Building a Motorboat Out of Chicken Bones
Something has changed, or shifted lately..in terms of my perception.
A few months back, I remember joking with Lisa about the two of us turning out to be zapped new-agers or Urantian cat hoarders by the time we entered our late 30's. Maybe we're on track here.
I've just been meditating a lot lately, and running into books (on "accident") that get me excited about experiencing the every day. I feel more secure in growing older, in that I am understanding a lot of the stuff that I have been talking about/mulling over for the last 4 or 5 years. It is no longer mere intellectual understanding; no longer the stuff of knowledge. I partly attribute it to the use of psychedelics..but then it also has a lot to do with moving into this house where I now feel very comfortable meditating, as opposed to the dorm I was living in previously. Actually, it's all very much like a repeat of my return to Massachusetts in Autumn 2006, in the sense that I'm existing in a bubble where everything is possible, there are no rules when it comes to creating and exploring, every dream and model of the universe is equally important/valid. Likewise, I am simultaneously existing in my own mind, sometimes at the point where it recalls a good portion of my childhood, and opening myself more to the outside, perhaps sometimes carelessly. Lisa is undergoing something similar, but she's been talking about her intuitive powers strengthening and a general increase in synchronicities for about two years now. She's reached this point where she sees a simulated reality as very sensible, and I gotta say that things do seem eerily scripted when we review her life thus far. I typically play the skeptic, though it's really none of my business if she gets really attached to the simulation model, and I'm just juggling models as usual.
However, I have added a few models to my operating system, all of which could be/can be/are/are not/can't be/couldn't ever be. It's not really to say that Anything goes, cause I've still got barriers up to lots of things, and then there's just personal interest/taste. For example, I was speed-walking to class last Wednesday morning and listening to some canonical emo album, and I just couldn't make it past the third song, try as I might to convince myself that I had to let go of my hang-ups to hear what was really there. But then the little voice of reason jumped in and prevented me from doing something I didn't want to do that did not need to be done. Then again, when speaking of things that one doesn't want to do that do not need to be done, I am still all tangled up in this college business, for the sake of the future, and digits on a computer screen at a bank in Michigan somewhere. There's a lot of struggle going on despite all of the deep understanding talk up above. I'm caught somewhere in between the aforementioned spike of awakening activity, desires to use various substances more often than once in a blue moon, and obligations involving stuff that other people, and myself have invested time and futuremoney in. It has a rather chaotic atmosphere to it, but it makes a lot of sense to me.
My personal awakening process is unfolding faster than it has in the past few years
(for whatever reason), and there's this great big burst of creativity that has exploded as a result. So there's all kinds of half-finished drawings lying around on top of new sketches, and a spectacular comic in progress, and fresh batches of songs (some are cooling down, and there are others baking in the oven), and poems on scraps of paper, and lists of plans and ideas. At the same time, I've been doing a lot of meditating, and I've been researching and practicing a bit of magickal tricks. And just waiting for the bus, or sitting up in the secluded stairwell on the 7th floor of this one big building at school can result in moments of blissful awareness. But there's still all the hang-ups associated with consensus reality, and the frustration and despair that occurs on account of deprogramming myself while participating in a game rigged against me in order to eat food and sleep under a roof and all kinds of other comfortable luxury bullshit that has formed a part of my identity and therefore functions, all together, as an extreme attachment to someone else's idea of what "reality" should be. So switches get flipped and I'm drawn toward easy pick-me ups (or put me downs, I suppose) in order to get away from that for a bit, without having to make much of an effort. It seems to me that the more detached I feel from consensus reality, via frequent meditation/realizations, the more difficult it is to give a shit about all the "SUPER IMPORTANT" stuff that isn't really important at all. But then guilt comes waltzing in and I skirt around it, avoiding direct contact, by working on assignments, looking for summer jobs, checking my school email, being responsible, and etc. Spending time in that frame of mind feels like punishment unless it involves readings for my mythology class, and then I naturally feel as if I deserve pleasure as a reward.
Long story short:
Everything is always changing but I felt a burst of inspiration to write
about a particular series of changes, and wound myself up in a web of a ramble that
is part confession, part guided tour through file-sorting in my brain. The web
would have kept growing, but luckily I was interrupted and that triggered a breakdown in my
ability to generate ramble juice.
On lighter note (or maybe a jazzier chord),
I've discovered there are 4 good ways to listen to Yes' Relayer album.
