A forewarning, this post I’m venturing into the abstract, as I deliver wild philosophical prose. More abstract and obscure than usual.
I’m hurtling at rapid velocity into abstract realms. Straight off the bat, I’m launching into the conceptual spheres.
I’m going to be discussing shapes, images, and spaces in relation to consciousness and visions of reality. Bizarre. Totally Bizarre.
This may get incredibly messy and convoluted.
You have been warned!
So, time to delve into abstraction, Kandinsky style.
People tend to get stuck in life when they adopt a reductionist bent towards living.
I’d view this as a natural occurrence and outgrowth from navigating through a pressurised life fuelled by bio-survival instincts.
A person feels perhaps trapped, confused, and deflated, by how life seems to be unfolding. The landscape of life one sees spread out before the eyes’, is pullulated with towers of problems, doubts, frustrations, and a multitude of other issues forever piling up on top of each other.
Until breaking point is reached, when one says to themself ‘’ enough is enough, time to unload all this pressure’’.
At such a juncture, it seems perfectly logically for one to reduce everything down.
For a person, it appears on some level as if life will be freer, clarified, and smoother, if it can be boiled down, like a soup.
There lies the problem, however. Life isn’t an existential soup.
Whatever one thinks, any effort to reduce and boil life down to an existential soup will inevitably short-change a person, leave one hungry for more in life.
Afterall, who wants to sit down every mealtime at the table, to slurp a bowl of soup which always tastes the same. Is bland and lacking any interesting flavours and textures. For example, I love a traditional roast dinner, but I wouldn’t want a roast for every meal, that’d become rather tedious.
Note to self: Perhaps I ought to eat before writing, as the gastric juices are stirring, and my brain appears to be in my gut presently.
Life isn’t soup. Full stop!
However, confronted by the overwhelming challenges and pressures that one can experience and feel mounting up against them. Then the appeal to reduce everything down becomes extremely seductive and mouth-watering.
The appeal to eliminate or reduce certain details, aspects, and factors seems the reasonable choice.
Removing the complexity and confusion of certain situations and contexts appears to be sound strategy, (sometimes you can have too many items on the menu, to use a gastronomical analogy).
When one is juggling too many plates, dragging a colossal weight around with them, then sure reductionism isn’t a bad idea. For the moment, for the short term, it may alleviate stress and worry. Bring a sense of relief and clarity to situations.
In the long haul though, deep within one’s subconscious, their life will be screaming out for LIFE.
At the superficial level of one’s psyche, a person may want his reality to fit into a simplified shape or pattern.
As a corollary, he may seek a cosmology or ideology or model of total reality, or for ‘the universe’ to be explained and represented by a universal shape or pattern.
He may perceive, slotting life into a metaphorical shape as the way forward, so life can be simplified and clarified. Perhaps, make the path ahead appear more easier and secure.
Get what I mean now, by abstract?
What I’ve observed in my consultancy practice, and by peering into the culture, through the lens of my own perception is that many people in life, travel down this road of reduction and simplification.
A constricted road, which continually narrows and narrows, and eventually leads to a dead end for the psyche and creative spirt.
What compounds matters are the hypnotic effects patterns and shapes can induce upon the psyche with their symmetry. People get lost in the compulsion for symmetry and balance. As if the harmonious symmetry of a pattern may define the person and reveal some cosmic truth.
But ultimately, it’s merely a material form devoid of any elevating consciousness.
However, people merge with shape and from. They become people of the materialist persuasion, which down the line transforms into material obsession; where the far-reaching scope and range of the non-material quality is exchanged down for a downgraded material existence.
As a result, People then find themselves in a pervasively material space where they feel further depleted of energy, desire, and will. And that life is lacking. Missing something.
That missing thing is IMAGINATION, along with spontaneity, which arises from one engaging and accessing one’s imagination.
Material states of consciousness are fixated on shape, form, and pattern.
Trouble is the individual isn’t at his core a pattern, form, or shape. The individual can’t flourish, when reduced down to reflect merely material reality; set within a certain form or structure.
We are all multi-dimensional beings, not flat 2-D images, nor 3-D beings. The realities we experience aren’t cartoons, nor are they simply black and white, there are many grey areas. Moreover, there are areas abundant with vibrant hues yet to been seen or explored.
