Daily routine is the key to health and clarity of mind and intention. It allows for the gradual development of a biological rhythm for all the activities of our life, and the alignment of those activities with our natural circadian rhythm. The regular and balanced cycling of our circadian rhythm is the wellspring of our mood and level of energy and, when it becomes irregular or fluctuates out of steady predictable rhythm, all aspects of our life suffer. Mood and energy level are the basis of our place and view in the world and, when they lose regularity, our perspective and all our activities and expression begin to wilt and lose potency, as if like a plant not being regularly tended.
TENDING TO OUR GARDEN
We forget that WE are a living thing, that the basic rules we know of caring for living things apply to ourselves, as much as to a plant in our garden. In this way, the skills of gardening can, perhaps, teach us more about the practices that lead to our well being than any branch or theory of psychology. Our behavior has the potential to bear fruit, but also to be overrun with weeds, strangling our lifeblood. Regular rows of plants are like daily habits, the seeds sown by our behavior which develop across the season of our life. There are so many factors that lead to a healthy beautiful crop of plants, and I believe each one can find some reflection in the development of a person.
Sun and soil, nutrients and exposure to the radiant source of all life, are needs we share with plants in a very literal way, no metaphor needed. But when we extend these needs we have from our environment to the non-physical, the psychic aspect of our being, we are given a special perspective by the directly observable health of plants, and the subtle variance of minute factors (soil pH, humidity, climate preference, cO2 levels) which must be taken into account by a skilled gardener if he wants his given temperamental strain to thrive. Many of these same aspects of self-care are, perhaps, lost to the blind spot we tend to have when attempting to observe and understand our own behavior. This is as true on a cultural level as it is on an individual level; the blind spot prevents us from seeing ourselves as we truly are* as a tree, itself, can never see the forest through the trees.
THE GENETICS OF CLIMATIC PREFERENCE AND GROWTH
Think of how, when you take seeds and “immigrate” them from a tropical land to a harsher Northern climate, they do not thrive as well, if at all. Their genetics developed in the soil of their home, and that environment. Suddenly pulling those genetics from their unseen “roots” in that soil and dropping them into a dramatically different ecosystem can cripple their development. Yet, as a species, these simple truths about living things evade our understanding when looking in the mirror. Immigration, as a cultural phenomenon, is not thought of in these genetic terms. Yet our common sense tells us the character of our environment has enormous influence over our growth and ability to “bear fruit.” To imagine taking a newborn baby from the depths of Northern Siberia, and dropping him into a family in the heart of Jamaica. We can see how, regardless of how much that family cared, loved and nurtured that baby, difficulties would quickly arise in the development of that infant whose genetics are rooted in a different land, with a drastically different climate and culture.
*Science’s egocentric tendency to separate Man from Nature, as if we are somehow divided from the ecosystem we inhabit.
In my own family, which shares a similar Nordic lineage to that of our Siberian infant, it was always by my dad that “our blood is too thick for that Southern heat.” That, imagining it something like oil in a car, our blood is heavy – not that “summer weight” oil that performs so well in those hot temperatures. This was a truth I experienced in years experimenting with living in dramatically hotter climates of the Southern hemisphere, like my years in Southern China, for instance. I found myself simply unable to function in the glaring heat of that region, my pale Scandinavian skin quickly burning under beads of excessive sweat. And, in that desperate state of exasperation, boiling in an area of the country traditionally called The Furnace, I was constantly surprised and embarrassed to find the people around me content and productive in the same heat, seemingly unphased, without a drop of sweat or hint of burn. Being born in that same climate their ancestors were born, and developing in that same land their lineage is rooted in, those people observably thrived. I honestly longed for the cold. It felt, at times, that I would simply drop dead if not for my air conditioner, which I quickly learned I could not stray far from. I joked the AC a sort of expensive life support system for fat Americans. Haha.
But, in truth, I was the fittest I’d been in a decade, and yet my body still responded so strongly to the climate, inhibiting my ability to think clearly or work efficiently. After just a short time in the country, my health began to fail and I was hospitalized for immune system complications. It, of course, cannot be said for certain, but I believe my body would not have undergone such a negative response had I stayed in the cold Northerly climate I was born in, and flew out for Southern China from. Of the many dramatic changes to my environment that occurred with that move, I believe climate was the most detrimental to my personal well-being. Our theoretical Siberian baby, carried like a seed an unnaturally large distance from home, would surely experience complications similar to mine. Our intuition tells us that, anything that stresses the mother, will also stress her infant. A hot, sweaty, feverish mother, a Siberian in Jamaica, will share her irritation with her baby – a transference whose incredibly subtlety we are only beginning to understand, in the levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, and influences in breast milk, for instance.
Yet, we rarely acknowledge this influence of climate on our development, as immigration, itself, in the grand scheme of our species, is a relatively new phenomenon. For the most part, oceans and great distance have limited our ability to see and settle in lands dramatically different from those of our ancestors. While sailors have existed for millennia, their explorations were exceptionally rare and dangerous. To cross the Atlantic ocean, lets be honest, is no small feat, nor is traveling from Siberia to a Southern hemispheric ecosystem by foot.
The technology of travel has taken what were great and rare feats of human kind and made them commonplace. Everyday people travel distances which would, for our ancestors, may have taken a lifetime. For me to leave my home with intention on arriving on the other side of the Earth, in China, during any other phase of our species’ history would have been, essentially, a decision of the goal of my life, or suicide, based on how many millennia BC it was.
RETURN TO THE GARDEN
So, the garden metaphor we drew for understanding human development gives us a perspective on the importance of periodicity and climate to our wellbeing. But these are just two examples of the many considerations of a skilled gardener; the choices he makes in planting and nurturing a crop towards a plentiful harvest.
EXPLORING THE GARDEN METAPHOR:
Techniques of Promoting Growth
- Choice of Strains (Marketability, Soil, Climate-Specific Considerations)
- Light Cycle (Indoor/Outdoor)
- pH Acid/Base
- Additional outside nutrients / supplementation
- Creating “Challenge” / Wind to Strengthen Stalks.
- Artificial Lighting
- Fertilization / Co2 Supplementation
- Co-Habitation of Different Strains
- Perishability of Fruit Product
- Heartiness / Sensitivity of Strain
- Pruning / Directing Excess Growth
- Efficient Harvest Technique
- Sale / Distribution of Fruit Product
And the advanced gardeners, perhaps after many generations, begin to learn the art of cross-pollinating or hybridizing different species to create new strains.
- Strain-specific traits isolated (phenotypes)
- Other beneficial traits and strains isolated, nurtured.
