Day 222: Surreal is the New Real

While working in the nursery in the mornings I have been listening to the Metaphysical Secrets of Imagination Series from Eqafe. Having gone down the road of ‘Eating Disorders’ I find this series very supportive in terms of providing structural guidance in terms of how we create our self-image and how one can assist and support oneself in deconstructing one’s relationship with oneself as an ‘image’ to getting to know yourself as a physical human being.

So while I was listening to some of the interviews I was relaying the information back to the time where I was participating in Eating Disorders as well as my hobby of taking pictures and editing them.

What I noticed for instance when I went through a period of Eating Disorder within obsessively and compulsively looking at pictures of models (which all go through extensive photo manipulation firstly through lighting/set up and then secondly through digital manipulation such as photoshop), what I was drawn to in each image/picture would be the ‘surrealness’ of what was being portrayed. I would for instance like particular curves or body shapes because they were on the border or within the realm of being surreal.

Having gone to art school and playing with taking pictures a lot in my life, I started noticing that what makes pictures ‘pop’ and what people seem to ‘respond to’ / like some pictures while not others (including myself) was their level of surrealness. Nobody enjoys a plain picture that you randomly took of your street and the houses in it. Not unless it has got some nice ‘angle’ to it and you ‘play’ with the colours. So the moment something looks ‘better’ than what it actually looks like in reality = you have a nice picture.

I mean, we just have to look at for instance the whole Instagram phenomenon, Why is it so popular? How come everyone is suddenly taking nice pictures? It’s because instagram allows you to for each and every single picture you take, to alter it and change the way it actually looks like in reality. You have your various filters which open up ‘different moods’ for your picture to be displayed in. Some are more dark/sad while others have a summery/funtime feel to it. You can play with the brightness and the contrast, manipulating the intensity of colours as to what it looks like compared in reality.

I mean, in the beginning of photography what was great was the ‘factual’ aspect of the whole invention. When you draw or paint a person there’s always a level of personal interpretation and style that will influence the accuracy of the representation of what it is that you’re drawing/painting. As photography evolved, we could take/make pictures of things and have an actual representation of what it looks like in reality. And ever since we’ve achieved that – we’ve just gone backwards again by finding new ways of manipulating and warping reality through photography and photo manipulation.
Looking at it, it’s like reality has become ‘not good enough’. Taking a normal picture of one of your friends just randomly, casually as what is there in the moment is now ‘not good enough’ anymore. It’s a ‘bad picture’ even though it merely just shows what happened to be in front of the lens at that particular moment. Unless a picture has been edited, it has already lost all interest. It's just 'too boring'.

So now we live in a society which makes use of visual stimulation such as pictures extensively. We have things like tv, the internet, magazines, books, advertisement, etc. Each time these visual media will show us something which is surreal – unreal really. And we’ve become so accustomed to it that we don’t even notice it. We now actually believe that we live in this surreal reality that and that we’re just not ‘matching up’. We’re never good enough, we’ll never look as perfect as those people on tv / pictures / magazines. I mean, there’s a reason for that, it’s because they’ve been made unreal/surreal so it’s not practically possible to become that way and yet we will buy into whatever product/service that promises us to get a step closer to such a state of being, while all the while it’s impossible = the perfect consumerism trap.

Day 221: Who’s the Bad Guy? Who’s to Blame? - Part 2

This blog is a continuation to the otter story in Day 222: Who’s the Bad Guy? Who’s to Blame? – Part 1.

What most people will do when they find out they have a ‘predator problem’, is to find the animal and kill, say by trapping it, gunning it or putting out bait with poison. Killings may not occur anymore and it looks like the situation is ‘fixed’. This is however a very limited way of looking at things, where we look at a problem in isolation of its context. We’re in fact not really fixing anything by just ‘killing the animal’, but merely removing a symptom of a bigger problem.

Each animal has a very specific habitat/environment which supports it, which is supposed to provide the animal with its suitable diet. When a disequilibrium takes place in any one of the points that keeps everything going / keeps everything in place in terms of having a functional ecosystem where all are supported, things start going wrong one by one.

