The Evolution of Me

It never ceases to amaze me how much progress we make as individuals. Have you ever looked back five years and wondered what the hell you were thinking? How could you be so naive, so stupid? What about the "you" of last year? Last month?
Often I look back at myself and can barely recognize the person that I once was. How could I have thought such thoughts? I often laugh at the naivety of my former self but really, is that not the guiltiest sin of all? The true naivete is in thinking that right now I have arrived at some sort of truth superior to the truths of my past.
So I look back at the things that I said, that I wrote--even on this blog--and sure, I cringe at some of my baseless assumptions, magically-arrived-at conclusions, and wild ideas but I also value them as a testament to the evolution of me. After all, will I not someday view the "me" of now in the same light?
I am not some static politician having to defend ideas that I once had thirty years ago; I am me, an ever evolving, always growing person capable of making mistakes and dedicated to the subjective experience that is life.

Judas' kiss,
sweetly lingers,
upon my lips.

Random Musing

Note: The following is a stream-of-consciousness free write. I make some (personally) valuable conclusions, but I don't contend that they are historical "truth." For example, I greatly simplified man's transition from a purely experiential existence to our current abstracted existence, attributing the shift to Classical Greece when in actuality it likely was not any single event and took many thousands of years.

Do I have anything to write? Do I ever have anything to write? I shall never be able to tell my story, because I can never step away from it. I am immersed—fully immersed in a way I am only beginning to understand. Maybe I am not as logical and methodical as I imagined. Maybe I am led by my heart, truly. Am I the only one who shudders in a sort of rapture at moments in life? At these moments an ecstasy flows through me. I want to cry but my rational mind does all it can to suppress what would otherwise be a social embarrassment. It is socially unacceptable to cry at your sister's soccer game, or during the wrong scene in a movie. But I don't want to cry when the hero dies, I cry in his moments of beauty. So why do I suppress this? Why is it so important that it isn't socially allowable? What could the reason be that my rational self tries to suppress that feeling, that raw emotion so strongly? It is a mystery to me, but one that having made myself aware of, my conscious self will try and make this suppression conscious and then quell it. Maybe I am one who follows heart and not rationality at my core. It's funny—to feel this battle between my cartesian and non cartesian self, and to see the sides so clearly! Maybe I am meant to lead this charge for balance between the mind and heart. Ah but if this is so then I must always follow my own heart...or must I have balance too? Two steps back to take three steps forward? Or is it nothing at all? Is all of it nothing and this all just a silly exercise? Am I just inventing all of this machinery, this system that has battles to be fought? Isn't it amazing? My mind is asking itself questions in order to identify what it needs to do? It's eliminating possibilities and finding solutions as if it were a computer. But which is me and which is the other? There really is a voice asking questions that my mind would know. Is it external to me? Why would my brain ask itself a question that it had the answer to? Then what the hell is it asking the questions? Is it just some algorithm that I must follow in order to process information or is it something else altogether?

Why do I think to myself in questions? Even while performing actions I ask myself—wow I just had a slight vision where I actually saw the struggle between the part of me that experiences things directly and the part of me asking the questions and I realized that they are both me, but that I am a sort of schizophrenic person, split into two. But while I prefer the non-rational part of myself, by choosing one or the other I am ensuring that harmony cannot be possible. Either extreme cannot exist without its other half but in choosing one or the other, you are ensuring imbalance. And a superposition of the two? That just seems like rubbish, not just to my rational self but intuitively too. The battle between my conscious and subconscious self cannot be won. All that can possibly exist is a balance between the two. Once a dichotomy is identified, it cannot go back to being singular—that is impossible, isn't it? That is why in Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, etc. the “good” never completely triumphs over evil, there can never be all good. And evil always fails because it seeks total victory over good. It can only fail at this. But the good side always seems to be on the non-Cartesian side of the battle, but perhaps that is only because we live in a Cartesian world. What if, for instance, we lived in a world that revered the subconscious self? Would Luke Skywalker be on the side of the masculine, rational self?

Orphic vs the Promethean... Not always in battle for not always have they been mutually exclusive. Before the dichotomization occurred the two existed not only in harmony, but they were not two but one. And then the fabrication of a barrier between the two created an actual barrier, and now they will always be locked in eternal conflict with only God, Buddha, Brahma, the Tao, Quetzalcoatl, Yahweh charged with holding the balance between the two. But what court is it the gods play in? Ah the mystery of life is a veil draped before our eyes. If only we could but lift the veil and take a peak! What wonders would we see? Ah but this mystery IS our subconscious, always just out of view.

