I Wonder...

I wonder a lot about a lot of things. I guess I could call it thinking outside the box except that I dislike that phrase almost as much as things like “on the ground” or “boots on the ground”. The idea that we are in a box to begin with makes me wonder. I wonder what that box is. I assume it means the contours of thought as they are shaped by the force of the world in its ordinary way of being. If the idea of thinking outside the box is something understood by most people then I wonder where most people think they are? Are they inside the box thinking about thinking outside the box? Do they think they are thinking outside the box while everyone else is inside the box? What happens if everyone thinks outside of the box? What happens to the box?

It’s like getting a tattoo or a piercing and thinking that it sets you apart from the other one hundred million who had the same original idea. It’s like getting that hairdo I’ve seen the last several years where they hack your hair off in uneven segments and get rats to shit in it then spray it with crazy glue so it looks like you just got out of bed with several rats and a tube of Crazy Glue. This is a guy’s haircut. My favorite female hairdo is the one where they cover up one of your eyes to conceal the mystery of a mirror that reflects a shop window.

Being without internet gives me a lot of time to wonder. Add to that the near absence of TV and the total absence of radio along with very limited social contact and it puts me a little more inside my head that I imagine most people are. There are those long gaps of time where I’m not at work like everyone else; not dodging traffic, not going out to dinner- not going out to anything except a store once or twice a week and here at the internet café for an hour or two every several days- ...long periods of time go by in a creative process or in thinking about some creative process or... wondering about things.

I wonder if it matters if the elephants disappear; or the whales or the Palestinians or the Myanmar monks. Does it actually matter, anything... except to those so affected? History tells us that life is a controlled turmoil that, like incipient madness, is always on the verge. It’s more on the verge now because the wider world is known and demarcated; mostly. Also the population is immense, mostly crowded into urban cauldrons making heat by friction.

I think there’s less general wondering going on than ever before because the struggle for survival (or an increased buffer zone), in most cases, precludes that luxury. The intensity of commercial chatter is far greater than it has ever been. The competition for attention is greater too.

I wonder about the need for growth. Every industry seems obsessed with it. You have to grow. You have to expand. It all has to get bigger and bigger in order to survive. So we are told. The general population seems to have taken this to heart by a horizontal widening that is epidemic. I don’t understand the math. I really don’t. It’s like the recent increase in oil prices. It has nothing to do with supply. It seems to be about speculators paying outrageous prices for stock, betting that there will soon be very little oil and that the consumer will pay astronomically for the product. The oddest thing is that the price of gas and related things has increased to reflect these high prices being paid for something that is still in good supply and prior to the much anticipated and salivated-after war has even happened. That’s the part I don’t get.

I wonder about all of the things that make no sense but which go on without question in the wider world. I can’t tell if people are dreaming or hypnotized, not paying attention or just not interested.

I wonder about the size of the Milky Way and how it is so big that another Milky Way could easily pass through it without any of the stars hitting each other. Then I think about what an infinitesimal portion of the universe the Milky Way occupies and about the nature of a spiral and the possible dimensions of the universe and what is outside of it. Doesn’t there have to be something outside of it? If it goes on forever then what is it reaching ‘out to’ ‘into’... and what is beyond that? For anything to exist something has to contain it and something has to be outside of that. That’s simplistic but it seems so to me.

I wonder about the fact that we are crystallized sunlight animated by living light and if that means that the stars are living beings. I wonder about how the idea of devils and angels is consistent in every religion and how that relates to the good and evil so apparent in human behavior. I wonder who I am talking to whenever I am talking to someone.

I wonder about the energy in the Earth and how it is that the elements conspire to form everything we perceive in a manifest way. There must be some enormous secrets hidden within the possibilities of their interaction. There has to be something that we don’t perceive that is a motivating force for the creation and dissolution of these forms.

There is this sense that everything is part of everything. This theater of operation that we are in has natural laws that control and limit, that compresses and expands, or else things couldn’t be what they are. Things are what they are essentially; whatever that is and then things are what we say they are. Some say this and some say that according to what they’ve learned and been told and what they want out of it.

I make no secret of the fact that I don’t like it here. I wish I hadn’t come here but I did. The reason I did escapes me. This is an inconvenient planet for my purposes and I will be well quit of it when I am graced with that opportunity. I can’t think what the best purpose for a person sentenced here for the space of a lifetime (or more) can be except for service of some kind. Ninety nine point 99999999999999999% of the people here relentlessly want something until they want something else and the heat of their need is large enough to count for an alternative energy source.

I feel like I am surrounded by bonfires of human desire that burns from the inside out until it consumes the vehicle and I wonder about that. I also wonder about how nothing that people get when they get what they want serves to make them happy. Observation tells me that some people are just naturally happy and some are not; independent of things going their way.

An astrologer once told me that if you were on one of the other planets in the system and you had your chart done that Earth would be a malefic as opposed to a benefic force; along the lines of Saturn and Mars. Jupiter and Venus are considered benefic.

In the process of my wondering it has become clear to me that everything is just the way it is supposed to be here, according to the way people are. They came here to work something out. They’re all here working on the same thing, though it may appear different to them. Actually, everything that everyone is doing is all about the same thing, regardless of what they may think they are up to or intending. A few people figure it out in each generation. They may or may not try to tell others about it but others will take what they are told and translate it into the context of their desires. They’ll put a familiar face on it so that it works according to what they plan on doing anyway, like g.w.b being a Christian. Of course, the majority of people will most likely never come across the majority of these people who are never in any kind of a majority.

Irony is an archetype; no mistake about that. In order to achieve what everyone strives for and calls by so many different names you have to not want anything that is available. You have to be completely at home with your inner nature and indifferent to what surrounds you; in terms of the need and desire to acquire any of it. Then you can say that you’ve got it all.

I wonder... and I heard once that “from wonder into wonder existence unfolds”. For me, living on this planet is similar to being a matador but comparable to the way five dimensional chess would relate to ordinary chess. I sense that once the dance is perfected that time stops... at least it does for you. I think that’s when it all starts to look like a big wheel of fire into which the fabric of life is intricately woven. Cue the Tandava dancers.