- Ideally, the hybrid species accents these positive genes while minimizing those less- beneficial genes.
Additionally, the metaphor could be extended beyond cultivation, to include:
- the preparation of the fruit of these harvested plants
- the culture which develops out from the advent of agriculture,
- the different markets and distributed roles which arise within a successful agricultural system
Admittedly, these higher level aspects of our metaphor can become challenging to encompass within a conception of personal well being, but that difficulty does not necessarily invalidate the metaphor. The relationship between plants and animals is an ancient and complex one, and it is my personal experience that, although subtle and infrequent by our standards, we, too, are “tended,” in a sense, by the intentions of wise and forward-thinking entities, “gardeners” of a finer density of conscious experience. This, for me, is not a belief system but a factual, however exceptional, aspect of my life experience. So, given that I accept as truth the rare privilege of having interacted with these “tending” personalities, my experience of their influence is open to be analyzed and rationalized, scientifically, as any other observable aspect of natural human experience. The rarity of an experience does not exclude it from the reach of scientific inquiry, it only limits the availability of that data we intend to study.
Could a change in a neuron’s threshold be used to describe different levels of latent inhibition? Or priming?
If threshold level is dynamic, and changes with increased action potential firing frequency, this would mimic what is described theoretically as the priming effect. This threshold could be called the “sensitivity” of the neuron to synaptic transmission and, I am curious, if the neuron’s weighted cell membrane is fixed, between individual neuron types and individual person types.
Typically, the weight of the synapses is seen as the deciding factor in the firing of an action potential, but if threshold were to be low, less synaptic transmission would be required for depolarization of the cell.
Remmy says “Fuck you all” and I leave Remmy to his or her self, in the virtual room. I should know better, again and again, I should know better. That is to say, I do know better, so much better. Brilliant radiance I have known personally and we collaborated on a project for my life. I know better than violence for humor on a Sunday night. I know better than mired negativity and the desperation of entertainment. I know better, and I strain so needily to know that we all do, somewhere deep and genuine. Please, know me there with this long truth we can breath together. I am so much searching for a self I knew once, who could live in this deeper place and still maintain to walk to town. What happened, Decade, to my ability to love fully and with self-abandon?
Hide my ears up into a curling cochlear cubby, and there I will listen to the things going on upstairs. I calm my heart along a long thin wire, a surface resonating within that wire like a corner window. I’ll take my own pulse there, and ride it inward across the realm of that flat line. Taste and touch exist represented in-fluence, whose waves give only rare indication of what lives beneath them. Tomb me here is nothing to be seen, to me there is a new world to be lived. And we will all someday dissolve into that surface of dreams.
Consistency breaks away in steps outward from an intention. I’ll close my eyes to see the shape of the pattern, a transient waveform whose amplitude is defined by the degree of my effort. And so my intention can fill a room, if only for the intensity and dedication of my choosing. Lay claim, Claimed laying about for a lifetime A guilty claim, negated only if by the radiant bursting of my heart from its cage. Ecstasy, back arched for release, the tension gripping my chest and surging neath skin for expression. Boil through the distractions until breath is realized. Hear the resonance of a long calm exhale, and let that resonant tone radiate pure through the whole spinal column. Spread your arms wide, to let the whole self open.
Woman, do you want to play strong or do you want to play victim? You cannot be both roles and remain convincing. You are a woman. Beneath all that empowerment, you wait for me to come and pick you up and carry you across the threshold. There is no threshold without that duality of within and without. You must be carried as you once carried me, in the birth of my closed eyes, before I was opened. Please let me lead and prove myself to you, please let me win all I want to give you. I love you so much when I can wrap you up and keep you safe in the warmth of my chest, as if I open up my ribcage to let you curl up warm inside me to sleep.
Uh! It aches….
Attachment, to something beyond a person…attachment to a line of a thousand women who I have held, her ear cradled against my heart. What worth is that? If to be thrown away so many times? What worth was all of that, to give so openly and have cut away? The aching of a long memory extending back through a thousand men I have been, and a thousand daughters and wives, lovers, mothers… Who could not ache with arms outstretched for them all?
The screenplay for this scene has me writhing in a bed, unbuttoning my shirt as if groping to let my spine out. I scrape the meat of my palms and fingers against my neck, feeling the raw edge of my nerves within. I was neglected... [censored]
A forest wall grows upended cartoonish protrusions, square ended, like fat table legs rising up to see the sun's rays. I’ll sprout as many, like tentacles, and let them turn darker tones as they squirm and squire, conspiring to impregnate a meaty purple-red-pink vessel. Fleshy bottoms pursed like a peaches soft lip. Phallic octopus of the forest, come down from your tree and know your place! God, Jesus, get tangled in sprouts like celery purple rhubarb stalks spreading open from inside the vampire’s tent.
[Macro photography of purple green blue dinosaur kale.]
Oxygen, accelerant medium, you age us against a rainbow of nutrient protectants Splay a fractal crystal spires freeze into place like conical braids raised from our hair. I know now those silvery edges of wisdom older than this body.
An aging captain caves into himself in spasming jerks and stuttered seizure echoes. I’ll take his place, not quite the same. A fat purple bulge, like a belly behind a plyester flap. Silk flap. Paisley inlays of embroidering the cushions of the royal seat. This image mocks me.
Lets begin with a bit of background into the universal aspect of psychedelic use, historically, before getting into modeling psychedelic cognition.
EPIC INTRO
"Since the Dawn of Time, Man…has…wanted to get high."
So…
For what reason should science, devoted to understanding man’s past and building the foundation of man’s future, not take into account this universal aspect of human nature?
Moments after taking mushrooms, or smoking marijuana, we feel the cognitive rush, the tendrils of branching neuronal activation, the priming of semantic nodes, spreading outwards across strands of associations in thought. It feels as if this associative phenomena would extend out into any direction or area of thought we focused on, branching in and spreading out across the semantic network.
(at this moment, I receive a call. The first call in over 2 weeks. By a somehow not-so-strange coincidence, it is my dealer. Haha!)
I should have measured latent inhibition and semantic priming using ERPs in the lab. I wonder if the global program allowsstudents to use the NPL?
BACKGROUND
As humans, some part of us tends to wants to change our state-of-consciousness, at some point. We are either feeling too slow, and want to speed up with COFFEE…or we’re feeling too fast, or worked up, and want to slow down with beer, or some other depressant. Or, we want to take a nap, or we want to jump out of an airplane, or we want to eat some mushrooms…
whatever the case, it seems we’re rarely content with our normal, everyday, waking state of consciousness and, for either utility or boredom, want to change that ordinary state to a non-ordinary one, from time to time.