Why do I love the Orphic so much more? Really it must be because I live in a Promethean world. If I had my wish and Orphic conquered over Promethean, humanity would lose its ability to survive. How else could we keep 7 billion people alive? Could we have invented language and technology if we were completely Orphic, with no ability to step back and observe the situation, for the Orphic experience of the world is a direct, unfiltered, unprocessed experience of the world. No—there must always be balance. If I lived in an Orphic world I would yearn for the Promethean. But my world is Promethean, so I yearn for the Orphic, I romanticize its history and dream of its future. Yet this world will never come—nor should it. This earth, this world, my life really is a battlefield between the two. Will I help bring the balance? What will my roll be?

Was Ancient Greece overly Orphic? And therefore the source of the Promethean uprising? How did that dichotomy occur? Things went from being just one, to all of a sudden dichotomous. After the dichotomy the world could be seen to be clearly much more feminine than masculine—maybe Heraclitus was the Emporer and Socrates was Luke. We now (we being the balancers of the Force!) demonize Socrates, Plato, and in particular, Aristotle as the inventors of the Promethean, masculine side, but perhaps they were the Rebellion? They were the heroes of their day, not the villains? Or perhaps they were the ones who invented the dichotomy in the first place and THAT is why they were villainized? In either case, that period proved pivotal because it marked humanity's separation from the rest of the world. That's the difference, that's where human rationality was born and it is that, the ability to step back and consider a situation, which truly separates us from animals. The invention of the dichotomy is indeed the banishment of man from eden (singularity), prior to then there was no battle and man was at rest. Man was forever forced to a life of unrest as long as their was not balance between masculine and feminine, his whole being always in conflict to bring back the balance. So the advent of agriculture was not evil on its own, but because it necessarily led to the invention of the dichotomy. Man now had material matters to contemplate of an abstract nature—surplus, future yields—and could think on a higher level than before.

But what if this banishment from Eden is not a curse after all, but is a necessary evil for our future growth. Perhaps Eden was the womb which we have been ejected from and mankind, in it's infancy, is going through growing pains? Maybe the dichotomy is necessary in order for us to meet our destiny. Maybe balance can be achieved and the two can become one again as humanity evolves. What if we aren't the thorn in nature's side but her golden child after all??

Life is Suffering

The Buddhists had it right: life is full of suffering. People die, things break, friends and lovers come and go, even the mind will some day whither away. But in between all of the suffering--in between all of the pain--are moments of bliss, moments of supreme joy so brilliant, so perfect that they make it all worth it. Losing yourself in the arms of your partner while making love, feeling the forest come alive just before twilight. Yes, these moments are worth fighting for--they are worth living for.

Happiness is a Warm Loaded Gun...

Greetings from Thailand! (not sure who I'm greeting, I think I'm the only one who reads this blog!!) I just finished a four day motorbike tour in Northern Thailand with my motorcycle gang (OK, I ride a scooter). We had a few good conversations along the way but one conversation in particular on our final day stuck with me that I would like to expand upon.

We were talking about "happiness" and how it can be achieved and I was spewing my "Way to Love" stuff about how happiness comes from within and it is hope in and desire for external things (whether it be material objects, people, a job, etc) that causes unhappiness. Despite making some valid points, the guys didn't buy it and after considering their responses, I don't think I buy it either.
How could the external world not influence an individual's happiness? First of all, we are all biologically and socially programmed to desire certain things. Even if you could somehow overcome this programming (potentially impossible) wouldn't external reality still influence your life? Also, if this idea of unity in all things (the "One") holds any truth (and I believe it does) then this "you" that is happy or unhappy is not limited to the spatial confines of your physical body. I am still somewhat of a solipsist though, so for me, "I" is the symphony of spatio-temporal reality in which I-the body/mind exerts an influence (if I take a stone and throw it in the ocean, I've influenced the world's oceans, maybe the atmosphere, etc). But beyond these intellectual problems with happiness being totally internal, there are definitely some pretty powerful experiential ones.

Certainly I am much happier when I am doing something that I enjoy with the people that I love than I am when I am sick and doing something which I detest. And it is impossibly easy to think up life situations for which happiness would be easier or harder to achieve.

