PEACE, language, change, death, etc.
"Be above it! Make the world serve your purpose, do not serve it." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible." - Friedrich Nietzsche
All my life, I have tended to look for patterns in things, and I make a point of taking notice of them. That is perhaps why I've so frequently mentioned the serendipitous events that I see occur around me. I used to make it a major 'hook' for my students during my teaching career...I'd always encourage them to relate what they were learning to something they already comfortably knew. I'd give assignments having them fill in the "link-ladders" between two concepts, constructs or ideas that we were dealing with. That's why I'm a metaphor person.
Beyond simply looking for and noting generic patterns, though, I am astutely aware that I tend to look for patterns of three. [mildly bizarre aside here: it just occurred to me now as I'm writing this blog, for instance, that my blog header has three statements, and that I changed the usual "think outside the box" (a four-sided figure) to "think outside the triangle", originally with the presumably witty intent to show that I'm trying to think outside the box by changing it to triangle, but it really does represent a more accurate reflection of how I process my world.]
I recall distinctly during one of my pre-hospitalizing manic periods, I spent about 48 hours frantically moving about my house picking up things here, placing them there, carrying them with me for awhile, writing down notes and leaving them in carefully selected spots and so on. This was endless, without stops for food or sleep. There was a very clear moment when I suddenly recognized what I was doing. I was grouping everything in my house into 3's. I'd pick up two books, and place them with another that I saw was alone. I'd move a lamp to be closer to two other lights, and so on. The moment I recognized that was my behaviour was also the moment I recognized this was abnormal behaviour and hospitalized myself within the hour.
Why do I mention all this, and what's it got to do with the title of this blog, 'PEACE, language, change death, etc.' ? WEll, let me tell you!
1) I finished reading the book on Googlewhacking, which I would describe as a superficial, whimsical, well-written fun kind of book. The author describes his journeys around the globe as he attempted, on a bet from a friend, to put together and then meet ten googlewhacks in a row. A googlewhack is basically getting exactly one and only one 'hit' in the google search engine when you enter two words. There were a few rules that had to be met to qualify as a legit googlewhack. He found two of them, sent an e-mail to the two, and then had to convince each one to meet with him, find him two more, and so on. Like I said, light reading, but.....(a seed of an idea is planted!)
2) I surf a lot of sites when I'm gathering information on what to write about, or I go to ones of interest, or ones that spin me off in totally unpredictable directions through links I come across. The other day, I came across this one, which among other features has a death clock. You plug in a few parameters about your age, lifestyle, health and so on, and it predicts the day you'll die. Kinda has a ring of finality to it. BTW, I'm good to go 'til March 27, 2037, so there's a few more decades in the old ticker yet, but for what? To write blog entries, and copy records from vinyl to MP3? OR do I still want to change the world, or make a difference, or change myself, or cure bipolarism, or teach the world how to sing in perfect harmony, or volunteer at a hospital, or......(the seed of an idea has grown some disturbing wings, and is wondering, from here, where; and for what, when and for how long?)
3) I started reading another book last night that was given to me by an aunt of mine some years ago, not long after her husband passed away, while I was in a particularly depressed period of my life but had not yet been diagnosed as bipolar (I had frequent depressions throughout my life, most of them quite manageable). It was one of the books that has re-surfaced from my crawl space as I've been digging out my record collection. It's titled "Peace of Mind", written by a rabbi and published in 1946, just as psychotherapy and psychiatry (in fact, he uses the two terms interchangeably) were becoming "acceptable". He refers to it as the "Science of the Soul", and presents his book as if psychology and Freud are the missing link of the soul. Obviously, being a rabbi, he is a man of faith, and he sees this 'new' science of looking inward as being a key force in evolving the soul into a scientifically-acceptable format. I'm paraphrasing, but that's the gist of his thesis. In reply to the social question, "does man even have the moral justification to contemplate personal peace of mind when the world is in such a tumult of reconstruction" [remember, this would be immediately post-World War II], he offers it as a pre-requisite, saying "No reconstructed society can be built on unreconstructed individuals." In other words, the buck stops here, take care of yourself, and that will (or will lead to) taking care of others.
Now, the reason I like 3's so much is that they form the platform for content or substance. The triangle is, from a geometric point of view, the sturdiest base to build on (at least that's what my shop teacher told me back in high school!), and we really look upon ourselves that way don't we (body, mind, spirit); in Christianity, father, son, holy ghost and so on. But each of those "3's" creates its own fourth, the gestalt, the wholeness, the sum and substance.
So there you have it. The three concepts that I have chosen, for the time being, to link together as the scripting for the next phase of 'is'.
1) Googlewhacking,
2)'the rest of my life',
3) inner PEACE.
Three previous blogs of connected interest:
1) Any regular reader has noticed since Feb. 22, I have ended each of my blogs with a PEACE link.
[mildly bizarre aside here: When I just looked back now to find out which blog I had introduced the feature, here's the paragraph I had written:
"For however many days or years my body has left on this planet, it's my intention to surround it and infuse it as much as I'm capable of doing with the mantra of PEACE. Today, I want to introduce a new feature to my entries. In addition to whatever happens to pour forth from my stream of consciousness, I'm going to add a different PEACE-link within each blog entry". I just had a bit of a shudder when I read the words "for however many days or years my body has left...", in light of the death-clock reference above. ]
2) Also, earlier I gave a very superficial introduction to the syntax of 'is' words and phrases, one feature being that they will be capitalized.
3) On a blog a few days ago, which I titled 'Eleventh Out Of A Million Plus', I pointed out that my site came up as the 11th listing out of over a million on google searching with the words 'universal', 'pattern', and 'triangle' that stats tracker showed someone had used to get to my site.
[mildly bizarre aside here: an interesting choice of words, given today's monologue!!].
In addition to PEACE, without further explanation, I ended that "Eleventh Out Of A Million" blog with eleven capitalized words [mildly bizarre aside here: interesting...I just noticed that number connection now!]. They were: UNDERSTANDING, TOLERANCE, LOVE, SUPPORT, FRIEND, UNIQUENESS, SUSTENANCE, GROWTH, CURIOSITY, HUMILITY, and CONTINUANCE. I can honestly tell you now that I hadn't intended to write them there then, they just came to me as I was ending the blog, so I typed them in. They are all words that I would consider to be 'positive' 'is' words (standing alone, and universally accepted with common understanding of meaning). Of course they don't currently meet that requirement outside of 'is'.
And that's where this will all come together.
Consider this blog entry as the "historical background" for the practical exercise that I will be proposing in the next one....to be posted shortly.
PEACE - a link to an article in a Calcutta newspaper titled 'Tryst with the peace trinity' - an article about Gandhi, King and Ikeda, discussing an exhibition of works on the three men from three different cultures with the same common goal.
"I've learned that I don't feel my age as long as I focus on my dreams instead of on my regrets." - Age 83
Post a Comment