I, for one, think this is quite ok and natural, for the most part. There is evidence we’ve been doing this for a very long time – perhaps even the WHOLE time, or even before we started thinking of time. The shaman, the medicine man, may be the ACTUAL first human profession – it’s really a toss up between that and the prostitute, depending really on what happened first: Did we get sick or did we get horny?
Eh, its hard to say, (DON’T SAY HARD) but regardless, we’ve been doing this a while. And by we, I mean ALL of us… There’s evidence of the same set of shamanic activities going on in ancient China, to Scandinavia, to Peru, to the aborigines in Australia, to the Antarctic, to Africa, the Middle East and Siberia…
We’ve been doing this all over, and for a very long time. That is, there is a set of central human experiences which arose in and of themselves, in nearly every culture in the world -- as if the wisest men of every one of those cultures came to the same conclusion, without any pre-existing knowledge or influence from any one of those other cultures. In instances like that, it is safe to call it a Universal human experience, some defining aspect of our character which could be thought to exist beneath culture, in our species, itself.
Experiences of extra-ordinary states of consciousness, however rare, are one of those rare and precious handful of experiences which could be termed universally human. The differences between us arise only afterwards, in the rituals, costumes, and stories which individual cultures decorate that peak human experience with.
…and then we have our culture. Where the ancient tools used to explore higher regions of spiritual consciousness are banned, and deemed without worth, either medical or otherwise. Haha. Wow, yea, what can be said about the West other than that we are young -- with barely half a millennia under our belt -- and we have a lot left to learn. And perhaps we’ll learn the hard way that you cannot suppress the knowledge of self… ANYWAY….
PSYCHEDELIC COGNITION
That flood of insight and self-understanding that comes with the psychedelic experience is usually described as expansive. And I can recall, years ago, the first time that that term “consciousness expansion,” which I had always considered a clichéd catch phrase from the 60’s..became no longer just a meaningless catch phrase, but a powerful experience, suddenly filled with personal meaning. Just to think of it -- the idea of the whole of our awareness and understanding of the world….EXPANDING outwards.
It was at that point I wanted, very much, to understand the mechanics of this expansion of awareness, and describe it as clearly as concisely as I could to the people in my life for whom the term was still just that same meaningless 60s catch phrase, as it had been for me.
So, I began, first, to think of other descriptions of the experience – those common sayings and metaphors that, in the last half century, have become established as the main effects of psychedelic drugs. These subjective experiences became the basis for making sense of what is actually happening during the ineffable psychedelic peak.
EXPRESSING THE INEFFABLE
Many people, even very “experienced” people, said that this could not be done – that the expansion of consciousness was “ineffable.” For the record, I feel simply labeling amazing and transformative experiences “ineffable,” and saying they can’t be put into words, is a cop out. I mean TRY! Do your damnest to form that peak experience into SOMETHING, some form of expression. If it cannot be expressed, the experience has no social worth. If not words, how about an image, a metaphor, a…whatever, a sculpture. To just say “Naw, its ineffable” is just lazy!
In what way can we take the ineffable and distill it down into an understanding or model of perception?
So, I tried for years to write about that “flood” of inspiration and ideas that came from the peak psychedelic experience, and that writing helped solidify some key universals to work with. In cognitive psychology, I found models of cognition which described aspects of the flood of inspiration – no model alone covered everything, of course, but each was a perspective that revealed one facet of the psychedelic experience. With another, so another side of the experience could be seen and described. From that point, of seeing the many sides of this thing, I wanted to describe the corners and edges, where those sides meet. In this way, we can begin to see the thing, as a whole.
(image of 3d shape, like a gemstone, rotating in the dark, with single light source revealing just one facet of the shape at a time)
When we think of psychedelics like mushrooms, and the DRAMATIC change in consciousness that they can bring about, we are provided with a range of discrete states; with minor changes, like our coffee and doughnut consciousness, located close to baseline, and our DMT insectoid spaceship laboratory consciousness, here, some light years away from baseline. But, at any rate, the psychedelics help to define a spectrum of these distinct states, all of which are, presumably, available to us in the right circumstances.
I say presumably, as, if there’s one thing we’ve learned in this territory, it is that no two people have the same experience and, regardless of the similarity of dosage, the experience induced tends to be very personalized, with all this interesting state-specific material concerning one’s ancestry and genetics often coming down the wire that I won’t even begin to get into. Suffice it to say that you may have an experience which, even with controlling for setting and dosage, you will never be able to share with your friend – that inward “set” component is a biggie, and there are many clues pointing to there being a genetic aspect to it.
The branching of semantic hyperpriming is problematic in it’s lack of focus. When thought of in fluid terms, this could be referred to as semantic “flooding,” oras if a volume of water is sourced on a land area without incline or “rut” for flow to occur. The area floods instead of forming inletsand branching out, as rivers do.
stock video footage of river? Imagining 50’s educational film style, river or raising water of pond, etc.
It has been said that, at any given moment, we have about 10,000 individual bits of information that we could perceive from our surroundings. Yet, at most, we typically attend to about 500 of those. The rest are filtered away, and ignored – seen here as held back from even flowing through the dam of Latent Inhibition.
Yet, when we take a psychedelic, latent inhibition lowers, allowing, instead of 500 bits, perhaps as much as 1500 or 2000 of those bits of information from our environment through, to be perceived and learned. This is like a flood of sensation, suddenly flowing inwards. What’s more, it can be focused – wherever you direct your attention decides the content of that suddenly opened inlet of new information. Focusing attention inwards, in meditation for instance, similarly reveals whole layers of selfhood typically not available for us to see. Much of the therapeutic benefit of psychedelics is in that deeper understanding of self and identity.
My thought, and the main point of my paper, is that this flood of heightened attention, the lowered LI on one side, and the flooding of novel semantic associations, the expansive river-like branches of hyper priming, are two phenomena which are connected. By thinking of attention in these fluid terms, we can easily see how the inner is a reflection of the outer – and so when you have more of the outer flowing in, you have more of the inner representation of it branching out.
Very powerful understandings and realizations can form when this hyperpriming phenomenon is focused, something which requires an equally expansive resource of working memory and intelligence.
If we think of the doors of perception as a dam, latent inhibition paradigm would concern everything on the outside of the dam, including its opening. The semantic network would concern everything on the inner side of the dam, including the priming phenomenon.
But, if we think of priming using this fluid metaphor, and LI as the dam for that fluid, what IS the fluid being held back and branching out? I’d like to think of it as attention, and the length of associative strands one can maintain, that is the length of semantic branching possible, being a measure dependent on the capacity of one’s attention span. (Quote introduction of “Attention,” explaining the interpretation as attention being, not what is ignored, but the volume of the inlet of information NOT ignored.)
