LIFE: Love Infinitely Furthers Evolution by Sander R.B.E. Beals (buy e reader TXT) 📕

Now the Light – Heavy duality has alternate meaning, one which 'bipolar' patients like myself are intimately familiar with: Our psychiatrists continuously remind us of the scale of utter depression right upto hypermanic behavior, and our requirement to stay somewhere in the middle, at fifty percent. To us patients, manic is Light, and depressed is Heavy or Dark. But no matter where we are on the ladder, our ability to use common sense does not need to be impaired. It's just that we easily confuse Light with an escape from whatever we find restricting in our environment. And where the depressed ones give up and sink into their swamp of negativity, a manic person can't be kept down: just like van Halen is now playing 'Jump' for me during this rereading of my text, the first lines of the lyrics say it all: "I get up, and nothing gets me down!"

A weird sync is the fact that the Miss Marple episode I'm watching while writing actually has a psychic patient in it. I guess that was a debut of Jodie Foster (or someone pretty much looking like Jodie in her younger years), who also turned up in yesterday's feature named 'Contact'. That may not mean anything, but I guess my way of reasoning is every bit as compact as my way of knitting: if I knit, I knit woollen surfboards that hardly bend, instead of the elegant woolly waves Miss Marple produces. Despite our difference in Modus Operandi, we both go the same way, but she restricts herself to the crime scene, where I refuse to acknowledge any borders, and thus adher to the second law of Creation: I figure any subset of the All can tell me about the whole of it! On the other hand that still does not make me stop attempting to experience it All....

What does stop me from experiencing it All are my preferences: even though I am not longer easily scared in any rollercoaster, and spend most of the ride making photographs of my daughters, you will never see me tie an elastic rope around my ankles and jump off a bridge. But that does not mean I won't be an enthousiastic passenger in a jet fighter if one of the stunt teams ever invites me....

Now you may think I'm going to sell you on the idea that we are all just driven by our preferences, thus creating some sort of Hell on Earth for all of us. Well actually, nothing could be more beside the actual intent of my writings: if we all listened to our preferences, this civilization would probably look a lot better than it does now. Because let's be honest: if a kidney is supposed to clean your blood, then it is equipped with the tools and talents to do so. Now we may not believe that such an organ has free will, but what if it actually did decide to do the hearts job? Wouldn't that mess things up terribly?

The same goes for (human) beings: the talents they are equipped with are theirs because of their desired role in the whole, and their preferences match those talents to a tee! It is just a matter of searching oneself, and honestly confessing what your talents are. I guess it's not just homosexuals who need to come out of the closet.... ;-)

Now my top talent is observation, because my passion is to figure it all out.. The moment I see something, I know it will be useful later on because I have that same feeling Mr. Spock used to have in the original series: "Hmmm, fascinating". I figure those are the moments you immediately store in long term memory, because you intuitively know you are going to have some purpose for it. From that angle, I could go on to my second talent, of being a reasonably gifted writer in both Dutch and English. And guess what? Most of the "Hmmm, fascinating" moments bubble up at the exact moment I need them in my story!

And all the while my top talent doesn't rest: it will take in whatever music or movie I have running on the side, and will alert me to synchronistic matches. Maybe I'm over-associating, being a manic, but I can assure you I'm as stable as the next guy (or gal) at this moment. It is just like I'm experiencing what being in a New Age forum had me wondering about: I never could figure out what they meant by our minds going into a crystalline configuration, until I started perceiving the facets in my own thinking and feeling processes.

And often our talents guide us: I haven't yet found the link, but my being tells me there is a correlation between my research, which hinges on 4 and 7 as special numbers, and the 4 basic elements of human DNA. I'm not sure whether I will find it or someone else will, but I know it is there! Of course the most obvious link is the SevenSphere to the right, because DNA has exactly six informational ingredients, regardless of their respective complexities! Where I aimed at putting the X on top as the men are the warring faction in humanity, I happen to be wrong: according to Wikipedia, I should have put the YX in red to put men in their place, and women in blue supporting the whole not because they must, but because they have the talent for it. And besides, we're all male and female in some way...

Hmm, XX & XY => XXX & Y => Sex is the question, Yes is the answer!

