don't live forever, for as much as we can define life and death. So what's the point? Becoming children again? Forgetting all we learned because we don't like it? Do I not like what I know? Is that why I'm changing it? Maybe I'm looking for happiness and I see it in chaos.

Since nothing could be independent that would mean that nothing was free, in the mental sense. We have to define freedom in order to understand it, and we understand it by throwing words at it, a strategy. But the words change, and so does the definition, and I have a hard time understanding this change, even though it's a constant, that it is static. An idea that is always in flux is never in flux with respect to the concept, as the concept of continuous change never changes. Thanks, I needed that.

I don't want to control my thoughts with abstract ones, I want to free myself from myself, I want to be happy. I want to release all the programs that I downloaded, I don't want to be a machine anymore, I want to be an animal. I want to walk I want to dream, I want to survive by thinking, by writing, by confusing myself, by making my circle as big as I can. Pi stays the same, the concept grows, and for me this means that it doesn't get bigger, but rather that it gets stronger. Stronger to be able to let things go, to be able to float, float in space. Isn't that it? Isn't that the answer to our question of the universe? Floating in space, mass, a thing. An idea in one word: universe.

-Anthony