Dreaming Madness

"Which is the most universal human characteristic, fear or laziness?"

In all honesty I could not say, what is more true, that we are afraid of never accomplishing our dreams, or that we are simply too lazy to put them into motion, to see them, to live them?
Are we all capable of doing great things, are we all capable of making our personal insanities reality? I think yes, but whether our failure is due to a lack of courage or a lack of will I could not say, I may perhaps never know. Many shirk these possibilities due to simple terror of the tasks before them, the immensity of their imagination.

Dreams are a thing of infinity, something that not many are prepared to grasp, to cope with and confront; fear blocks us, paralyzes us and leaves us close minded and material, incapable of diving further into the maze of making our hallucinations a reality and tied to our boundaries. So many of us fail to accept the limitless, so many of us simply choose to float and see where we might end up, we find ourselves constantly stuck at an idea of what cannot be done, why it cannot be done, instead of just going beyond and finding something new and strange.

Yet sloth is another great sin of man and it is all the more natural, for we can overcome fear, yet we seem to have more of a difficulty overcoming our own laziness. The simple lack of will can break us worse than fearing something, and I find that far more succumb to laziness, including myself. Us common mortals differ so greatly from the great thinkers of the past in the fact that they could spur themselve to go further, to dive deeper than the rest of us, to actually bring their thoughts into reality, to awaken themselves and confront what must be confronted.

I cannot pass a verdict on which of these characteristics are more universal, but I can say that each hampers us, yet each of them should not be difficult to overcome. It merely requires us to dream with our full conscieousness , and not fall into doubt or lethargy.


"Sanity is madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled."

Madness, the one force capable of breaking through the lines, of smashing barriers of all kinds, of being new, of creating continuosly. Madness flowing through a mind and into reality is a true force of creation, of novelty. Madness put to good uses is pure creativity, it is the new and the incredible. Our lives are true once we can use it, once our dreams have become truly ours, and we make them real.

This I think is crucial, and is a point that can be misunderstood and misinterpreted. To truly awaken yourself you must live under the concept that all you do is a dream, so that all that can be imagined can become possible, and all failure becomes inconsequential. To be alive this is the way, to live reality under the assumption that nothing is beyond grasping, all you need do is imagine.

To use your madness is key, something necessary to overcome that which holds us to rules that often are unreal and unecessary, inexistent and easily overcome. All that is necessary is a bit of channeled insanity to create something of novelty. For true sanity is the gaining of the conscieousness necessary to know that nothing is beyond us, that we can become better and we can create, if only we shake off our lethargy and open ourselves to the concepts our world throws upon us.

The only true insanity is doubting that we can change reality, that we hold a very significant place in our own lives, and to live otherwise is true foolishness.

Visions of Angles

Throughout all of the pieces of literature we have read the theme of truth is a constant, whether it is viewed as a relative or an absolute, a single or a plural, provable or unprovable. Each of the tales we have read gave us some idea on how we can view truth, or how it is viewed and percieved.
The children's books were the most interesting for me, as they explained some very strong points in very simple ways, understandable even by children: In "The Wolves in the Walls" , the way we know truth is put into question: the mantra recited by the parents in the book ("When the wolves come out of the walls its all over") seems to be the sort of knowledge accepted blindly, by simple coherence and having heard it over and over. Throughout the tale this knowledge is questioned and finally proven wrong, when, in the end, the humans return to their home. In"I know the moon" a different view of the truth is taken, that of subjectiveness; in this story each animal sees the moon at night, and each describes it in its own way as something different. When the animals seek out a man of science to tell them what the moon is, they find his description of numbers to be inexact, and come to the realization that the moon is a great many things in its being. I also enjoyed reading O'Brien's "how to tell a true war story", a tale that spoke of the impossibilities of knowing the truth: he spins a tale that combines a great number of interesting notions and images of great beauty, all of wich he says could be quite untrue. He tells us of war stories, that to be true have to be without a moral, they have to mad, or they have to be somewhat false in order for us to believe them. This somewhat skeptical (almost nihilistic) version of the truth seems to imply that we cannot prove anything we are told or that we learn, that there is no objective truth, only what we believe. However my favorite of our readings were the Emily Dickinson poems: these took a fairly platonic view of the truth, as something great, absolute, self sufficient, eternal and blinding, something we cannot know all at once lest we misunderstand it.

These tales all have as a subject the search for truth, and each takes a different stand on it: in this they are all united, as each takes a different perspective of that truth we all seek. They are the opinions, the fragments of something larger and greater, comprehensive of all these views. Certainly amongst most of them the theme of a truth that is subjective is maintained, but each of these subjective views stems from a more expansive concept that is the objective truth.

