Sweet dreams
Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree?
I travel the world and the seven seas
Everybody's looking for something
I can remember the time when I saw the Quicksilver, saving the men, women and children, and even a dog, with its pizza. Have you seen the movie scene, with the above background music. If you haven't, I suggest you watch it. A quick search in YouTube with Quicksilver sweet dreams would bring it up. As it is the second most popular video after the sweet dream's original song. Ah, I just watched it now. Such a beautiful part of the movie.
As you already know, a lot of mindfulness stories I have written comes from the movies. As the movies have the ability to capture some of the concepts we often do not encounter in our normal routine life. As our cameras and microphones are more advanced than our eyes and ears nowadays this is very much expected. So, what can we learn about mindfulness from Quicksilver?
Following is a paragraph from the book, what is time. Check whether it makes sense. I suggest you watch the above video first to understand this.
What is an event? Becoming Quicksilver.
What is an event? someone might ask. It's time to find out mysteries in our events. Let's imagine you went to visit a football match between England and France, the last world cup. And when you had been there from the beginning of the match till the end. After that you would tell the story to your friend who unfortunately could not attend with you the events of the day. You would start by saying “I was there at the beginning of the match until the end of it. I saw the great free kick landing on the net. Beckhem was in his spirits today”. And your friend would agree and nod, he will share your story and make a version of it for himself. He will watch the match and get excited.
But what is exactly meant by the beginning of the match. Is it when the players enter the field? Is it the national anthem? Is it the whistle of the referee? If it is the whistle, then is it the start of the whistle or end of the whistle.
Imagine you have become the Quicksilver (Marvel comics ) to slow down the time or be fast enough and see what is going on at the “beginning”, you will see there are several things start to happen, the referee takes his whistle into his mouth and he takes a deep breath and blows, the first wave of air hits the whistle flaps and they start vibrating and produce a sound wave, which start to travel in wave motion through the air and hits on ears of two players of the team at the middle, each one at slightly different time. They are processing information at their own speed and start kicking the ball. And the light of this happening reaches back of your eyes, and you start processing it.
Now, back to our own time and speed, what really is the beginning of the game? Is it the start of the blowing of the whistle or the end, or when it hits the ears of the players, or when they understand the whistle is blown? Is it the first kick of the ball? Is it the foot raised from the ground or point of impact of the ball, or is it the processing of all this in your mind?
So, you will now have so many beginnings to the football match. And whatever you have told your friend has no meaning, or validity as an absolute, but still conveys ideas and stories. If you look at every event that is happening all around you, we will notice it is true for everything. There is a lot more going on than what we really process. We still have old windows 96 in our system, even our cameras have faster shutter speeds than our eyes.
Next time when you start your story telling chit chat with your best friend notice how you are lying from the beginning of the story! You would say ‘I started walking out of the hotel room into the beach’ and notice there is no exact starting point to point out. Still, you would make a successful communication, but this time with some better wisdom. And there is nothing called a true story. As we discussed earlier, we are limited by our language and the processing speed of our machine.
I have given a similar example in the story 'The cloud would save the day' about the atomic bombing. So, what are the intuitions we get from the Quicksilver for our mindful practice?
Becoming Quicksilver of Quicksilver.
Imagine Mr. Quicksilver married Similar Miss Quicksilver, and they brought up a child. Quicksilver Jr. Imagine what would Quicksilver Jr has to say about the world. While Mr. Quicksilver laugh at us about being fooled by events happening around us. As he could see lots of stupid things we talk about like in the above example about the football match. However Quicksilver Jr can see even his father is lying. That is not what exactly happening. And there is no depth to the level of abstraction we can go, when we slow down our time and go deeper. And ultimately, it would make no sense. If we slow down enough, we will see a still image. Would we find a still image? or nothing? I bet, there would be nothing meaningful can be found if we slow down so much. Now the question is, if that is the reality of everything, how come we are making meaningful inferences in our speed. There cannot be two truths as Mr. Quicksilver Jr, is living in the same world and same physics same laws as us. (Does this suggest our Physics and laws are wrong?)
Hence, we have to agree Mr. Quicksilver Jr is closer to the truth than his father or us.
I would end the article here. Leaving you to imagine what will happen if generations of Quicksilver evolved. Would they ever come to the truth or just realize stupidity of everything. And I invite you to look at everyday 'events' with this vision, so you can come closer to the truth by becoming Quicksilver
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