"Noise"
Marcus - 2007
 

Everything is so noisy these days. I think it is an echo of what goes on inside people's heads. Or perhaps the noise inside our heads is an echo of what is going on "out there" in the external world.

Sometimes it is very hard to find any tranquillity. Recently I started becoming aware of my thoughts whilst I sleep! It is a warm, fuzzy semi-lucid awareness, but even there in sleep, my mind is full of racing thoughts. I am aware to the level that I can feel the thoughts as they occur – there is no linearity to them, my awareness is only on each thought as it occurs. But the moment I wake up I can follow the string of thoughts back. An entire stream of them!

My conscious mind of course is elsewhere at the time of sleep; I was sleeping and wasn’t fully lucid. So where did I go – and if I had gone away somewhere, who’s thoughts were there in my head whilst I slept?

The thing of it is; when I am awake and supposedly fully lucid – the racing thoughts are still present. Carrying on in an uninterrupted manner – seemingly it doesn't matter whether I am asleep or awake...I constantly have the same stream of unlinked garbage going through my head.

So how often do we mistake these thoughts for an actual thinking process rather than background noise? As I am writing this the humming of the air-conditioner is ever present in the background. Noisy minds are a little like that. The air-conditioner isn’t me either.

The world is full of noise – it over-powers the noise of our minds. In turn the noise of our minds over-power the noise of our lives. It doesn't stop. Not even in sleep! It is very hard to be peaceful and focused, we aren’t allowed – everything stops us from doing so, including ourselves. We do not stop long enough to see what we are doing and who we are. The noise of the world around us, the noise in our minds – all of it distracts us, and like crazy people we associate ourselves with it. We identify inwardly and outwardly with what is nothing more than static. The static of the technology around us has only served to increase the amount of noise. Everything picks up pace and it is coming faster and more often with little letup.

Digital technology may have reduced the noise of old analogue static – the white snowy pictures on your TV. But it has replaced it with a quantity and volume that is impossible to keep up with. It doesn’t matter if you don’t watch it, and it does not matter if you don't listen to it. It is all there – always in the background – or else being transmitted through the air and through your body.

Our thoughts are a bit like that too. We transmit them all over the place – in a sense we are like biological transmitters and receivers. We are all linked; strings of emotions and thoughts spread over the entire planet. We all pick up on them – we are hard wired into the human emotional / mental grid and we have got no firewall or protection. Heck most of us don’t even realise we are connected.

Is it like being superficial – but on the inside?

All surface and no real content?

That is the trick – the little sideways twist. Organised thought is not what it is cracked up to be. Connecting the points from A to B to C – it is how we are taught, and it is slow, tedious and often does not even work. Things get missed; we are like horses walking along with blinders. Tunnel vision. We can’t connect all the dots when we can’t see them.

Buried among the noise are a lot of dots, many useable and worthwhile – and some of not much use at all. We ignore them all because they sound like static, and A does not link to B. Sometimes A links to E, H or even Z. It doesn’t really make much sense to a mind that attempts to be organised and linear.

It probably explains the saying; "There is a fine line between madness and genius".

There is something about linear thinking that makes me think of the story of Hansel and Gretel, leaving their trail of breadcrumbs so that they will not get lost. Anyone following those breadcrumbs would have ended up right at the witch's house as well. Even an animal can follow an easily laid out trail.

Breadcrumbs. Carrot on a stick.

Rats in a maze.

The concept of linear thinking is fine in and of itself. But who lays out the breadcrumbs? Who told us which method of thinking is "okay" and which method is crazy, useless – insane even?

In the TV series X-Files, Fox Mulder was considered spooky – "out there", and so he was relegated to the basement. There are a lot of interesting and useful dots in the basement of our mind. High flyers sit on the upper floors, developing systems of analysis, recording data and searching for those elusive connections. When Scully moved into the basement – ultimately she learnt how to make those connections intuitively; jumping from A to H to Y.

Is there a difference between the noise we as humans generate with our systems, laws, bureaucratic nonsense, media and our technology – and the noise of our inner minds? Is it possible that one set of noise is the static of the false world we have created – and the other set of noise is the signal of our reality, the Universe, our higher-selves, God?

The speed at which our lives move has gathered pace. The more dependant we become upon technology, the faster we go – the higher our expectations become. How many devices do you carry around on a daily basis? A cell phone, an iPod and / or PDA? Think about the devices in your home, a TV, DVD Player, Computer, Laptop, Phone, another TV, wireless routers. How much noise do they generate – how much media consumption do they provide?

It’s gathering pace; things are moving faster now. There is more noise in our minds than ever before. But our reality keeps pace, the faster our minds become capable of working, the more information we will receive – not just the information of our technology – but information from other living beings – and information from the Universe itself.

We can see more now, our mental capacities have increased. That is the gift technology has given us. For what will we use that gift? Further media consumption, to help us live our artificial lives?

Or maybe we can use the new found capacity to tune into the signal of our reality. It too has gathered pace – a quickening of information. A change in the fabric of our reality, we can feel it. The Earth is feeling it – and it is reeling, look around it is easy to see.

Listen to the noise, what is it telling you?


Marcus – 2007

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