Arrogance of power

Who do not want power?  Juan de la Cruz?  Priests?  Politicians?

Juan de la Cruz wants power desperately.  He has suffered injustices for so long.  He could not even eat three times a day much more send his children to school. With power, his woes would be over.

The hierarchy of power in the Catholic Church, and other religions are very elaborate.  Subordinates are directed to observe blind obedience to the superiors.  After all, the superiors are held to be the vicars of Christ. Power is wielded so the apostolate may be propagated.

Politicians occupy positions of power.  They hold the reigns of the government.  With millions of constituents under them, they need the awesome and vast state powers so the common good may be promoted.

Power per se is not wrong.  Without it, there can be no control, no peace and order in the world, and even in the universe.  Can you imagine what happens to the cosmos if the fallen angel Lucifer were as powerful as God?

The problem sets in when there is disconnect between the ideal and reality.  This is particularly of strong significance in case of politicians because they wield the vast resources of the state.  Corporations may fall; religious sects may fold up.  But their effects are not as pernicious as the failure of politicians.

When politicians fall, and wield power in a manner diametrically opposed to its avowed purpose, the mayhem it will cause to the people multiplies a thousand fold; it is even exponential.  The people suffer physically and spiritually. With wrong exercise of power, people get hungry and illiterate, and their freedoms curtailed.

By virtue of the command of politicians over the multitude of citizens, they can easily play god over the plight and fate of so many people. The trouble with this is that the more they exercise power, the more they think that they hold the destinies of people, and the more they delude themselves of being gods.

Politicians who go beyond the threshold of powerful leaders to being demigods do with delusions that they are already indestructible, that no opposition can stop their further ascent to power, and of perpetuating their grip over it. This is a psychological threshold that not only wreaks havoc over the nation but over the person himself.

We have witnessed in history men who have deluded themselves to be demigods that they led with seeming impunity. It is history too that proved that as long as these leaders are still made of flesh and bone, they too have to suffer the penalties of their abuse.

Adolf Hitler. Benito Mussolini. Saddam Hussein. Joseph Stalin.  These are international figures that have fallen from the ivory tower of their delusions to the ashes of their destructions.

In the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos is too recent in our memory.  He usurped presidential and legislative powers, and ruled with seeming impunity for more than two decades.  He too, like the rest of his breed, had to suffer the humility of defeat and destruction.

Despite the historical lessons, people do not seem to learn, and still insist on threading the path where others have fallen.  Is it human nature to learn things when they experience personally the agony of failure? Or is it just like a child that has to burn his finger to learn that something is really hot which much be avoided?

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is a well-read person.  She does not hold a graduate degree in economics without a good reading of history.

But despite the historical lessons, she is showing the symptoms of arrogance of power.  Maybe her stay in the palace when her father was then president, and her own nine years stay there has pushed her to a psychological threshold when a leader thinks that whatever she does, nothing can stop her nor could she be held accountable for it.

History has shown that when this psychological threshold is reached, the leader is prone to commit stupendous blunders.  These are blunders which the people could not anymore take, and therefore, they have no option but to punish the leader.

President Arroyo may have to meditate deep and long whether her charter change moves amount to a psychological threshold of arrogance of power.

wishes she had: a child who chose to die

On November 9, 2007, in Davao City, Philippines, at the tender age of 11, little girl Mariannet Amper hanged herself with a nylon rope. Borne to parents whose mother earned only P25 a day packing noodles, or half a US $ dollar, and a father who is jobless, the little girl lived a life at the cellar even among the slum dwellers. In a slum area, her family was discriminated because they were unshaven, dirty, and poor even by the slum standards. Who ever said that even among the poor, there is no social ladder.

But the little girl did not die without a statement. Under her pillow was a diary and an unfinished letter she titled, “Wish ko lang”, which means “my wishes”. She wished for a bag, new shoes, and jobs for her parents so she could finish primary school. At a tender age, she knew that her only ticket away from the depravity of slum life is education. In her diary, she wrote she missed school because she had no money for the fare. She was absent so many times that her teacher stopped counting. Her passion for learning was evident when she said that being absent for a week felt she missed school already for months. Though she wanted to go to church, she could not because she had no money for the fare.

