Wandering with the Wind...

Saturday, July 23, 2011

The poor. Such an encompassing word, not just implying monetary concerns, but is rather a category of all deficits in all aspects. I was just walking along the road back home sometime ago and while I was waiting by the traffic lights, I had the chance to observe a particular Chinese lady whom I often see by the MRT station, settled in a makeshift chair with a brown worn-down wooden box, a set of loudspeakers and a microphone in her hand as she sang songs that hopefully appeal to the masses that pass her by. She was a blind street artist. Occasionally her voice would quiver a little, the kind of quiver that renders you unable to tell if she was really tired or really absorbed in the song. And once in a while, she would reach out, tentatively yet with a little bit of desperation and a little bit of fear, and run her fingers across the wooden box, just to check, just to check...if it was still there.

There was a sour feeling that travelled up the bridge of my nose at this point. I wonder if others in that crowd milling around me felt the same, if they saw it at all, or whether it was just me being over-sensitive again. I felt this strange horrible sadness like a pain that isn't quite there but still exists all the same, a pain that isn't quite mine but still exists because it belongs to some other existence. Now if my friends were to know they'd probably tell me to stop being so sensitive, or in worst cases hypocritically pretentious. But I really did feel it. The way she was so hesitant yet anxious to ensure that all her hard-earned money was still there...to think that anyone would even be so heartless as to steal it. Isn't it such a miserable, miserable thing?

Az is right about what she said you know, her implication that if I start caring unduly I'd become bothered by things that the people in question don't even feel themselves. In other words, caring about things that aren't there, worrying about things that haven't come, sympathising with people who probably didn't want or didn't care about sympathy. Yet something in me always makes me care too much. It's like a voice inside my head, or perhaps outside, whose owner I do not know but which compels me to feel things beyond my own plane of emotions, and I follow it dutifully and experience these new, strange emotions that flood into me at specific times. It's as if there's a floodgate on the watershed between the outer world and my own sanctuary, and that floodgate opens and everything flows...and then it would close again, and things would be back to normal.

I no longer care so fervently about things like "empaths" and other spiritual connotations as much as I used to when I was small. At the end of the day, what good will these names do? What good does knowing that you're an empath do? What good does categorising things do? If you truly are an empath, you will set out doing what you need to do; things will come to you and you will receive things as you were meant to anyway, and if you are a true empath, things will still be the same whether you know your identity or not. The self exists without the need for specific knowledge of what the self constitutes. Regardless of how fruitless philosophical discussions about Personal Identity may have been through the millenia, haven't we still existed, as a whole, as one human race, as ourselves and all by ourselves?

It is perhaps this very indefinition of Self that paves the way to the final stage of universal consciousness. Well, let's not use such a melodramatic word; Awareness as a whole would do. Awareness of the self as something that constitutes individuality in unity, diversity in collectiveness, the overall knowledge of existence that presides in every being, everything, every building block of the world as we see it. Imagine if one day we find the definite answer to self, be it Soul Theory, Body Theory, Memory Theory, or Illusion Theory, say, Soul Theory, and we would suddenly become worlds apart due to a strong sense of possession over this thing that belongs solely to us and constitutes us as individuals. Let's say Body Theory, which would serve to pronounce prejudices even more, or Memory Theory, which doesn't quite work in the first place because of existing controversies like Amnesia. But if it were to work, we'd all be separated by our pasts and things would be carved into stone without the lubricative indefinition of the future. That isn't quite good considering how most of the earthly conflicts are with regards to disparities that carried on from history: religion and faith, race and ethnicity, hierarchies after hierarchies of social classes and categories...things that push us apart, separate us further and further, until we can no longer perceive the others but rather as annoying black blotches against our horizons.

The Illusion Theory is a little more unique, in the sense that it advocates a lack of Self, claiming that everything you think constitutes the self is an illusion. But there is a self. There is a self, just universal, one that encompasses all disaparities and differences to make a whole. And to gain knowledge of this Self is to change our perspective from a microscopic observation of human conditions to a telescopic acknowledgement of the big picture: existence, existence in itself, existence that is One and All at the same time. When Man finally achieves this one day, he will review his turbulent past and laugh amusedly as he would at a child's play, because he will realise just how easy it would have been to end conflicts if only he saw, earlier, that there was no point battling with himself.

Widely explored ideas such as National Pride and Cultural Identity, whether you realise it or not, are little steps to the wider consciousness. They are in a way little "Selves", miniature models of the final big united individual which in these immature stages only pertain to particular groups of people. It's the rush of collective support while watching your school compete in a national tournament. It is the united exhuberance you feel on National Day when colours of the country's flag in the wind remind you of how long you've all come.

And most definitely, it is that little twinge of pride and joy the 20th century's population experienced as it huddled around TVs and watched the video of Armstrong's landing on the moon, for as much as he was the first of mankind to step beyond home, in that split second, he was also Man as a whole himself.

Now as I think of that poor lady by the MRT Station, I think it's alright after all to feel the sadness, whether she wishes me to feel it, be it pretentious or not. She is after all not just my sister but also a part of me. She is myself.

***

~~~*Played with the winds at 12.36pm*~~~

Aurinya blogged at 12:36 PM

Roaming the Winds