The heart wants…

 

Tai and Sora. From Digimon Adventure 02

While not exactly following on the existentialism related post from before, one of the most primordial needs the human being has, besides assurance of the worth of their existence, and of their own purpose and meaning, is a strong desire to belong: to love and be loved. Abraham Maslow had it so right.

But one doesn’t need to be a psychologist to realize the fundamental. Mankind needs love. You and I need love. But what is love?

There should be a dictionary of redundancy, for one of the definitions given by google is “a person or thing that one loves”. Yet the feeling of intense attraction or affection towards someone else is ever more fitting a definition. But what causes such attraction?

Let’s face it, even as creations of God, we are akin with animals. We have hormones. No matter how much one person would deny it, regardless their genre, there will always be attraction for those whose outer beauty is more visible. Unfortunately, that comes as one if not the main reason why youth today search for what they think is love. To many, love’s meaning is scrambled, and it soon becomes confused with a more carnal desire. This is the main reason why I hate the so-called artists who take advantage of the rushed-up emotions of teens and turn them into fleeting poetry through “music”. Teens today believe love HAS to do with the intercourse.

But I tell you, and you will agree with me. Isn’t it to “have sex” with that girl everyone likes, and “making love” with your beloved two different things? When did these two become the same? It is not wrong, but sad, to believe love focuses on physical attraction. There is much more than that.

The true meaning of love doesn’t come from outside. The outside will age, rot away, and fade from existence. I have to and will sound cliche when I dare to say that the inside is what matters, for it is what we don’t see that signifies more.

When a person is able to see people for their real worth, love grows in a different way. Beyond that weird looking zit, short stature, goofy eyeglasses, fashion style, or whatever hurtful thing one may think about people around them, there is a beautiful soul. Everybody can have a beautiful soul. But if one ever falls in love seeing the inside of the person, the one loved won’t merely be pleasant to be around with, such a person will shine to the lover’s eyes. 

So what’s that shine, pray tell? I ask you, when you have truly loved someone, what did you like about that person? To one who hasn’t had the real chance to find love AND KEEP IT, such a question is hard to answer.

Maybe it is that we see ourselves through the beloved’s eyes. Maybe, maybe we feel a need to see such a person laugh. Maybe we feel the need to protect. Maybe we feel complete with that person. Maybe we need someone with whom to share our own happiness… or maybe we need someone who would actually help us through a certain pain.

Whatever the reason may be for love, please, make sure not to confuse it with the physical kind. Do not relate your going out with that girl across the street with a desire to “have fun”. Do not look to hang out with someone only to arouse jealousy in another’s heart. Do not stain your heart and stoop as low as to do these things only for selfish pleasure.

Love is a gift of purity we make to one another. Love needs not be searched for, it comes to you. And it is a treasure two people are bound to find, and when it is found both of these people will rejoice together. Not anymore will they wish to let it go.

 

Modified from an image at organiseforlife.com.au

But if you find it, keep it healthy, keep your love strong. Express it and let it grow. When I was fourteen, I fell in love with a girl from my Algebra class. I remember she was very lively, smart, and even sassy. But I was too shy to express myself. I couldn’t face her. And what could have turned out to be the best relationship in my life was cut short and ahead of time. To this day, I remember her, and truly, I hope she’s doing well.

Andrea, wherever you are, I hope you are happy.

I cannot say that I don’t regret this, I am not that cold. And for the same reason there are days that I can’t help but reminisce and wonder in what dimension, if it even exists, things would have been different. But with life, everything is an experience. The time will come when it is my turn again, but I now know what I have to do more and less of. 

Don’t you ever waste your chance, time will never be enough.

Guys, let your love flourish, and express it, no one has the right to judge you wrong, or even judge you at all for doing it, don’t be too macho. Keep your sanity in check, and to put it bluntly, SEX CAN WAIT.

Girls, let your love define you. Always display it and regale your partners with it. Have some self-respect, don’t give yourself in despite any conditions.They will, if they know what’s good for them, be content with just having you around.

