I just received the follwing e mail from Tiit and really feel a need to share it with all who read my blog as it is wonderful and very much to the point:
Woke up in the middle of the night...not unusual for me especially during these recent times...normally I'd get up and draw or send e-mails...but decided to stay in bed, lay on my back and start mentally writing about 'what is real'. When I was a younger man I could never keep more than a sentence or two going in my mind at one time...but...after years of writing in my notebooks I can now mentally write many paragraphs...greart fun when you're wide awake and you don't want to drag your ass out of bed. And usually after a time I'm back in dream-land.
What is real? Years ago I attended a College Art Conference in Minneapolis...the artist Robert Irwin was one of the presenters...he's one of the most interesting and intelligent artist around...he can be Googled so I won't mention anything more about him. He started his presentation by talking about what he had heard during a presentation given by an art historian who kept using the phrase " in reality" over and over again. To which Irwin said, "Everything is reality".
'Everything is reality' immediately clicked with me...it made total sense. We generally think of 'the real' as those things we experience directly though our five senses...I suppose these are the things that can be confirmed by others who observe the same scene, let's say...and things like dreams and hallucinations and figments of the imagination as not being real...since they are only observable and experienced by the individual. But what the individual experiences is 'real' to the individual doing the experiencing.
My recent experience with the fantastic dreams and the visuals and the hearing of music during the early stages of chemo treatment were certainly 'real' to me...I can still see and hear what I experienced...the floating bed and it moving through space and then me with it going through walls and floating around seeing this fantastic landscape and buildings and then floating down a long set of stairs and up toward another wall and going through it back to the room. I know this was a dream...but I experienced it...as I did the music and other visuals. But most would not consider these experiences as 'real'. Fine.
Everything is real...perhaps not in the physical sense...but real never-the-less. These inner world and experiences are as real as the physical world...and they can influence us as much as a punch in the face.
Our society and educational system dosen't give much attention to this inward world...and it is this inner world that probably has more to do with the condition of the world than anything physical or those things we collectively experience.
Peace is not something that comes from the outside...no one can give it to us...no government can create it...no organized religious institution can pray it into exsistence...all we need to do is look around to what is happening in our world today or what has taken place in the past...the war to end all wars did not end wars...GW's policy that war will bring peace to Iraq is and was sheer bullshit.
Peace starts from within and within each individual. If the individual is not at peace the family will not be at peace...and in turn the nation and the world.
So all we can do is to work like hell on ourselves...visit that inner world we think is not a part of reality...everything is real.
That's my story for today...and I'm sticking to it.
Tiit
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