The trouble with attributing happiness to external factors is that people tend to want to create a linear formula, such as more money = greater happiness. It is here that I think the idea of happiness coming from within can be very useful. Instead of saying "Oh, if I only had ______ I could be happy," [insert: new car, beautiful girlfriend, new job, etc] people must first look to themselves as the main source of their own happiness. Once you look at yourself you will better be able to identify the external sources in your life which impact your happiness. For example, maybe your job doesn't make you happy, maybe it produces the opposite effect or maybe you realize that you find a certain activity enjoyable. At any rate, only upon examining yourself will you be able to make the necessary internal and external adjustments to put yourself on the path to happiness.

I must offer a disclaimer regarding happiness: Happiness, though a worthwhile pursuit, is not an end in itself, nor is it something which can be "achieved." In fact, happiness without its inverse (sadness) is nothing and the two form a sort of dualistic unity. There is always (and must always be) unhappiness; though certainly unpleasurable, it is not "bad" and is always necessary.

All emotion we experience is only experienced as a deviation from the mean. If your entire life existed with precisely the same external inputs, we would have neither happiness or sadness (or boredom either, which requires the perspective of a different experience to exist).

It is for this reason that happiness requires sadness. Our highest high only means something in relation to our lowest low and vice versa. If you consider a sine wave running along the x-axis (with happiness being the y-value and time the x-value) a happy moment would be registered as the line running above the x-axis and a sad moment would run below the axis. This method allows an accounting of the degree of happiness as well (the further from the axis, the greater the degree of emotion). But a normal sine wave is quite boring and reality is never as simple. Most people's lives change a great deal over time and their general happiness (say, the level of their mean (average) happiness) can increase or decrease over time. Many people seem to get progressively less happy as they grow older so their graph might not be level but would be sloping downward. Over time, if this downward trend continues, their mean would continuously creep downward as well (at a rate determined by the rate of their decline). Here, the x-axis would no longer be the mean as it is with a plain sine wave, it is merely the starting point. The mean continuously changes with respect to the current level of happiness. This person could still experience "happiness" if their current happiness level rose above the mean though unless it rose to its initial height (the highest previous point) they would still remember a time when they were happier.

So if happiness is all about deviation from the mean, then what is the point of worrying about it? Well, just as someone can get progressively unhappier, they could just as well get progressively happier. Take a line rising diagonally toward the right, the person whose unhappiness graph looked like this would always be getting progressively happier. In the past, they would have experience some instances in which they were happy at the time (above the mean) but upon reflection (and after raising their mean) they realize that they now know greater happiness.

So then, if it is possible to increase your happiness over time, how can it be done? If you value something like money, than you will always want more (because you can always have more) and your graph could likely be downward sloping. If you value something like learning, you could spend the majority of your lifetime in its pursuit quite happily (and raising your mean), though as anyone who has met an elderly person distressed by their mental decline would know, eventually this could lead to tremendous unhappiness.

I think then, that the trick is to value experience--the "good" and the "bad" alike. Experience is something that you will always be guaranteed to have and will always be acquiring (even the experience of gaining or losing money or of going senile is an experience) and you can never have any more of it or less of it. It is possible for someone to have more varied experiences than another, but only if value is placed on variety will this impact their happiness (this is something that I am guilty of, so I better keep changing it up!). But even the "bad" experiences such as having your heart broken, getting fired from a job, etc, seem to make sense or even have been necessary in hindsight. At any rate, whether all of your experiences make sense or not they certainly led to the you that exists right here and now. So--bringing it all together--if you are happy with yourself than you can recognize and appreciate the value of your experiences.

Happiness then, is a self feeding loop (rather than some linear map that I've made it out to be) that necessarily involves unhappiness but can always move forward--provided that you enjoy the ride!!

Nature

There are it seems, two ways to view nature: as a cruel, unforgiving, and thoughtless force which man must overcome, or as Gaia, the mother and great balancing force of the Universe.

Modern man, or Western society at least, has come to view nature as in opposition to humanity. We may have risen from nature, but that ugly little truth is merely an additional inconvenience in the endless battle to wrest our fate from the hands of Gaia. We look at the world and see the death and destruction caused by nature, we see the massive hurricanes and devastating earthquakes. On our television programs we watch sharks tear apart unsuspecting seals and lions devouring infant gazelles. Our science tella us that the supreme law of nature is "survival of the fittest" and man, surely the fittest of all, must do what he can to oppose the rest of nature and to rise to his rightful place above the rest.