In life, she was nothing, but she had something that even death could not take away from her: her dreams, the dreams that she surely shared with the little children across the globe. How many children have been deprived of food, health, shelter, and education? Mariannet made sure that her death would open our eyes to the grinding poverty children have been exposed to.

The news shocked the senses. How could a little girl decide to hang herself? The children are supposed to be gay, playful, and unmindful of the troubles the parents have. If what were flashed in the news was the suicide of an adult, it would not have bothered us that much. But here was a child who was innocent and supposed to be insulated from the woes of the adult, all the while bearing the pains only the adults should carry, finally taking her life when she could not have P100 to buy materials for her school project.

Yes, she was finally buried. But she kept us shocked that we should be too calloused if her poignant statement about life among the poor children would not open our eyes.

evolving consciousness

 

Before daybreak today, I drove going to Camiguin, a one hour ride by car and another one hour ride by boat, for a court hearing. Just as last year, when days before the day I first saw the world, I have been in contemplative mood, pondering of the life I have lived and what remains of the earthly journey. In a word, I have this stream of consciousness that never fails to flash in my mind, as in a movie.

The age of reason is supposedly seven years old, when the child becomes self-aware of himself, of the outside world, when he starts to use his reasoning prowess – in a word, when the child slowly evolves into a man. As we look back, there is this realization that what we are now is strangely different when we were, say 7 years old. The way we look at the world, and relate to it, and to act in a community of men, is never the same each passing year. Somehow, our consciousness is not the same as that of last year. We simply change, hopefully for the better, but the reality is that, it is not always so.

The young tends, generally, to favor loud, metallic sounds, punk, or outright rock. Later in life, you realize that you could not anymore groove with the fast beat, when you tend to go cozy with the jazz or the classic.

From what source does the change spring? Is it the natural development of the brain, from childhood to adulthood, and the natural decay as man is nearing the grave, by age? Or is it the myriad of factors, like the people around you, the wares that you strut around, or the place where you hang around? Am I evolving alone, or my consciousness evolves with the collective psyche, with the universal man?

Friedrich Hegel said that the “mind” is evolving, and that this evolution determines how society in general is structured. Social structures are the product of a pure thought which in itself is evolving, and as it evolves, so does society. Karl Marx turned upside down Hegel’s concept when he said “ the economic superstructure determines consciousness”. Simply put, the way we structure our society, culturally and politically, depends on the kind of economy. Agriculture has feudalism; industry and trade have capitalism. The consciousness among the feudal lords and among the capitalists is drastically different from the proletariat. The rich reads the classical novels, the laborer in the hovel, the comics. The rich is concerned with the Victorian table manners; the poor, of immediately using the hand that feed the mouth. The rich lives above the clouds and therefore is conscious of the finer things in life; the poor toils the earth, and is therefore, conscious more of daily survival.

In my youth, Karl Marx never convinced me, and more now.

Yesterday, CNN reported about a scientist in London who is into hybrid animal-human stem cell research. Man, after having decoded the human gnome is now playing god. There may be serious ethical issues here but one fact cannot be disputed: science has evolved in quantum leaps. More than half a century ago, man reached the moon, later planet mars. The internet has drastically changed communication. But, after Darwin challenged the creation theory, the decoding of man’s gnome makes it possible the cloning of parts of the human body. The implications are far reaching.

If there is anything so pervasive and incessant an influence on man’s consciousness, science is it. It may be true that the economic structure determines consciousness, but the economy is determined by the progress of science. Mass production, telecommunication, planes, sky-rise building, internet, medicine, all these we owe to science. Name a field in science, and come to realize, how this field has changed our lifestyle, and the way we relate to the outside world. Before, we wrote love letters with our paper and pen, now we just email it. Even in rigid countries such as Iran, the cable table and internet and constant human travel have influenced this previously cloistered society. Some women are already getting rid of the burqas. Thanks to the information overload.