Let those who are single not mourn. You guys must always have faith someone will come to bear with you! Don’t find pleasure ANYWHERE ELSE.

To the single girls, do not rush feelings. With a little hope, someone will finally see what you really are worth for. Every one of you is beautiful in different ways.

With that, I hope that everyone can have a wonderful Valentine’s Day… and enjoy the chocolate…

A beautiful song by Daniel Bedingfield

The meaning of Life

Life. I’m not referring to a 19th century magazine. The life we live, the time it encompasses, the span through which we consciously exist, is a subject of wonder to even the world’s most renowned scientist, philosophers, and wise men today. Even Wikipedia puzzles itself over it, and tries to give several answers depending on the beliefs of different groups. One nice job it does is reducing this huge inquiry in several smaller parts:

What are we here for?
Who are we?
What is our purpose?
What are we living for?
Where do we come from?
Where are we going?

It is by no means wrong to ask these questions, for they are no more than the basis of our nature. We ask because we wish to know about ourselves. We wish to learn about ourselves. We wish to understand what makes us who we are, and why, and to what end. And wikipedia has it right when it proposes several meanings of life for different cultures and beliefs. We are not clones to each other, so what is nice to you or me might not be nice to another. This is why we all don’t work on the same things, this is why we have lawyers, politicians, police, firefighters, teachers, etc. We try to find a job that suits us because that is what we like and we are happy with it.

And sometimes we are happy doing something else besides politics

While I wouldn’t have voted for Romney based on his political views, I just may have voted for him IF elections depended on who dances the best. Anyways, think about for a second on the white word above. What is to be happy? Happiness, as defined on a quick google search, is “the state of being happy”. I always hated those redundant definitions, but what does it mean to be happy? Imagine working hard the whole day for several hours non-stop, then your shift ends, you go home, sit down at the sofa and have a drink (of whatever). How does that feel? Happiness is a feeling of relaxation, fulfillment, when a person feels it is okay to unwind, sit back and enjoy the fact that things in life are going well, that there are no worries to torment the soul.

Have I in any way answered the questions mentioned above? Not a single one. Despite these questions holding reasonable importance in modern philosophy, their answers will always vary, so long as ideas are different in each individual.

One thing we do share in common, is our own humanity. We all want to live well, be free of worry, to feel like we are doing the right thing. Despite our different sets of values, objectives or plans, these goals can only be achieved through happiness. When we are happy, it’s because everything is perfect. And when everything is perfect, so are we.

Fulfillment can only be accomplished by realizing our goals, and thus I believe the meaning of life is to be happy. Don’t stop to ponder about where we came from or where we’re going, we would only be living in the past or the future. The time will come when we find all these answers for ourselves, but for now, just be happy. Be happy that you’re alive, that you can learn and have fun. Be happy that you can love and/or be loved. Be happy that you can choose to follow your own path. May you thrive in it, and may you accomplish your dreams…

From wallpaperweb.org. It’s gotta feel really nice to be in a place like this

On Dreams

The drawing above is a rough sketch, representing a dream I had some days ago. Why knights? I wonder that myself. Maybe I’m reading too much Tirant Lo Blanch? Although medieval times have always appealed to me so much I would always fantasize living in such times. Yet, I meant to talk about dreams, of the kind we get while sleeping.

A dream is a collection of images from our memories, the information we absorb every day, our deepest thoughts, desires and even fantasies, that occur while we’re sleeping, that we may or may not have control of (like when you wake up in the middle of one, think that you wish to get back to it, fall asleep and back to it you are). While most memorable dreams occur in the last stage of sleep, known as REM sleep, (rapid eye movement, maybe because dreams present themselves as a slideshow that goes left and right or viceversa) some of the dreams we have may occur in other stages of sleep, which comprise those dreams we cannot remember. So what’s so important about them if we’re only gonna see them in our sleep? That is if we remember them.

Sigmund Freud was a strong believer that we had another conscience within us, which would not be accessible even by ourselves in our conscious state (when we are awake) because its ideas differed from our normal ones greatly. He named this conscience the subconscious, which being repressed by us without our knowing because of how unacceptable it could be to our way of life and others around us, would only get to appear when we lacked a conscious state, meaning when we’re sleeping. The ideas that formed part of it would then appear to us as images to interpret, which would be our dreams.