As it is, the word “priming” already suggests a fluid model, that of a pipe and the idea of priming the pump, the get the water from the well or source up to the spicket, where it would flow immediately, once primed. This was an appropriate metaphor, given the priming phenomena and the timings arriving from those semantic information experiments. But the phenomena of waterways is more inclusive of the whole of the priming paradigm, both the experimental and the theoretical sides, in that, like the concept of a pipe, a river also brings water and makes it available a great distance from its source – but, a river also accounts for the natural system of branching. From above, the expanse of rivers into streams and tributaries is, in all shapes and appearances, identical to that of arteries branching into blood vessels and capillaries, or nerves branching and spreading. Flow is central to all of these systems, and all are naturally developing, unlike the metal pipes of the plumbing under our sink.
(USE ALAN WATTS QUOTE, DESCRIBING ATTENTION AS A FLASHLIGHT OF CONSCIOUSNESS)
The early psychedelic writing of Alan Watts has been a source of great inspiration to me, over the years. This quote here from “The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.,” his declared psychedelic text, “The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures In The Chemistry of Consciousness” has a poetic simplicity and playful freedom to its writing that I felt Huxley could never allow himself in “The Doors of Perception.” For that reason, Joyous is a much more enjoyable read for me. Get both!
Writing using large quotes and then expanding/discussing is like a return to the revered text w/ comments system used in the wisdom traditions. Each commenter forms a “step” of ascent and development onto the original of, say, The Art of War.
The selfishness of unique perspective is often viewed as a blemish “standing out” from the uniformity of popular belief. That it is, in many ways, similarly inflamed – the writer discontent with the current system, or with society in general. I think immediately of the miserly negativity of Nietzsche , the sharp clarity of his insightful gripes. But, often new opinions can be born of truly positive insights, the main clear and healthy understandings granted from psychedelic inspiration, for instance, which led to those social changes and developments of the Consciousness Expansion Movement beyond the restrictions of previous social conventions of the 50s.
TART:
An example of the ready creation of meaning is a test we used in the laboratory to decide whether a subject had sufficiently recovered from the psychedelic drug effects to be allowed to go home on his own. Keeler had taken a number of ordinary proverbs, split them in half, and randomly mixed the beginnings and endings. To evaluate whether a subject would be allowed to go home, he would be asked something like: "Do you under- stand that birds of a feather gather no moss?" If he understood, he was not ready to leave the laboratory. The capacity of the mind to read meaning into random collections of stimuli is indeed extraordinary. Even today I suspect that that particular proverb could be quite meaningful in certain circumstances. One of the most important professional benefits of becoming sensitized to this hyper-creative faculty of the mind is a certain caution about feelings of insight. I know how much I enjoy such feelings, but I also know that their intensity does not guarantee their applicability and validity in any particular situation.
When the flood of semantic priming occurs, does it create a “pond” or a “river?”
That is, does it simply gather static into a single spot, collecting near the source? Or does it flow outwards, branching and expanding old ruts? In nature, the collecting or expanding of water is decided by gravity, and the stream, flowing down the mountain, or the lake, collecting in a valley. What is the equivalent cognitive faculty, if water is equated to attention in our metaphor? I say the force, which decides the direction of associative “strands” in the semantic network, is focus; the area one directs their attention. If the hyperpriming state is NOT directed, it simply saturates outwards in all directions from the hyperprimed node.
When we think deeply of a concept while in the hyperpriming state, we begin to “branch out” from that location, extending association across the semantic network, connecting one node to another, to another, down the line. Many nodes, close together, are connected often. Yet, when the flood of attention from the hyperpriming state hits those old dry “ruts” of association between those ideas, they fill them fast, and extend them out to finer ruts, capillary river beds which have, perhaps, been dry for a long time. And, further yet, the flood of water pushes the furthest reaches of even these river branches, cutting streams into new territory, connecting conceptual areas which have never before been branched into one-another. Based on the state of attention, this hyper-associative state can continue, until, like in psychedelic cognition, we are fully aware of the fact that “everything is connected!”
“All is one.” to use the cliché – although, for the record, it was a cliché among the Hindu mystics first. It only caught on with the hippies millennia later, when they too started thinking in terms of that scale.
Cognitively, I can recall being able to literally see this scale of perspective as a sort of “map” of my inner world, and suddenly being granted a perspective of great height. Where, in moments of marijuana association, I had been able to see new connections between concepts, and, at that time, could be localized into categories, like say “social self,” “women,” “private self,” “emotion,” “family,” “sexuality,” “society,” “other,” “friendship,” “animals” etc…
[create video of expanding outwards from street view to globe view]
(Consider using worldwide map of electrical grid to represent SN)
CATCH PHRASES / CATCH SYMPTOMS
This hyperpriming state, present in both thought disordered schizophrenia and psychedelic cognition, helps give a tangible representation for popular catch phrases like “far out” or “high.” Someone who is “far out” describes ideas that are “far out” from one-another, semantic nodes strung together with associations that span great inward distance. These associatons, themselves, imply cognition which has taken place in a certain state-of-consciousness – they imply the individual has explored perspectives of great height.
Likewise these same thought associations can be labeled pathological with just a change in wording: “loose associations” or tangential thinking both describe the same hyperpriming state, yet are key symptoms of thought disordered schizophrenia. Yet, the sharing of a heightened state of attention does not necessarily support the psychotomimetic theory. It need only imply that the hyperpriming state is a sharp and double-edged sword which, like any tool, can be dangerous if not handled with focus and intention.
[QUOTE CAMPBELL “Shaman and Schizophrenic”]
The highest perspective I’d been granted of each of those concepts defined the extent of its semantic network, the furthest association outward from that node. Marijuana had helped me to understand greater aspects of self, ego, society, and emotion, for instance. Yet, when I was given LSD for the first time, I can vividly recall seeing these distinct areas of semantic association and personal understanding, all at once, as small isolate islands, limited by my previous perspective. That is, I’d only ever had small local maps of individual countries. For the first time, I was given a view of the world,. For the first time, I could see the lay of the land, and how each of those isolate islands of understanding were, actually, connected to one another. I watched the inroads and branching associations gradually connected my self to my society, I became my friends, my family, my lovers, in a very real sense, my identity expanded to encompass all I’d ever known or shared. This is the benefit of a perspective of height, it allows you to see your life, place, and direction as a map, and see what is coming up, where you’ve been, the bends and curves in the trail, the full breadth of the inwards expanse, and its differing terrains and distinct territories. And, all at once, the way we’ve separated the world into things, and the way we’ve separated our self from the world, seems quite superficial and short-sighted, as the grander scheme of things rises into awareness. And, all at once, you can laugh heartily at yourself, that unfortunate grounded ant clutching terrified so far down there, and find the transcendent joy where you once had convinced yourself you were trapped and limited to sadness.
