And Two Fishes

Remember the story that Jesus used five loaves of bread and two fishes to feed 5,000 people? Source Bible: here.

This morning I realized that it's a metaphor of farming. The grain that is sown, germinates, grows and is harvested. A part of the grain will be eaten and another part will be reused for the next cycle of regenerating. The infinite process of sowing and eating. Grain that nevers dies and always will be a new beginning as food, fertilising mould or next season's harvest. If a farmer, farms well there will be food now and in the future for hundreds or thousands of 'homo sapiens'. And for a couple of 'mus musculus' as well ;).

What if the core metaphor of Christianity (better: New Testament in Bible) was not farming? What would humanity's life on planet Earth have looked like today if two thousand years ago one of these had become the core metaphor of Christianity?

• Radiating, boiling, flooding and abundant light from the sun
• Sculpting a sculpture out of a rock
• Make a pot out of clay on a turntable
• A hunter-gatherer who pulls along with a large herds of game
• A quatum entity may be described as either a particle or a wave

I know for sure our here and now would have been different if instead of Christianity we could speak of Attila-the-hunter-gatherer-ianity

 
P.S. A farmer can regenerate grain, but also fish and animals.
P.P.S. Mark, that Jezus is a grain too. He was food for the souls more than 2,000 years ago. His body became fertilising mould. His christian message is sown and harvested generation after generation.

My Chinese Garden

Do you want to take a look at my Chinese garden? If yes, open 

this door

Frozen?

Are you frozen on love, life or what to say/ think/ dream/ do next? Why?

Is your "constraint" as steady and unmovable as a mountain? Really? Why don't you treat your constraint the way Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) did? The way he painted Mont Sainte-Victoire again and again. Year in. Year out. He painted his mountain 60 times. His mountain was never the same. Different mood. Different angle. Different colour. Different season. Different style. Different ... - there must be more. His mountain was never the same. Never! So why should you be frozen on your constraint?

Life is more

To be honest. I don't feel like blogging anymore. In a way I lost my appetite. The urgency is gone. Next to that nobody really seems to care. Nobody seems to wait for what I'll write next. Last few weeks I'm making up my mind about my wins. More and more the feeling grows in me to commit web suicide. Life is more than Twitter, BlipFM and Blogging. How strange to be back on Ana Carolina's song 'Mais que isso'. It's the image of my first 'Live Life!' blog.

Question: Is my concept of 'win win' wrong? What image fits better?

Tyranny of positive thinking. Why deny our SOUR parts in life?

What's my point? There is too much positive thinking these days with the wrong motivation. We are trapped in it and are hardly able to see anymore that we deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune and blame only ourselves for our fate. We deny our sour parts.

From my point of view 'homo sapiens' life consists (non-limited list): tears, fears, love, jealousy, anger, aggression, hunger for power, horror, happiness, satisfaction, peace, outrage and bad luck. Our life is sweet AND sour. These days it seems we don't want to see our sour emotions anymore. We deny them.

Strategies to overcome our sour parts:

• Grow up! It seems we are kids when we have sour emotions.
• Change point of view. It's not sour it's sweet too. "When life hands out lemons, squeeze out a smile."
• Use another metaphor. Smile! You've got cancer. Cancer is not a problem or an illness. It's a gift.
• Transition. You will become a better, bigger and real being out of it. It's a makeover opportunity.
• Think positively. See the glass half full even when it lies shattered on the floor.

Intermezzo. Today no historical flashback from me. If you want to puzzle yourselves: the influence of manichaeism in  Christianity (look at the images) and reason as primary source since Age of Enlightenment.

What's next? I'm pleading for being a real human being, with his good and bad days, with his happy and unhappy days, with his fortune and misfortune. I'm pleading for the right to be unhappy. Huxley in his 'Brave New World': "But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

Embrace the sweet AND sour parts in life. Don't deny! If you need an image or metaphor. Handle your emotions like 'After rain there will be sunshine AND after sunshine there will be rain'. Don't deny the rain!

Does this ring any bell for you? Or do you think I need a therapist or that I'm the next fool on the hill?

P.S. Ehrenreich tells in 'Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America And The World' (2010) that there is no scientific proof for healing from cancer by positive thinking.

Any idea how influential images are?

Details. I'm a man of details. I pick the images or metaphors I use in my communication  - in case you missed it - with great care. I do not only pick them with great care I also 'play' with them. Surprised? Any idea how influential images are? Did you know that every language has it's own historical biased set of metaphors? Did you know that in Dutch there are a lot of images who can be traced back to the Dutch 'Golden Age' of the 17th century? Did you know that the explorations of the 15th and 16th century have left their traces in  Portuguese and Spanish?

Let me use an example, we all are very familiar are with, to explain what I am pointing at. Images of 'love':

• river: floating and never the same
• game: win or lose
• prison: feel locked up and always longing for being somewhere else
• alpha and omega of life: begin and end
• unit of raising kids: bond between man and wife to reproduce species 'homo sapiens'
• other half of me: your 1/2 and my 1/2 = 1
• hunting: hunter and prey

What's my point? If we look at love from an 'Other half of me' point of view we live our lives expecting to find her one day. Who? The one who will make my 1/2 soul 1. If I can't find her I'll be disappointed and frustrated. If my present love will have it's downs (ups are never the contraint) I'll conclude that she in retrospect was not the '1' I was looking and longing for. The relation will not last.

If we look at love from the 'Unit of raising kids' image of Desmond Morris we will learn that  man and wife join together to get procreated. Morris also tells that a good relation evolves from pair forming sex  (high intensity) to pair binding sex (less intense). If you expect to always have pair forming kind of sex any relation will be a disappointment.  

What has all this to do with you? I try to make you sensitive for the fact that we sometimes are trapped in the image we use for something. The image we use is like a prison - this is a metaphor too. It  tell us what we see and don't see. It predicts what makes us happy and sad. It even defines our definition on happiness.

The bible, Matthew 7:24-29 says: "built your house on rock and not on sand". At first sight we'd better not built our house on sand because it's not rock. But! If we look at sand like a 'sea of sand' a window of opportunities is opened. A houseboat is perfectly capable to navigate on any dessert. 

Tell me. When was the last time that you realised that you could escape from a "trap" by using another metaphor?