I found this Tumblr post called "Our World Is Surreal" that I made a while ago. While it may be outright silly, there's something about it that I really like about it. Dunno, it's like some bizarre, possibly naive charm that it holds. For your reading pleasure, here it is.
Note: I’m aware that what I’m about to type is the type of analysis that attempts to sound as if its message is something new when it could just be a rewording of something that is already battered to the ground time and time again. I simply just wanted to get to talking.
It is already evident that when you listen to music that you like, it brings about an euphoric feeling of self-realization and gets your mind to flow with multiple emotions and thoughts that perhaps will get you to create something of your own. Music is a medium that regardless of being something that you can not see, you definitely feel its presence. You know that when you hear good music, it changes you, it starts to define more of you. I have always been a person that has enjoyed music, and it was only later on in my life that I have understood the grander beauty that music has to offer. I appreciate various genres of music, and find that my favorite tunes invoke a clear picture in my head that I would like to be able to share with others. Lately though, I have found that certain types of music have tangled themselves into my mind to the point that my perception of the world around me has changed.
The sort of music I talk about is hard to really explain genre-wise since I don’t know exactly what this is specifically classified as. All I know is that it is avant-garde electronic music that may use select samples in a specific way to create this feeling of being lost in an enchanted forest. Songs like Flying Lotus’s Zodiac Shit and Odesza’s How Did I Get Here manage to trigger a surreal sensation when you hear them. You start to wish that everything you saw right now acted like a Dali painting, as you would venture into some akin to the subconcious of a drug addict who frequently consumes LSD. They also give off a spiritual vibe that trip-hop artists like Nujabes or Pogo give off, but crank it up to a level where you’re expecting the laws of reality to crumble away. Keep in mind that while the images you conjure from listening to this songs are purely fantasy, the undertone of spirituality remains constant.
Spirituality is an important part of who I am as a person. Mostly this comes from my upbringing, since I was born a Catholic. Slowly my connection to religion disintegrated and vanished away, to a point where it was not much of a concern anymore. It was a part of me, but it did not define me. It did not help that I was seeing the other side of the coin where these fundamental ideas that I grew up with were being challenged with a more realistic view. Yet I was always told that “understanding religion is based on faith”. Once I started to construct my own view on the world, the question of faith came up once again. I pondered the question of if there was such a thing as God for a long while. I knew that there was a lot of facts that rejected such the idea to be possible. Then it hit me. We are a very small part of the grand world we live in. That world is a small part of an even larger world that exists. How can we be so certain that there is not something outside from our point of reach? Perhaps the idea of God existing is not a ludicrous one, but perhaps the perception of it is a little more different.
After realizing this, the next part was to explain to myself why I thought this. I knew that I could not base it on actual evidence, so I had to fall to the idea of faith. Did I still have enough faith to assure myself that there was an omnipotent being that create the world? As you would imagine, the answer was yes. I would then ask myself why do I still have faith. The way I see it the world around us is surreal on its own. While our imaginations are vast and can create wonderful works of art, the world is a natural masterpiece. Think about it, the world created tastes, smells, sounds, senses and sights that we can not even dream about creating. Every creation that we have made has derived from a multiple array of different aspects of the world. The world itself created every single one of these aspects from scratch. A human is unable to imagine a new color because we do not know how that’s even possible. Sure, we could say that something looks like a combination of different colors, but that’s not the same as magically conjuring up the color red without any other color being remotely similar to another. In essence, nature is God’s painting.
While we can not create something so magnificent as a new color, there are still achievements that come from our own design. Watches, computers, music players, buildings, weapons and more have been passed down from generation to generation, with the original inventor being the breakthrough to a new way of living. We continue to evolve as the years go by, for better or for worse. The grander miracle of life and the human experience though becomes commonplace that we don’t act in awe over something so simple as being able to fly from one place to the other. Yet, at some points I find myself enjoying the simpler things in life. Finding a certain angle to take a picture of a building makes me admire the shape of the structure, even though it’s relatively common. Seeing fog envelop a city skyline at a distance could make you feel anything from intrigued to helpless. Even something so arbitrary as a pair of dice can get me wondering about how this world is built.
With all this said, I still know that the world harbors people who are ignorant, immoral, manipulative, insane and/or desensitized. I know that there is still a lot about this world that I will never understand until I die. I understand why people act cynical, misanthropic or nihilistic. Sometimes I even am one of those three, whether I have good reason to be or not. Yet, I always know that there is this third eye in my mind that is opened up to seeing something beyond the confines of this world. That for every step back, there is a step forward. I hope that as the years go by that I still everything around me with a surreal beauty that the music that I’ve listened to could offer.