Life is multi-dimensional; consciousness is overflowing with infinite realities which overlap and interweave each other.
My work involves encouraging individuals to seek and access those multi-dimensional layers of self and reality.
This requires a reacquaintance with imagination.
Because without the colossal rivers of imagination flowing through life, people tend to stick on the very dry and barren land of ‘what already exists’.
‘What already exists’, is where people are often left stranded. And because of fear and the sake of survival, they often tell themselves stories that ‘what already exists’ is ‘where everything exists’.
People then proceed with their lives, shoring up and consolidating ‘what already exists’. People go about constantly seeking ways to tighten and secure its boundaries. And with it they shrink their desires and visions of what is possible for their future and life; squeezing everything down so it all fits inside those limited and reinforced boundaries.
In the long run the sheer thrill and adventure of life diminishes and fades away, and everything becomes merely a grind as that person chips away, scratching out the boundaries of a shape or form, where they express themselves with waning energy and power.
life isn’t a form. It can’t be defined by a shape.
I been there myself, living life with shrunken vison and desire. Seeking a new system, or pattern, or shape – to define who I am, and a way to pursue shrivelled ambitions.
I tried many times, to make reality represent a shape, so I could live with greater simplicity and comfort. I really tried, but no dice.
I tried making life fit into a square and a circle, it wouldn’t fit.
I pressed hard to make a life replicate and fit into a rectangle. No luck. Life pushed back harder and kept spilling over the edges.
Then I thought I’d try making life imitate a trapezoid, as trapezoid sounds edgy (no pun intended), also It’s a sharp name I think for a geometrical shape. No chance, I found those angles far too acute, and they lambasted my attempt.
Then I endeavoured with a rhomboid, once again no dice. I was at a loss. No matter what, nothing worked. No shape could mimic life, to any degree (another geometric pun) of authenticity.
Then I slapped myself vigorously, and it obviously knocked some sense into me as a realisation washed over me like a wave of lucidity. It dawned on me that life and my unique self, can’t be represented and defined by a shape.
Rather the essence of a human, the essence of a soul is non-material. The individual is a free, unique, creative spirit, far removed from the boundaries of material form.
However, the obsession for systems and forms has seen many endeavours to make life fit into a pattern or shape.
Society is full of people pulling their hair out, trying to squeeze life into those squares and circles; the slightly more intelligent and sophisticated try cramming life into trapezoids and rhomboids, some even experiment with dodecahedrons. Can’t blame them I see the lure of those tantalising geometrical shapes parading around with their fanciful names.
Look back throughout history and many organisations, whether political, religious, or sociological have presented populaces with cosmologies and ideologies that fed into this compulsion for shape and form.
In many spiritual practices and teachings, many of the centralised themes involve mediating or aligning oneself with a described sacred pattern or shape; which supposedly embodies the secrets of the cosmos, and unifies consciousness.
Personally, I turn things upside down and go in a 180-degree direction from these new age and old age style cosmologies (I don’t mean I make a semi-circle).
Instead, I engage with the philosophy of imagination. Live intensely with and through imagination.
It’s the philosophy of imagination I teach and encourage clients to embrace. Not rigid forms and structures and shapes. I don’t lure a client with a hypnotic pattern contained inside a system.
I view these so-called sacred geometric patterns heralded in spiritual practices (which many worship hypnotically), as merely individual inventions which meant something to someone once, but now utterly fail to deliver any true meaning for the individual. Nor do they possess any real transformative powers to reveal any wisdom, expand consciousness, define what is the essence of the individual; nor can these patterns transfer any insight for what potentials a person can envision or create in their reality.
I view reality, the universe, beyond any unified form, or shape, or pattern. I feel deep in my bones, in the sinews, and my heart, a tremendous conviction which flows through my veins: that unlimited potential and scope for expanding consciousness, manifesting, and creating reality lies with the power of imagination.
This conviction and profound vision are far removed from any propensity for geometric symmetry or uniformity.
Instead, I envision the universe and the self, as a part of endless universes, which are never-ending, always unfolding as a proliferating adventure into new spaces and realities which are abundant and overflowing with: wild and vivid imagery, pulsating energies, intense sensations, ebullient feelings, vibrant colours, blissful vibrations, electric language, marvellously rhythmic poetry, and triumphant music which all emanates from the celestial bodies of our imaginations.
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