At no point in recorded history has the influence of science more pervasive than now. The change of our individual consciousness is triggered largely by the rapid progress of science which has changed the way we live, and even the way we perceive things. The gnome project has pushed us to rethink our philosophy vis-à-vis our morality and beliefs.

As I write this blog, I received a cell phone message, greeting me this early. I replied through text message. Twenty years ago, I used to receive a real greeting card, not virtual. I have online friends worldwide which was not possible two decades ago. Things are a-changing, and my consciousness is a particle of the collective consciousness that is now emerging globally.

 

 

 

Tags: consciousness, science, evolution, philosophy | Edit Tags

Friday September 7, 2007 – 06:33am (CST) Edit | Delete

Next Post: Tagging Marriage Previous Post: Lost In Translation: The Art of Double-Speak

Comments

(3 total) Post a Comment

the other worlds

It starts with a basic premise. Everything that we perceive is based on the limitations of our senses, and the extent by which our minds process these perceptions. In this sense , man is truly unique; it is not our color, height, or weight that make as an individual, it is our peculiar perception of the reality that confronts us, which is basically determined by our senses and mental capacity, and the memories that we have stored in your psyche.

The dog perceives you starkly definitely from the way you see yourself in the mirror. The range vision of the dog is different from yours. The dog has powerful sense of smell. We, concededly, cannot sniff a bomb. The world we see is not the same kind of world the dog experiences. Imagine if you had night vision: the nights would never be the same again.

At a time when I was engrossed in my study of philosophy, I was enamored with the idea of parallel universes, and the implications they have on human existence. Philippine Studies, my other major way back in the undergraduate, exposed me to the world of faith healing, shamanism, witchcraft, magic, the frontiers of the mind – the other worlds. If we perceive reality differently, ergo, we cannot shut the door to the possibility that parallel to the reality that we now live, there are other possible universes that co-exist with us but which, owing to the limitations of human faculties, we cannot perceive and understand, as of yet.

Parapsychology explains these other worldly phenomena based on the capacity of the mind, and the yet its uncharted potential. Yuri Geller is able to bend metals by merely concentrating on it, and telekinetic powers take over. John of God, the Brazilian doctor turned faith healer, is able to operate without use of anesthesia. Nostradamus had clairvoyant powers, the gift to see the future. If your beloved is in distress, thousand of miles away, you too will feel the distress. Charge it to your extra sensory perception. All these are but illustration of the powers of the mind.

Yet, there are similar phenomena which do not fold quite fully well in the mold the parapsychologist explains as the power of the mind.

Take my grandmother, who incidentally, at the age of 94 can still recognize her grandchildren. At a tender, I witnessed many people who were suffering from the worst form of skin diseases. She did not finish elementary nor medical course. But she has this potion which is heated, and then she would rub this to the affected area, and murmured incantations the language of which I do not understand. Amazingly, living micro-organisms were collected in this hot potion, so hot that I wondered why these organisms were still crawling. The process was repeated depending on the severity of the disease. In days, the skin diseases were cured.

I developed recurring sinusitis way back in high school. Every summer vacation, I would return to our very rural hometown where my grandma lived then. One time, I had this sinusitis, with the debilitating fever and headache. There was this faith healer named Inday Moran (may her soul rest in peace). My grandma accompanied me to her clinic. To my surprise, the same medicines which my doctor gave me were prescribed by this faith healer. She also operated other patients the same way a doctor would. But she would also refuse to administer serious cases like operating on a kidney due to lack of facilities. When I was examined by her, I realized that she was a linguist. She spoke English, Tagalog, and other languages fluently. Yet, she only reached Grade III in the elementary level.

She cured so many people that she was elected mayor of our town, and was undefeated until she died. And my sinusitis? She cured it.

Ever since, I have opened to the possibility of parallel universes. I have to unless I had super human senses and perceptions. If one recognizes his limitations, there is no other logical way but to be open to the possibility that the other universes may indeed exist.

