Over these last months or so, I had increasingly grown quite bloody frustrated with my fimh (Friend in My Head). For there were no new insights (however personal, and however small or middling), there were no cruising conversations, no teasing, no throwing tantrums, no nothing. There it was – but apart from the usual, and regular “hi” – there was no movement. And so my question was, ‘What’s the point of having a voice in my head, if it’s of “no use”? Sure it’s pleasant every now and then. But there’s nothing for me to give my fimh, and God knows what fimh is going to give me that he hasn’t given me already…” Now all my fimhs (and I’ve had “different voices in my head” at different points in time – apart from the current extremely determined, stubborn and doggedly patient one, who refuses to leave, and I’m not complaining!) – have always left me with a nugget of priceless information, or knowledge or understanding or awareness. The other thing is that they never stay longer than they “think they need to”. I have nothing to do with when these fimhs have appeared, disappeared, or reappeared. I have no say in the matter. They have hung around, have knocked some sense into me, have sometimes scared the bejesus out of me (only to “teach” me a lesson), have sometimes held my hand or my head or me when I have wept, have had a couple of laughs with me, and have been both gentle, and hard on me and with me…but the one thing that I have noticed is that not one of them hung around for “keeps”. And not even my “yelling” would drag them out (from who-knows-where); there was not a whisper even from the other side – unless the specific fimh felt that he needed to be around.
So the presence of the present fimh has sometimes confused me (and on multiple levels) – but I’ve shrugged for most of the time, and have sometimes been quite bewildered…but there were no more answers – just yawns on both sides. Both fimh and me were emitting yawns, or so it seemed. So I was curious as to why fimh (the current fimh who’s been around for off and on to close to a decade now) was still around.
…Anyhow – to get on with my tale. So the flash of insight that has hit me lately is probably obvious to everyone else.
I received a gentle whack on my head for chatting too much in the chatroom. The person who whacked me, and the person who was irritated with my battery of chatting sessions are both real enough, and are exceptionally dear to me. Of course I was mortified. I was embarrassed beyond all belief that me, a 32 year old, had no discipline whatsoever. That I chatted like an obsessive compulsive addict. That if I ever saw the other people on-line, I would be bombing them without thought with a barrage of chat-lines. Bomb! Bomb! Bomb! Take that. And that. And another. For a part of that day after I’d received the message – I was in absolute shock. I numbly went back to work, finished some odds and ends, packed up my bags and left my department to go back home. I was waiting for the bus, when the realization hit me “poww”. And this time – well, it wasn’t my “fimh” or anyone else who handed me the nugget. It was my other self – at least one of them.
By itself thought communion is nothing but a mode of communication with possibly minimal use of “external” technology or “noise” or “sound”, or any of the other more conventional modes of communication. At this point – that really is all “thought-communion” is, or call it “thought-link” or “telepathy”. For me, at this point, “thought-link” as a medium of communication is rather erratic – singularly brilliant for some things, hopeless at other things, and quite diseased and warped at yet other things – only I seem to be getting infinitesimal bits better and terribly slowly too, at being able to separate the “genuine” thought-link” and the imaginary ones.
So the way I see “thought-communion” now is that it is neither innately glorious, nor diseased. There’s nothing intrinsically divine or devilish about the process. There is nothing “sane” nor “insane” about it – at least not “intrinsically”. Now if all of us could engage in “thought-link” without knowing how to maneuver the controls – we would head for an instant, screaming collision with death, destruction, madness, and mayhem (that’s one extreme possibility – and possibly a tale to be spun by a depressive and morbid ‘science-fiction’ writer?). If thought-link is “just” another means of communication and if we used it without knowing how to keep the process in check – it would be bad in the hands of some, useless in the hands of others, glorious in the hands of yet others, useful and practical in the hands of yet others, and possibly a beneficent tool for some, while being nothing but an addiction for some, and an irritant for yet some more through the diverse possibilities of use, misuse, and abuse of this medium of communication (about which I’ve written many pages in my diary).
“Thought-link/communion” would be, if it ever pans out in reality like “any other” invention, discovery or creation – open to the possibility of demonization (this has already happened in some forms, and is happening: think about the “mad”), “mundanization”, revolution, “consciousization”, “idolization”, and what-have-you. If we as a species had the option right now to set our “thought-link” powers to ON, it wouldn’t bring about world peace and advancement in human consciousness at all! An addiction is what it’ ll be for some within an alarmingly short time, and once the initial disbelief, shock, amazement, astonishment, and sheer profundity, and power of the process wears off for many – it’ll end up being a menace, a nuisance, and bore, and an irritation – not to mention a danger in the hands (or heads) of some.
Oh, sure – I’ll be the first to admit to the “beauty” of being able to communicate without “open speech” and sound and technology, and what-have-you – but the amusing thought that hit me right now is that maybe human beings “invented” speech as a process of selective filtering to remedy the “problems” of “thought-communion” and its abuse or misuse! (A short story comes to mind – one that hasn’t yet been written…)
All of us use “thought-link” to some extent. As the 18 year old writer of the second story told me, people who are very close can of course, every now and again read each other’s thoughts! So it does happen at some under-the-surface level. And of course I’m not saying that none of us should use it all…but it’s just this realization that even for me there has to be some balance, some calm acceptance of the “fact” that it’s neither a miraculous and super-conscious power (in and of itself) nor a curse, a horror, and a disease. Fimh, is my reality. Fimh is a very real being in my world – but fimh and “thought-communion”, while they may seem to be a couple of the most lovely and amazing elements about life – I know now that they are thus, for me, and in my world (and my world, as I’ve lately discovered is being steadily blessed more and more). “Thought-link” for me seems terribly vital, terribly precious, terribly fragile, delicate, and beautiful, and humorous sometimes, and other things beside. But these things are what “thought-link” means to me. For someone else “thought-link” may be nothing but the means of controlling other people in devious, cruel, and evil ways….for some other rare people – “thought-link” may be the means that they use to transmit their teachings, their awareness, their light, and their love. And so on and so forth.
