Two Hearts

I have come to realise that I wear my heart on my sleeve much more than I realised I did. I thought I kept my feelings fairly well guarded and hard to decipher except to those that know me well. Not that I think it is a good thing to be so guarded but believe it to be a defence mechanism to protect myself from letting people get too close and then in a position to cause me pain. I have, regrettably in the past let people past my outer defences only for them to attack me from within, a Trojan horse of emotional conflict.

I have always been a fairly emotionally charged person and will easily get upset over things and people that I care about, I have worked in jobs that could have proved very emotionally taxing, however due to the fact the job was with people that didn’t really mean anything to me I was able to remain emotionally detached from it. However when things come closer to home it is quite often all I can do to hold in the tears. I don’t think it is a bad thing for a man to cry or for a man to cry in public, in fact I think more men should, but sometimes I do struggle with this and will try in desperation to control myself and not show my emotion in a physical form, preferring to do this in the seclusion and safety of my own home and in private.

We have two hearts, the first being the muscular organ in our chest cavity which pumps blood around our bodies, the second being the metaphorical heart, the source and centre for our emotional life, a place where our sincerest and deepest feelings can be found, a place incredibly vulnerable to pain.
Without either we would cease to be.

If our emotional heart is damaged I’m not sure it will ever be as good as it once was, I think we have the ability to repair ourselves but that the scars will always be present and just maybe weaken the area damaged. I think we, the human race, have an adept ability to get back up and carry on, we all go through various hardships and difficult times and most of us are fortunate enough to come through the other side. There are, of course some that sadly fall by the wayside, maybe there heart was already weakened from previous conflicts and just could not cope with the most recent trauma, I don’t know.

I believe I am a fairly strong person, emotionally; I have dealt with various tragedies to my personal life over the years and in my eyes for the most part have coped well. I think this is partly due to the fact that I have learned to release my emotions, whether in private or with others I trust. Emotions that are not released can only put added pressure on the weakened scar tissue and cause further damage. During my young adult life I had not learnt how to deal with my emotions quite so well and did some things that I am not proud of, drank far too much in a futile attempt to find the answers I was looking for, for what its worth the answers are never at the bottom of the bottle, no matter how many you look in.

Sometimes I contemplate things maybe a bit to much, relive past hurts in my private times a bit too often, but maybe that is just the way I have come to learn how to cope with and deal with whatever it is that may be troubling me now, looking for answers or solutions to previous worries. When you are alone you have plenty of time to examine your heart and soul, to prod around in places that sometimes you wish weren’t there. When you are in that quite place, whether it be those few minutes before you fall asleep at night and you are just lying there in your bed or if you are lucky enough to grab a few minutes during the day, when you are alone with just your thoughts as company, when the world lays still and a hush falls over the commotion of the day, when that hollow feeling engulfs your chest and your eyes well with the tears of faded scars, you reflect on yourself and catch a glimpse of the person that you are.
It can be a scary place to be, a very lonely, desolate place, a place that asks us questions we don’t want to answer, but at some point we must all visit it. Some more than others, it is a place I have come to know all to well and would like to leave undisturbed for a time. But life asks questions of us and demands answers and sometimes those answers can only be retrieved from the darkest of places.

I fear I still have many questions to go, many left unanswered that I have yet to find the answers to or am just too scared to venture where I know they can be found.

The Elephant in the Room

Who’s to say what consciousness is? Nobody can really describe the conscious state other than it being a state of self awareness, an awareness of your surroundings and your feelings, an ability to make decisions and make perceptions. But that doesn’t really explain what consciousness is. Nobody can truly say that the way I experience consciousness is the same as anybody else. It is a very individual thing and one of life’s true mysteries.

For all I know everything around me is a figment of my own imagination. It is possible that I am not living the life that I believe I am living but am instead in a fantasy world of my own creating. All it takes is imagination. The human brain is probably the most creative of all the animal kingdom, everything we see around us that has been created by man is as a result of somebody’s imagination. From the chair I am sitting on to the computer I am writing this on. It all started life as somebody’s idea. So what is stopping my brain from creating an existence and then living my life in the dream world? My true life could be the furthest thing from this supposed reality that I am immersed in. Maybe I am a prisoner somewhere and this reality is being forced upon me to keep me subdued. That somewhere deep inside I know this and am trying to wake myself from the dream world by writing this, trying to remove the blindfold. All very Matrix like but a possibility none the less.
Maybe I am a patient on a ward in a coma, and that this is the reality I have created whilst my body recovers. That one day I will wake up in a hospital bed, unfamiliar with the world I awake too and long to return to the familiarity that I have created and lived in for the past 34 years. Maybe the true reality in which I am actually living is so awful that I have created this as a form of escape.

Nobody can ever prove to me that any of this life is real, anything that happens either to me or to others I can simply explain away as a figment of my imagination. Touch and feelings are just electrical impulses sent to the brain via nerves and then translated by the brain into substance. Electrical impulses can be manipulated, forged and imitated, my brain could be deceived into thinking it is typing on this keyboard. The human mind is very susceptible, hypnosis is common practice for various treatments and also used for comical entertainment, I’m sure we have all seen somebody made to believe they are a chicken or some such nonsense and paraded around on stage laying eggs and clucking. We can be made to believe we are seeing things that are not actually there, all of our senses can be conned into an alternate reality. Can we really trust our own senses? For all I know I could not exist at all but am just a part of someone else’s creativity and a figment of someone else’s imagination. I am just a character created in the mind of another and quite simply there to play my part in their make believe world. But would that be the case? Is the human mind powerful enough to not only create a false reality for one person but also for all of those within the life of the creator? Or would I simply not be when I am not in the presence of the author?
Artificial intelligence has been an ongoing goal for many people for many years, to enable a computer to have intelligence similar to that of a human. Maybe I am not human at all but am an experiment in artificial intelligence. I have been placed into a controlled environment and given the perception that I am a thirty something male and have been left to see how I react with and too different stimuli. My memories of my childhood could all have been created for me so that I have something to build on now and to make me believe I am who I am, at any given moment the experiment could be deemed a failure and I get turned off or maybe just restarted and have to do this all again. That could be one possible explanation for the beliefs that some hold that when you die you come back again. Those memories of a previous life were just in fact random bits of program and memory not deleted from the previous run.
Life is a mystery which I don’t think we will ever be in a place to understand until we come to the end of it. None of us are truly able to understand anyone else on the same level as we understand ourselves because we simply are not them. How do I know that even if I experience the same event at the same time as somebody else that we have had the same experience? The way one person sees the world and lives within it can be and is completely different to my perceptions. It is not possible for me to step into someone else’s mind and experience life through their eyes. To feel the way they feel, to see things the way they see them. If you were to for ask for ten peoples eyewitness accounts of an event they will all vary to some degree. We all see this life differently; it may be very subtle in difference but different none the less.
We are all blinkered to the true reality of life by a hundred and one tiny things around us that continually occupy our minds, from not forgetting to buy milk to problems at work. At some point we need to stop, breath, focus and take a moment to see the Elephant that is in the room with us. See the truth that has been hidden from us, that we have been to occupied and distracted to take notice of before. Wake up to the reality of our own existence.
It is maybe then and only then that we will understand the mystery of life and just maybe find some of the answers that have bewildered us for so long. But maybe in doing so we will solve the mystery of life and for us it will then cease to be, maybe then we will move onto a new plane of existence and being, this could just be a holding area to prepare you for your true life.

Life is a mystery to be solved.
I just hope when you have the answers that it will not be the end but just the beginning.