So here's a thought. This is what i would look like if I were a super hero. :)

Thought Anatomy

Since the title of this whole Blog revolves around the idea of thoughts, it is only befitting that I try to reach an understanding of what thoughts are.

I have thought about this issue for a while. I have wondered about its relevance to my happiness. I have tried playing with my thoughts and I have failed in controlling them. I have also put effort into disregarding them only to fall into them again and again and time after time. They were only becoming stronger. I probably thought too hard about them. ☺

My decision to start this Blog was spontaneous. I am not the king nor queen of control. I have been known to make hasty decisions but I can safely say that my life choices have so far mostly had good results. Maybe they have and maybe I have learned to assume. Maybe I am not naturally inclined to regret. Or maybe I’m just good at management. Whatever it is, a thought I experienced instantly translated into this Blog, which in turn will translate into other things. A thought spawns generations of material and immaterial manifestations.

So why worry about this? What’s important about those thoughts? If I examine them, will I be considered as taking a backdoor into psychoanalysis? The answer is no, because it’s not what a thought is about that I am concerned with here. It’s what a thought is. What is this thing, really? It’s treated as nothing but it actually has the capacity to move mountains. Literally. Look at the thought of Dubai. Look at the thought of Beirut. Look at the thought of the Middle East. Look at the thought of fear. The thought of fear for example causes knee-jerk reactions, which cause more thoughts of fear, which cause sentiments of hatred and aggression and interact with stupidity to instigate violence, which can cause the whole world to bear the weight of collective killing sprees. Thoughts are extremely powerful.

What are those entities?

Let’s start with perceptions about thoughts. Thoughts are perceived as occurring involuntarily. In other words, we do not hold people accountable for their thoughts, but only for their actions. However, there does seem to be a continuum starting with thoughts and ending with action along which different people choose different points to start to credit or blame people for what they are observed as planning to do. It is difficult to pin down the exact point where a thought begins or ends.

So thoughts are involuntary. We do not create them. However, after a thought is born it seems to develop the capacity to trap its owner into either running with it or fighting it. It actually appears to want the person experiencing it to do so because that is how a thought reproduces. It’s as if those entities have a life of their own which they seem to be working hard to preserve. If you run with them or fight them, they end up growing and multiplying. Many thoughts interacting with each other can generate even more thoughts, they can give birth to an idea or ideas, or they can lead to fixation.

There it is again that two-times-four letter F word. Fixation. How does one little unidentified object of a thought become that dreaded fixation? Personally, I have found that when I toy with a thought, when I resist it, or when I try hard not to acknowledge it, it can turn into fixation. From meditation I know that flirting with a thought and fighting it can have the same effect. A thought lets you fight it only to multiply itself. It also lets you play with it for the same result. The only way you can get rid of a thought is to just watch it pass by, acknowledging it, accepting it, seeing it for what it is. But what is it, really? What do we know about it?

A thought is an unidentified body of energy that seems to be present somewhere in the area of the upper part of the head but with its weight spanning between the chest and that part of the head and affecting the whole body. It also has the potential of causing something to happen outside the body. In fact it can be argued that any thought, no matter how small will eventually materialize somehow in the domain outside the body. Take this a bit further and we can start seeing everything around us as being in the nature of a thought.

We also know that a thought can be pleasant, annoying, insignificant, worthwhile, or a total waste of time. It can make you lose sleep, develop unwanted feelings, understand or misunderstand the world around you, and develop intentions and actions. A thought can stop you from thinking right.

A thought can lead to ‘good’ or ‘bad’ actions or states of mind. Therefore a thought is not intrinsically good or bad. A thought perceived as good may develop into what’s perceived as a bad fixation and a thought perceived as bad may materialize as what's perceived as a good idea or a fine product. Look at religious fundamentalism and take a whiff of blue cheese.

If we delve into our thoughts, some claim we would be able to paint a better picture of our minds but it’s a picture we may never get to see finished. If we don’t delve into our thoughts, the same may happen. A thought, therefore, is not inherently capable of explaining anything.

The existence of thoughts, however, can. It points to a source that’s producing them. They are produced as neutral, tasteless, and shapeless entities, which we can use to project any state of mind we want on or to fuel any result we desire. Regardless of what a thought is or what it’s about, we know that it is nothing but the expression of a magnificent source that is beyond being called good, or bad. It is non-judgmental and it cannot be judged. It is clear but not quite easy to see. It is to be accepted, but not embraced. It is neither to be rejected nor defended. We would be aware of it, if it weren’t for those thoughts.

Poooooondering...

Here are a few questions that I have struggled with and that I would like an Apothecary's response to.

• Why do I do things that I know I don't want to do?
• Why do I keep on doing things that i know I don't want to do?
• Why can't I stop doing the things that I don't want to do?
• Why can't I keep doing the things that i want to do?
• What is it about sitting in front of a computer that makes me stick to the chair?
• What is it about doing nothing that makes it so hard to bear?
  