1.Involves the use of the LP (I think it belongs to Anthony) on 45 RPM setting with the pitch button turned all the way towards the left (adult chipmunk voices instead of baby chipmunk voices). This mode of listening really dazzles the mind as it sounds like all the instruments are bouncing off of one another, but yet they're all colliding in a tuneful way. Jon Anderson Chipmunk is weaving fantastical lyrics around all the flying instruments, mindful to weave them in such a way that none are smashed by snare hits or ricocheting keyboard arpeggios.
2.Involves the use of my hand-held tape recorder and the Relayer tape I found at Salvation Army last summer. The pitch is turned all the way down, but on normal speed as playing it at half-speed would be like listening to someone experiencing jazz fusion diarrhea for 2 hours. It kind of sounds like post-rock when there are no vocals present, and the drums are doing a standard rock sort of thing. It's charming, but all the best transitions are too sluggish to be majestic.
3.Involves listening to the tape and the LP at the same time, and it's not very enjoyable unless I give up a bit into side one, and flip the record over to listen to the slow section from "To Be Over." That's exactly what I did, of course.
4.Involves putting the record OR tape on and listening to either as intended by Yes, Atlantic Records, whomever. Great, but I'm preferring #1 as of late since I need an extra push to do things.
And speaking of records...
Lisa and I went to NYC recently for haircuts and browsed a good record store and some not-so-great outdoor record thing. I didn't buy anything, because there was nothing that jumped out at me, and more so because nothing on my vinyl wishlist was available. I noted a slight depression on account of my fruitless hunt, which wasn't even supposed to be a hunt, but became one once I started to invest a lot of time in browsing. It was as if, I had at some point invested too much time to simply be browsing, and felt like I had to hunt for something to make that investment worthwhile. The absurdity of this occurred to me after we had left the shop, but then about 10 minutes in our walk we bumped into some guy selling three tables of records on a corner. I began wrestling with the urge to hunt through all the crates, partly on account of wanting to find something to make my previous hunting worthwhile. It was kind of funny how quickly I gave in, and after flipping through crates of absolutely nothing promising whatsoever, I gave up and then felt doubly stupid.
I'm writing about this because it has a lot to do with something Lisa and I talked about driving to a state park on a Sunday, which we partly decided to go to because the house I live in was, on that particular Sunday, full of fat guys eating buffalo wings on account of my landlord hosting an annual fantasy baseball draft. Just a side note here, when I first heard of "fantasy football" I was maybe 15 or so, and briefly entertained the idea that it was like some kind of Dungeons & Dragons thing that incorporated football.
So anyway, Lisa and I were driving and I asked her if she believed it was better to wait for desired things to come into being, to come into your possession, as opposed to searching for them, and perhaps, if desperate enough, attempting to hack "reality" to "get" things desired.
Lisa surmised that it might depend on what the desired thing is, and then concluded that she didn't know. I don't know either, and I wasn't really asking the question wanting to hear a particular answer. If "reality" is a virtual simulation that doesn't necessarily mean you can't tweak things here and there, provided "reality" doesn't have to bend very much to give you what you want. But I don't know if it is a virtual simulation, and the whole idea of getting the universe to work for you has begun to appeal to me less and less, and it doesn't take long to drift from sigil-making into the realms of all that law of attraction, wealth generation stuff. That specific approach has never appealed to me as it seems to perceive the universe as a dumb tool which can be forced into generating all kinds of material garbage for your pleasure. Maybe the non-effort approach appeals to me more because I'm generally lazy, however. Though I do find that many amazing things have come to me when I give up searching for them so hard, and though it always isn't the case, it seems that spontaneous creation, spontaneous play, spontaneous trips and etc are always more spiritually enriching than micro-managed, pre-planned out "songwriting," "vacations" and etc. For example, that Sunday trip turned into a good time in the forest, setting up shop off of the path, lying down with our heads on a fallen tree and turning the sky-view into a mutual screensaver for about 35 minutes. I had turned my jacket inside out to blend in with the forest better and avoid the eyes of people on the path who might look in our direction, and when we left the woods I never turned it outside in, and Lisa and I climbed up this big stairway to overlook an artificial pond, and then spent a good amount of time on an extremely tortured set of swings. I tried to lose my sense of self in the crying chains, and swung in something of a trance with my eyes closed for a bit. It was an accidentally perfect Sunday, and there was very little effort involved..it just kind of unfolded by itself.
