#randomthoughts
Of the Darkness Behind the Eyes
The journey towards what is becoming The #ChroniclesofEnoch is a long one, having begun as many nebulous and unrelated ideas decades ago. An idea, some rough characters and scenes, a novel I could never really get to develop and flow properly. Then along came my friend Joe and our ever to be remembered literary jam session that birthed the Chronicles as I spontaneously channelled #Asmodeus for the first time. I then birthed #Lorasta from some very decent cues from Joe.
As many of you know, Joe moved off to pursue projects of his own but there'll always be a piece of him in the Chronicles.
The earlier, stubborn work was operating under the title of "Trinity" and has since been amalgamated into the #Hegemony series and Gabriel's solo outing may or may not happen one day in the future.
"So, nebulous ideas...I have always been fascinated by the esoteric, the spiritual, what I suppose you could call magical or paranormal. I myself have had experiences neither I nor science can adequately explain.
Of course, I consider myself open-minded. What I believe does not necessarily have to be fact, I might lack important data as I am no expert. I've researched extensively, both for my writing and my own interests. I've dabbled with Religion but found myself unsatisfied on some deep level.
I boils down to this; that voice we hear inside out heads, who is it? Okay, so we think and we hear what we are certain is our own voice speaking the words our thoughts form. Now, I hate the sound of my recorded voice. It sounds nothing like my thought voice or the one I hear when speaking out loud. It led me to think more deeply.
We like to think that we are in complete and utter control. That our intelligence and conscious can at least affect and influence this carbon-based construct housing the really important part of us; the brain. Being conscious and intelligent beings, we're sure we are the boss, that we call the shots but do we?
We suffer maladies of the soul, feelings we have no control over, thoughts we cannot identify the origin of...
Are we really in control after all?
Millions of processes in our bodies trundle along daily, all regulated and controlled by our brains. I could no more stop my breathing than I could jump out of a window and drift safely to the ground unaided. There are some adepts who claim ability to do this, Shaolin and Buddhist monks for example but my point is this; what does that mean?
Of course there is the regularly disproven "we only use 10% of our brains" theory. Studies have shown we use a lot more but my question is this; how much do we control or use consciously?
Now, I admit that the great Frank Herbert started me along this line of reasoning. David Zindell's "A Requiem for Homo Sapiens" also provided food for thought, as it were. The were other works but these I recall best.
There is a Darkness Within
The idea of a dark place within ourselves, a consciousness separate from that which we consider "us" which is the one truly in control. We are just the passenger. Quite the shocking idea, right?
All these phenomena we often infer to; déjà vu, inspiration, instinct, intuition, empathy...we know that our brains record, observe and process hundreds of not thousands of stimulus per second. Our eyes, for example are in constant motion yet our sight appears to be steady. We are told what we consider as what we're seeing at any given time is a stitched together edit of what our brain decided as relevant.
Our brain decided? A logical, conscious decision was made? I don't remember that! The brain, it appears, does this often. It decides what we need to notice, to remember, to be aware of, all without our consciousness being directly involved. We repress memories or self-edit them. Hypnosis, it is said uncovers these poor edit jobs. Emotional reactions colour what we remember and how; it lessens or exaggerates aspects of the recollection.
It implies decision making but does it imply conscious intelligence? I do not truly know. Access to file restricted, user not authorised. It's in there, neuroscientists tell us, but how do we get to it? Who decided what my access privileges were anyway?
Perchance to Dream
It is said that dreams, especially the vivid, abstract, and downright weird ones are the brain tidying up, sorting memories and stimuli for storage or archiving (it deletes nothing apparently). Visions of future events are simply based, these theories continue, on millions of subconscious observations we have made throughout the course of the day. Our brain reconstructs these clues into our night's entertainment. All the nonverbal cues we picked up from those around us, the people we barely noticed (our brain cannot invent faces apparently), signals and signs we saw but which were edited out to help us avoid sensory overload, and so on.
My main question is why? Is this the entertainment laid on to keep the children occupied while the adults are busy or resting? Is my mind creating cartoons so I don't wake up and start annoying it?
Neuroscience claims that were we to be conscious of every stimulus our senses (those five we commonly accept and the other we pretend not have have; propioperceptive, electromagnetic, time...) recorded, we would be frozen in one spot as we tried to sort through them all and decide what's important. Our vision would be unfocussed and overwhelming. Imagine what recent movies showed General Zod or Superman experiencing with their enhanced senses, it would be a lot like that, they tell us.
So it's for our own good, then, we're presented with the useful, relevent, and filtered version of reality that our brain decided is both relevant and important.
Illusionary Reality?
That word again; decides. To me, that implies intelligence, that implies thought, that gives the impression of applying experience and rules to a situation, it implies knowledge. Knowledge from where?
This is the true philosophical, psychological, and existencial conundrum to which, I think, we will never have an answer. Is what we quite rightly consider to be reality actually real or, if it is, how much more is there that the editor decided to be not "important"?
It really makes you think once you get started, doesn't it? The problem is that you start to then wonder where those thoughts are coming from...
We have, unfortunately, more questions than answers, more theories than concrete fact. The whispers from behind the eyes shall remain anonymous and in darkness for now.
Maybe it's better, one reflection, that there it remains..."
From the Life Memoirs of Shamshir Naik, Volume XXVI pp279.
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