A Hidden Universe

A Hidden Universe

There is a hidden universe within my head,

Residing in the electronic pathways

Of my cerebrum.

This world contains the traces of days gone by,

Of people dead, places visited

Experiences felt.

It’s a store of things that no longer exist,

Distorted through time

Like an image in a mirror

Under the surface of a rippling brook,

Sometimes clear, sometimes hazy.

Memories revisited, unvisited and forgotten,

Waiting to be reawakened.

Incidents frozen in time,

Embellished, improved, recreated

And relived.

A whole life is trapped in fragments,

Unique fragments;

A vision of the world

Containing all that exists of many things.

It’s a jumble of oddments,

Some special, some mundane,

Poorly arranged, poorly stored, frustratingly incomplete.

Occasionally a stimulus causes a forgotten moment to emerge,

Like a silvery fish from amongst the weeds,

Darting into clarity from the depths to surprise us.

Then it’s gone.

One day it will all be gone forever.

Opher 23.2.2022

Inside my head the whole of my life is recorded. Everything I’ve seen, heard and felt is laid down in a continuous tape, a chemical, electric phenomenon.

It’s a universe with a unique perspective. My view.

I find it miraculous to even begin to imagine this process.

My memory used to be sharp and clear – now it is hazy. So much forgotten.

They say that we rebuild our memories, remake them, change them, embellish hem. Often what we are remembering is the memory of a rebuil memory.

How I wish it was sharper.

I often wonder if it is the memories decaying or the process of remembering becoming less effective.

Age is a frustration.

I cannot remember people clearly, whole events are missing, most days have entirely vanished, yet some are as sharp as yesterday.

One day this whole universe will dissolve into oblivion.

Out of One Comes Many

Out of One Comes Many

Starting with one

                Giving rise to many.

Coming from a place

                Where there wasn’t any.

Impossible to understand

                How it came to be.

Everything about it

                An impossibility.

From the inanimate

                To consciousness.

To see, hear and touch

                The more with less.

We’ve created religions

                To try to understand.

Now science steps in

                To lend a hand.

But to understand

                Is beyond humanity.

No phony explanations.

                Appreciate the majesty!

Opher – 11.4.2021

We live in an amazing infinite universe.

We do not know how it came into being.

We have consciousness. We see, hear, think, touch, smell and taste.

We do not know how.

We live and we die.

We find death frightening so we invented an afterlife.

We found the mysteries of the beginning of the universe, life and consciousness too bewildering. So we invented gods, heavens and paradise.

For some of us these inventions explain everything.

They explain nothing.

They are inventions.

We live in an amazing infinite universe.

We have consciousness.

It is a wonder.

That is enough.

Out of the Unknown

Out of the Unknown

Out of lightning into reality.

Out of chemistry into biology.

Out of nothing into life.

From the darkness into light.

From the mindless into thought.

From lifeless to where it’s rife.

Opher 11.4.2021

There are many great mysteries. One of the biggest is the question of how life arose.

How did a bunch of chemicals become infused with life?

What strange reaction occurred to imbue inorganic molecules with life?

In a universe full of wonder there was nothing to see, hear, touch, taste or smell it. All that incredible majesty was unnoticed.

Then came life and the light, sound, touch, smell and taste came alive. The unverse had a witness.

Over billions of years this life was honed through mutation and evolution into the myriad forms we see around us. Each one a wonder.

This is incredible.

I live.

I walk. I eat. I breathe. I see. I think.

I am conscious.

Nobody knows how.

I find that too amazing for words.

Some invent god to explain it.

Why replace one incredible wonder with another?

Just marvel at it.

That is enough.

Out of the Unknown

Out of the Unknown

Out of lightning into reality.

Out of chemistry into biology.

Out of nothing into life.

From the darkness into light.

From the mindless into thought.

From lifeless to where it’s rife.

Opher 11.4.2021

There are many great mysteries. One of the biggest is the question of how life arose.

How did a bunch of chemicals become infused with life?

What strange reaction occurred to imbue inorganic molecules with life?

In a universe full of wonder there was nothing to see, hear, touch, taste or smell it. All that incredible majesty was unnoticed.

Then came life and the light, sound, touch, smell and taste came alive. The unverse had a witness.

Over billions of years this life was honed through mutation and evolution into the myriad forms we see around us. Each one a wonder.