Here in the Netherlands we have a saying that claims that lack of adult behavior is caused by not getting enough kicks in the behind while growing up. Now I can't really remember having received that many, but I guess if my eldest gives me Dumbledore's wand, "Because you always give wise answers, even if you really do not know...", I'm OK as dads go. But that isn't what I want to talk about, except for the growth aspect implied by the father / daughter relationship: Let's just take a look at the various aspects of it, from both the personal and more public view:

The SevenSphere for this concept has a very obvious triangle pointing up, if you allow me the concept of my artistic freedom: Evolution and Revolution are pretty much common phrases, whereas the 'Wevolution' introduced a few pages ago isn't. But since I'm the 'inventor' of the term, let me explain to you what I mean by it:

Apart from Evolution, which is usually gradual, and Revolution which is a growth spurt usually initiated by the 'oppressed', and which usually targets the Status Quo, Wevolution is that type of event where all of us actually agree that it is the right thing to do. I know, this type of growth is quite uncommon to Earth's society so far, although ancient cultures may have had a better understanding of it. We can easily show these terms as balloons being treated different ways:

Evolution is a balloon being inflated: it grows regularly.

Revolution is a balloon being punctured, making room for a new one.

Wevolution is when the knot is untied, and the balloon goes where it wants to go!

The other triangle is more personal, in that it allows us Free Will (Volition) to decide as we chose, also provides for the evaluation of the alternatives by both us and the world we perceive around us. In the end however, it is we ourselves who get to choose again, based on what we heard and saw from those around us. Since our environment is just a mirror for us, as stated by the third law of Creation, there is nobody but us to decide. One choice we often have to make is the one between Evolution and Revolution. Wevolution does not belong in that set, because it is the one choice we all agree about without any further choice being needed. It is quite a bit like Buckminster Fuller once said it: "Do not fight the System. Instead, design a better one!" And of course, as soon as 'better one' is sufficiently better, we have arrived at Wevolution because everybody loves it!

Funny thing is that our personal experiences somehow feed back on what we select to enjoy. For instance, CD albums like Queensrijche's Live Evolution and Accelerated Evolution by the Devin Townsend band are examples of albums I chose without even listening to them first! Somehow the title and the cover design were enough to make me handpick them. On the other hand, Tarot's album Suffer our Pleasures was also one of these, completely negative as it seemed to be: why should anyone have to suffer my pleasures?

(although the Light vs. Dark theme is quite obvious from the cover)

And if the cover didn't give away the theme, the lyrics sure did! The whole album paints an image of a personality that seems to have a completely topsy-turvy idea of good and bad, which may be quite repulsive to many people. Still though, if you can identify with the singer and the raw music, you spot the fact that even though you enjoy the songs, the whole of it doesn't really alter your view of reality. It may nudge you into one direction or another, but actual revolutions tend to need an accumulation of displeasure, in order to get enough trust (or thrust) to get off the ground. Since you picked it, you probably love it..... or learn to!

So yes, it basically shows that both good and bad are but labels, just like any word or concept in any language. And the intermixing of languages and concepts doesn't make it any simpler: a bouquet given to the couple you are visiting might have surprising effects if the couple you are visiting is Japanese, and the flowers are yellow Sakura blossoms: they are associated with life and death, and women.

Nowadays our brains are a jumble of concepts from all over the place, certainly if we take into account the boundless nature of the Web. Using it has made those with access to it into tightly woven webs of knowledge, of which the certainty is a very disputed part: Most sources of information have the joint authority of their contributors, and even though sites like Wikipedia use some form of peer review, many articles still contain random inaccuracies: my daughter once proved it by defiling a page of it in a humorous way, and it literally took the peer review system three whole months to detect and correct it!

Back in the days of old, authority of the written word was far more ingrained. When I was a kid, I didn't dare question the information I gleamed from encyclopediae and other printed sources to make my school assignments. For that matter, neither did my teachers! What I'm trying to point out, is that now we are much more in need of using our intuition as a tool for survival. Like I said before, we do not know all consciously, but we do know how well we know it! And likewise, we know just how well we can trust any incoming information: listening to the silence of your own being you soon get a feel for the piece of information you are contemplating. Mind you though, the 'Truth' of it just indicates its fitness for your particular being. Others might feel that to them the info is totally irrelevant. The funny thing is, that the Miss Marple episode currently playing was also about this intuition business: Jane is handed a magazine called 'Film Facts', and instantly comments to her friend: "I wonder if they are...."

A short writing break brings me to the point where Miss Marple visits the studio in which a visiting movie star is making a movie. And then it struck me, the reality within the reality: I always claimed not to be able to play in a movie, simply because I did not really know how to control my emotions as if