If you take the otter for instance, he’s supposed to be eating fish, crabs and frogs. He is living in a ‘humanized’ area where there is not much ‘wild nature’ available for him to thrive. There are limitations like fences and waters which have been polluted due to human activity. Now there are no crabs and fish around, and he doesn’t have much other place to go that would be more suitable in the direct environment. So now he’s eating whatever else he can get his hands on: ducks, geese, chickens, random birds. He does not really want to eat these animals but was forced to because his environment was out of harmony. Now we have for instance a situation where we have no more male ducks left and thus the ducks have no way of making babies (though we can just buy more males, but this is not always possible in every situation). So there, another point of disharmony has been created which will have further consequence. When I put out birdseed for the wild birds in the morning by the river, I also see a lot of his poop lying around. What’s interesting here is that he is not even able to digest the meat he is eating properly. There are lots of undigested pieces of meat present in his poo. So obviously, this diet is not for him. So it’s really kind of a lose-lose situation where ducks and geese are dying and at the same time they are dying so he can sustain himself but it’s not really doing the job.

So it’s easy to go ‘oooh look, there’s the culprit! Damn otter!!’ – but he is also just being a victim of his environment and the conditions he found himself within. We can then keep on pointing at each little point that was out of place somewhere down the line that caused him / drove him to the behaviour he currently adopted for the sake of survival. The thing is that, just like with the money system, we can’t just fix nature and the animals by only changing ‘one point’. Nature and the Animal Kingdom are one whole, one interconnected system. To fix one problem you really have to always go back to the whole and ensure that the whole system is sound and in a state of harmony in all ways. If you look at Nature, it is quite fine working and sustaining itself, by itself, when left alone. Once you bring in the human factor, disharmony starts occurring as we through our ignorance and arrogance start appropriating land that we believe are ‘entitled’ to, which animals then lose. So if we really want to point fingers for these type of events where predators come and eat livestock – it’s really a matter of pointing it at yourself since the human has been the main cause of disrupting harmony in the nature and animal kingdom. We are also the only one’s who are in a position to fix this and to restore balance to the earth.

Related articles

• The Interrelatedness Of All Animals, Including Humans
• Day 220: Who's the Bad Guy? Who's to Blame? - Part 1
• 27 Animal Facts That Will Brighten Your Day
• Basic Income Guaranteed and Animal Rights
• Day 413: Nature: the Reflection of Human Nature

Day 220: Who's the Bad Guy? Who's to Blame? - Part 1

On the farm we started noticing a little while back that our ducks were disappearing. Previously when we had ducks disappearing, it was mostly ducklings that would be grabbed by some of the bigger Nile Monitor Lizards that resided by our river at the time. Those have since been re-located to a more suitable environment -- so we knew: it wasn't the lizards.

So it started with all the ducklings disappearing, at a rate of about one a day. This is usually not very suspicious since they are small and we have things like eagle, mongoose and smaller lizards that can easily eat them. But then -- the motherduck also disappeared! Again, we weren't too suspicious about it -- because it happens and then afterwards thing usually go 'back to normal', which it did for a while. But then, we noticed that our adult duck population was declining, and more specifically it were the male ducks that had just started 'vanishing'. They would fly out to our dam during the day and one of them would not return at night. So we started looking around more and found some duck carcasses around our river. We started investigating and found some poo as well. So we checked what animals would eat the ducks in terms of their size and the rate at which they were being eaten and determined that it could either be a caracal or a jackal, but the poo matched the jackal more so we went with that.

One of our neighbours that moved away used to provide the jackals in the area with sheep that had died. We figured that since he had moved and there were no longer any sheep around, the jackals had moved out to look for food elsewhere. They are known to eat poultry and are about the size that could eat adult ducks.

As the male ducks died and mostly females remained who now had learnt that it is safer to sleep on the roof of the stables, no ducks had died in a while and everything was quiet.

Then, about a week later we noticed a goose had disappeared. We had 11, now there was 10. We didn't see any signs of struggle or snatching (usually there's a spot with lots of feathers and then a trail of feather to the corpse), it was just weird. The goose was gone and we didn't see any sign of it dead or alive for a couple of days. Then, another goose disappeared, and some leftovers were found by the river. A few more of them disappeared. In the meantime, Gian had stopped working in town and resumed working on the farm and was now also spending time looking out for the jackals, checking if he couldn't catch a glimpse of them. The dogs would usually get tense and restless just before and during an attack, so we used that as our guide. One night, the dogs were restless and there was lots of noise of ducks and geese by the stables -- so Gian went to have a look.