--
Disciplined and reverent use of psychedelics – two things which a great cross section of the youth culture are not interested in given them. At all. It’s a lot of work. Meditation and focus.
Why, yes, I am definitely a believer.
I believe it’s dark, I believe in America…
I believe America has grown to be dark.
Why, yes.
Why?
Yes.
The fortunes of undersea kings,
hidden neath frothy waves and wrapped in delicate coral,
are the treasures of lonely men who turned their back to the land
and everything they once loved
which did not love them back.
They became foreigners in distant lands of the mind,
Whole inward worlds opened before them, exotic and strange.
And they attracted attention, these foreigners who could walk between worlds,
Those who travelled far from physicality, but still had a body there.
They, shamans, half alive and half dead,
who could fly through the skies
and learned the art of leaving their body.
To test them and their abilities, great shapes, insects and animals, were drawn in huge scale with rocks. The Nazca lines of Peru.
May the windows hidden in the night swing open with my late and genuine prayer, And the sweet blue white light of her visit shower my heart with the indescribable warmth of her knowing, the realm she descended from to see me, or rather, so that I could finally see her, who has watched with pure radiant love, and heard my call, if only because of its persistence, and the depths of its insistence.
Purity is needed. It is the path drawn to that blue white place, a place of clean clarity and pure seeing The distance of vision afforded to the air and its higher plane composed of a finer density. If, perhaps a lapse or staff axis could rise or tumble, a lesser one as us could climb or descend in a mastered state of pre-sleep. Awake we can descend through ranges of consciousness and beneath the range to which our physical body is devoted, there, where it is as if buoyant. In doing so, the subtle frequency interactions between our nonphysical self and our physical self reveal themselves via energetic rules which we can observe between other mediums, those of matter. Specifically, for instance, the documented convulsive state of the research subject’s body as she leaves physical body and begins her out of body state.
This convulsive outburst is the observable manifestation of an energetic interaction, the phase of the residual self gradually losing sync with the physical self, creating “noise” during the transitory shift towards “unlocking.” The sensation of this separation period is dependent on it’s speed, how fast the transition occurs cleanly. But this phase “noise” period, as one would expect, sounds like noise – white noise, building to a crescendo and releasing. It can occur as quickly as to sound like a gunshot, or builds slowly, sounding almost like a waterfall.
The wolf in sheep’s clothing,
The sheep in wolf’s clothing.
What skill is THIS? What work is it that can be shown in retreating? What was the purpose of ascetic retreat? It would define the work of retreat (all the work I've never been able to do! ;) The skill of self-restraint, of restriction and the limits placed in self control. This one type of work, in truth, must be the most difficult of all of the labors men can choose to take onto themselves to build a trade and a social identity. That instance would be the social identity defined by its apartness from society.
It seems as if, at some point, some sections of the Transpersonal movement came to deny their roots, as if to wash their hands of that dirty narcotic, LSD, and all associations with that psychedelic culture that gave birth to that frame of mind, the Trans-personal, which could be called a “perspective of height.” The transcending of personhood is what I wish to write about. The change in self, to which point Identity comes to be seen with a capital I.
I cannot contain the quivering torrents of bliss sometimes, they cause my whole nervous system to almost clench with the torrents of sensation. I have visited cardiographers to try to understand these quivering chest sensations, which at some point began to simply represent states of intense sensitivity, which bombarded my heart, as if something of a presense was being held in my rib cage and quivered taut intention. I can activate that sensitivity in less and less dosage, as psychedelics follow an activation curve of reverse-tollerance. I relay between states of ascension and the vibratory sensation is that of approaching some out of body state, or in to body state, where presnese enteres the body. Both are subject to the same rules governing the phenomena of the residual self. Whose subtle energetic signature can be represented as frequency.
I don’t feel I’ve made the purpose of my retreat clear, either to myself, these women, or the spirits. The purpose of this retreat from society is clarity. I must cleanse myself of all unhealthy influence, first, and then to all influence, in time.
Begin with painting a character, an individual born into a certain culture, :America, in the turn of the century, and in the twelve years that have since followed. The torrents of corruption and military power awash against the shoresof humanity like the onslaught of radiation bombarding the shores of the West coast from Fukushima, and the solar radiation bombarding the skies with blaring electromagnetic intensity.
A whistling sound is heard in the back of my ear. I breath deeply and focus on it, and gradually it defines a peak which, within it, white noise is heard, much like a waterfall in the distance.
Like so many things, there is no distinct edge, but a gradation, (misspelled as gradiation (gradation of radiation. )) There is a light rain, and I swore I saw something in the window, a head peak up. I feel chills as weight shifts near the door where I saw it. I feel deep rippling expanse come through me, oceanic realm which encompassed my whole room, the whole floor being felt to quake in transmission, wind sensation with deep breath again…
Wow! Whew, who the hell was THAT guy.
Haha. Sorry about all that. I sometimes forget my place
Certain sensitivities attract attention and, if not tended and cleansed with intention and prayer, can bring negative influence. I say prayer as meaning focused communion with a spiritual entity, a relationship which, once established, can grow and develop or become abandoned and be cut, like any other. Prayer, as a practice, is the gradual nightly building of a relationship with spirit. And, like so many other relationships in my life, even when I have not connected with them in a while, I know that with good friends, old friends, I can always call on them.
Why, yes, I am definitely a believer.
The tide has come in and I try to imagine the consciousness of a duck, diving to the bottom of the water, searching for food in the mud, and then popping back up to the surface. I watch a small black and white duck do this and the seemingly self-conscious way he quickly turns his head to the other ducks right after surfacing, as if to be ever aware of the group in reference to himself. There must be a thought there, however simple; some universal concept like loneliness/togetherness, or competition.
5 days at this cabin, mostly alone save for Stet. He is like me, but more like my Uncle Alan. When talking to him, you can sense the gnawing tension in his gut, the urge to get away and escape to safety. Uncle Alan lived far away from civilization, too, on one of those long roads that’s barely a road anymore. We would go to Uncle Alan’s and Aunty Sue’s for Thanksgiving, almost an hour drive into the woods from our house, which was already so far from town. No children, I think he was sterile, so it was just the two of them, Sue and Alan, out there in all that quiet nothing.