It struck me the other day how truly separate humanity sees itself from nature. I was taking my brother to school when a bird struck the side of our car; it just flew right into it. My brother remarked, "I didn't know that could happen." I asked him what he meant, and he explained that he didn't realize that a bird could actually fly into our car, he didn't think such a thing could occur. I questioned him further, "You thought they were incapable of flying into our car? Don't you bump into things all the time walking around the house? And the house doesn't even move!" Yes, he explained, it made sense, he just never realized that birds could hit us, he had never seen it happen before and it seemed to him like something very odd.

Thinking about this incident with my brother further, I realized that for most American's, nature is something that occurs beyond themselves. Birds don't regularly fly into us, most of the time they are just there in the background, able to be seen and heard but rarely interacted with. Nature is not something that we experience or engage in regularly. As a society, we even suppress and diminish the significance of our own natural functions such as going to the bathroom, making love (having sex), and aging. These reminders of our status as animals are tabooed in our society to the point that it is by far more acceptable to see a decapitation than a love scene in a movie.

While only the occasional bird actually comes into direct contact with our balkanized existences, there is one constant reminder that nature exists beyond our doors and often, even sharing our home: insects. Bugs, spiders, creepy crawlies and the like seem to be one of the only constant sources of continued interaction with nature. And so what do we do? We exterminate, banish, and expel these unwelcome connections to the greater world. Us humans, we want our sterilized, quarantined, hermetically sealed homes where we can eat, sleep, fuck, shit, and die in privacy. We have become so caught up in our own myth of superiority, that we have forbidden any remnants of our relationship to the great unity of mother nature. I am not suggesting that we should allow bugs to overrun our places of dwelling, but I am suggesting that our "fear" of these mostly harmless cousins of life is perhaps rooted in our own insecurity as the wayward son of mother nature, always yearning to break away and prove that we are worthy of our imaginary independence.

But to break away is impossible, for there is nothing external to nature. We are born of her, when we die we return to her, and while we are alive, try as we might, we cannot deny that we are her. We are not only of nature, we are nature. To remain in opposition to nature is like the liver saying it is in opposition to the body. Occasionally though, the liver does deny the body, but like with the denial of nature, all that can result from this denial is death.

So it seems that the two views of nature proposed in the beginning are not after all at odds with each other. If nature is treated as the enemy, as something which must be overcome and superseded, than the great balancing force that it is, nature will resist with great fervor. And so, it is not only naive of man to believe that he has some sort of ability to combat nature, but it is even naive of man to think that our resistance will have any lasting effect on nature at all in the first place. This is not to say that we should not yield to nature when making decisions--not in the least--but nature will not mind one way or the other whether the totality of mankind chooses to fight her or worship her. Rather, it is in the interest of man that we ought to lay down our arms against the great mother of us all. If we can do so, we may find that Eden was not lost after all; it has been here all along.

Time and the Eternal Present

On a recent psilocybin mushroom trip, the concept of "time" was a major theme that carried on for the duration of my experience. As can happen during miserable experiences such as being ill, undergoing a difficult physical experience, or waiting for the work day to end, during my trip past and future seemed completely irrelevant and were nothing more than elusive concepts. My trip however, was not a miserable experience--far from it in fact--but was a wonderful, beautiful, profound experience.

Being only my second trip with psilocybin mushrooms, I've had to follow the advice of other people whom I respect and who are far more experienced than I with psychedelics for dosage recommendations, set and setting pointers, and various other details. One of these recommendations which I chose to follow was to record my trip using a digital voice recorder. This seemed a brilliant idea to me as I frequently wish I could record thoughts I have while driving or otherwise unable to take the time to write them out. Given the fact that the psychedelic experience is notoriously easy to "forget," the recorder seemed like it would prove invaluable.

But as I hit the peak of my trip, I found myself talking to the recorder, trying to capture the experience so my future self could appreciate it more. Not only was this at the expense of the appreciation of the trip that I was undergoing at the time, but it also proved to be a barrier preventing me from going further. At one point, I was lying under the Milky Way and some entity (whether of my own invention or external to me is irrelevant) tried to "show me" the raw experiential beauty of the Universe but my ego kept trying to capture and record all that I was experiencing. The entity, which was pulling me upward in an effort to show me, continuously told me that until I could let go and allow myself to just experience this journey in the present that I would not be able to see what it is that I needed to see. Each time it would try and show me, I would tell myself, "Okay, here we go, you've got to remember this." It was as if my ego would try and explain this situation to itself. It kept trying to capture everything, to articulate it into language to process it, to remember it, but the entity kept telling me that this experience could not be captured, could not be experienced other than in the present, yet each time it tried to show me, my ego would not let go. And so, after a while, the entity gave up. "You are not ready," it said.

