And in the center is God (P.S. I'm moving to myspace)
And in the center is God...
I'm an intellectual being. I don't know something is true or accept it until I've come to the conclusion myself, which has caused many a mental thrashing in my head. My consciousness is housed in said head. This encasement of flesh, sinew and bone. A limited creation of guilt and disgust that I have always sought to escape and yet have always futilely known was inescapable. My senses only extended so far as I could physically see, touch, feel, taste, experience. If something wasn't there, at that moment, I could not experience it. I could not, and still cannot, bring to mind memories of things experienced in the past and savor them. I do not have object constancy like so many others seem to. But that has caused me to rely only on myself, and to know that you are always going to fail makes it so that you don't try at all for yourself. So I failed myself. And failed myself. And failed myself well. Hence the rush for oblivion. I knew that nothing I could say or do or make or feel or taste or touch or sense of experience of create would ever be unique. I knew it in my very bones - and if I knew it it was real. It just works that way. My whole life I've been thinking, pondering, fighting that inevitability, but when I finally accepted it as truth there seemed no purpose to life. Life just for living was a waste. So I thought to use the addictions I had already fostered and the malignancies of my flesh to destroy myself in an appropriate way. I came close. It made sense at the time.
I was thwarted in my macabre efforts. You can all have my mother to thank for my presence. Really, she is the only reason I am alive. If I had it my way I would be dead by now, and no one else would have thought of me soon enough to come and save me.
That doesn't change the fact that I really won't amount to much. Everyone tells me I will change the world, ya ya ya. Well, frankly, I will not. I am ordinary, normal. I may have a touch of the fey in me, but it is only a touch and it serves me in ways that I don't see serving the world, such as in writing. I have magic when I write. I can feel it. I don't know if others sense it, but I do. When I write and the words come out properly, I can feel the connection of which I am about to speak most poignantly...and then I feel loved.
When your whole world starts, begins and ends with your body and its organic decomposition and limitedness it is a terrifying, harsh place indeed. You are reminded every day in every way that you are most certainly not connected to any other human being, any high power, any thing at all. You are a consciousness encased in a shell that is slowly rotting around you. And to make you feel even smaller and more alone you are a sole consciousness among billions of others just like you, and among trillions of other self-conscious life forms in various other guises. All in all we're just another brick in the wall....
Even in my most isolative moments I would reach out to other consciousnesses in my own way...Media, email, window, sky, earth, rain, music, sound, my own voice. Because in my state even my own self was another consciousness to me. My own mind was an other. Anything Other than me, the prison in which I was and am held, is an Other to which I want to be bonded in some way, if even for a second. My fears, however, the lows to which I had been taken, forbad me even that connection, hwoever, gave me agoraphobia and terror of being seen, looked at, touched, of noise, sound, affection, inaffection...anything another human being's presense or even proximity could affect upon me was terrifying on a visceral level. But still I reached out for those forms of connection over which I had control...music was the most soothing...the one I chose. Drowning myself in the chords of a song over and over and over again until I went into the delerious tremens from withdrawal as the nights wore on and began weaving prophecies. But it was something.
And here is where this new philosophy which is bringing me peace and joy and a smile and contentment comes. Imagine a top...a top made of layers, the ones they are always speaking of when they tell you to delve deep into yourself. But these aren't the layers of yourself. ... These are the layers of it all. So stay with me, and I'll unwrap the mystery for you as I see it, all right? Bear with me, this concept has been shaping in my head for a few days and the words for it just fell out of me last night...
You're the outside layer. I am, or you are. Whoever's perspective this is. Because perspective is everything and I am not you, and you are not me. We all look at the world through our own prison eyes and have the choice to see what we will, the connections everywhere or the abysses laying between us all...We are like a layer of paint here on the outside, flaking, paper thin, gaudy and hideous, hiding imperfections in the wood and there only as ornamentation. Nothing but pomp and circumstance, adding nothing to the function of the toy. The mechanism.
