Subtle shifts in the sand call upon the captain to change course.

Our mind and emotions are like the tunes you hear out of a radio or the dramas which unfold before your eyes through the lens of a television screen. The melody out of the radio is a representation of the invisible signal no ordinary man cares to ever consider. Nor does he think of the complicated data which streams through wires and satellites in order to conjure visual cinema from nothing and nowhere. It is the sleight of hand that men never notice. Rarely will one stumble upon the method, the modes, and the sources of phenomena.

Noumena is what they sometimes call it, at least in one respect. What is a thing in itself, broken into its very substance(s), and seen as it is? Perception is faulty, and there is hardly a single modern mind who will deny that fact of reality. A man will look upon himself as if looking down a well, and realize that much of what he considers to be true and real is in fact simply fantasy. Science and its instruments provides insights into how the blood changes when moods shift from one polarity to another, as emotions transition from one shade to the next, and neurons lay there eggs and chat amongst each other.

Hormones and other chemical catalysts continually pump from internal glands which paint the mosaic of how we feel, think, sense and move in any given moment of time. Little, tiny, building blocks travel through the capillaries, veins and arteries as if populating them like automobiles transporting packages from one town to the next. It is their quality and quantity, active presence or dormant existence, which defines most, if not all, of what our identity is here and now. By psychological instigation our blood will change. Concentrate for a single second and in that twinkling of an eye, the blood and body will, although often invisibly, reflect it by mutual accord.

What escapes us is the use of a double-arrow to understand cause and effect. We like to simplify matters by believing a relationship flows in only one direction. It is hard to understand how the roles can be seen equally in reverse, where cause is effect in one instant, and effect in another. It is almost impossible to further discover that both at times are true in the very same case. Paradox — that is the word du jour. The wise chap plays out the role of both idiot and clown, moving towards a relative position towards every affair of consequence where not one, nor the other, are true in and of themselves.

But what does all this claptrap mean? Often we believe our mood is real, our thoughts are sound, and the body’s posture is true. Yet in most cases the mood is arbitrary and false, thoughts are blinding and narrow, and the body is simply mimicking its motions based on past repetitive behaviour. We are filled constantly by influences, as if containers of any passing hypnotic spell to come our way. We justify our state at a near constant rate, never stopping for a moment to suspect that what we are is often a big question mark.