Psychoanalysis a la Freud is still used today, yet most of his theories with respect to dreams have been left behind due to a palpable lack of proof. Logic alone tells us our subconscious is not necessarily made up of ideas/behavior we reject, as those who are  multifaceted (whether good or bad) can and embrace their other selves.

So what’s my take?

I’m always interested in time, because I always like to analyse different outcomes, whether for this world or my own life, past or future. Yet while it is unnecessary to travel back, we are not able to perfectly do it anyways. So how does this relate to dreams?

There’s a very interesting video that explains the ten dimensions of our existence, from which I can conclude: “To travel through a higher dimension, one must be able to fold such dimension by means of using an even higher dimension”. How does this make sense? Maybe with numbers! For us 3D beings, traveling through the 4th dimension (often thought of as time) would involve bending the 5th dimension to our will.

So what’s this fifth dimension? If a line is a one dimension, two lines intersecting form a second, and that along with a tangible normality (in physics, a perpendicular line through an object’s center of gravity) would form a three dimensional object, what can we infer?

3D = 2D + D and 2D = 1D + D

Meaning that the third dimension forms part of the fourth, plus another flat dimension (though figuratively flat). So let’s say the fourth dimension is time. Then for any and all of us, our whole life and the time we live of it is our fourth dimension. But if you imagine again the first dimension as a line, and the second dimension this time instead, as a square, and the third dimension as a cube:

It could be said that one dimension is an agglomeration of every possible outcome of its immediately inferior dimension, which becomes true when we think that a one dimensional object, a line, is a group of zero dimensional objects, which are dots (remember, dots are only representations). Thus the fifth dimension is the mix of all of the possible fourth dimensional objects we can experience, meaning every possible outcome in our life, given we explore every possible event in life that leads us until today, and all of their ramifications.

So, haven’t you ever dreamed you were a super hero? Haven’t you dreamed of living in an alien world? Haven’t you dreamed of being a pop sensation?

What if those dreams are glimpses of what our lives can be, could have been, or could become? Wouldn’t that mean we are (even if slightly) traveling into the fifth dimension? There’s no way to prove this completely, but what if? As a programmer, the ifs are very very important to me, and every possibility to explore different worlds proves to be a most enjoyable challenge.

So what is YOUR take? What do you think about dreams? Find them interesting too or prefer to let them develop on their own?

On time traveling

Who in here hasn’t ever been interested in time travelling? “If I had done this”, or “If I had done that” are expressions that have most likely passed by anyone’s head at least once in their lifetime. And this concept is not a ’20th century’ whim:

Some of the earliest recordings of time travel date back to 700 BC, with Hindu mythology’s Mahabharata, where King Revaita travels to another world to meet Brahma, their creator. Upon his return, a length of time had passed on Earth, which shocked the monarch. So it is plain to see humanity’s deep interest in returning to what they had, where they lived, or who they lived with, has never changed despite our constant evolution.

Several scientists and wise men propose that to achieve such a feat, a time machine would be needed. Yet the existence of such a ‘ship’ would depend on ONE important thing: energy. Where are you gonna eat a delicious grilled cheese IN STONE AGE (provided you have a toaster)?? This notion would only work for the eras at which the machine may retrieve energy from a vast source. Meaning any other time beyond the creation of an energy station, making it impossible to travel to the past, only up to the time the machine was created. Yet let’s get creative, we can build some sort of solar panel or hydro-alternator to charge our machine and go watch God create the universe! Hold your horses, the next step would be to actually enable time traveling. How? Einstein knows…

According to the twin paradox, traveling at a huge speed away from the earth and then going back to it will slow down every biological process dependent on the speed of light, which includes aging. So upon returning to Earth, you might have to get used to the fact that while every single one of your friends are married already you are still (miserably is for anyone who would really feel like moping) single. Yet you may gloat that you are still young! Now I love science fiction and UFO sighting and middle ages, but logic tells me what a traveler of this sort did was just a trip! If he/she traveled 20 light years then he/she LIVED those 20 years, so all this implies (if I’m forgetting anything from this theory, please let me know. Else keep reading!) that, if anyone is ever able to create a rocket that can go that fast, they may as well found an ‘anti-aging company’ that would clean out Nivea.