Walking in there for Thanksgiving, even as a child, there was a sense of it being his dominion, his space. He had hunting beagles and a machine for pressing his own shotgun shells in the basement, by the pool table. He ruled over that place, and everything in it. He was a cruel and angry king, so they say, and mistreated Aunty Sue in maligned ways.
My dad tells a story of bringing mom out muddin in his truck once, on the backroads there in the deep woods behind Gwinn. Just a 12 pack and the two of them, enjoying the summer and the trees. The truck broke down somewhere far back, in the middle of nowhere, and so they had to start walking. My parents walked for over 4 hours until the reached Uncle Alan and Aunt Sue’s place. It was past 1 am by that point. They knocked and yelled, but there was no answer. Dad pounded on the door hard, but nobody came down. He cupped his mouth and yelled up to their bedroom for help, but the light never came on. They were in there, he knew it, but Alan firmly told Sue to stay in bed, to not answer the door. And so, with bleeding blistered wet feet, my parents kept walking…
Social order can be thought of as the organizing principles governing civilization’s development and, to facilitate that development adequately, must serve as a framework whose complexity matches that of society’s expansion. Yet, ideally, the ordered frame does not merely provide structure for society’s current level of development. A good frame, by its very design, guides the direction and form of that development, to ensure that order is maintained and managed given the changes to follow. This is a systemic understanding of civilization, yes, but a natural system, in so far as we define organic life by its use of organs. Organizational structures, ordered and divided into specific cell types whose social roles are defined by their very physical development. Yes, I use the word “social” to describe the relationship between the various cells of our body – and what better word could be used to describe the transmission of sensory information between neurons, for instance. These cells are living things interacting within a complex network – a civilization with an incredible degree of social order. And, if we were to generalize the structures and functions seen in our own body, we would have a blueprint for a sophisticated and elegant social system; the most complex nature has yet devised.
“Know thyself.”
The intention to truly know one’s self is the deepest we can aim to know. And it could be said that understanding identity is a goal which has no end, as there will always be a further layer, of time, ego, or causality, left to uncover. In physicality, however, we have the body and material science has come to know this aspect of self extensively. The function of organs, their composition, development, and maintenance, is now understood by medical science to a degree of meticulous detail.
What will happen if I move to the isolate cabin in Washington?
ANSWER:
Cast Hexagram:
43 - Forty-Three
Kuai / Breakthrough
A Deluge from Heaven:
The Superior Person rains fortune upon those in need, then moves on with no thought of the good he does.
The issue must be raised before an impartial authority.
Be sincere and earnest, despite the danger.
Do not try to force the outcome, but seek support where needed.
Set a clear goal.
I want to tear out of myself, I cannot stand this body or its place,
or these people and annoyances that surround, aflame with restraints.
This spirit is untamed rage, I feel it's hot red surface in my blood.
I cant sit still, my head turns to either side in bed.
Any sustenance, if I could sustain even just a moment,
but the thoughts never submit, not for a second.
Range. What is range as it pertains to dimensionality?
4th dimensional object, a square shown to exist within a square, is merely one of an infinite set of objects, but which demonstrate an extension beyond our range of experience. The inner square existing within the surface of the outer actually can extend, in theory, beyond that surface -- and, in thinking in terms of the grid containing the points of this object, it does.
A metaphor I prefer to use is that of a grid of streets -- North/South crossing East/West, as streets tend to do. With this grid, we have a set of defined intersection points which help us to map things and locations. Let's say we have the corner of Pine Street and Main Street, and that is where we usually spend our time. Yet if, at that corner, there were to be built a 10 story building, with a 4 level subterranean parking garage beneath, we would sudden have a new range of experience available to us, both above and below that grid, at the location of Pine and Main. That is to say, we could suddenly dip "beneath" that grid, and see whole levels of existence hidden from the sidewalk. Or, we could ascend upwards, to higher levels of existence -- each level, or "floor," existing totally separate from the outdoor or "external" world we'd come to know so well. So, very much like our hyperdimensional cube, within the "square" defined by the grid at Pine and Main exists another "square" and grid, one which allows access to "up" and "down" along an inward expanse. Knowing that all this is available, our only task is to learn how to operate the elevator! Let's start exploring these other floors!
Eh, sorry. It all sounds too proud.
I mean to work towards something, yet I am so often reminded it is the something which wishes to work through me, towards my highest potential. It's this peak of identity these great somethings, these friends and relatives who love me, wish to share and celebrate with me. These are reminders to drop the act and remember that this isn't all about me -- this life isn't JUST mine, and that my true Identity is something not bound within this quickly-weathering bag of skin, but is a window allowing light through, from wherever it may come.
"Get out of the way, you are blocking my light! I'm trying to work here!" ;)
Light is not simply a metaphor for consciousness; in my mind, it is a literal carrier of conscious stimulus, the waveforms of radiant frequency of which our experience is composed. These physical laws govern our sense experience of the visible spectrum, yes, but that is no reason for us to assume the are bound TO the visible spectrum. Rather, we must use our knowledge of the mechanics of light and the visible to better understand the non-visible aspects of conscious life, those ranges of electromagnetic energy which extend above and below that narrow visible bandwidth. The full spectrum of light includes ranges radiant beauty the likes of which of ol' ROY G. BIV could only imagine.
Taming attention, gradually loosening the neurotic knots that tangle over time in our thought and behavior, is the main benefit of meditative practice, as best I can tell. Attention, when broadened, calmed, and focused, is a resource with no known limits. So much of mental illness is born first in these unpleasantly tight little "cyclical" thought patterns; habits, obsessions, addictions - each a tense, restraining obstruction, much like a knot. If this set of...
As a community, we are witnessing the Psychedelic Renaissance as it approaches full bloom -- blossoming through the development of modern culture, finding expression in both academic and popular circles. But, as the members of the leading edge of this expansive reopening of attention onto the tools and techniques of consciousness exploration, we have special responsibilities. Our choices at this delicate juncture will define the future of the entheogen, and its place in Western society. In what ways can we avoid those same pitfalls which doomed the first Consciousness Expansion movement of the 60s? How can we establish and maintain the sense of respect, reverence, and awe for the Transpersonal experience, all of which it not only deserves, but requires if it is to grant us access to our highest potential, as individuals and as a species.