• Why am I always in the situation of being crazy over one thing only to drop it in a short while and go crazy over another?
  
• Why can't I focus on what I'm doing without falling into my mind's blubber?
  

Ponder ponder, makes me wonder...

Apothecary thinks Fixation is the stuff of genius. By fixating on the little issues, my mind has found a smart little routine to avoid the big ones. It's found a way of keeping itself from looking at what's important and what (seems to be) difficult to consider. Einstein-of-a-mind has found a way to relieve itself from working.

My mind, free from fixation is...

Ponder ponder, makes me wonder...

Last Night at the Lonely Closet

Coming home from work yesterday, the night seemed like it was going to be eventful. A few friends had gotten in touch proposing to do different things. I wasn’t sure where I was going but as I got home, one cancellation after another came through and I found myself doing nothing. I was happy about it in a sense because after all, I did come here with the intention to relax a bit and get away from the constantly-have-to-be-doing-something mode I so frequently find myself caught in.

I remembered a batch of bootleg DVDs that I bought from a Chinese lady who knocked on my door a few days ago. I ended up watching a film called Grey Matters. It’s another coming of age story about a brother and sister who fall in love with the same woman. I thought it was too stereotypical and I started using my forward button a little bit. I did, that is, until at one point the movie changed tone. As the sister came out to the brother and confessed about her crush, I put down the remote control and paid a little more attention. After a while there was a scene where they are stuck in an elevator and she’s coming out again. Here is where the weird stuff started to happen. As I was watching, I was thinking LAME, not again, etcetera but I discovered that I was actually choking up. I was stopping myself from crying. I was undeniably denying myself a feeling.
To watch the scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l6Kh0kILgM

What made me choke up? The girl was telling her brother about her feelings about being gay. She didn’t feel normal, she did feel apologetic for who she was, and she did feel lonely. Lonely. Lonely because she would never be able to walk down the street holding hands with her partner without the rest of the world giving them a look, because she may never have the wedding that she once dreamed of, because she may never have children, and, one day when she dies, because people will never give respect to her grieving lover as much as if she were her husband.

Lonely. The girl had friends, a good job, a loving brother, and she was lonely.

For the past few weeks I have been in Dubai. I moved here from my city where I was always surrounded by people, friends and family, colleagues and neighbors and, and, and… I came here with the intention of slowing down my social life. But, I felt a little shame somewhere when someone asked what did you do last night and I answered nothing. Here I am this mature 40-year-old well-adjusted man embarrassed by the simple fact that I stayed home the night before. I didn’t want to go out, but a small part of me was embarrassed that I didn’t. I dove deeper into this feeling to understand why. It wasn’t because I like the image of being a man with a busy social calendar and it wasn’t because I wanted to go out and didn’t. It was because I am so used to being surrounded by people that I developed an attachment to it. I thought about it some more and I discovered that at the very core of this feeling was the feeling that, as a gay man, I am lonely. I’m in a relationship with a man that I love but that didn’t get rid of that feeling. I have friends and colleagues and spiritual friends and teachers. I’m always involved in one project or another, I travel a lot, and I seriously barely have time to do anything. But there it is again, when I get home at night, I get that feeling that I‘m alone.

Are all gay people lonely? I look around me and I can’t help but feel that we are. Most of us, though, work hard on maintaining the busy agenda look. Party here, dinner there, work engagements everywhere. All in vain effort to beat that little feeling hiding at the bottom right corner of our rib cage that we’re unaware of, which bites us in the ass, and not where it feels nice, every time we find ourselves alone at home or with no where to go or nothing to do. Did we come out of the gay closet only to enter the lonely closet?

Truth is, I may be more aware of it than the average gay person because I ‘discovered’ who I was late in life. I didn’t have time to push those feelings down as they appeared suddenly and without warning. I unconsciously worked hard at maintaining the ‘normalcy’ of my life. It’s normal, I’m normal, and nothing has really changed, I maintained. Nothing changes when you set your life up in a good way. I have good friends and my family seems to be coping, though not too well, but it’s still coping. I forgot to face those feelings that I have lost the privilege of being one of the people. I had stepped out of the mass. I left the big circle and entered a little one on the side. I lost the right to not feel different. This may sound romantic and heroic, but how can it be when it is not by choice?

So here it is, the Apothecary of Thought’s response to the concern:

Recognition. It’s the mother of all cures.

To beat that loneliness, I have at times been addicted to friends, to clubs, to work, to substances of various levels of danger. I ate without restraint. I went out and got sick. I bought clothes that I didn’t like. I spent endless hours at the gym. And I did all those things for the wrong reasons. I thought they would beat the loneliness. But they can’t. The only thing that can is seeing and admitting and accepting those feelings that we all share. I have to own the fact that from the beginning we are alone. I am not just referring to gay people. Everyone has that feeling. I, as a human being, am alone. We all go through the bigger journey alone. That is how we beat the loneliness. By recognizing what we are all in this together.

No one is alone in feeling alone.