Beneath that is the layer we are attached to. The connections we make in our day to day to stay sane, stay alive, stay in love, stay in friendships, stay attached to the mechanism, the top, the world, the universe, this life. The conversations we have, the news we read or watch, the movies we see, the music we hear, the friends we keep or lose, the lovers we love or scorn, the family we hate or emulate, our jobs and commutes, our cars, our apartments and landlords, our hobbies, habits, routines, pasttimes, vices and cures. The things that make us who we are are, in reality, not a part of us at all. They are taken from the outside and brought in, attached to us and added to the colors of our paint. Making us who we are, yes, but we are dibbles and dabbles from the giant canvas which contains all.
The layer beneath that, the third layer, is made up of the connections YOUR connections make to the world to stay attached and become who they are. Following me? Because for them to be what they are and available to you, they needed to become who they are through the same process of selection and growth, and use the world in the same way. The road crew that does maintenence on your commute, your boss and fellow employees and the people who pay and hire them and the overarching company and all the people who work there and around the world if it's a corporation, all the band members and their dramas of all the music you listen to, and their record deals and their inspirations, and their girlfriends and boyfriends and loves and hates and families and deaths and births and drug addictions and destructions and rejuvenations. All the people who go into making the news and movies you watch, the coffee getters, the boom operaters, actors and actress, screeplays, directors, producers, funders, patrons of the arts, those who tried out - all their lives. You're now connected to them all without even realizing it. The conversations you have with other people...Yes, the very same conversation may have been said before, but in that respect you are connecting as well. You are linking to another mind in a profound way, across space and time itself, to have a thought in the exact same way. How fantastic...how spiritual. How unique and uncommon. What could have brought that person to those thoughts? What brought you? Were your journeys the same? What makes up the beautiful canvas of their colors?
The layer beneath all of those connections is yet another layer...The one in which everything is grounded and all these possibilities are made possibile. Nature. For without nature there would be no steel for our girders, no paper for the screenplays, the coffee cups at Starbucks, the napkins to cry into, the petrol, the asphalt that allows millions jobs, the natural gas, natural resources, the air we breath when we inhale, the carbon dioxide that helps the flowers and trees grow, the rain that falls and recycles our wastes and completes the circle, waters our crops, feeds us in bygone years. We all sprang from the perfect nature circle, even if we have transcended it a little by now. The circle has just grown wider, but if we look at it from a larger height we will see...it is still a circle. That never changes...Nature, which allowed us to evolve in a specific set of circumstances and coincidences that would not have been possible without her. ... Thereby none of these connections would be possible. Time doesn't matter in this process...
Beneath that is just the planet and the solar system on/in which we live. Just, hah. Then the galaxy. The milky way. The universe. The next universe. The edge of the Everything We Can Concieve. Which is very much like the edge of the top I've been describing...with me at the very center as the smallest, most insignificant thing, and it as the paint, the shell. Something fragile and inconsequential to the mechanism...which in this case, this perspective is me. But in the perspective I've been describing I am not the mechanism. The world in which I live is. And if we give it a spin. Spin the top at physics defying speeds. I'll fly away, the paint will flake and burn off, crisp away and leave the second layer bereft, and then without me there's no need for my connections to people to remain and so they'll go screaming away, grasping back for what they remember in this apocalypse. My apocalypse of the mind. Of meaninglessness and of insignificance. Then what made them as connections important. Then Nature unravels. Then the sun dies and the Earth turns to a molten pit of despair and vacancy. Then the shell of the Everything We Know cracks and the Everything expands into Nothing until the top has spun everything away and the only thing left is a thread of substance where the center used to spin madly. That inch that perfect sliver, that core, is the heart of it all. Where all the goassamer threads of connection went back to. I can still see the silken, ghostly attachments, fistfuls of importance tying me to him. Every word I've ever said has been important. Every thought I've ever had. Every tear has been paramount. He cherishes me for my imagination. He cherishes me for this experiment. And he won't let me fly away and be lost, so he spins us back again and when the process is done we are back where we belong, and I am the paint - well worn and loved paint, touched by many childrens hands, obviously meant for play and then jubilant observation. Come be with me, see me, feel me, know me. My colors shine bright. Brighter now for the knowing - and I am part of the mechanism - I am the edge of the universe...it's a cool thing to know...