This is certainly why I enjoyed Dickinson's poems above all the other passages we have read, for she truly strikes the center of the argument, by saying in her poems how each of us can only glimpse a fragment of truth, a slant piece of it that we can understand before we are able to move on to the bigger picture.

The end is nigh, it's a good time for a nap

I must say, I agree almost entirely with Asimov’s predictions. While some of his points seem almost to be a joke, if one looks beyond his sarcasm a greater meaning is uncovered. Our world today is on the brink of collapse: over-population is taking a toll on our food supplies and the number of starving mouths continues to rise, natural resources are nearing depletion and our climate is changing very swiftly, all things covered by the topics in his lecture, all foreseeable from quite a while back.

This is the point of his sarcastic comments, because Asimov is merely pointing out the obvious, something we have known is coming and yet is still not being addressed. We have yet to find alternative means of energy and cannot seem to control our population, and the ensuing problems that were long ago predicted have arisen. Nature is doing its best to address the problem, and knew diseases have spawned. Asimov makes good a point, and we would do well to consider his ideas.

As well as pointing out the dangers of recklessly continuing on our destructive path he makes good a point about our society. In his lecture he points out that to control our birth rates we would have to find alternative tasks for women to perform asides from being mothers. While this is said jokingly, and many women already fill roles that in the past have been that of men, it is quite true that even today we fail to fully integrate women into our masculine society: they are still taboo to some extent and old prejudices remain even in our modern world of today. The way in which he refers to education, and also on that note the elderly, also is spoken of sarcastically, most probably to mock our stupidity on over emphasizing youth at the disregard of wisdom. For it is very true that many of us view education as a weight, and see our elderly as unchanging hulks, relics, useless to our progressive society, meaningless in that they hold true to a past that is forgotten in favor of a naïve future. Those that are past their youth are far from useless, as they have much to teach in experience, and still much to learn from the world, and it is best we do not forget that to learn is in all things and moments of life. Also, Asimov makes a point that we are a world without war. To some degree this may seem untrue, as conflict ensues in all parts of the world, but I believe that what he means is that with all the balances created in our world devastating conflicts are behind us, and in any case the problems that we will face as a species will be far greater then our small wars, that do not have the power to shake the human race all that deeply.

Asimov presents us with a heavily synoptic view of the world: this can be seen by his regard to the human race as a whole and his disregard for nationality, sex and age. He sees us all as one entity, that either survives as a whole or perishes together; in other lectures he makes a clear point that damage to the earth affects everyone living on it, nothing is seen as unimportant, and this holistic spectrum of thought is a wise one indeed, for the more we concentrate on singularity and the more we lose sight of the big picture the closer we are to disaster, breaking off from the knowledge that he longer we put off what must be done the more precarious our situation becomes.

We should give it a try, after all, what do we have to lose?

Our quest for understanding

"If there is one indisputable fact about the human condition it is that no community can survive if it is persuaded--or even suspects--that its members are leading meaningless lives in a meaningless universe."--Irving Kristol


A man without a purpose is something broken, betrayed by the cosmos. He is leaderless, pointless, a mere causality in the great universe, and at the end of all things holds no more meaning then a speck of dust. Without a meaningful purpose, be it redemption, knowledge, love, illumination, happiness, man is lost in the simple insignificance he may represent in the scheme of things, lost in the fact that everything he does in his life is without any kind of value. How could a man bring himself to rise in the morning if he knew how his every little task made not a speck of difference? To sum it up in the words of Yamamoto Tsunemoto:

“Everyone says that no masters of the arts will appear as the world comes to an end. People become imbued with the idea that the world has come to an end and no longer put forth any effort.”

Mankind is incapable of any kind of action that does not further himself, and when he is convinced of having no meaning, no reason therefore to better himself, he gives up. That is why in the end all trivial matters fall, and why we look to the heavens in fear and wonder, and attempt to explain that which we cannot, because as humans in some way we all feel useless, and to know that this is true would cause the end of any being.

Bertrand Russell’s work tells us that philosophy is the study of the impossible, the unknown and its many possibilities, in order to find a truth that transcends time and explains to us why we are truly here. In the meantime we are caught in the loop of the very questions we ask, and so our work is never truly done, our end never truly reached. This is one of the values of philosophy, the search for truth, which gives meaning to the life of every human being.

In his “Apology” Plato tells us, through the words of Socrates, that we must also reconcile ourselves with our own ignorance, and liberate ourselves from convictions’ in order to become wise, and to then pass down our wisdom onto those who wish to learn. This too can give us purpose, and perhaps that very wisdom is simply understanding how meaningless we are and being at peace with the fact that we are not the center of the universe, that we are no different from the smallest insect, that we are merely a small part of one gigantic universe, and nothing we could ever do would surpass its grandeur.