A few months back, I remember joking with Lisa about the two of us turning out to be zapped new-agers or Urantian cat hoarders by the time we entered our late 30's. Maybe we're on track here.
I've just been meditating a lot lately, and running into books (on "accident") that get me excited about experiencing the every day. I feel more secure in growing older, in that I am understanding a lot of the stuff that I have been talking about/mulling over for the last 4 or 5 years. It is no longer mere intellectual understanding; no longer the stuff of knowledge. I partly attribute it to the use of psychedelics..but then it also has a lot to do with moving into this house where I now feel very comfortable meditating, as opposed to the dorm I was living in previously. Actually, it's all very much like a repeat of my return to Massachusetts in Autumn 2006, in the sense that I'm existing in a bubble where everything is possible, there are no rules when it comes to creating and exploring, every dream and model of the universe is equally important/valid. Likewise, I am simultaneously existing in my own mind, sometimes at the point where it recalls a good portion of my childhood, and opening myself more to the outside, perhaps sometimes carelessly. Lisa is undergoing something similar, but she's been talking about her intuitive powers strengthening and a general increase in synchronicities for about two years now. She's reached this point where she sees a simulated reality as very sensible, and I gotta say that things do seem eerily scripted when we review her life thus far. I typically play the skeptic, though it's really none of my business if she gets really attached to the simulation model, and I'm just juggling models as usual.
However, I have added a few models to my operating system, all of which could be/can be/are/are not/can't be/couldn't ever be. It's not really to say that Anything goes, cause I've still got barriers up to lots of things, and then there's just personal interest/taste. For example, I was speed-walking to class last Wednesday morning and listening to some canonical emo album, and I just couldn't make it past the third song, try as I might to convince myself that I had to let go of my hang-ups to hear what was really there. But then the little voice of reason jumped in and prevented me from doing something I didn't want to do that did not need to be done. Then again, when speaking of things that one doesn't want to do that do not need to be done, I am still all tangled up in this college business, for the sake of the future, and digits on a computer screen at a bank in Michigan somewhere. There's a lot of struggle going on despite all of the deep understanding talk up above. I'm caught somewhere in between the aforementioned spike of awakening activity, desires to use various substances more often than once in a blue moon, and obligations involving stuff that other people, and myself have invested time and futuremoney in. It has a rather chaotic atmosphere to it, but it makes a lot of sense to me.
My personal awakening process is unfolding faster than it has in the past few years
(for whatever reason), and there's this great big burst of creativity that has exploded as a result. So there's all kinds of half-finished drawings lying around on top of new sketches, and a spectacular comic in progress, and fresh batches of songs (some are cooling down, and there are others baking in the oven), and poems on scraps of paper, and lists of plans and ideas. At the same time, I've been doing a lot of meditating, and I've been researching and practicing a bit of magickal tricks. And just waiting for the bus, or sitting up in the secluded stairwell on the 7th floor of this one big building at school can result in moments of blissful awareness. But there's still all the hang-ups associated with consensus reality, and the frustration and despair that occurs on account of deprogramming myself while participating in a game rigged against me in order to eat food and sleep under a roof and all kinds of other comfortable luxury bullshit that has formed a part of my identity and therefore functions, all together, as an extreme attachment to someone else's idea of what "reality" should be. So switches get flipped and I'm drawn toward easy pick-me ups (or put me downs, I suppose) in order to get away from that for a bit, without having to make much of an effort. It seems to me that the more detached I feel from consensus reality, via frequent meditation/realizations, the more difficult it is to give a shit about all the "SUPER IMPORTANT" stuff that isn't really important at all. But then guilt comes waltzing in and I skirt around it, avoiding direct contact, by working on assignments, looking for summer jobs, checking my school email, being responsible, and etc. Spending time in that frame of mind feels like punishment unless it involves readings for my mythology class, and then I naturally feel as if I deserve pleasure as a reward.
Long story short:
Everything is always changing but I felt a burst of inspiration to write
about a particular series of changes, and wound myself up in a web of a ramble that
is part confession, part guided tour through file-sorting in my brain. The web
would have kept growing, but luckily I was interrupted and that triggered a breakdown in my
ability to generate ramble juice.
On lighter note (or maybe a jazzier chord),
I've discovered there are 4 good ways to listen to Yes' Relayer album.
