The upgrading of humanity requires deep listening and a reset. When we question how far we’ve come with gratitude for the past, present and future, we can concretize our reality through our own experiences, revealing clarity and presence.
I wrote my first poem at age seven: An existential smorgasbord, I could see the many different dishes of my future beautifully spread, communicating my perspective with different flavors. I could feel the span and history of consciousness doing *something* and all I could do at the time was lean into the future and communicate through words.
Words liberated my physicality into an abyss, creating a portal and distributing dormant, evolutionary codes. Words helped me to peel through the layers of multidimensional consciousness. I often felt restricted in my body. And words helped to liberate my identity into another world where time is non-linear.
At seven, I found more meaning in words than I did in the materialist world. It was around this time that I discovered one of my favorite poems, written by Edgar Allen Poe, which only furthered my existentialism:
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow:
You are not wrong who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
This poem explores the difference between our perceptions of life and the effects of time; it woke me up to the idea that all human sensory experiences are simply a hallucination experienced by humans, a figment of their imaginations and illusions. And this thing called “beliefs” only help to further our hallucinations. We latch onto beliefs and create meaning through them with things like religion, spirituality, culture and communities.
Belief is a funny thing. Belief can lock you into an identity, chaining you into one reality tunnel. Once you shed a belief, you realize the myopic lens you were wearing, like horse blinders, kept you oblivious to other ways of “believing.”
In the same way that thoughts are linear, words are often limiting when only used for their literal meaning. The best poets bridge the gap between the metaphysical and the mind, embodying a new paradigm for existence.
Poets immerse themselves into an unseen reality, using words and silence to create an alchemical change in the world. By introducing the previous structures into dialogue with their own findings, they awaken new realms of consciousness.
According to Julian Jayne in his book, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,” language and metaphor helped create human consciousness. Consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. If this theory is true, then language and metaphor helped create human consciousness.
There’s always more going on than the literal words.
Modern neuroscience is grappling with this theory and many poets know this as inherent truth.
The frequency that exists in the structure of words is art. And we’re still learning how to master this frequency today.
When we create art from a place that’s beyond the ego and beyond the personality, we give voice to those that don’t follow the leader blindly.
“You are an artist. Your own innocence now is of one who has become an artist, who has been, as it were, transmuted. You don’t behave as the person behaves who has never mastered an art.” — Joseph Campbell
At seven, my quest to make sense of my inner voice, an inner world that I naturally inhabited led me to where I am today, and it continues to fuel my curiosity. Whether through the poetry of Poe or the comedy of Carlin, art infuses our essence with meaning.
When the smorgasbord of life is asking us to taste a new flavor, do we take a bite?