I am prompted to blog about this because of my recent experience. Two years ago, my wife went to Ireland for two months. When she came back, she could barely walk and had been suffering excruciating pain for almost a month already. She was taking pain relievers but the pain persisted. After three doctors and many tests, she was diagnosed to have slip disc, an incurable disease in which one of the disc in the lower spinal column collapsed, and the major nerve compressed. Without surgical intervention, she could suffer paralysis in the lower part of her body. But I asked and researched about the success rate of slip disc operation. The result: it is a 60-40 proposition, with the possibility of major accident during surgery.

I have a German tennis buddy who has slip disc also. There are only two recognized experts in this field, two German doctors in Germany who can operate for a fee of P5 million or $100,000.00. Where on earth can I get the money?

Then, we went to this faith healer. Miraculously, the day after the healing, the pain was gone and my wife can walk again.

Was it our faith that healed? But to be candid, when we went to this faith healer, I was the typically doubting Thomas. The faith healer must have some powers which science, as of yet, cannot explain. The key is openness.

My friend Millie was kind enough to let me read about the Einstein Theory of Relativity. Small objects travel space that is warped by the larger objects, This warping can only be seen in at least 3 dimension-reality. But accordingly, there are 7 dimensions of the hyperspace which are not yet determined with particularity. Will somebody pursue Einstein and explain to us the possibility of parallel universes, the other worlds?

Tags: faithhealing, parapsychology, cosmoslogy | Edit Tags

Sunday August 19, 2007 – 07:40am (CST) Edit | Delete

Next Post: Lost In Translation: The Art of Double-Speak Previous Post: of holy wars

Comments

(4 total) Post a Comment

soulmates

shaped in the same cast, we trek apart

searching for our own cithara sings

the melody written in the universes of our fate

distanced by space, longing for the presence

we keep on humming, the same tune of our birth

when we sing, there is always the broken chord

that empties our being, and longing

in the concert hall of our heart, we know what

the music that completes the song

the soundtrack that our destinies must play

to our heart we keep, the testament of our birth

wherever we trod, we hear

the murmurs of the heart

the same melody we have always known

that by fate we, each, sing alone…

free hit counters

Tags: poetry, soulmates | Edit Tags

Sunday July 1, 2007 – 06:17am (CST) Edit | Delete

Next Post: global warming? Previous Post: three rivers

Comments

(2 total) Post a Comment

belonging and alienation

Way back in college, there was this professor, Fr. Malley, who analyzed divine and human history in terms of alienation and belonging, instead of thesis and anti-thesis, the latter being more popular to the students considering the political temperature during Marcos time. The Marxist dialectical materialism took man as a mere object, a mere commodity in the historical moment. Fr. Malley’s analysis however considered man as the focal point of history. If history has to be understood, we have to dig deeper on the nature of man. To him, history is the full stretch of the tensions of belonging and alienation, played in the recesses of the human psyche and outwardly projected in our collective history.

twas in the Garden of Eden when alienation started

The Garden of Eden, although more allegorical than historical, jump starts the connection of the divine with the human and at the same time the alienation of man. At the end of the story of the Genesis, when God already breathed into man the breath of life, the Creator gave man an abode, which was a paradise on earth, the Garden of Eden. Man belonged then to the embrace of the Creator. But the snake in the garden which tempted Eve to take the forbidden fruit, opened man to the other world, the possibility of living beyond God’s reach.

It was in the Garden of Eden that man strayed away from completely belonging to God. Throughout the Bible, there is a constant struggle to belong to God and at the same time to be alienated therefrom. Moses, in leading his people to the promise land, was faced with pagan-worship, bacchanalia, sex orgies, and all vices in complete defiance of God’s commandments.

Moses parted the red sea only to be betrayed by the people he wanted saved

Human history is a mere extension of the biblical tension in terms of religious wars. In fact, the most gruesome war is not political but religious; the former war aims to conquer territory, but the latter is concerned with the conquest of the soul. What we witness today by way of terror attacks is not a clash of civilization but of one group trying to consolidate its piece in the already fractious religious debate, claiming their religion as the only path to salvation and the rest will lead to the road of perdition. The issue, to what religion should man finally belong, Christianity or Islam, has only alienated man from the source of love and belonging. In an attempt to spread its own version of salvation, people have been killed, and when called upon to account for the deaths, these groups would only charge the killings to collateral damage.