Throughout this talk, I would like to frame one of several potential futures for academic psychedelia, focusing primarily on clinical training in the psychotherapeutic use of the entheogen and the empathgen, with an overview of relevant and proposed research. The guidelines for psychedelic therapy developed by Jim Fadiman, and the formal diagnostic criteria for spiritual emergence developed by Grof and Lukoff, have provided a solid groundwork for a formal clinical approach to entheogenic healing. Yet, in many ways, the Western medical paradigm alone is inadequate, unable to account for the full range of sensitivity afforded by the psychedelic. Cultures much older than our own, Eastern meditative, and shamanic, can each help supplement the gaps in our understanding of the subtle and spiritual facets of our consciousness.
The community we are all part of, the subculture we represent, is unique in that is not necessarily defined by a specific location or religious affiliation, but rather a state-of-consciousness. Or, to put it another way, we are unified by a location, not a physical location, but an inner location along the spectrum of consciousness -- a bandwidth of higher frequency we have each crossed over into and which changed us in some way, changed our perspective of our self or our relationship with the world, and left us with what we learned and a lifetime to appreciate it.
What is the value of being genuine, and expressing one's thoughts without self-censorship?
...
ENTHEOGEN
I say to my breath once again, little breath come from in front of me, go away behind me, row me quietly now, as far as you can, for I am an abyss that I am trying to cross.
--w.s. merwin
Wet baby lover stays dry in the heat with the patented Tri-Touch System.
Too many lasters fret neath the puls-kind spirit watch of listers, post-urn.
BEGIN
NEW
TRANSMISSION
MISSION 3-1-12
Charlie. Charlie, are you there?
YES, I AM HERE.
1/2 Charlie, 1/4 Charlie, are you all there?
MOSTLY.
Full Nelson, are you still there? How are you holding up through all this?
I am the tragic figure brooding over my own funeral. Earplugs.
Glue nipples to Couger, and to medicine cabinet.
Call elderly lesbian doctor.
Slander is a girl's best friend.
Ask the ghosts how to improve recording.
God, cry down your mangled shards' sharp puncture.
Slug fulla too slow bucket to the face,
we children make a home behind the crank shaft chassis.
All my heroes fought for life or death just to socialize,
And I'll be damned if I'll let it all be in vain!
Relax, they got nothin on me?
Relax, they got nothin on you!
Cowboy grain shift swaggers with horse rearing up.
His beat is contained.
The question always was:
Are those stereotypically psychedelic visuals I'm seeing the original basis for all those cheap posters and so on,
or do those posters somehow inform my trip?
A: The culture we are exposed to provides material for mind to manifest THROUGH. Never identical, always with new meaning behind, the novelty is as simple, often, as recombining cliches in new and suddenly fresh ways -- which transcend the levels of all composite parts.
Let's go up into the next level.
"I am at the door."
Woman: "Crawl up there!"
Massive Approaching Borg-Like Barbi Cube (one side=the whole of the visual field.)
GOLD CONTACTS!
Scalar Model of Cultural Development
The organization of society is, most generally, a process of division and is, from this offered perspective, is systemically-established upon the basis of our body’s own organizational divisions. This perspective on our culture is one from a location distant and reversed, that is to say looking back onto civilization from a grand scale, and noting similarities to the microscalar organizational structures, or organs, of multicellular organisms.
Latent Inhibition
Latent Inhibition, (potential prevention) is a technical term used in Classical conditioning. A stimulus that has not had any significance in the past takes longer to acquire meaning (as a signal) than a new stimulus. For most of us, the majority of the world and our surroundings compose the set of these inhibited stimuli, with only a miniscule set of items receiving our actual attention. This tendency to ignore or disregard whole ranges of potential information, and to inhibit the formation of memory by preventing associative learning of the given stimuli, is an unconscious response and is assumed to prevent sensory overload and cognitive overload (Lubow, 2010).
| Power Req. | Jack Size | Module Height | Module Width (Minimum) | Module Depth (Max.) | Number of Modules | Kits | Assembled | Comments | |
| Blacet | +/-15V | 3.5mm | 5.25" 4 | 3" (1.5") | 6.5" | 13 | Yes | Yes | Unusual, multi function modules |
| Cyndustries | +/-15 | Banana | 9" | 2.25" | 7 | 17 | No | Yes | Modcan style modules |
| Analog Solutions | +/-12/+5V | 3.5mm | 5.06" 5 | (.8") 6 | 4.725" | 32 | No | Yes | Lots of drum modules |
| Doepfer | +/-12/+5V 1 | 3.5mm | 5.06" 5 | (.8") 6 | 65+ | No | Yes | Simple modules | |
| Metasonix | 12VAC | 1/4" 3 | See Note 3 | 4.5" | 3 | No | Yes | tube based | |
| Modcan | +/-15 | Banana | 9" | 2.25" | 7 | 29 | No | Yes | Popular Canadian system |
| Paia | +/-18 or +/-15V 2 | 3.5mm | 5.25" 4 | 3" | 6.5" | 4 | Yes | No | Extensive normalling |
| Analog Systems | +/-12/+5V | 3.5mm | 5.06" 5 | (1.2") 6 | 42 | No | Yes | ||
| STS (Serge) | +/-12V | Banana | 7" | 17" | 65 | No | Yes | panelized "modules" | |
| Synthesizers.com | +/-15/+5V 8 | 1/4" | 8.75" | (2.125") | 2.5" | 35 | No | Yes | Simple Moog style modules |
| Synth Tech (MOTM) | +/-15V | 1/4" | 8.75" | 3.5" (2.125") | 4.5" | 21 | Yes | Yes | Very rugged |
| Technosaurus | +18/-18V | 1/4" | 15.75" | 1.6" | 11 | No | Yes | ||
| Wiard | +/-15 | 3.5mm | 10.5"9 | 2.83" | 8 | No | Yes | Very unusual and creative modules. |
All Modulars accept signal levels in the 10V P-P range, control voltages in the +/-5V or 0-10V range and Gate levels of 5V.
Bought PCBs for two analogue synthesizers today -- one 3 oscillator drum synth and a 3 layer sequencer. All voltage controlled.
I am thinking I want to build the enclosures into standard synth module dimensions, probably following the Moog module specifications as a template: 1/4" patch cords, with 8.75" X 2.125" (or 4.25" based on the width of the board, itself.)
Then, hopefully, mount those modules into a nice wooden enclosure. Something portable, like a wooden suitcase sort of thing...
Here's the MPS, or Mega Percussive Synthesizer:
http://www.birthofasynth.com/Thomas_Henr
This one will be the most difficult...
http://www.birthofasynth.com/Scott_Stite
A close-eyed thrill ride through the disease of another person?
Seeing "into" their body, a sea urchin infesting my intestines.
A cat's eyes are revealed.
trust in their attending to my best potentials, assisting with my best interests in mind.
