Life is amazing when you think of it. Take what you’re really seeing right now, for instance. Try to abandon frontal vision for a minute and embrace the whole picture. You’ll have noticed that, above what you’re seeing, starts a black area, the place where your vision is physically obstructed by the existence of your eyebrows, your front… If you look downwards, you’ll get to see a tiny bit of your nose, hanging out, with that semitransparent, ghost-like look that things have when we look at them with squint, and then some more darkness.
That ‘hard landscape’, that ‘helmet’, has been with you your whole life, and will stay with you till the end of your days. It is where the mystery starts, one of those in-your-face (sic) evidences that takes you into weird, contradictory questions (“but then, the world is outside or inside of me? Or: I am inside the world or am just an observer, a limit?”).
We have it in front of us all the time, all of us, but we hardly notice. Why? Well, I think it’s has to do with the synthetic mode in our brains. I talked about it before, our brain cannot tell the difference between seeing something and just imagining it. And, for the sake of saving resources, many times it works upon mere abstractions, reducing things to its primary elements, according to previous, accumulated experiences. In short: we think we are seeing what’s the action here and now, but we are only seeing a scheme we put over it, to speed up things. Needless to say, this way of perceiving is very practical, but skips a lot of things too. and our ‘black helmet’ could be one of them.
Those of you who read me on a regular basis know that I like to consider death once in a while, without bitterness, just to make life more tasty and conscious. I imagine the moment of death not like the darkness of the helmet coming in, but rather like it slipping away, like a fruit after it’s been peeled, letting everything be image. Like a glass of water dropping its contents into the ocean. I have no means to know if I’m right, of course.
So take a look at that helmet, once in a while. Remember who you really are. A lot of awareness arises from that single glance.
As for myself, I got aware of the ‘black area’ thanks to this powerful post at ‘The conference report’, which I strongly recommend you.
Try some. Which are the effects on you?
Related posts:
Ask and thou will have: creating a vision board
The key, if you ask me…
Addicted to the black frame (or I wish I were)
One quote and two warnings
Considerations on the dump