But why should man kill if he only wanted to belong to his divine? The answer lies in the estrangement of man. If we have to read historical moments, we have to go back to human nature. Without roots in the divine, man is a broken piece. The sentient, and intelligent man needs to belong, to the divine and to the people he truly loves. According to Saint Agustine, “My heart is restless until it rests in thee”. Ironically, the jihadist that kills is moved by the overpowering mission to accomplish a mission that is, for him, truly divine. If he fails in his mission, he not only fails his Allah but the people around him as well. He needs to belong, and if he has to kill to achieve this, then kill he must. Alienation is at times worse than death.

So too the Crusaders who slaughtered the Muslims on their way to redeem the Holy Land. The medals of war conferred on them were mere testaments of their deep desire to be accepted and to belong in the bigger Christian community.

The most lethal assassin is not one who brandishes his weapon with dexterity; it is one who is willing to die in the pursuit of a mission imposed upon him by his group that sets the common vision. If he dies, he will be a martyr to his brethren, no matter the scorn of the society that he has wronged. Unfortunately, in man’s desire to belong to a common mission, divine or worldly, he sets him apart, by force of circumstance , from the larger community. What we see now are packets of cohesive groups unwittingly annihilating each other.

The necessity to belong is both divine and human. It is existential in character. There is a proverbial hole in a donut. A donut ceases to be one without the hole. Man is suffering from an existential hole, an emptiness that he carries to his grave; he is forever in constant attempt to fill-it up but never succeeds. The members of the family, friends, and other humans who we love and care are sources of

the hole remains till we die

belonging that somehow fill-in the hole. But while still alive, we look upon God as the source of total completeness, as the Being with whom we truly belong.

Historical movements are manifestations of this existential hole in every man. People seek salvation in recognition of this hole. Otherwise, if man feels complete, there is no need to look for the beyond. Push to the extremes, we see congregation of people, who, in their search for their own version of salvation, have relegated others as mere collaterals.

Is man cursed to kill each other in the name of salvation? Look at the mayhem in Bali.

Tags: wars, religion, philosophy | Edit Tags

Sunday May 20, 2007 – 08:30pm (CST) Edit | Delete

Next Post: the kids Previous Post: How to cheat in the election

Comments

(1 total) Post a Comment

going back to the core of life

Yesterday, I received a tragic news: my once tennis buddy, Dodong, died, apparently of car accident. But there is more than meets the eye. At 1:00 o’clcok in the afternoon of March 24, 2007, his car rammed into a truck that was parked at the road shoulder. He must be running with a speed of 120km/hour that his car and his mangled body were beyond recognition. Initial finding points to a suicide. Accordingly, his young wife, called him over the mobile phone to break the tragic news: she was leaving him. One tragic news leading to a more horrific news.

We were stunned, numbed. How could he took his life? He was doing well in his business? He was a class “A” tennis player, and for us, tennis players, “tennis is life”. So long as there is a tennis court, life continues. And yet, Dodong’s case proved that afterall, contrary to our slogan, there is more to life than tennis, that behind the grunts for a power stroke, underneath lies the sobbing self, hidden behind the facade of a happy face.

One time, I eavesdropped upon a conversation between two of my friends. This friend is planning to resign from his present job that compensates him enough to place his family in the middle income bracket. But he is planning to go to Canada for greener pasture, leaving his family in the Philippines. I joined the conversation, and asked this friend, what really does he want in life. He is doing financially okay here in the Philippines, but he is willing to leave for a higher income, despite the terrible adjustments that he has to make in Canada. The question struck a chord. He could not answer what he really wanted in going to Canada. And yet, he was then in the verge of deciding to leave.

How many times have we embarked on something, yet if we are asked why we did that, we become speechless because we dont have the reason why. Once, I gave a peptalk to my students. “Why are you studying? So that you can work later on? You work so that you can earn your bread, and you need to earn your bread, to give you energy. You need energy so that you can work well.”