After this, my trip went on with minimal interaction with anything I would classify as an entity, but I kept the recorder with me. I spent the majority of my trip lying under the Milky Way on a blanket at my family's tree farm in upstate New York watching the Perseid meteor shower. At one point, I remembered how afraid I had been in the darkness prior to starting my trip and was amazed that I felt absolutely no fear at all. I thought about it and I realized that in the present, fear does not exist. Fear REQUIRES past and future in order to exist; if you are completely in the present, you could never be afraid. What I realized was, all of fear is based off of some past memory and some future expectation. If all that exists is the present, then there can be no such thing as fear. I am not arguing that fear can not be experienced in the present, just that it requires the past and the future in order to be experienced at all.

I was completely unafraid during my trip because I was COMPLETELY in the present. I could not fear some animal jumping out of the woods and eating me because 1) that could only be an event that happened in the future and 2) the basis for this fear only existed in my mental past.

As I tried to fathom the future, I struggled to imagine anything other than the present. The notion of "Monday" seemed comically absurd to me. There is no Monday, there is only right now! Going to work at some point in the future was an absolute absurdity, a figment of my imagination. The experience that I was having at that very moment was the only experience I would ever have, it was eternal. I experienced the present so powerfully--for the first time in my life (or at least what I remember :-)--that I completely forgot who I was. I don't mean that I forgot my name, or was confused or something. I completely forgot who I was. My name, my memories, my body, my relationships, all didn't exist in the present, they had no meaning. I couldn't remember a thing about my childhood and was completely unable to come up with a single idea or memory that could satisfactorily identify me as me. I just was, that's all. Eventually, I came up with a few vague concepts that I knew that I had formally identified myself with: the street I grew up on, my own name, the image of my girlfriend, my major, but these things held no meaning, they all lived in my past and the past after all, did not exist anywhere but in my mind!

Just as the past exists only in the memories of my mind, the future also exists only in my mind, the only difference being that we call the ideas of the future dreams rather than memories. In really examining these two concepts, they are more difficult to differentiate between than initial inspection would lead one to believe. How should one think about the past? It is traditionally regarded as some point in linear time that happened prior to "now." But you cannot hold the past in your hand, it is not right in front of your eyes like the present is. It can only exist in the memories of the mind and memories can fade or change through time. The trout caught by the fisherman always grows in time. And since the past only lives in memories, it must be mutable and therefore cannot be thought of as holding any "objective truth."

As with the past, the future too only exists in the mind in the form of dreams. The traditional definition of "future" would be some point in linear time beyond "now." And like memories, these dreams are completely mutable and, though they can contain as much truth as the past, also cannot be thought of as holding any "objective truth." Really, the only difference between the past and future is the arbitrary distinction of being either prior to or beyond the present. The problem is, it is always the present. It is the never the future just as much as it is never the past. Past and future, far from being opposites are in fact, the same thing. As with all dualities they merely represent different sides of the same phenomenon.

As my trip wore on and lost its intensity, my experience of the present slowly dissolved so that I was able to incorporate more and more of my memories into my experience, but I continued to think about this notion of time. One of the biggest lessons that I took out of the whole experience was that all we have is the present. Memories can live inside us, and can be experienced in recollection, but they interfere with and limit our experience of the present (this may be a "good" thing or a "bad" thing). But just as one can live in the past, so too can one live in the future with similar consequences. Someone living in the future might put off their present situation in order to make a better future for themselves, but that person runs the risk of always putting off the present for some idealized future that never comes. After all, when has it ever been tomorrow?

Just as I experienced that fear cannot exist without the past AND the future, so it is with fear's opposite: hope. And just as fear can be dangerous, so too can hope. The notion of hope removes us from the present. It causes us to put off our present for some desirable future. But just as I mentioned above, it is never the future, it is never tomorrow. And if all that we have is today, then lets live for today.

Some think of this world as Hell, or a purgatory, a staging ground for a future eternal bliss, but if you are living your life for some paradise lying beyond this world, than you're missing the paradise right in front of your eyes. No god put us here to suffer and toil and labor for some future salvation. Salvation is yours if you open your eyes and live in the present. God's Paradise is among us here and now. We were not banished from Eden, it is not hidden in some ideal past or future, but it is hidden in the one place that modern man would never look: the present.