Hello:

To me, writing that triggers my questions, and opens new ideas for me to engage in my own interpretations and draw my own sorts of meanings from similar experiences, has hit it's mark.

Has anyone tried reading any of the poetry on this site out loud - like a performance? Do you hear the same things when you read aloud as when you read silently? Do you hear something different when someone else reads (performs) aloud?

How do we decide what something means?

I'd love to swap interpretations on any specific piece...

Drop me a note here,
Spinfo

I'm sorry,

Guess I'm a bit lost here... I couldn't find a 'specific' article or poem refering to "Performance". Or... where you asking about the works as a collection?

See you on the flip side,
David4444

Hi David!

Actually I meant any of the poetry on this site, read out loud as a performance.

Do you have a poem or a line or verse in anything posted that brings you a question of your own, or a question about the original meaning, or want to share any imaginative spin of your own?!

Later,
Spinfo

Yes…In fact I have about a million questions from everything I have read. But let's start with something very simple like the poem “Evolvement”. It’s short, but the twist is the last line of the first verse, “its pain was my escape”:

Evolvement

I fell upon a lie
a shard of silent purpose
forged its shape
it cut me
down to bleeding bone
its pain was my escape.

I tore the edge of sanity --
broke the seal of time
I found myself within the truth
to claim my life as mine.

I know pain well in all configurations. Once when having a heart attack, I was just doing my thing working through the pain. I came to the point where I had to admit to myself, that the pain was so “overwhelming” that if something wasn’t done in about 2 hours, I was just going to pass out and would have no other options available to me. I went to the hospital, and they determined in pretty short order that I was indeed under “attack” and saved my life. There was one statement made by the Surgeon I always will remember. It was, “David… In another two hours we would have been doing an autopsy on you rather than vascular reconstruction.”

Yes, in this instance pain was my salvation. But in all other instances of pain that I have had, it has always been something you simply “worked through” and gave it as little attention as possible, not “FEEDING” it to make it larger.

So the question is really: If you FEED a lie, then won’t it make the lie bigger and worse than when it first started?

TKS
David4444

Hi David!

Great point.

By "feed it" do you mean give it attention/energy/focus/significance?
Could that be used as a helpful idea, just as it could be used as a not so helpful idea?

Could the purpose of pain be to get our attention, so we will try to find where the pain originates or reflects from as a puzzle, conundrum, aggravation, frustration or some sort of dis-ease or distress or (??) Could our pain be so we will ask ourselves about the meaning of the pain. What if pain is a personal inward shorthand that our Self is using to say "hey, look into this" -- and in the process of looking, maybe we will discover something that will help us move forward, onward, inward -- lightward. If it leads us to question, or to realize that we're struggling with contradictions, then can we think of it as if it was the pain that has led us to escape from the source of the pain -- as in the escaping our own limiting ideas?

Personally I kind of came to a conclusion that there is no virtue in suffering, and the only meaning of pain must be as a trigger to get me to question my Self-and-self about the where and how it? So if I am suffering there must be a reason -- something that I'm not understanding about my thinking, my beliefs, the way I'm putting my ideas about myself in relationship to my own experiences and in relationship to other people, together. that I've come up with pain when that couldn't have been what I was aiming for -- human Beings are way to bright and beautiful to do that!

Could the purpose of our pain be to help us escape from our own misunderstanding, or misconceptions, or unrecognized contradictions?

It is great to hear a thoughtful point of view!

Where does this line of thinking take you?

For answering a question, you ask a lot of them.

Yes, in all categories, by “paying attention to” by “giving it energy”, by “focusing” on it, by “giving it significance” you give it strength. And in my humble opinion, MORE strength than it had before, allowing and even creating a worse situation.

By definition according to the AMA (American Medical Association), NO pain should go untreated. So if you feel depressed, seek out a shrink, if you have a mole on your back, see your local physician (after all it could be cancer), if you don’t feel right in you stomach, talk to your doctor, you might have an ulcer. It doesn’t matter WHAT you think of as a “pain”, the medical profession wants to see you right away. Very alrming isn’t it?

To me, there is NO pain that “shouldn’t go without” a doctors opinion according to those powers that be. (Of course I obviously dissagree with this). However, when you consider how far we came without the current medical system, then it’s totally amazing we lived at all, and that is for MOST of humanities existence. How did we manage?

So where do you draw the line? For me, it was simple. I knew in some part of me that something was truly wrong. (Now we are speaking of a lifetime of pain in a LOT of different ways - - this WAS the ONLY time I truly needed EMERGENCY help to keep me alive). But there were ALL the other times “in pain” that I was correct in stating to myself, “well, it may look pretty bad, or it may feel pretty bad, but I’ll Live”.

What you bring up is the concept of “personal in-ward reaction”. And it doesn’t matter if it manifests itself in the form of a mole, or “just not feeling right” about a specific situation. Something that SHOULD be attended to, but the way you put it, the individual should look into it, not someone outside looking in.