You go to companies and other workplaces, you find people who are working without being able to transcend the workplace, meaning, unable to break the cycle of working to earn the bread to give energy, to work well. Life becomes a conundrum. A person lost in a riddle of life may later find no direction.

We are living in a dizzying world. Knowledge, information, and events come to us in a fast pace that we can hardly catch-up. Often, we do things as a knee-jerk reaction to events without truly reflecting on the reason why we do things, or we decide on something. I often ask students why are they taking a particular course, the usual refrain is that it is what their parents told them, or, it is the easiest course, or it assures them of job in the future. It was rarely when somebody answered me, “Sir, because I am excited and happy to learn about this course.”

In this dizzying world, the call to humanities is most imperative. The sciences may provide us with the technological know – how on how to deal with the present world, but it is in the humanities that provide us with the reason on why and how to deal with the present world. The humanities open our eyes to a deeper appreciation of life, a life that we chart and travel. There is a need to ask: Why and what am living for? The meaning of one’s life, and the depth of our conviction to it, is like a shining star that where ever we are, as we charter our ship of life, will guide us, and tell us whether we are on course or not.

Once we have an existential connection to the deeper meaning of life, no wind nor wave can buffet us into the neverland. We will always find our bearing in the turbulent seas because as we look up in the sky, we still find and relate to the shining star.

My tennis buddy Dodong may have been buffeted by the howling winds, and perhaps, did not place his shining star up there. Seconds before he rammed his car into a truck, the record show that he told somebody from the other end of the phone conversation, “I will ram this car into the truck.” Which, tragically, he did. He lost touched with the core of his life, the reason for living.

Maybe, he had placed a shining star, but he did not have a strong existential connection to it, that at the instant that the shining star was to be his guide, it dimmed, and failed to lift his spirits up, and there, his life went into oblivion.

soulmates

February 14 is St. Valentine’s Day when as the cliche goes, love triumphs above all. Today, I commit to digress from my brand of writing, in honor of somebody to whom I promised to write a topic about – soulmates. She asked me whether I believed in soulmates, by way of an answer, let me assay further….

 

More in depth in Classical Definition

 

“Plato wrote in his Symposium that humans have been looking for their soul mate ever since Zeus cut them in half. In his mythic story, Plato describes a world where there were men, women and people who were both men and women. Apparently, humans began discussing how they could climb up to heaven and replace the gods. The gods were upset by this and discussed what should be done. The simplest solution would be to destroy mankind, but Zeus came up with a better idea. He suggested cutting all human beings in half. This would serve two purposes. First, it would immediately double the number of people making offerings to the gods. Second, it would weaken the humans, so they would not be able to carry out their plan. Zeus’ idea was accepted, and the humans were all divided into two. Naturally, the humans were upset at this, and Zeus decided to enable each half to have intercourse with their opposite , symbolically creating a whole. Consequently, the males sought other males, the females other females, and the people who had been both male and female sought their other half, allowing population to reproduce.”¹ This concept is outlined in the modern musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch

 

New Age concept of soulmate

 

There is a prevalent concept in some segments of the New Age movement that some souls are literally made and/or fated to be the mates of each other, or to play certain other important roles in each others’ lives. These souls are thought to have created something in a past life and they have chosen this lifetime to help each other “heal.” Following this concept, one can have many soulmates. For example: One could see another person they have never met in this lifetime and instantly hate or love them because of previous interaction(s) with the other in one or more previous lifetimes. The most popular use of this concept is in applying it to those who were loved intimately in other lifetimes which were then found in this one.

 

Also, being conscious of the “soul mate connection” is not necessary, according to this idea.

 

Soulmate Emotional Destruction Theory

 

Ultimately the consequence of this notion is the unfortunate reality that soulmates often possess the ability to inflict serious emotional injury unto their twin flame, greater than any other being could. This often results in the separation of idealized love, due to the severe emotional impact. Many soulmates are destined for an eternal search, not for lack of meeting, but rather lack of acceptance. The encounter is often analogous to the collision of matter and antimatter, a violent explosive reaction will occur, but if held through to completion only pure energy, and thus harmony, will result. Unfortunately few encounters are held through to completion.

