The River and her ghosts
[thoughts from the River - by Sha'Tara]
As I often did after a few beers at the Continental, I wandered around by the river. This night I met a talkative old man mending a net near the walk that crossed one of the many tributaries.
"I see many times the sun set, maybe too many times," he told me without looking at me, "but never see such a sunset as tonight. Not with my eyes, look at this fog, and up there, these clouds - dark clouds. But in my head, I see the sun set, hard and dark. I think, maybe never to rise again. It is a dream, I think, but who dreams with eyes open? It is no dream. The sun is dark now. No tomorrow, no rising. Now all will die. I have two children, one a man, one a woman. I have three grandchildren, two boys, one a very pretty girl soon to marry. Now, all die. No more sun rise."
As I see it now, as I remember it, I was sure I was drunk. The old man was a ghost. His story was much too close to my story. We always think about endings, yet live as if it would never end. And these dreams, these visions, are they meant to shake us out of our lethargy? Warnings, perhaps? The old man was so sure that tomorrow would never come; that the sun would never rise again. What was he telling me?
No, he wasn't talking about a physical reality but something else; something we don't think about: how each night we go to sleep and everything has changed when morning comes. Only in our heads we refuse to accept that so we force reality to conform to our belief of continuity. We are subconsciously frightened of a world that could completely change itself each time we close our eyes. What if we woke up in the morning and we had to adapt ourselves to a wholly new environment and a whole new self? If you wanted to "finish" anything, you'd have to do it in one day because there would be no unfinished business the next day. Each day, a new life of its own. For anyone who has ever watched, perhaps better, studied the concept, in Groundhog Day (the movie) think of something exactly the opposite. While Phil Connors is stuck, repeating the same day over and over, you would be beginning a new day with no possible way to continue anything you'd been doing the day before: midnight, that's it.
This is like dying every night. You cannot continue; you cannot finish. "It" - whatever that is - terminates it all, ignoring all your efforts to prevent the end. The next morning, at whatever time, in whatever place you woke up, you'd look around and even if you remembered what you had been doing the day before, there'd be no way to pick it up again, to continue because the expected, the continuity with "it" would not be there. You'd have to set to with whatever was at hand - for this day, and you'd have to make up your mind, once you caught on, to end it, if only in your mind, before midnight.
So, every night, you die and every morning you are born again - in your mind and awareness and in the possibilities surrounding you. Oh sure, the "things" of yesterday would be there, all around you. Certainly, you'd be in the same house, with the same people, same surroundings, but your mind would be unable to form any continuity with it. It's a bit like the story of the manna in the wilderness of Sinai which the Hebrews were given by their god, Yahweh, to live on. No matter how much of the stuff they collected there would only be enough for one day. The next day, any left-over was spoiled, rotted, inedible. They'd have to go out before sunrise to collect another supply for that one day.
The interesting thing about this, which any thinking individual would immediately catch, is that this is exactly how it is with people on this world: there really is no continuity. Whether your day is an arbitrary twenty-four hours or an equally arbitrary "lifetime" it makes no difference at all. It begins in darkness and ends in darkness. You must face your own "midnight" alone and you must relinquish everything you did during your "day" and you have no power to change that. Of course, not everything else dies when you do. What dies is your continuity with the other "things" - be they inanimate objects, relationships, plans, goals, dreams. That's what the old man had realized. Whatever else was going on around him, he realized he would not be part of it. He would become a part of something else, something new, an unknown factor, if there be any, or he would simply cease to exist. That idea frightens man. Each "morning" to wake up an alien and stranger to others and to his surroundings, having to adapt again, and again, never knowing what the "day" will bring, nor how it will terminate. To never have enough "time" to really gain control over his way, his path, his destiny, thus having to abandon that to unknown "forces" whom he must acknowledge as the ones who have control over his life - forever.
As I crossed the steel walkway suspended over the tributary I stopped to look into the roiling waters below and to listen to the incessant swooshing noise of whirlpools and eddies. There was a sense of continuity in that view and sound but it did not interact energetically with my mind. I could not make myself a part of it in order that I too could continue my day beyond my own midnight, as the river seemed to be able to do. I was completely different. I could not maintain the flow because my mind was trapped by its ability to think. It was that ability so highly valued by man that cut me off at the roots every night.
Had I only existed I would have had a degree of continuity. I would have endured until I died and then I would have been truly dead. But that was no longer possible. Now I was an intelligent, sentient, self-aware being. I was alive. A sort of confused, twisted god-thing that had to terminate itself and re-start itself. I had to have dream-time, or the death-dream in order for my "self" to re-boot itself and do a self-diagnosis on start-up - with a completely different operating system. To just continue piling up each day's experiences into the system would quickly overload and crash it - like a massive string of temp files, cookies and viruses accumulated on a hard drive. That's the problem with having a mind. We, newly-awakened, evolving ISSA's have not yet learned what it means to be a mind and to experience life as purely an extension of that mind.
For a complete mind is fully autonomous. It needs nothing else and broaches no interference in its workings. No Power, no Matrix, no System, no status quo - nothing of the sort can gainsay a fully developed mind. When man realizes this truth, he will force himself to rise above all his Powers, his gods, his mentors, his rulers and leaders and not-so-wise teachers. He will no longer abandon himself willy-nilly into the hands of manipulating invasive and regressive forces that have kept him in slavery to false beliefs these thousands upon thousands of years.
Listen to the ghosts. They know, even when it would seem they are just babbling, or figments of the imagination.
“Truth is a hunter. Truth is what kills you when you give up the lies.” (Greg Bear—Dead Lines)
hugs
Lathy
great write :)
Mych thanks....:)
Neerja
It brought to mind one thing, though… My partner's sister had a traumatic stroke a couple of months ago. She had always remained aloof and rather unconcerned about her extensive family. Bleeding from the stroke required surgery to reduce the pressure. She came out of surgery with a loss of her short-term memory. She now spends each day starting over, using her long-term memory to try to connect to family members, many who are dead, like her husband who was shot and killed in their convenience store in 1979. Each day she asks for her long dead mother and father. She is living a kind of hell.
Ron
Love ya!
Jane