So this brings us back to the ORIGINAL question of the author. “IF, you feed something BAD, like a LIE, that the author says they were, then are you not feeding something that is indeed bad? How could this be a salvation? IF the author is saying “I recognized the lie for what it was, and, no matter how painful took the path of truth to correct it and make it known this was a lie, then THAT would be another matter altogether. But I don’t see that in this poem.

Hi David,

Perhaps I’m the one a little lost now. What triggered your question and discussion about feeding a lie? In re-visiting the poem Evolvement, I personally can’t see any suggestion in there of "feeding" anything - a lie or any other proposition.

When I look at the words:

"I fell upon a lie..."

to me, this means that I discovered a lie - I found within my own experiences that something I believed was true, in fact, was not true. I fell upon this realization - recognized a lie - it was on my path but I didn't see it...it was in my way, I tripped over it, maybe I was chasing it, maybe it was chasing me, and then…I fell…in love, out of love, through the cracks, from grace, off my chair, in with thieves, into the lake, for that line… upon a lie.

To me, to "fall upon a lie" doesn't mean I've somehow "fed" that lie my directed energy as an action that I've deliberately initiated and pursued. To me, to fall upon a lie is a re-action, not an action of my own instigation. That I fall on a stone in my path, is only to say that my falling was a re-action and I am aware that there was some reason for my falling.

"a shard of silent purpose forged its shape..."

To me this means, I not only fell upon that rock - or discovered a lie, it supposes that I decided and chose to investigate, figure out, somehow come to understand – the why of that lie - so I don't keep on falling on it. I saw the reason - the purpose of the lie - how the lie - this rock - got onto my path. To ask "whose purpose or what purpose does this serve?" can be very enlightening. There’s the idea that the aim, the purpose of anything, directs or powers the development or the operational shape of the thing – and we decide the purpose, so...

There is the thought that a reason, a purpose, an aim, a design, can be forged – falsely intimated. The reason for that rock being on my path could be that someone put it there deliberately, expecting me to fall on it - the reason for the lie could be that someone is expecting me NOT to fall on it - hoping I won't discover it for what it is, hoping I will remain unaware of it.

There is the idea that the aim or reason for that rock/lie could be formed, either deliberately or by defaulted awareness, by heating and hammering - shaping it through "intention". Or, it could be that the aim of the lie was to move my blinded sight ahead (along with their subterfuge), steadily progressed, advanced, constructed… keeping the lie in play...

There is the idea that any lie - no matter who puts it on our path, our self or another, is often invisible and silent, to us or to others, as either the ones who fall upon lies or the ones who instigate them.

Then, within these words, there is the notion that the purpose of anything is only ever a shard, a piece or fragment of something else – a sharp edged piece of something larger than only what is seen, known, understood, or aimed for. Perhaps the suggestion here is that "a lie" is always a product that comes from a larger purpose - a lie is an outcome that grows from a larger idea or concept of "who is responsible for what" in the interactions of you to me, me to you, self-to-Self and Self-to-self.

"it cut me down to bleeding bone..."

To me this means, that the discovery of the truth of our experiences can be deeply distressing as a clear realization of our own power through our own choices. (That "truth" being, that either I've been telling a lie to my self or to another self, or another self has been telling me a lie that I've been ignoring either by ignorance/default or lack of effort to distinguish between truths and lies as my own responsibility to my self).

It’s up to us to gather the information and to decide, to CHOOSE what we believe, to pick our actions - it’s up to us to discern the precise MEANING behind the actual facts and to discover what are the truths or lies of our experiences. The precise words in this line, from the poet’s intimate perspective, speak a personal conclusion, result, or consequence - a deep sorrow or pain. The most common interpretation would be the "pain" of betrayal as a broken trust, and the destruction of a dearly held belief that has shaped our thinking and emotions. It is often painful to discovered that what we believed, thought to be true, was a lie or a deception of some sort, seen to be inaccurate when compared to a deeper, clearer, more honest or informed interpretation of the facts as we know them at any given time. This idea speaks to how dishonesty affects the heart of our reality, cutting through our core belief systems, exposing the skeletal structure of conceptual paridigms that holds up, upholds, the whole of our experienced reality.

"its pain was my escape..."

Assuredly, pain of any sort serves to register the reality of both our inward and our physical experiences as private truth about both our reality and our experiences - something has happened, something is not "business as usual", something is amiss for us. That we register our pain or are aware of our pain, does not - at least to my mind - imply that we've fed it, fueled it, given it any sort of "consciously-directed" attention as a personally creative intention. Recognition, realization alone is not equatable to a choice to add to, increase or "feed" what is realized, recognized, seen - to see the rock on the road does not automatically mean I am choosing to add more rocks. Nor does such a recognition or such a registered awareness pre-suppose - at least no on the poet's part - that we will make a further choice to take the pain of falling on that rock on our road, off to some "expert" or other to have it fixed...

Yes, the poet did decide to make use of the information provided through the awareness of the pain, to actually choose a directly intended action out of the initial reaction to the pain itself and then to the cause of the pain (which in this case was the lie). Using first hand information is generally helpful in avoiding, in not repeating or perpetuating either the cause or the effect (getting fooled or caught or sucked into the lie and/or the pain that results). I do believe that to register a pain, more often than not, provides us the information to free our selves -- escape from very many situations, results, outcomes that might otherwise be more to our determent than to our benefit.