 

Eastern View

While the Greeks had the idea of soulmates as mythology, Eastern Philosophy, Hinduism more particularly, has believed in the idea of soulmates as something real and experiential. Man has many past lives, not necessarily as humans but as other forms of organism. In man’s quest for nirvana, that is, complete bliss, he undergoes the wheel of reincarnation, sometimes as a cricket, a frog, a cow, or as man. But the spirit behind this earthly manifestations is the same constant spirit in search for nirvana. In this wheel of reincarnation, the spirit , in one of its earthly lives, encountered its true mate, which due to temporary existence is cut short by death. But in future lives, as if by coincidence, the two constant spirits would meet in other bodily presence. Their past lives would be re-awakened in an instant as if two combustible materials ignite each other, and they identify and recognize each other. In that one particular lifetime, they realize that they are only complete in the presence and love for each other. But alas, their present circumstances may not be similar in their past lives, so the love for each other is muted and pounded in the arms of another person.

The deepest love of all has cosmological origin, and in the spread of eternity, that kind of love may not find fruition at all. But when these two spirits indeed meet but are trapped in different circumstances, in time and space, they still recognize their true love for each other, that kind of love that is not imprisoned in the flesh and circumstances, the love that springs eternal and magical.

The celebration of Valentine’s Day is not necessarily the celebration of true love, but the sanctity of the search itself.

Tags: soulmates, valentine’sday | Edit Tags

Tuesday February 13, 2007 – 08:32pm (CST) Edit | Delete

Next Post: re Rohan’s comment (2-16-07) Previous Post: Entry for February 08, 2007-towards a new morality

Comments

(1 total) Post a Comment

when life begins at 40ish

        it was strange. usually, after three shots of brandy, i get usually sleepy. but not last night. i could not sleep, even if i tried to. i was told that when you get older, 41 to be exact, your sleep time diminishes: you sleep late but wake up early. father time, as it were, is taking its toll. the sleep hormone is fast depleting.

        is this more physiological than psychical? or is it more philosophical, a tectonic paradigm shift about life?

        when you reach forty-ish , the tell-tale signs are becoming, in the legal parlance, res ipsa loquitor – the thing speaks for itself: the hairline is fast receding, the knees start to wobble, the waistline turns immeasurable… ad infinitum. sleep problems come with the greying of the hair.

        but the physical signs are mere manifestations of the changes inside. chemically, at the age of forty, the estrogen re-asserts itself. the male libido suddenly surges back as in the youth of the past, save for the organic weapon, which, due to constricted blood vessels, needs the chinese prescription , the happy king potion.

        the hormonal changes necessarily trigger electro-physical reactions in the left hemisphere of the brain. at this stage, one becomes irritable, easily sex-cited with the twin peaks of the woman, and tends to go sporty in apparrel, in an attempt to hold back father time. the psychologist, if not psychiatrist, describes this as mid-life crisis, a wish to stay younger forever as against the lurking realities of aging, with all its pervasive signs.

        between a wish and a reality which seems irreconcialable at this point in life, the deep-seated frustrations inevitably appears by way of the beers, and women – as if to prove that one can still do it and nothing has changed. at the philosophical level, becoming forty-ish is being in the threshold of youth and of age, of the gnawing reality that deep inside is the realization that life , or rather living, is a process of dying: that no matter what the facade one projects, inside lurk the fears, or rather, anxieties of death that may just knock anytime. and because death, or aging, is now in the doorstep, one has to leave his tracks on earth, good or bad, for the living to relive.

        the focus to achieve for fame or infamy reaches its apex at this stage. normally, empires, a business or harem, take clear shape. the life project that would leave an indellible imprint is being realized, till the forty-ish marches towards his grave. But precisely due to the temporariness of life that we try to make it eternal, to live in the here and now, in a word, to be immortal by the seconds.