While he was there he saw two geese being killed by an animal coming from out of the water, which had the shape of a mongoose. Ok, so it's not jackals we're dealing with -- it's a mongoose.
This was strange though because the only mongoose I had ever seen on the farm had been pretty tiny, like cat-size and I couldn't imagine it being able to carry a goose up in the air (which is what it did when Gian saw it). We started locking up the geese so that the four that remained from the 11 could survive. I started leaving some vegetable closeby where the mongoose had been eating its prey because supposedly they also eat fruit and vegetables - and maybe he would be okay turning to veggies 100% for a while. In the mornings I would go pick up the vegetables again so that Quizzy the little naughty pony we have on the farm, wouldn't go and eat it as fences don't stop him lol.

Every morning I would find the vegetables untouched, but the remaining geese carcasses had been eaten more of. A few days ago we then in the morning saw a patch of feathers on the ground where the chickens sleep, and a trail of feather going towards the dam. Gian had invested in some wildlife books on mammals in South Africa and how to read their tracks, and had noticed some perfectly preserved paw prints in the mud by the dam where the chicken had been dragged to. Using his newly acquired skill, he determined that the paw prints were not mongoose prints -- but otter prints! The cape clawless ottter to be precise. Now this made both more sense and less sense, as otters are bigger than mongoose and thus can carry a goose -- but at the same time it didn't make sense because their diet is supposed to be limited to crabs, fish and frogs. We used to have crabs in the river but it had been a while since we had seen any. We had fish but many had been eaten by fish eating birds like the heron and spoonbills. Now that it was winter and not much rain had passed, the dam had not received any new water from higher up in the valley, where usually fish would flood in with the new water of the summer rains flooding rivers and dams all over the place. The frogs -- they go and hide and hibernate all throughout winter.
So, now that his natural diet had become unavailable, the otter had decided to start eating the next best thing in the water -- which was first ducklings, then ducks and now geese. Going bigger and bigger as he ran out of options.

So this is the story / background to our chicken/duck/goose snatchings -- and in my next blog I will get to the actual point that I wanted to share lol.

Related articles

• You do not really know them...

Day 219: Have we Reached our Final Destination?

When I was in primary school, most classrooms were fitted with this loooong horizontal poster, showing a timeline of history from the hunter/gatherers up to the Modern Age or the ‘Now’. From year to year, grade to grade, we would move up the timeline in our history lessons.

I remember staring a lot at this timeline whenever I was bored, and I remember thinking that ‘we’ve come a long way’. We started with ‘nothing’ at our hunter/gathers stage, being very primitive. Then we moved through the Ancient times with Egypt and the classical times of the Greeks and the Romans and the middle ages aaall the way up to where we are now. The timelines would also have little pictures of ‘significant’ points in history and I remember the last section of the timeline being cramped up with lots of pictures of like an astronaut and a train, airplane, tv, telephone – all the cool technology shit that we’ve got today.

What I had gathered from my history lessons was that we had gone through a lot of struggle in terms of our own survival and being barbaric towards one another – but that we now finally had come to a stage where we had our living environment sorted out and us humans were living together in ‘good times’. As a kid, this made sense. I had a home, I had a family, I had food every day, a bed to sleep, friends to play with, a future in this world. All my needs were taken care of. So from my perspective at that stage, it had seemed that in terms of where we were at in history was our ‘Final Destination’, like we finally got it right, we’re finally living comfortably – from here on it can only get better.

13 – 15 Years later, I got some more perspective.

Turns out, that when we were looking at the' ‘Modern Age’ and nice, comfy living – that this only counted for a small segment of the world population. Turns out, that everyone else is still stuck on various different points of the timeline, where some are still living primitive lives, coming by with the minimum. Turns our, that child labour is not a nightmare of the past, but a present issue still being lived out by many. Turns out, that people are still servants to those with more money with no potential of getting out of such position. Turns out, that poverty has been increasing and more people are suffering today ever before. Turns out that in this Great Day and Age with all our ‘Modernity’ we’re doing fuck-all to actually make a change to these situations, doing fuck-all to make sure that this magnificent point in history as being taken care of completely in every single way, having all your Human Rights secured – is being stretched and expanded to every single ‘corner’ of the earth.

I mean, looking at that timeline now – it’s really one big scam. That timeline did not in anyway reflect world history in a factual way, but was only meant to show the history of a minority and the present of a minority – and then create the idea / belief that where we’re at now in world history is a world-wide phenomena: bullocks!!