And I have God at the very center of me.
I'm an intellectual being. I don't know something is true or accept it until I've come to the conclusion myself, which has caused many a mental thrashing in my head. My consciousness is housed in said head. This encasement of flesh, sinew and bone. A limited creation of guilt and disgust that I have always sought to escape and yet have always futilely known was inescapable. My senses only extended so far as I could physically see, touch, feel, taste, experience. If something wasn't there, at that moment, I could not experience it. I could not, and still cannot, bring to mind memories of things experienced in the past and savor them. I do not have object constancy like so many others seem to. But that has caused me to rely only on myself, and to know that you are always going to fail makes it so that you don't try at all for yourself. So I failed myself. And failed myself. And failed myself well. Hence the rush for oblivion. I knew that nothing I could say or do or make or feel or taste or touch or sense of experience of create would ever be unique. I knew it in my very bones - and if I knew it it was real. It just works that way. My whole life I've been thinking, pondering, fighting that inevitability, but when I finally accepted it as truth there seemed no purpose to life. Life just for living was a waste. So I thought to use the addictions I had already fostered and the malignancies of my flesh to destroy myself in an appropriate way. I came close. It made sense at the time.
I was thwarted in my macabre efforts. You can all have my mother to thank for my presence. Really, she is the only reason I am alive. If I had it my way I would be dead by now, and no one else would have thought of me soon enough to come and save me.
That doesn't change the fact that I really won't amount to much. Everyone tells me I will change the world, ya ya ya. Well, frankly, I will not. I am ordinary, normal. I may have a touch of the fey in me, but it is only a touch and it serves me in ways that I don't see serving the world, such as in writing. I have magic when I write. I can feel it. I don't know if others sense it, but I do. When I write and the words come out properly, I can feel the connection of which I am about to speak most poignantly...and then I feel loved.
When your whole world starts, begins and ends with your body and its organic decomposition and limitedness it is a terrifying, harsh place indeed. You are reminded every day in every way that you are most certainly not connected to any other human being, any high power, any thing at all. You are a consciousness encased in a shell that is slowly rotting around you. And to make you feel even smaller and more alone you are a sole consciousness among billions of others just like you, and among trillions of other self-conscious life forms in various other guises. All in all we're just another brick in the wall....
Even in my most isolative moments I would reach out to other consciousnesses in my own way...Media, email, window, sky, earth, rain, music, sound, my own voice. Because in my state even my own self was another consciousness to me. My own mind was an other. Anything Other than me, the prison in which I was and am held, is an Other to which I want to be bonded in some way, if even for a second. My fears, however, the lows to which I had been taken, forbad me even that connection, hwoever, gave me agoraphobia and terror of being seen, looked at, touched, of noise, sound, affection, inaffection...anything another human being's presense or even proximity could affect upon me was terrifying on a visceral level. But still I reached out for those forms of connection over which I had control...music was the most soothing...the one I chose. Drowning myself in the chords of a song over and over and over again until I went into the delerious tremens from withdrawal as the nights wore on and began weaving prophecies. But it was something.
And here is where this new philosophy which is bringing me peace and joy and a smile and contentment comes. Imagine a top...a top made of layers, the ones they are always speaking of when they tell you to delve deep into yourself. But these aren't the layers of yourself. ... These are the layers of it all. So stay with me, and I'll unwrap the mystery for you as I see it, all right? Bear with me, this concept has been shaping in my head for a few days and the words for it just fell out of me last night...
You're the outside layer. I am, or you are. Whoever's perspective this is. Because perspective is everything and I am not you, and you are not me. We all look at the world through our own prison eyes and have the choice to see what we will, the connections everywhere or the abysses laying between us all...We are like a layer of paint here on the outside, flaking, paper thin, gaudy and hideous, hiding imperfections in the wood and there only as ornamentation. Nothing but pomp and circumstance, adding nothing to the function of the toy. The mechanism.