This is incredible.

I live.

I walk. I eat. I breathe. I see. I think.

I am conscious.

Nobody knows how.

I find that too amazing for words.

Some invent god to explain it.

Why replace one incredible wonder with another?

Just marvel at it.

That is enough.

Poetry – Looking for Wonder

Looking for Wonder

From the endless sky to the churning sea,

A piece of art to a simple tree;

From mountain tops to the words in a book,

We need to stop and take a look –

At the flower, bird and the bee,

The fly, and even you and me.

For there’s nothing ordinary in anything around

From soil to air, mysteries abound.

Every step is a wondrous adventure

Into light, substance, energy and sound.

We too can add to that beauty to share

With music, paint and the things we wear.

Writing words to please the mind

Of all the friends that we will find.

If you’ve got a poem you need to bind it

If you go looking for wonder

You’ll always find it!

Opher – 16.6.2019

Wonder is all around us. There is no such thing as mundane. Every single aspect of everything is amazing.

Perhaps we should learn to value it more?

Poetry – Amazing

Amazing

Wonder in the sky,

                In trees,

                                In rocks,

                                                In sunsets.

Feel it.

The soil gives life,

                With rain,

                                With air,

                                                With light.

Respect it.

Living on a rock,

                In space,

                                Spinning,

                                                Careering.

Amazing!

Opher 3.5.2019

Although I am not religious, have no concept of god and no expectation of any existence after death, I still feel a mystical connection with many things; as if we are connected via a vibration that we are attuned to.

I can happily feel the power of rocks, trees, seas, cliffs, mountains and sunsets.

The Stone And Reality

The Stone And Reality

I picked up a stone,

A lump of flint,

And held it in my hand

That I might judge its reality.

It weighed heavy in my hand,

Solid and brittle.

The outside rounded

With nodules,

All chalky white,

Smooth with small holes

Speckling its surface,

Tiny craters,

Glimpses through the crust

To the darker kernel of its nature.

One side had sheered

Into a glassy sheet,

Alive with brown, grey and black hues,

With depth,

As if my gaze could pierce into its deepness;

As if it were an aqueous liquid,

An undulating vitreous fluid

In which the shapes and colours flowed,

But it was only light playing on its surface.

The stone was impenetrable.

This flint,

This brittle rock,

So easily shattered,

Whose shards

Have served us well in ages past,

As knives, arrow heads or scrapers,

But is this the reality of this stone?

The sum total of its being,

Its aesthetics?

Its uses?

Isn’t there more?

Shouldn’t we not consider its history?

Born from great pressure in chalk,

Silica seeping,

Slowly crystallising within the strata

In the earth’s crust

Over millions of years.

Chemicals fusing to form these nodules.

Should we not go back further –

To the birth of those chemicals in distant stars –

Their formation

In the nuclear holocaust inside a sun;

The Nova that spewed them forth into space;

The condensing into planets?

Or yet further back

To the hydrogen

That fuelled that fusion.

Or beyond that

To the Big Bang itself

When the fundamental particles

From which it was formed

Were created in a flash –

Into existence from nothing.

I held the stone

And slowly turned it in my hand.

Billions of years of change

Manifested itself before my senses.

Yet its reality was still elusive.

Should I not consider its molecular structure?

The atoms that it is made from?

The subatomic particles that lie within?

The network of forces binding it together?

The microcosm of my rock?

Should I not consider the energy it possesses?

The heat it radiates?

The light it reflects off every surface?

Its sound as I tap?

The radiation it emits as its atoms decay?

What was its reality?

I had barely scratched the surface.

I turned it slowly,

Examined it carefully,

Before tossing it away.

Opher – 26.7.2021

We are surrounded by mystery, complexity and wonder which we take for granted.

Everything is so much more complex than the reality we afford it.

Nothing is trivia.

I was thinking of Blake when I wrote this.

Poetry – I WANNA BELIEVE

I WANNA BELIEVE

I wanna believe

I wanna believe

You have to believe

I wanna believe

I see the mystery

I feel the awe

I wanna believe

Show me what it’s all for

Give me a break

Give me a sign

I just wanna believe

It’ll all work out fine

So the universe is big

Life is so complex

Time lasts forever

And mystery comes next

I wanna believe

I wanna believe

You have to believe

I wanna believe

There must be a reason

There must be a why

Looking up at this wonder

You could fall into the sky

I’ve got this mind

I feel and I breathe

I look through two peepholes

To a reality I perceive

I wanna believe

I wanna believe

You have to believe

I wanna believe

It’s hard to imagine

 it could exist without me

Does a tree really fall

With nobody to see?