I’m busy reading a People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, and one of the things that struck me as I progress through the timeline, is how nothing every changes. We move from enslaving one kinds of people to another. We move from slavery to servitude. Then, while we have all the real though, shitty, cruel slavery taking place – we have an entire hierarchy of different slavery forms within that, where there’s an entire hierarchy of groups – each one enslaved to the next. So that each time when there is some ‘big revolution’ or some ‘big change’ that apparently happened – it’s really no big deal because they same pattern just keeps re-occurring over and over and over again in different forms, over different types of people, over different regions in the world. Like now for instance, I am reading about how bad the workers and laborers had it round the 1850s, having to work in terrible, life-threatening job environments for a near-to-nothing pay – that’s including the child laborers. So now, while the American people may have fought and resisted hard to have made this change – two centuries later and miles off shore = we have the exact same conditions, the exact same situation playing out, where adults and children are forced into labor, dangerous labor, just to get by another day. But are we going out on the street and strike? Are we getting angry, mad, demanding change in anyway whatsoever? No – because apparently ‘that’s all over and all is better now’.

So from reading this book, it is clear that we have not reached anything. I’ve only read about a third of the book but you can already see where it is going. With what I’ve read, and within seeing what is going on in the world today – we are still repeating the exact same patterns as 500 years ago. We haven’t reached our final destination. We’re nowhere close to it. All those great happenings like ‘Independence’, ‘abolishment of slavery’, ‘end of segregation’, ‘end of apartheid’, ‘the declaration of human rights’ – all those events turn bleak and shriveled in the face of history. They are but minute moments where we thought we were getting somewhere, but they are actually completely meaningless. I mean, have a look at the world today, the wars, the conflict, the economic hardship – we have obviously not learnt ANYTHING. We’re still freaking idiots bashing each others heads in, in the name of survival – while we have all the tools to actually live in a world that’s Best for All. All those ‘Great Achievements’ as the only things we tend to remember about our history = it’s just one big joke. They’re completely meaningless. How can you give those events ANY value in the face of what we live today.

If we want to come to a point where we can stop playing out the same old pattern, and actually settle down – we need to consider changes that will actually make an impact on our quality of living here on Earth. We should at the least implement a Basic Income, such as proposed by The Equal Life Foundation as the Basic Income Guaranteed.  This story has gone on for far too long, let’s create our Happy Ending.

Day 218: Suppression will keep me Safe – Part 2

Continuing from:
Day 216: Internalizing Conversations
Day 217: Suppression will keep me Safe

When and as I see myself observing something within my external reality which I would like to comment on and within experiencing the movement of ‘wanting to say something’ / ‘comment’ – go and re-route what I want to say to my mind as formulating my say as thought as if it is the normal way of doing things – I stop and I breathe – I see and realize that I am running on automatic where I am following the patterns of my mind based on past experiences and am missing out on breath – I thus commit myself to snap myself out of ‘automatic mode’ and bring myself back here in my human physical body, as breath, and voice my say out loud using my physical body

When and as I see myself believing that I am doing ‘the right thing’, within voicing my say as thought instead of voicing my say as sounded words, as the ‘safe thing to do’  – I stop and I breathe – I see and realise that I am accessing a construct where I believe that I am avoiding conflict / negativity within my external world/reality by keeping things for myself while still being able to “express” myself. I commit myself to stop the fear that leads me to escape into my mind and commit myself to remain here as breath and simply speak when the opportunity opens up to do so

When and as I see myself believe / think that it is ‘fine’ and ‘okay’ to keep things to myself in the form of holding back and that it is ‘no biggy’ that I didn’t speak – I stop and I breathe – I see and realise that holding back does matter as I have seen and experienced the consequence of not speaking as the inner conflict and energy accumulation that takes places inside self – and thus I commit myself to remind myself of the consequences that I have seen for myself so that I can assist myself in not doing something which i will end up regretting anyway

I commit myself to let go of the conditioned pattern of holding back and not speaking in the moment based on some past memories which have lost all relevance in the here moment. I commit myself to remind myself of the redundancy of this pattern and allow myself to let go and be the directive principle in my reality

When and as I see myself assessing whether I should speak or not depending on my prospect of ‘conflict’ – I stop and I breathe – I see and realise that I cannot allow this single variable be the one thing that will determine whether I will speak or not and thus I commit myself to push through the fear of conflict and simply speak and find out what happens lol

When and as I see myself being pre-occupied within my mind reality / space with no attention or awareness for my external reality and my human physical body – I stop and I breathe – I see and realise that I am busy creating / generating / building up towards a mind pattern and possible possession. I commit myself to remind myself that if I go down this path I will have to walk it back anyway so there is no point to go there and bring myself back here within and as breath and take note of the pattern/point that was occupying me to sort it out within writing, Self Forgiveness and Self Corrective Statements