“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”
~ Gustave Flaubert
Yesterday, a villa guest approached me with an idea he has, which involves a coloring book for children. He wanted to gain my feedback as a fellow web marketer. As we chatted, we both began to question: Do children today even use coloring books? Is it an outdated activity destined for the museums of the future? I was amazed later in the day when Spencer shared with me an astounding statistic: An estimated 92% of all people in the world now own a smart phone. Yes, 92% !!!! We have become a society of electronica.
I chimed in that it’s actually the adult parents who are the purchasers of coloring books. So if the coloring book is slowly dying, it’s the parents who are killing it.
And why do we even care, I asked?
Well, we both share a belief that there is something profoundly important about learning the skill of putting one’s hand to paper.
A girlfriend was talking about a music album which she has produced. She originally wrote the lyrics when she was a teen, on paper in magic marker. Those sheets of paper hold strong sentimental value to her, and the energy of that time, when she looks at those pages, is still as raw and alive as ever. Would those words hold as much meaning for her, had she typed them digitally? I’m not sure.
While I type here digitally, I’ve mentioned that I often forget what I’ve written. Yet the act of daily writing reveals my life’s philosophy. And it is only through the act of writing, just as the opening quote surmises, that I am beginning to discover that which I believe.
Through the electronic age, are we losing touch with the beauty, as manifest in our physical world?
Do we care that instagram selfies are taking the place of the poloroid? Or that photoshop is taking the place of the artist’s canvas?
How do I feel about the fact that wordpress and blogger seem to have supplanted the written diary? I still keep a hand-written journal, and the contents are much different than those here on this blog. It’s filled with the mundane activities of my life, my emotions, my hopes and dreams. It’s written in various hues of colored pencil, with colorful print outs of quotes and photos which hold meaning to me in that moment. And as I’ve been going back through my writings here on WordPress, it’s fun to look at my daily journal to see what sometimes prompted my writings and research here.
I love the thought behind the television series, Revolution: What if the power grid went down, and the internet died tomorrow? Would we become a lost civilization like Atlantis?? We will have very little physical evidence of our existence if we continue in this way.
Thoughts such as these prompted the great philosopher Alan Watts to write in “The Nature of Consciousness”:
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But you see, we are playing a game. The game runs like this: the only thing you really know is what you can put into words. Let’s suppose I love some girl, rapturously, and somebody says to me, ‘Do you REALLY love her?’ Well, how am I going to prove this? They’ll say, ‘Write poetry. Tell us all how much you love her. Then we’ll believe you.’ So if I’m an artist, and can put this into words, and can convince everybody I’ve written the most ecstatic love letter ever written, they say ‘All right, ok, we admit it, you really do love her.’
But supposing you’re not very articulate, are we going to tell you you DON’T love her? Surely not. But the whole game that our culture is playing is that nothing really happens unless it’s in the newspaper.
So when we’re at a party, and it’s a great party, somebody says ‘Too bad we didn’t bring a camera. Too bad there wasn’t a tape recorder. And so our children begin to feel that they don’t exist authentically unless they get their names in the papers, and the fastest way to get your name in the paper is to commit a crime. Then you’ll be photographed, and you’ll appear in court, and everybody will notice you.
And you’re THERE. So you’re not there unless you’re recorded. It really happened if it was recorded. In other words, if you shout, and it doesn’t come back and echo, it didn’t happen.
Well that’s a real hang-up !!
It’s true, the fun with echoes; we all like singing in the bathtub, because there’s more resonance there. And when we play a musical instrument, like a violin or a cello, it has a sounding box, because that gives resonance to the sound. And in the same way, the cortex of the human brain enables us when we’re happy to know that we’re happy, and that gives a certain resonance to it. If you’re happy, and you don’t know you’re happy, there’s nobody home.
But this is the whole problem for us. Several thousand years ago, human beings devolved the system of self-consciousness, and they knew, they knew.
There was a young man who said ‘though
It seems that I know that I know,
What I would like to see
Is the I that sees me
When I know that I know that I know.’
And this is the human problem: we know that we know. And so, there came a point in our evolution where we didn’t guide life by distrusting our instincts. Suppose that you could live absolutely spontaneously. You don’t make any plans, you just live like you feel like it. And you say ‘What a gas that is, I don’t have to make any plans, anything. I don’t worry; I just do what comes naturally.’
So then. If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death–or shall I say, death implies life–you can conceive yourself. Not conceive, but FEEL yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as someone here on sufferance, on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental.
What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.
—–
So, I suppose when the camera, the pen, and my computer have died, I’ll have found bliss, consciousness itself. Isn’t that what I’m really trying to understand with all my physical manifestations in this world? And that friends, is why keeping the coloring book alive is so important! Without them, children lose their creativity, their innate ability to connect with consciousness itself. And apart from that, putting pen to paper every day has taught me non-attachment, discipline, courage, patience, appreciation & gratitude.
I bid you a beautiful day. And please do pick up some crayons and color your world today 🙂
Resource: http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/watts_alan/watts_alan_article1.shtml