If I don't "register" or don't consciously and clearly acknowledge my awareness of my own experiences, how will I ever choose not to prepetuate the action/reaction/interaction/path, that presents them? I do believe that to hear the message my Self is trying to get me to acknowledge or listen to can very often free me – lead me to escape from the vicious cycles of perpetuating, repeating the same mis-understanding, self-blinding, defaulting uses of my own power of sound mind, many times over... By buying into such ideas as "just get over it", just ignore it and "get on with with life", sometimes we are hearing, saying and believing that if we just don't question it, don't acknowledge it, it will magically disappear. That's not generally been my experience, even if the immediate pain does diminish, it usually just shows up in another form.... and the process repeats ....

Many of us are familiar with this syndrome of changing the specifics without ever changing the pattern of our problems, and doing so because we refuse to understand WHY we go down the same painful paths. We refuse to give up the pathways of chameleon beliefs, self-imposed and self-blinding ignorance, and the repetitious behaviors that hold us in cycles of pain. The CHOICE of ignorance in refusing to see or register our pain - pretending it isn't really there, or it's not really important, or that we aren't "smart" enough to understand our own workings of selfhood, (or any of the inexhaustible "reasons" for not dealing with a situation), is often only a tactic to absolve ourselves or our own responsibility to be proactive in our own lives, according to our sound inward reasoning. Personally, I see this scenario as driven by fear, distrust and chameleon concepts about our own power - fear of the truth of our self-to-Self identity as the power of the choices we make, and fear of the truth of our own responsibility for that power.

To register pain is an autonomic function, meant to alert me to some problem. It is hard to decide beforehand not to register something that may or may not occur or appear. Anyone seriously set about a conscious path of “enlightenment” will have to conclude that running off to some “expert” to fix every pain could NOT logically be what is meant or what is advocated in this poem, as a viable ideal for any of us.

The idea that pain could be an escape, prompts me to wonder HOW did the pain lead to escaping from WHAT? And to trigger such wondering and questioning can be one of the functions of writing or articulating our ideas - to lead us to examine, to look deeper, to wonder loudly at what the writer's intent was – to look through our own looking glass into the wonderland of mind, and our own life’s experiences. After all, didn't this poem lead you to wonder what it meant or how these ideas could be understood in your own life's context?

Not to mix apples and oranges here, but the poetry on this site came about as an adjunct or extension to the "conversations" text presented. There is a detailed proposition woven through the introduction conversations on this site, concerning the idea that we (general humanity) have been hood-winked into believing that someone else must know better than we ourselves do, about almost everything and anything - including ourselves. From the opening salvo this writing advocates our learning how to responsibly, honestly and accurately assess our own reality and then choose our actions, reactions and interactions, to serve both personal and collective, intelligent evolution, to the best of our ability.

I must admit I'm quite astonished that you draw such an astute interpretation of this verse and then decide that such is your own intention and conclusion but somehow not because it is within the words of the poem as the poets own (struggled for) meaning! Had I been interpreting, (which of course I am) I couldn't have stated the poems meaning better than your own conclusion!

Regardless, it's very difficult to think, consider, investigate, wonder, study, learn about, look into... anything at all, without applying the energy of our thought to it. To me, to discern, seek, question, try to understand a thing, does not mean that I am "feeding" it my energy, but rather that I am using my energy of mind for that which I believe it was designed for – discovery! Nor does a closer look into a problem mean that I am fueling or perpetuating that problem -- my intentions DO count in choosing my actions. My own point of view is that a fuller understanding of intention, aim, purpose, goal and all manner of the power within our own reasoning as the fuel for our choices, would help all of us more precisely clarify what we want to produce, to convey, to manifest. Asking why a situation occurs, very often leads us to discover how it was created. Why we make our choices - what drives our choices, speaks to the meaning we assign, give, provide - or neglect to provide - to our experiences. (And I think that such an investigation is woven in-and-out of the text of this site - including its poetry.)

Thanks David, for opening such an interesting discussion,
Spinfo

Decipher

The Key word to what is written. Is “deciphering” the object of these words? Or is listening and finding new and “re-newed” information from them what we (as the general public) seek?

From a personal standpoint, I read, and a LOT of time, I do not understand, or at least not now. It might be for me to understand in the future, or more advanced… in the past… but just not now. Who knows? I know what I read I enjoy. That isn’t a bad thing.

I like the posters pasted that match the mood of each piece… or at least they do for me. The information I read I consider “soul food”. For most in the world they have no Idea what that means. “Soul Food” are those things you consume that make you feel at home. They make you feel you have found the place you belong. And while I may not understand all that I read in the content and text that the author meant them to be, there is the possibility that these words crossed me once before. Of that I do not want to go into detail.

I would recommend a person just to make a big cup of coffee, sit down for a while, and see what comes to mind for them. More importantly, “how do you feel” after you have read for a while?

David