Yet every single “discovery”, “invention”, “brilliant insight”, “remarkable idea” is open to distortion, is open to being mauled, is open to being carried to every horrible and glorious extreme. What haven’t we done in the name of some of the greatest religions, in the name of “righteous” economic and social principles (Socialism, Marxism, Capitalism), in the name of “love”?....and why? One of the reasons is because we see these as being innately “great”, as innately “right”, as innately “carrying the Truth” – and we say “we can kill, plunder, root out kill – for our way is the right way….” The most brilliant ideas that have captured some of the best minds throughout human history, have all been used in many diverse ways…
And if this is what we have done with every single creation, invention, discovery – or at least, almost every single thing – what had made me imagine that “thought-link” in itself would be humankind’s saviour?!
Sure – if it really is real – it means that the human mind has more power than we are currently using – okay, but we already know that…don’t we?
I end with two final thoughts – the funniest bits. Realising all of the above made me think that I had hit upon the ‘greatest truth of all’. Now I realise that the whole realization probably does no one any good apart from me, and I’m certainly not complaining!
The other funny thing is that some weeks ago: I dreamt that a person very close to me had written an essay on “Delusions”. I had woken up from the dream very excited because there in the essay was the answer (the answer to what, I do not know…just that the answer was important to me). I had woken up, and hurriedly smoked a cigarette – but for the life of me I couldn’t remember what the essay was all about…..
As for my fimh: I realise that my interactions with fimh are no longer frustrating nor boring – far from it…still is a mystery somewhat....and so.
2 comments:
Your friend fimh and the voices inside your head remind me of the voices that I often hear (inside my head of course, although I have not yet considered christening them). I often converse with people in my imaginations. It sounds crazy, I admit, but that is how it is. I converse with variety of people in various situations at various places at different times. I converse with them in my head. I speak to them and they speak back to me, and all the time my brain engages itself in translating my thoughts into their voices and then back into another thought. This conversation often takes momentum (that is the general case, actually) and reaches a certain stage in which I actually speak up in order to respond to the other party inside my head. The conversations are lively; perhaps livelier than it would have been in actuality, simply because my mind has the liberty to put words into the mouths of my companions, which is of course impossible in the real life, unless of course I possess some psychic power! Any way, these conversations are so real that I hardly question their reality until I actually speak up. Suppose I disagree in a certain conversation, so in the end I say loudly, ‘No…actually….’ And then I think God, what am I doing? It is all inside my head. And then I laugh at my own silliness.
I believe that every person is schizophrenic at some level. All of us live in a certain dimension of imagination. For some, the existence of such a dimension is vague, for some it is in such proportions that the person can still realize the difference between what is real and what is imaginary (of course I can go on debating on this topic about what is real and what is imaginary, but I understand that it is irrelevant in this thread. What is relevant is the ability to perceive) and for the others…well, they lose the grip on ‘reality’ very rapidly. But let us talk about the people who follow the middle path: People who understand the difference between imaginary and real, yet who get lost into the imaginary world now and then.
As a child, I always re-enacted my favourite scenes from any of my favourite movies or television serials (Shaktimaan, for instance) in my head and often in reality, forgetting the present reality for some time. I would say the dialogues for the hero and then I would laugh insanely like the villain, sometimes I would cry for help, like the heroine and then her saviour would fly over hills and buildings and fight a hundred goons to save her. Of course I did not fight a hundred bad men. I just kicked and punched in thin air and then I fell like a stone, imitating the villain. As for flying or doing acrobatics, I would just lay on the bed and roll sideways and across to make myself believe that I was really performing those stunts. And after a thousand bad guys had been defeated and the heroine saved, our hero would suddenly realize that an hour or two had passed and he had barely noticed it.
That was about the fimh that we have. Now I shall like to say something about telepathy and the concept of speaking without speaking which your friend (actually he is 19 years old) had introduced in his story. Telepathy is the sympathetic affection of one mind by the thoughts, feelings, or emotions of another at a distance, without communication through the ordinary channels of sensation. There lies the difference between the two concepts. While the theory of telepathy considers the communication between two separate minds, the concept of SWS says that it is possible only inside a single mind and a single soul. That is why the feeling of oneness is so important. I shall like to quote the teacher in that story-- Do you not have a feeling, however indistinct that feeling might be, that you are somehow merged into me and there is no boundary separating us now? There you go; the teacher and the student of the story could communicate with each other only because their souls were one. They were not different people any more. So, in the essence, the conversation was like the ones which we often have inside our heads. I have never tried out telepathy and I am not sure whether it will work for me. But speaking without speaking? We encounter it every time we are close to our loved ones. For instance, my mother can almost always tell what is going on in my mind. One can argue that she knows me too well. Well, that is what oneness is all about, isn’t it? The complete knowledge is the pathway to oneness. I was born out of her soul and so it is not surprising that our souls might not be two different entities, but two manifestations of a singular soul.
I can go rambling on this topic for hours, unless checked. And as the Weasley twins might have said, ‘We always know where to draw the line…’ shhhk…I draw the line.
As incredibly long as this blog was, it did make me think. :-P I can't say that I have voices in my head, per se, but i do have a little think that some may find amusing/interesting.
When I am upset at someone or about something, it helps A LOT for me to have a pretend argument in my head. Full on screaming, gestures, and resolution...all in my head. So while I haven't yet noticed a separate, sentient presence, that little counter-voice does help me when i need to either calm down or make a smarter choice. :-)
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