Essay Opus 1- on thought and illusion

 I am a bit drunk and my thoughts, mannerisms etc. are different. Skewed. More authentic, or more polluted. Either way, they’re different. Different in what they are, how they come out, what they address. The thoughts from alcohol are more heavily influenced by emotion. This means emotion plays a role- even a dominating role- in our thoughts.

A drunk man, or woman, does what they normally would not. Their brain still functions- they can see, they can think, they can talk. The woman is more likely to give in to amorous instincts. The man is morely to give in to violent and otherwise annoying mannerisms too. Both are more likely to dance more freely and better. Yet their *thought* is a valid thought. A thought seems intangible; it comes from somewhere, somewhere in our brain. The colour and nature of the thought, as said earlier, is influenced by emotion but we most realise this under the influence of intoxicants.

What, then, are we to make of the ‘truth’ of our thoughts? They are real in that they exist; they are reliable in that in the real world thoughts can make or break a person, in the most tangible sense in terms of keeping us alive or making us dead. But if are to go a little less simplistic, more grey, we find a blurring between the lines of normal or sober thought and drunken or intoxicated thought. If one is to copy Nietzsche, who borrows from the ancient Greeks, it is a conflict between the Apollonian and Dionysian, who are both true to themselves and within us.
There are profound truths and wisdom, and complete nonsense, within the buddhist-like sayings that ‘thoughts are an illusion’. The blockhead appropriately says ‘if I were to strike you with a block of wood how much of an illusion would that be!’ But if the mind were anaesthetised, the act would be an illusion as far as the mind were concerned. If the body were dead and struck, again it would be an illusion- a tree falling in the woods but nobody there to hear it. We must be careful of our thoughts, meditating upon what a thought might actually. There is no precise order in finding the truth of the matter; the mind can figure this out on its own. To my own understanding at this present moment, it would be to realise the illusory nature of the thought; experience and realise the difference of thought under intoxicants; realise the effect emotion has on the thought; realise what an emotion is and where it comes from; view the different realms of isms based on different lines of thought happening within the same mind of the individual. The point to this whole exercise would be to realise the illusory nature of our senses, our ideas, the non-realness of what ‘is’. I could have stated “the non-realness of our understanding of what “is”", but thinkers already understand relativism and the subjective nature of existence. I thus took it one step further to show that what you are thinking right now may not even be real.

21 April 2009.