Let’s assume for a moment that the twin paradox is true, and such a journey will really send us to the future. The catastrophe will either send you straight to Arkham Asylum, or to heaven. How selfish would it be to go to the future (only the future, since there’s no way to travel to the past in the rocket, or else going from Florida to California would also be considered time travel, if even by milliseconds, either forward or backwards) by yourself and miss out on all the experiences (and people!) that occurred during your journey? Not worth it, right?

Let’s forget we once knew science, and get a bit more spiritual. I can surely tell you there IS a way to travel in time. Several in fact, and we experience them everyday.

So what are these time traveling customs? There are three as far as my count goes:

1. One time I was speaking to my physics professor, Felix Rodrigues-Trelles, who also seemed (at least a bit) interested on the matter. He made me realize that time travel actually depends on going back (or forward) to an specific time, at an specific place. Or else going back to your home a week ago will find you exploding in the middle of the emptiness of space where the Earth was rotating and translating a week ago. So this spatial time travel can partially occur in your everyday routines. You were sleeping in the same bed yesterday right? Well then, tonight you are ‘spatially’ going to travel back to where you were 24 hours ago: about to hit the sack!

2. The second type of time travel, the temporary time travel, may happen in about as much as the spatial time travel, or even more, depending on how much you move throughout the day. It is the simplest thing we do, which is called ‘remembering’ ( reminds me of Michael Jackson’s “Do you remember the Time” song). Remember that waffle you ate for breakfast last morning or last week? Well you are now temporarily time traveling!

3. The third time travel type might be heavily discussed, for it is something I myself came up with (most likely of no importance to every PhD holder considering I just have an AA in Computer Science). It is called Perfect Time Traveling. How does Perfect Time Traveling work?

Perfect time traveling is based on the accurate control of all of the dimensions required to effectively perform a step back (or forward) in time. It is widely believed that ‘time’ is the fourth dimension in the plane of our existence (yet also rejected as such), because we travel through is as we age and our live goes through its natural cycle. We cannot do it to ourselves, because we only perceive time, we are not able to change it. We are not good enough to do such journeys. So how can we do it? Not to ourselves, since we’re not good enough, but to ‘others’ much less perfect than us! Who are these others?

Think of everything we create that exists in a lesser plane of existence, with less dimensions. Paper, that’s correct. If we are making a drawing, and we don’t like something, we erase it and then redraw it as we wish. Same with cartoon videos, tv shows, telenovelas, etc. We rewind or forward what we are watching. In video games, there’s the option to save the game, which lets us leave it for later and load it and play it then. In games such as Crash Bandicoot 3, it is possible to actually load the game while on another section of the game, thereby going either back or forward in the timeline of the game. Curiously enough, the game even has levels where the player goes back in time. But what’s important about all of these citations is that in every instance the controlled characters have no notion, no conscience of actually travelling forward or back in time. We as 3-Dimension controllers can make measly 2-Dimension creations of our own travel in time. So what’s stopping a higher being, able to actually reside in a higher plane of existence than us, capable of controlling the 4th, the 5th, even the 10th dimension, to make us travel in time? Nothing! Because if what I’ve discussed is true, we are not even aware of it.

I’m Catholic, and to me such a higher being, the Lord, could do so, but has not had a need to mention it in his Holy Book, only to show John the Revelation. So if such a pure and perfect being doesn’t give time travelling a second thought, then why should we? There’s a saying, by Alice Morse Earle:

“The clock is running. Make the most of today. Time waits for no man. Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why it is called the present.”

So instead of worrying about the mistakes of the past, why not worry about what you might make to avoid having regrets just as bad in the future? Let’s live our life to the fullest, without being licentious or irresponsible, and enjoy the days of creativity and good health we are given!!