Beneath that is the layer we are attached to. The connections we make in our day to day to stay sane, stay alive, stay in love, stay in friendships, stay attached to the mechanism, the top, the world, the universe, this life. The conversations we have, the news we read or watch, the movies we see, the music we hear, the friends we keep or lose, the lovers we love or scorn, the family we hate or emulate, our jobs and commutes, our cars, our apartments and landlords, our hobbies, habits, routines, pasttimes, vices and cures. The things that make us who we are are, in reality, not a part of us at all. They are taken from the outside and brought in, attached to us and added to the colors of our paint. Making us who we are, yes, but we are dibbles and dabbles from the giant canvas which contains all.
The layer beneath that, the third layer, is made up of the connections YOUR connections make to the world to stay attached and become who they are. Following me? Because for them to be what they are and available to you, they needed to become who they are through the same process of selection and growth, and use the world in the same way. The road crew that does maintenence on your commute, your boss and fellow employees and the people who pay and hire them and the overarching company and all the people who work there and around the world if it's a corporation, all the band members and their dramas of all the music you listen to, and their record deals and their inspirations, and their girlfriends and boyfriends and loves and hates and families and deaths and births and drug addictions and destructions and rejuvenations. All the people who go into making the news and movies you watch, the coffee getters, the boom operaters, actors and actress, screeplays, directors, producers, funders, patrons of the arts, those who tried out - all their lives. You're now connected to them all without even realizing it. The conversations you have with other people...Yes, the very same conversation may have been said before, but in that respect you are connecting as well. You are linking to another mind in a profound way, across space and time itself, to have a thought in the exact same way. How fantastic...how spiritual. How unique and uncommon. What could have brought that person to those thoughts? What brought you? Were your journeys the same? What makes up the beautiful canvas of their colors?
The layer beneath all of those connections is yet another layer...The one in which everything is grounded and all these possibilities are made possibile. Nature. For without nature there would be no steel for our girders, no paper for the screenplays, the coffee cups at Starbucks, the napkins to cry into, the petrol, the asphalt that allows millions jobs, the natural gas, natural resources, the air we breath when we inhale, the carbon dioxide that helps the flowers and trees grow, the rain that falls and recycles our wastes and completes the circle, waters our crops, feeds us in bygone years. We all sprang from the perfect nature circle, even if we have transcended it a little by now. The circle has just grown wider, but if we look at it from a larger height we will see...it is still a circle. That never changes...Nature, which allowed us to evolve in a specific set of circumstances and coincidences that would not have been possible without her. ... Thereby none of these connections would be possible. Time doesn't matter in this process...
Beneath that is just the planet and the solar system on/in which we live. Just, hah. Then the galaxy. The milky way. The universe. The next universe. The edge of the Everything We Can Concieve. Which is very much like the edge of the top I've been describing...with me at the very center as the smallest, most insignificant thing, and it as the paint, the shell. Something fragile and inconsequential to the mechanism...which in this case, this perspective is me. But in the perspective I've been describing I am not the mechanism. The world in which I live is. And if we give it a spin. Spin the top at physics defying speeds. I'll fly away, the paint will flake and burn off, crisp away and leave the second layer bereft, and then without me there's no need for my connections to people to remain and so they'll go screaming away, grasping back for what they remember in this apocalypse. My apocalypse of the mind. Of meaninglessness and of insignificance. Then what made them as connections important. Then Nature unravels. Then the sun dies and the Earth turns to a molten pit of despair and vacancy. Then the shell of the Everything We Know cracks and the Everything expands into Nothing until the top has spun everything away and the only thing left is a thread of substance where the center used to spin madly. That inch that perfect sliver, that core, is the heart of it all. Where all the goassamer threads of connection went back to. I can still see the silken, ghostly attachments, fistfuls of importance tying me to him. Every word I've ever said has been important. Every thought I've ever had. Every tear has been paramount. He cherishes me for my imagination. He cherishes me for this experiment. And he won't let me fly away and be lost, so he spins us back again and when the process is done we are back where we belong, and I am the paint - well worn and loved paint, touched by many childrens hands, obviously meant for play and then jubilant observation. Come be with me, see me, feel me, know me. My colors shine bright. Brighter now for the knowing - and I am part of the mechanism - I am the edge of the universe...it's a cool thing to know...
And I have God at the very center of me.