Note: I’m aware that what I’m about to type is the type of analysis that attempts to sound as if its message is something new when it could just be a rewording of something that is already battered to the ground time and time again. I simply just wanted to get to talking.
It is already evident that when you listen to music that you like, it brings about an euphoric feeling of self-realization and gets your mind to flow with multiple emotions and thoughts that perhaps will get you to create something of your own. Music is a medium that regardless of being something that you can not see, you definitely feel its presence. You know that when you hear good music, it changes you, it starts to define more of you. I have always been a person that has enjoyed music, and it was only later on in my life that I have understood the grander beauty that music has to offer. I appreciate various genres of music, and find that my favorite tunes invoke a clear picture in my head that I would like to be able to share with others. Lately though, I have found that certain types of music have tangled themselves into my mind to the point that my perception of the world around me has changed.
The sort of music I talk about is hard to really explain genre-wise since I don’t know exactly what this is specifically classified as. All I know is that it is avant-garde electronic music that may use select samples in a specific way to create this feeling of being lost in an enchanted forest. Songs like Flying Lotus’s Zodiac Shit and Odesza’s How Did I Get Here manage to trigger a surreal sensation when you hear them. You start to wish that everything you saw right now acted like a Dali painting, as you would venture into some akin to the subconcious of a drug addict who frequently consumes LSD. They also give off a spiritual vibe that trip-hop artists like Nujabes or Pogo give off, but crank it up to a level where you’re expecting the laws of reality to crumble away. Keep in mind that while the images you conjure from listening to this songs are purely fantasy, the undertone of spirituality remains constant.
Spirituality is an important part of who I am as a person. Mostly this comes from my upbringing, since I was born a Catholic. Slowly my connection to religion disintegrated and vanished away, to a point where it was not much of a concern anymore. It was a part of me, but it did not define me. It did not help that I was seeing the other side of the coin where these fundamental ideas that I grew up with were being challenged with a more realistic view. Yet I was always told that “understanding religion is based on faith”. Once I started to construct my own view on the world, the question of faith came up once again. I pondered the question of if there was such a thing as God for a long while. I knew that there was a lot of facts that rejected such the idea to be possible. Then it hit me. We are a very small part of the grand world we live in. That world is a small part of an even larger world that exists. How can we be so certain that there is not something outside from our point of reach? Perhaps the idea of God existing is not a ludicrous one, but perhaps the perception of it is a little more different.
After realizing this, the next part was to explain to myself why I thought this. I knew that I could not base it on actual evidence, so I had to fall to the idea of faith. Did I still have enough faith to assure myself that there was an omnipotent being that create the world? As you would imagine, the answer was yes. I would then ask myself why do I still have faith. The way I see it the world around us is surreal on its own. While our imaginations are vast and can create wonderful works of art, the world is a natural masterpiece. Think about it, the world created tastes, smells, sounds, senses and sights that we can not even dream about creating. Every creation that we have made has derived from a multiple array of different aspects of the world. The world itself created every single one of these aspects from scratch. A human is unable to imagine a new color because we do not know how that’s even possible. Sure, we could say that something looks like a combination of different colors, but that’s not the same as magically conjuring up the color red without any other color being remotely similar to another. In essence, nature is God’s painting.
While we can not create something so magnificent as a new color, there are still achievements that come from our own design. Watches, computers, music players, buildings, weapons and more have been passed down from generation to generation, with the original inventor being the breakthrough to a new way of living. We continue to evolve as the years go by, for better or for worse. The grander miracle of life and the human experience though becomes commonplace that we don’t act in awe over something so simple as being able to fly from one place to the other. Yet, at some points I find myself enjoying the simpler things in life. Finding a certain angle to take a picture of a building makes me admire the shape of the structure, even though it’s relatively common. Seeing fog envelop a city skyline at a distance could make you feel anything from intrigued to helpless. Even something so arbitrary as a pair of dice can get me wondering about how this world is built.
With all this said, I still know that the world harbors people who are ignorant, immoral, manipulative, insane and/or desensitized. I know that there is still a lot about this world that I will never understand until I die. I understand why people act cynical, misanthropic or nihilistic. Sometimes I even am one of those three, whether I have good reason to be or not. Yet, I always know that there is this third eye in my mind that is opened up to seeing something beyond the confines of this world. That for every step back, there is a step forward. I hope that as the years go by that I still everything around me with a surreal beauty that the music that I’ve listened to could offer.