I want the cat
Steal the cat for me
I need the cat
Give me the cat
I got a dark secret and the cat is the key.
With my power to control the wind and the evil cat i will rule the world and exploit everyone else.
I need your help.
The cat!!!!
Adina Klink
The fact we can draw the outside world on a piece of paper is one of the most unbelievable, incredible, almost ungrasplable facts of this existence. Our brains look to the “outside” world through our eyes, which capture light that bounces off objects around us, and doing so, it projects for us an image of the outside world. But the way it does this is quite mysteryous and fascinating, because when we look at parallel lines that go to the distance, they don’t look parallel at all, they are at an angle, and they converge to a point on the horizon, which is at eye level and exactly aligned with our eyes. Our brains take the shapes of external 3 dimentional objects and projects an image to us, it makes its own curves and lines, which are different from the outside reality, simply because we can always change the angles from which we are seeing things. So our brains are continuously changing the inside drawing for us so that we can recognize the outside world from the correct perspectives.
So when we draw or paint, what we are really doing is encoding the outisde world into out inner brain language, in terms of curves and lines, and that’s how we fake it and make it look 3d when it’s actually on a 2d surface.
No other painter in history moves my heart more than Vincent Van Gogh. His story is one of sadness and amazing beauty.
I guess his story is very similar to mine that’s why I feel so strongly about it.
Music and Silence are two sides of the same coin. There is no music without silence and no silence without music. Music consists of beats with varying lenghts, spaced out by silent gaps, if there were no silent gaps, then there would only be constant sound and it would become noise. This means that we are not only attracted to particular sounds when we listen to a song, but mostly to the contrast between different sounds, and a melody is made as much of sounds as it is made of silence. But it’s not only in music that contrast plays the fundamental part, take paintings, what is a painting? a painting is a mix of colors that have contrast between them, if there is no contrast, then the painting is not interesting, blue contrasts with orange the most, purple contrasts with yellow the most, red with green and so on, but a painting is also composed of light and dark shades, if there is no variation in light and shadow, it will look flat and lifeless, it is the play of light and shadow that makes a painting look three dimentional and amazing, rather than flat and dull.
This is one of the fundamental laws of the universe, that eveything comes in opposites so that we can know the difference between anything at all. If we were ecstatic at all times, we wouldn’t even know what ecstasy is, we would be indifferent to it. We need dark times so that we know when the light has come. There is no point in resisting darkness, for in doing that, we would be resisting light too.
“People think the world is light, so they push away the darkness, but if the world was darkness, would they push away the light?” – Gincola
In about 276BC, it was known that at noon, in the city of Syene, the sun would shine directly over a water well, meaning its rays are perpendicular to the water. At the same time in Alexandria, the sun would cast shadows on objects, meaning the angle of the light rays were different than 90 degrees to the ground.
Eratosthenes, a greek scholar, knowing about this, asked a man to walk the distance between the two cities and record it. It was about 787Km.
He then measured the angle that the sun rays made with objects on the ground and found it to be approximately 7.2 degrees.
Now the way to do it is:
We zoom into the triangle that Syene, Alexandria and the centre of the earth make:
Now we use a bit of maths: the radius of the Earth is called the hypothenuse of the triangle, and it is the distance we want. Let R be the radius of the earth, then 787/R = Sine(7.2)
Hence R = 787/Sine(7.2) and Sine(7.2) is about 0.125 (you can use a calculator for this). Hence R = 787/0.125 = 6296Km. The accepted distance nowadays is about 6 378.1 Km. How close he was and what a genius he was.
“Lord Subramanian, second son of Lord Shiva, also known as Skanda the fierce lord of war, once went to visit Lord Shiva and complained that the current world, which was created by Lord Brahma, was imperfect – full of corruption, crime and injustice. Shiva suggested that he create a better world. Subramaniam then defeated and incarcerated Brahma and destroyed his world. Then he created his own, perfect world.
After some time Lord Shiva visited Subramaniam and looked at his perfect world. In it nothing moved or lived or changed, as everything was arrested, frozen in the static state of perfection. There were not even sentient beings, as their essential nature is to strive for perfection and, if perfection is reached, life as come to an end. Liberated beings are not reborn. The Buddha, after reaching Mahaparinirvana, never came back. That is why bodhisattvas avoid perfection: they are thus able to continue to serve others. According to indian thought, the state of perfection exists only as conciousness, called purusha or atman, which is the seat of awareness. What changes is the transitory world of manifestation, which includes body, mind, egoity, and all objects made up of the elements and subtle particles.
Shiva pointed out to Subramaniam that this world was not a world at all, but only a frozen imge of perfection. The purpose of a manifest world is to supply beings with the right combination of pleasure and pain, which eventually leads to self knowledge. For this purpose it has to be in constant flux, and hence imperfect. Seeing the flaw in his world, Subramaniam freed Brahma to reinstall his old, imperfect world.”
Life is change, and resisting change is proportional to suffering, the more we resist change, the more we suffer, and the more we let go, the more blissful we become. There’s no need to strive or to try hard at anything. We are already perfectly imperfect. Children are born and until they develop an idea of themselves and the others, they are pure, innocent and totally free, they accept themselves exactly as they are, isn’t that a big enough clue?
We try so many things and criticize ourselves so hard, but look at a tree: it spends its whole life in the same place, and some trees live to thousands of years! It accepts rain when it rains, it accepts the sun whe it’s sunny and hot, snow falls on them and they drop all their leaves so that they can survive, yet there is never any complaint. Why can’t we be the same? Well we are the same, just we learn to think we aren’t. We learned to separate ouselves from the “rest” of nature, we look at a cloud and we start to describe it: “wow that’s a cloud, it is miles away from me, it is white, gray, orange, it’s made of water dropplets and it can float on the sky” we describe it as different from us, but is it something different ? That water is going to rain somewhere, and someone will drink it, and the moment they drink that water, it becomes part of their bodies and will run through their veins, it will beat their hearts and sustain their lives. In the same way, the juice that flows through a tree up to its fruits, will be the same substance that will flow through the body of whoever eats it, and each component of it, like specific vitamins, will be used by different parts of the body, for different fuctions, and the body knows how to it use – that information is encoded deep down in our dna.
During a very fragile period of my life, I saw a picture known as “the ring lady” – a picture of the remaining skeleton of a woman that died when the Vesuvious mount erupted in Italy in AD 79. The picture said it all. It was what remained of a person that once felt what it is to live, that loved, had hopes and dreams, that felt love and related to others, a picture of what remained of an extremely complicated process – so complicated that we haven’t been able (and maybe never will be) able to figure out – that the universe has put together in the here and now, just so that we can experience it.
Our bodies will one day perish and die and they will go back to the soil, back to the universal cycle, thereby feeding other plants and animals, just in the same way as we have fed ourselves with their dead bodies throughout our entire lives. In this universe, life implies death, and death implies life and that is simply a natural law. Therefore you don’t need to be Isaac Newton in order to realize that there is no separation between you and me, and the rest of the universe – we are one and the same. Everytime someone is born, that is us being born. When someone is suffering, it is our suffering. When someone is having a great time and laughing hard, it’s our laughter. Anything at all that happens is our happening.
Reflections on the Art of Existing 