1.Involves the use of the LP (I think it belongs to Anthony) on 45 RPM setting with the pitch button turned all the way towards the left (adult chipmunk voices instead of baby chipmunk voices). This mode of listening really dazzles the mind as it sounds like all the instruments are bouncing off of one another, but yet they're all colliding in a tuneful way. Jon Anderson Chipmunk is weaving fantastical lyrics around all the flying instruments, mindful to weave them in such a way that none are smashed by snare hits or ricocheting keyboard arpeggios.
2.Involves the use of my hand-held tape recorder and the Relayer tape I found at Salvation Army last summer. The pitch is turned all the way down, but on normal speed as playing it at half-speed would be like listening to someone experiencing jazz fusion diarrhea for 2 hours. It kind of sounds like post-rock when there are no vocals present, and the drums are doing a standard rock sort of thing. It's charming, but all the best transitions are too sluggish to be majestic.
3.Involves listening to the tape and the LP at the same time, and it's not very enjoyable unless I give up a bit into side one, and flip the record over to listen to the slow section from "To Be Over." That's exactly what I did, of course.
4.Involves putting the record OR tape on and listening to either as intended by Yes, Atlantic Records, whomever. Great, but I'm preferring #1 as of late since I need an extra push to do things.
And speaking of records...
Lisa and I went to NYC recently for haircuts and browsed a good record store and some not-so-great outdoor record thing. I didn't buy anything, because there was nothing that jumped out at me, and more so because nothing on my vinyl wishlist was available. I noted a slight depression on account of my fruitless hunt, which wasn't even supposed to be a hunt, but became one once I started to invest a lot of time in browsing. It was as if, I had at some point invested too much time to simply be browsing, and felt like I had to hunt for something to make that investment worthwhile. The absurdity of this occurred to me after we had left the shop, but then about 10 minutes in our walk we bumped into some guy selling three tables of records on a corner. I began wrestling with the urge to hunt through all the crates, partly on account of wanting to find something to make my previous hunting worthwhile. It was kind of funny how quickly I gave in, and after flipping through crates of absolutely nothing promising whatsoever, I gave up and then felt doubly stupid.
I'm writing about this because it has a lot to do with something Lisa and I talked about driving to a state park on a Sunday, which we partly decided to go to because the house I live in was, on that particular Sunday, full of fat guys eating buffalo wings on account of my landlord hosting an annual fantasy baseball draft. Just a side note here, when I first heard of "fantasy football" I was maybe 15 or so, and briefly entertained the idea that it was like some kind of Dungeons & Dragons thing that incorporated football.
So anyway, Lisa and I were driving and I asked her if she believed it was better to wait for desired things to come into being, to come into your possession, as opposed to searching for them, and perhaps, if desperate enough, attempting to hack "reality" to "get" things desired.
Lisa surmised that it might depend on what the desired thing is, and then concluded that she didn't know. I don't know either, and I wasn't really asking the question wanting to hear a particular answer. If "reality" is a virtual simulation that doesn't necessarily mean you can't tweak things here and there, provided "reality" doesn't have to bend very much to give you what you want. But I don't know if it is a virtual simulation, and the whole idea of getting the universe to work for you has begun to appeal to me less and less, and it doesn't take long to drift from sigil-making into the realms of all that law of attraction, wealth generation stuff. That specific approach has never appealed to me as it seems to perceive the universe as a dumb tool which can be forced into generating all kinds of material garbage for your pleasure. Maybe the non-effort approach appeals to me more because I'm generally lazy, however. Though I do find that many amazing things have come to me when I give up searching for them so hard, and though it always isn't the case, it seems that spontaneous creation, spontaneous play, spontaneous trips and etc are always more spiritually enriching than micro-managed, pre-planned out "songwriting," "vacations" and etc. For example, that Sunday trip turned into a good time in the forest, setting up shop off of the path, lying down with our heads on a fallen tree and turning the sky-view into a mutual screensaver for about 35 minutes. I had turned my jacket inside out to blend in with the forest better and avoid the eyes of people on the path who might look in our direction, and when we left the woods I never turned it outside in, and Lisa and I climbed up this big stairway to overlook an artificial pond, and then spent a good amount of time on an extremely tortured set of swings. I tried to lose my sense of self in the crying chains, and swung in something of a trance with my eyes closed for a bit. It was an accidentally perfect Sunday, and there was very little effort involved..it just kind of unfolded by itself.
