One of the most challenging scenarios in life is to find that you are no longer sure why you are here. On a very specific level, you can make all sorts of observations about existential definitions of purpose and ultimately, they must remain unverbalised, or you risk a very real diminution in the eyes of your closest allies that is the inevitable conclusion of allowing yourself to appear to be so implausibly adolescent in your views. There is nothing remotely naive about adolescence of course, but we make it that way because the alternative is almost heinous; that our adultness is an ever-strengthening lens that distorts reality until we possess only an entirely abstract understanding of our place within the Universe. Like all constructs of the human mind (and the logic within that observation is more than ironically self-referential) it posits the possibility that all we have managed with our allotted span is to rationalise our increasingly tragic and desperate descent into madness and propped it up into a state of prominence with Saturnine epithets of maturity, responsibility and practicality. Like a statue of Abraham Lincoln.

I almost envy those who can accept the world prima facie; and have no needs beyond the mundanely relevant and the beautiful, but such a state of introspective equilibrium is rather dependent upon a condition approaching egoless equanimity, or the more likely alternative that life is good and that it remains so. I believe that is the wisdom of crocodiles; which self-evidently is astonishingly relevant to crocodiles.

For me, I have to accept that the maelstrom in my heart that is threatening to overwhelm my personality - not consistently, but on occasion – has a real and true purpose and if that makes me appear ridiculous then it is only so because it is so unfashionable, because we cannot all be crocodiles. If that were even possible – never mind laudable – then the crocodiles would very quickly be forced to turn on each other or starve.

Oh wait...

#111338 +(13078)- [X]

Purely in the interests of science, I have replaced the word "wand" with "wang" in the first Harry Potter Book
Let's see the results...

"Why aren't you supposed to do magic?" asked Harry.
"Oh, well -- I was at Hogwarts meself but I -- er -- got expelled, ter tell yeh the truth. In me third year. They snapped me wang in half an' everything

A magic wang... this was what Harry had been really looking forward to.

"Yes, yes. I thought I'd be seeing you soon. Harry Potter." It wasn't a question. "You have your mother's eyes. It seems only yesterday she was in here herself, buying her first wang. Ten and a quarter inches long, swishy, made of willow. Nice wang for charm work."
"Your father, on the other hand, favored a mahogany wang. Eleven inches. "

Harry took the wang. He felt a sudden warmth in his fingers. He raised the wang above his head, brought it swishing down through the dusty air and a stream of red and gold sparks shot from the end like a firework, throwing dancing spots of light on to the walls

"Oh, move over," Hermione snarled. She grabbed Harry's wang, tapped the lock, and whispered, 'Alohomora!"

The troll couldn't feel Harry hanging there, but even a troll will notice if you stick a long bit of wood up its nose, and Harry's wang had still been in his hand when he'd jumped - it had gone straight up one of the troll's nostrils.

He bent down and pulled his wang out of the troll's nose. It was covered in what looked like lumpy gray glue.

He ran onto the field as you fell, waved his wang, and you sort of slowed down before you hit the ground. Then he whirled his wang at the dementors. Shot silver stuff at them.

Ok
I have found, definitive proof
that J.K Rowling is a dirty DIRTY woman, making a fool of us all
"Yes," Harry said, gripping his wang very tightly, and moving into the middle of the deserted classroom. He tried to keep his mind on flying, but something else kept intruding.... Any second now, he might hear his mother again... but he shouldn't think that, or he would hear her again, and he didn't want to... or did he?
O_______O
Something silver-white, something enormous, erupted from the end of his wang

Then, with a sigh, he raised his wang and prodded the silvery substance with its tip.

'Get - off - me!' Harry gasped. For a few seconds they struggled, Harry pulling at his uncles sausage-like fingers with his left hand, his right maintaining a firm grip on his raised wang.

So yesterday I asked a question about how would life be different if we were popped out of the earth like mushrooms, I wasn't just being silly; because that is the entire ambience of my book. Here is an excerpt on this very issue.

Imagine if, instead of being born of woman, we popped out of the earth, like a mushroom and grew there; that in every way possible we were the same as we are in our current “human” state, except for the single fact that we were rooted to the spot and we received all our required sustenance from out of the earth in the same way as a tree does. How different would we be?

Imagining this hypothesis is rightly bizarre; there is no question that it takes some effort to conjure up the picture, but the tendency would be to imagine that we would be just the same, except for the great handicap of being rooted to the spot and thus immobile throughout the long years of our lives. But to grasp the point of this exercise we have to question our most basic assumptions about life and this game of the imagination gets under the skin of one of the most fundamental assumptions of our entire existence; hence it is important.

The reason for this profundity of comprehension is the simple expedient that by growing out of the earth it addresses the most intrinsic discontent of our human condition; namely that instead of coming out of the world; we came into it. It is almost a cliché in fact to say that “I came into the world, kicking and screaming,” and this underlines two very prevalent assumptions that need to be examined if we are to progress at all in this life and strangely, we as human beings are not prone to examining them at all; we would rather look at things through microscopes and hope to find an answer there. The first assumption then is that we are in some fundamental manner separate from the world, and secondly that we are broadly antagonistic to it, or at least to some extent out of place. This latter point can be better grasped if we consider how the womb is analogous with security; thus our prenatal state is harmonious; our postnatal state, as the ‘kicking and screaming’ implies, puts us at odds with things. When we are in our mothers then, we are part of something, and then we are born, and no longer part of things; we are cut adrift, separate from the earth and everything in it and thus we are born into our discontent, unmerged and feeling like a trespasser in the world, we feel an inherent lack of entitlement, and this entitlement issue is profound too, because with it is born a desire to own the earth, because it addresses that lack of entitlement. If we own the earth, then we have a certain measure of right to exist upon it and our discontent, our sense of separation and thus antagonism is assuaged.

This then is why people are driven to own the earth. Of course, because owning the earth can only partially address the entitlement issue, they make the mistake of thinking that the more they own, the less discontented they will feel and the more entitled they will become. That is the starting point for a whole other level of problems that can only be addressed by finding a real solution to our sense of trespassing in this life. The easiest solution would be if we could grow straight out of the earth like trees; because then we would not feel out of place; the earth would be a part of us; we would have come out of the world, rather than – reluctantly – into it, and all would be well and we would not make the mistake of thinking that a solution to life’s discontent might be to own it. Now if we understand that, we might be free to escape the empty trap of materialism and instead concentrate on developing an awareness of our true purpose and the mechanics of our entitlement; which we have in abundance, if only we can reconnect with the truth of our being.

You can test the validity of this understanding by going outside and spending a few hours gardening; by making jam from fruit you have picked yourself, by swimming in the sea; because all of these activities to one extent or other momentarily give us roots; they reconnect us with the earth, with the world and just for a few moments we are part of the earth, not floating about upon it, like lost souls cast adrift in an angry and hostile ocean.