Still it doesn’t make sense

All this wonder and awe

Believing in afterlives

Does not explain what it’s for

Heaven’s so crowded

Everything nice for eternity

So pleasant and twee

Bored to death by perpetual ecstasy

I’ve trouble with this purpose

Your God’s eternity

It doesn’t make any sense to me

You see

When my brain gets no blood

There won’t be a me

I wanna believe

I wanna believe

You have to believe

I wanna believe

It’d be nice to think

That there would

But wishing it so

Does not mean that it could

Our thoughts are so profound

Our consciousness great

Our galaxy spins

In an infinite state

It’s amazing and impossible

So we can’t comprehend

But with no greater purpose

One day it will end

It can make you feel good

To think of other stars

But the purpose we need

Is to do better with ours

I wanna believe

I wanna believe

You have to believe

I wanna believe

But I’m afraid I cannot

Books written by men

Do not thrill me a lot

Paradise invented for power

To put despots

In their ivory tower

And religions created

By the hour

I do believe

There is no

No heaven or hell

I do believe

There’s no sea

In this shell.

OPHER 20.9.96

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a purpose to life and we all toodle off to paradise for eternity, meet up with the rellies and friends and live happily ever after?

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a paradise somewhere where everything was wonderful?

Wouldn’t it be nice if all the different religious sacred books were right (at least the nice bits) and there was a God?

Unfortunately it all looks too human and contrived to me.

Religion has been used for power and control and still is.

Too many children have been indoctrinated from birth and too much insane cruelty inflicted.

I look around me and see beauty, awe and wonder. I do not even glimpse creation.

The human imagination and psychological needs have conjured up an elaborate charade to fill in the gaps.

Why should be fear death? What has formed this wondrous universe? What is the purpose of life?

Don’t worry. I have all the answers.

Mystery to Misery

Mystery to Misery

 

Rocks, Stones, Moon and Sea

Mystery, Mystery.

Sun, Lake, Sky and Tree

Mystery, Mystery

Stand the Stone, Eyes that See

Mystery, Mystery.

Locked in Books and Decree

Hypocrisy, Misery.

 

Opher 13.6.2017

 

I woke up this morning with this poem in my head. I think it sums up my feelings about spirituality and religion. There is a vibration that runs through the universe. It is something to marvel at. It seems to vibrate through nature. I can become ecstatic at the sight of a rock formation or sunset. I feel the power of the sky and sea. It connects. It is when humans try to give that mystery a name, call it a god and worship it, try to load their psychological needs on to it and lock it in words, holy books and decrees that they reduce it, misrepresent it, and begin to use it for their own power. Spirituality good; religion bad.

The words in those holy books are written by people who seek dominion, ownership and authority over something that cannot be confined, defined or reduced.

We are all part of that mystery. It exists within us and without us – as George so succinctly put. People whose minds are limited by the texts are imprisoned by their own limitations.

Poetry – Miniscule in Reality – A poem of awe and wonder

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Miniscule in Reality

I am always in awe of nature; there’s a wonder at work. Infinity with its swirling galaxies, spinning atoms and amazing mysteries of consciousness is inspiring, is full of majesty, is uplifting.

There is a harmony in a sunset, rainbow and the glow it produces. There is a spirit in the rocks, trees and seas. To sit beside the crashing waves and feel the breeze in ones face connects us to the universe. To feel the sun upon the face and bask in its benevolent warmth is to feel the congruence.

There is a mystical force that is natural, beyond religion, and integral to that dynamo of nature through which we are all one.

Calm and peaceful, without barriers as the vibration of energy flows through and on, forever.

Miniscule in Reality

Glowing dawns and standing stones,

Mystic storms, vibrations in the wind

And majestic trees.

Skies that swirl with stars,

Chasms of glowing rock at sunset

And crashing seas.

There’s a wonder at work –

A celestial spectacle of awe.

There’s a mystery in the mind

That’s knocking at our door.

Standing before the horizon

Outlined against infinity

Feeling large against the sky

But miniscule in reality.

Opher – 1.8.2016