About weirdness and freedom.

A small essay about what being free really means to my own subjective perception.

“It never got weird enough for me.”

-Hunter S. Thompson

Weird: Strikingly odd or unusual, especially in an unsettling way; strange/ Suggestive of the supernatural:

Weirdness, weirdly, weirdo, and so many other ways of describing the beauty of the madness culture. Hunter S. Thompson was well aware of this, him and his freak power campaign, the wonders of being and of being a freak, completely twisted, extrovert, free, without limitations just the pure nature of the strikingly odd, hell maybe even supernatural considering the prejudice and prejudges made in our society in this foul year of our lord.

The culture is a limitation, to my own opinion, one of the biggest ones right next to time, laws, family, friends (sometimes not most of the times anyway), we live in a short minded and corroded society this days, that we have even forgot the original meaning of culture.

Etymologically speaking, culture means “cultivation of the soul”, not a collective soul but an individual one. Based on this concept, my imagination rambles into a certain image, a society full of “freaks” “weirdo’s”, “phenomena”, “nutcases”, “misfits”, “crackpots” and every other word one could find in a thesaurus related to weirdness, or maybe not for that matter, if we lived in a world where real culture was prophesied there wouldn’t be a need to make a million different ways of describing weird, the word itself would be pointless.

The principle of psychology as a science that studies the entire composition of the human being and its behavior, tell us that everyone is different, there is not a single person in the whole world that is completely equal to anyone else. We share similarities of course, as human beings we share basically and mostly the same physical characteristics, and even thou, not everyone has the same attributes and/or qualities, some people are painters, others musicians, players, etc. That’s still a generalization and a particular profession that we humans can flourish. But the way we cultivate that quality or attribute is completely different from the others. No one paints the same picture, no one writes the same music and no one plays the same way as the others, we all have deep in ourselves a certain way of performing this tasks, and not only this ones, but everything for that matter.

Everything gets reduced to that, to the particular way we make our own living, and where does this comes from? Arthur Schopenhauer says that every human being, and also animals and plants, have an intuitive knowledge that permits us to comprehend, live, adapt and merge with this vast world and mostly to the cause and effect law that governs this physical manifestation of shapes, forms, actions and beings. It is through the intuitive knowledge that we, living beings, become conscious of time, space and causality. The intuitive knowledge of plants tells them where and how to search for water in the roots of the earth and tells animals what they have/can do and how to do it. Intuitive knowledge is like instinct.

However, we humans possess a special, singular, precise and particular skill, that distinguishes us from other living beings, and that is the capability of elaborating abstract thinking and generating abstract knowledge. But now what’s really interesting is that not only do we have this technique, but also, every human produces it different, which gives us the allure of individuality.

Every human being is different, so equally composed or created yet so differently developed. Just how the way it was supposed to be, a world where we could all be complete freaks, completely liberated, free from cultural limitations,

Being weird means following your soul, communicating and feeling the presence of our one true essence, just letting it and us be, freedom is like music, when a song plays, the touching composition of the melody creeps all the way into one’s being, it moves us from the inside, when you let the music dance through your existence, you get the feeling of complete freedom, your being starts moving and manifesting through your body, there’s nothing to think about, one just has to let the music do the job.

“Weird” people are like that, they don’t think, they just let their true essence emerge from its depths and they just go with its flow, to wherever it leads them, all of a sudden you start seeing people with odd or unnatural dressing habits, people notice and they judge, but the funny thing is that they notice, they realize that something’s different with all those “creeps”, that is the freedom that exhales through their bodies, freedom is, to my perception, the best gift life gave us.

There’re remarkable figures that represent this wonderful gift, figures like Jim Morrison, Jimmy Hendrix, Hunter S. Thompson, completely twisted, they didn’t repress their freedom because of the short minded society, they were just like they were supposed to be, in its concept, just like we all should be, unique, different, individual, becoming the Übermensch Nietzsche described, without a necessity to judge, without a fear to be judged, “Too weird to live, too rare to die” like the good Doctor would say.

When you become liberated from the limitations that domain in a culture, a metamorphosis occurs, the perception changes in an extreme and incontrollable way, all of a sudden you start realizing what you really want for yourself in your life, you easily begin to realize all the things you truly like and love to do or be and you start enjoying them, your ideas or even expectations about life morph too, you start observing life through different eyes and perceiving the entire reality with different senses too, your rationalization begins to expand, it gets deeper and focused on the things you like to do with your whole heart, you find yourself experiencing life in a complete way, the enormous feeling of wholeness in everything you do or think is overwhelming. You become “a new creature” as Christians would say.

We find ourselves expressing the abstractness of our own and particular being, enjoying ourselves every moment, you break the system; you become the 3 in a world of 1’s and 0’s.

I cannot speak for everyone, I cannot establish an objective philosophical perspective about the effects of being free, not repressing or limiting the extension of  our being because the mere concept of trying to object something completely unique and subjective is ridiculous, but I can share my own experience, pure Gonzo philosophy.

I used to be a normal person, I did what everyone else did, maybe I had/have a small tunnel of light that guided me to where I am, a certain tendency of questioning everything that came to me instead of just taking it for truth and keeping on with it, but even tou I had this certain characteristic, I wasn’t entirely free, I was completely unaware of a lot of things, but through my own critical sense I began to breed new perspectives that led me to the enlightening knowledge that permits me to write this particular essay.

 Just like Plato’s allegory of the cave, we are the philosophers, man with its capacity to learn, to acquire knowledge through the path that leads his greatest existential doubts and with the particular habit he possess of questioning everything and trying to find the reason of everything, becomes aware of the cultural sense of judge, of how society is lost in a habitual tendency to criticize everything using the criterion pre-established in the culture he lives, and therefore he becomes liberated from this limitations, he perceives a small glimpse of the world of ideas, he goes with his previous fellows prisoner friends (the members of the culture he belongs), and tells them what he learned, expecting to spread the fruits of the knowledge he had obtained, his fellow prisoners think his crazy, they judge him and label him as “weird”, “freak”, “odd” and many other denominations they throw to free people. The philosopher becomes a “weird” person.

That’s an analogy to the way my freeness has been, I became aware of the limitations of the culture and of how ridiculous is the idea of a judge considering that we’re all different, there is no precise or objective criterion or a righteous sense of what’s “normal” or “weird”, “pretty” or “ugly”, “good” or “bad”, it doesn’t exist! It’s all the perspective one has based on what one has learned and adapted as good for his life or the contrary. I can say that a girl is pretty, and a friend can say that she’s ugly, between his criteria and mine which wins? The answer is none, it’s simply personal perspective of each one, sometimes we agree with someone’s judgment, sometimes not, it’s all up to how we are in our own abstract and individual way and how others are in that aspect too.

Prejudice people stick to what they have been imposed by their superiors, by their family, their teachers, their representative political figures, by the media, by the TV and by many other factors that stimulate the evolutional process of human development. I was freed from this nightmare, but once I came back I found myself judged by others, I didn’t care anyway, I had the most revealing experience, my perspective was completely changed and I began to perceive everything with a better developed sense. I started developing specific odd habits and mannerisms, a particular way of resolving things and problems; I began living just like I was supposed to, following the impulses my spirit evoked and evoke in my being.

I began to act, speak, behave and act just like I was told by my spirit, this latent luminous being that was made manifest when I opened my perspective to it by opening and knowing myself deeply, a bright introspective life exteriorized in every moment my body is able to produce or reproduce in that context. I became a reflection of the true essence that lies in me, I dug that which was once covered and repressed by this damned culture I have over mentioned already. I am the walking mirror.