Needed a place to ask and talk about an experience that seemed to really shake me up over the last few days. I can't get over it and it's driving me nuts. I thought about asking the paranormal board, but... well, those guys are weird.
I was watching the news the other night, and I was ignoring what the newscaster was saying, and just observing the whole scene behind the screen. I imagined being in her shoes. Not... "how cool would it be to do a newscast" but as in, I saw the camera, the studio, the prompter. I could smell the lights on the set as the newscast was read.
I felt her frustrations with her story and her mind wandered to dinner and her drive home. Then it jumped to the camera man and his mind wandered while he worked the camera. Years of operating one, he was able to work it on instinct and hummed to a tune that was stuck in his head.
My wife asked if I was okay and snapped me back to... myself.
That night, it just got worse. My mind wandered off and I experienced my city as a whole (best way I could describe it). All at once, I could see from everyone's eyes, hear their mundane thoughts. Feel their fears and concerns. Everyone scurried about with their own lives, and I could feel the entirety of all of them.
And it just, really hit me how blind everyone was. The fear and frustrations this whole place has, how futile it felt knowing that each life was just mundane and had no direction. The people who wanted to do more and better the world were looked at by others with disregard because they had their own problems and couldn't be bothered.
I don't know how long I spiraled like this. I don't know if it was my imagination, (I am a writer, and that's how I get into character is by placing myself as them... really becoming that person in the way of thoughts and mannerisms.) or if it was something more.
When I came back to my senses, I have a huge weight on me. It's like I know something, but I can't seem to bring it forward and I'm clouded with a sense of depression and hopelessness that I can't shake off. I look at the news, and the people around me and I just feel like it's all futile and a big joke that no one know they are the butt of.
Anyway. I didn't know who to talk to about this. I don't really know what I want to hear, but this just felt like the right place.
8 Comments
If I jumped into your eyes - would it seem mundane from my perspective?
Probably very mundane.
my point is its all subjective. I personally fine great joy in my day to day, in my mundane moment to moment... but no one else could see it that way. Because our joy all lies in different things
Ive found most people have the profound wisdom I thought was rare - we just explain it in different ways.
Does it really matter?
"You asked me about my controlled folly and I told you that everything I do in regard to myself and my fellow men is folly, because nothing matters."
"My point is, don Juan, that if nothing matters to you, how can you go on living?"
He laughed and after a moment's pause, in which he seemed to deliberate whether or not to answer, he got up and went to the back of his house. I followed him.
"Wait, wait, don Juan." I said. "I really want to know; you must explain to me what you mean."
"Perhaps it's not possible to explain," he said. "Certain things in your life matter to you because they're important; your acts are certainly important to you, but for me, not a single thing is important any longer, neither my acts nor the acts of any of my fellow men. I go on living, though, because I have my will. Because I have tempered my will throughout my life until it's neat and wholesome and now it doesn't matter to me that nothing matters. My will controls the folly of my life." [...]
"Once a man learns to see he finds himself alone in the world with nothing but folly," don Juan said cryptically.
He paused for a moment and looked at me as if he wanted to judge the effect of his words.
"Your acts, as well as the acts of your fellow men in general, appear to be important to you because you have learned to think they are important."
He used the word "learned" with such a peculiar inflection that it forced me to ask what he meant by it.
He stopped handling his plants and looked at me.
"We learn to think about everything," he said, "and then we train our eyes to look as we think about the things we look at. We look at ourselves already thinking that we are important. And therefore we've got to feel important! But then when a man learns to see, he realizes that he can no longer think about the things he looks at, and if he cannot think about what he looks at everything becomes unimportant." [...]
They choose to die because it doesn't matter to them. On the other hand, I choose to live, and to laugh, not because it matters, but because that choice is the bent of my nature. The reason I say I choose is because I see, but it isn't that I choose to live; my will makes me go on living in spite of anything I may see.
Castaneda talks about the tonal (the world we are all accustomed to living, the world of things) being plunged into suicidal ideation when it is challenged with something beyond its comprehension. That "something" is what Castaneda and Don Juan refer to as the nagual, or the indescribable (the unknown) and their whole effort is to bring that nagual to the forfront of experience without damaging yourself.
Castaneda talks about how Don Juan would go to history museums and look from the point of view of the artifact he was looking at, and how that leads to great insights. You can also read books with the same POV variance, where you're the author, writing, or you're the character on the page--which sounds like what you're doing.
I would say you have become aware that there is more to man than meets the eye.
Amazing experience! Perhaps you should incorporate into your works
I try to include my insights into my writings.