Sunday, July 20, 2008 Assorted candies By Aissa Ang Vagabond
I SUPPOSE that for anyone who's coming of age, lots of questions begin to indulge in the nasty habit of sneaking up behind one and springing the awful necessity of personal courage, honesty, and action. At the risk of being branded a rugged individualist (giggle), I can only speak for myself, and entertain the flicker of a notion that others might share in the experience. You might wonder, what's eating this gibbering schoolgirl? I wonder the very same thing.
My chronological age is twenty, but I feel closer to a range oscillating between two years to three hundred. I say "two years" because the toddler in me delightfully insists on disrupting the serious arrogance of adulthood that sometimes comes when I think I know many things but actually know pathetically little. This facet of me enjoys watching (again and again) Finding Nemo, the Shrek and Ice Age series, Monsters Inc., Ratatouille, The Land Before Time, and Alvin and the Chipmunks. Kiddie movies like these remind me to tame my Machiavellian nature and help me remember that I must keep on nurturing the light in me, the light that I was born in. This age keeps me soaring through every day with flexibility and confidence that, according to P. McIntyre, "comes not from always being right, but from not fearing to be wrong."
I've realized that when I experience "age" not as a cumbersome monolithic straitjacket but as a state of mind that is open to innovation and creativity, as Deepak Chopra and David Simon write about in "Grow Younger, Live Longer" (highly recommended!), life takes on a different feel. It has literally been easier for me to run a mile in the morning, wrestle with my senior thesis like that Bible character (was it Jacob?) who struggled with an angel, and embrace the thrilling chilling exhilarating uncertainties of the rest of my life after graduation.
Last semester, my gracious auntie Virgie brought me and my cousins to a fengshui master for individual readings. Mr. Victor Yee told us something to the effect of: this current lifetime being my spirit's three hundredth year, or that the particulars of my Chinese zodiac sign being on the borderline of Rabbit and Dragon point to a three hundred year cycle, or I don't know exactly what he said because my Hokkien requires serious improvement. Anyway, the number stuck to me, and I'm using it here. Of course, my belief allows for the probability that it could easily be an infinite possibility of numbers indicating an infinite amount of expanded lifetimes. (Note: I am not Christian or Catholic. I'm not an atheist or an agnostic, too. It's a fuzzy characterization, but I'm a non-aligned believer.)
Now I realize that for some, the spirit is really a timeless being. And here I am digressing again (oh boy this article rambles so): people like Deepak Chopra and those on the forefront of quantum physics and mind/body approaches to reality posit that the physical world is only one level of reality, and that there is a virtual domain (domain of the mind) and a quantum domain (domain of the spirit). Here I foresee some complications with garden-variety religion, so it seems best to write about what could be a controversial topic in another article. Meanwhile, I encourage you to get your mind blown away by reading up on Deepak Chopra's book "How to Know God," and on God as understood by quantum physics and different wisdom traditions of spirituality.
My apologies for the tempestuous quality of my writing. This is partly the result of an unforgiving cocktail: Ateneo's heavyweight theology and philosophy programs, the mishmash of authors I've been devouring, the nature of my course (AB Development Studies: think "Imagine" by John Lennon), and the dragons of my ambition.
It is my hope that I shall succeed in letting the rapacious appetite of ego be tamed and guided by the limitless timeless source of spirit. We can call it God, or infinite intelligence, or the All. What I am hoping for is a tough grace that will shape me into a worthier human who lessens her dependencies on excuses and justifications that prevent her from taking full responsibility of her life. Part of this comes from recognizing that the material world is not all there is, that the physical body is not the only form of being, that there exists a field of pure potentiality that people have forgotten as their source. A phrase I encountered in three instances (my Philosophy 101/102 class with Dr. Leovino Ma. Garcia, Deepak Chopra's Dalai Lama-endorsed book "How to Know God" and his Arthurian adaptation "The Return of Merlin") alights on my shoulder, "...to be in the world, but not of it." I cannot help but exist as a person in this physical body in a material universe, and yet this phrase presents the possibility that there are higher levels of awareness.
Uh-oh, she's gone insane. This might be running through anyone's head right about now, but I request the benefit of a doubt. I entertain no illusions that this could be an example of chaotic brilliance some writers are known for. What I can say is that this is a fairly accurate illustration of the candy bowl called Aissa's (Muddled?) Mind. Assorted candies it is for this weekend. Let's hope I get enlightened as I do the sorting out.
(Writer's Note: Thank you to family friend, mentor and paediatrician of the Ang clan, Dr. Magdalena Estoque, for lending me "Grow Younger, Live Longer" by Deepak Chopra and David Simon. Thank you also to another wonderful mentor and family friend, Mr. Chin Bon Lu for lending me "How to Know God: The Soul's Journey into the Mystery of Mysteries" also by Deepak Chopra. My brief discussion of Chopra's books does not do justice to the luminosity of the ideas, so I am cheekily encouraging you to read them or read about them.)