Garden brook of bee's yellow black, flowers blurred in a pattern along a portion of a feather.
Above, the black and white green accent of a mallard cheetah.
Summer will, in all its radiant powers, accomplishment and triumph of youth's energy, the vivacious virile electricity of our sexual peak, the tension that drives us to make our mark on the world, if only to impress her. Clampet wagon, everything I own being hauled across the country. Chairs tied to the top, a real sight, outhouse door on the back.
So sharp, yet I lose feeling in my fingers, and have pain shooting down my back into my legs.
Creature. Take a picture, oh yes, oh yes...
This inward flow of attention can be conceptualized as that which is"inhibited" in the Latent Inhibition model used in schizophrenia.
The arrows flash flaring concentrically upwards, like mountains reflecting the light of a great fire.
The clothes, the resignation, the abandonment of a taut and mentally fit "gymnast" of meditation, flexible yogi's doing yoga inwardly and outwardly. The purity of their body and the clarity of their mind is like a radiant antenna, both broadcasting and receiving -- and his strength is in being able to hold states of consciousness for long periods, much like they hold difficult yoga poses. That is to say, over time, as they learn to manage their attention, so they come to learn how to control the flow of the "dam" of perception, Latent Inhibition, and gradually lower it, allowing greater volumes of attention to flow inwards.
A place where I can be safe? The foolish awkward fears and the style defined by what is obscured.
Less I free a dozen days a month, slaving in the freedom of isolation, for writing all I need to write.
The descent of the second week will be accessing whole ranges of subconscious content, releasing them into expression.
There is a great field of tension, one which acts like the surface tension of a medium of water. It defines the waking fully-alert state of consciousness as a density, like that of air, and the "breadth" of our fully physical awareness -- that bandwidth of consciousness whose boundary is defined by the perceptual organs of the body. Yet, the water below is a density of medium beneath whose diverse contents of conscious life in its variety of diverse forms, is mostly invisible to us Standing along the beach, an uninformed man could only wonder what manner of wildlife, huge whales and squid, existed in those inaccessible depths. Yet, he may hear a myth, an account of those long dead men who once had their encounter with some massive beast of the great depths, when they once traveled far away from shore. So, too, there are those brave explorers of consciousness who decided, with intention, to travel far and beneath from the sunlit beach, perhaps holding our breath in meditation, and descending as far as we can on that single breath. We can access many things in those meditative dives, the invisible inward landscape and all beneath it.
"Trouble with hum"
Yes, there is definitely a change in my capacity for extending focus, to really let the inward hum resonate fully up and through the contents of the mind, flooding the state of attention with simple pure tone -- inward resonant tone is a powerful method of altering or "traversing" a range of states of consciousness.
Less means more, get shit simple -- it's like playing drums. Make a motor of rhythm, to move you along through consciousness.
This is the shaman's drum, on one level.
But in a larger rhythm, circadian for instance, perfect harmony can be achieved with steady routine, the biology of sleeping and eating can be made regular, so that a resonant state can come to multiply the activity in the cycle of those biological functions. For instance, sleeping at the same time every night makes you gradually get more tired at that sleep time and, inversely, feel more awake when starting their day. And so steady rhythm in our routine makes us more efficient.
Q: "But what of unhealthy or negative social roles, or stereotypes which an individual may not wish to internalize? Unspoken cues in that instance may be harsh or unwarranted judgments."
>:| -------> ( ' _ ' )
zap! ("fat fatty!!")
A valid point, at which a distinction must be made between varying densities of social situation: a tightly-packed elevator? Or a romantic dinner for two with a blind date? The spectrum between overcrowding and solitude is wide and further informed by the "depth" of the given relationship(s) with the people involved (eg: family VS strangers.) The transition into interpersonal depth and the formation of trust requires a social skill set, a functional personality, and both the establishment and testing of norms -- all of which are generally healthy or therapeutic developments.
Is it worthwhile to even try to defend my character against slander?
Or should I simply allow her shame to dictate the conditions of my severance, saying my goodbyes to the bay with self-respect and whatever remnants of grace? Realistically, if I can salvage one friendship from this, I don't feel I need much else from this period of my life.
To her, I represent a harsh truth, a memory of behavior bound to a place.
To them, I represent 6 shades of unknown; the quiet and dark outside where trust does not venture.
Every loss is a shake awake,
Every breakdown an opening.
I want to deny it. I want to forget it ever happened, that a meeting ever took place -- as good as it sounded to express openly for the first time, we must never let it happen again because it never happened. The sound wasn't heard by anyone that night, the sound that fell into place so naturally. The sound that repeats only in shameful memory.
The German biophysicist Fritz-Albert Popp spent many years studying biophoton emission, i.e., the light that the body naturally emits. Popp’s studies indicate that DNA is one of the main suppliers of biophotons. Through comprehensive studies, he discovered that DNA is a harmonic oscillator – an oscillating system with its own particular frequency, or resonating frequency. Using the length of the DNA molecule (about two meters, when stretched out), and the known speed of light, DNA’s own frequency is calculated as about 150 megahertz...
I know that should go into the Crystal Cop Idea Bin, I know it should....sometimes.
Smooth, like a lion. A rounded metal hat, a beehive silhouette.
Luigi hates Japanese pop music.
Christmas hoe dag.
Amphitheater system speakers designed with your family in mind. Like a huge deep chasm splitting down through the center of the skull, like breaking a cake in half. Your eyes will light up like that, cheese curd big bird.
So, maybe I'm not sweet in that traditional way there are tender things I feel you should know, nonetheless. None the less, a showroom floor announcer screaming for us to get on the bus. Neon green bright blue smurf, a tent of neon waiting. A closet of colors, hidden. A sand dune dips into a toothy carnivore's grin. Whiskers show me I'm not alone, they sense me and lead me.
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.
Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,
that savage forest, dense and difficult,
which even in recall renews my fear;
so bitter — death is hardly more severe!
But to retell the good discovered there,
I'll also tell of other things I saw.
-DANTE, Inferno, Canto I
There are many developmental stages which are biologically-based and culturally universal. Piaget's four to Erikson's eight, children of all ages learn language, operation, interaction, and logic in a developmentally linear way, which can be correlated to certain months and years of age. Yet, these developmental stages extend beyond childhood and adolescence -- as humans continue to mature all through their lives, so there are stages of maturation which we pass through in that time, in theory extending straight through until death. While those cognitive stages accompanying rapid physical development, those seen in ages 1 through 12, are the most obvious, I feel the growth (and degradation) of cognition and personality, as they change in more gradual and subtle ways through adulthood, has not received as much attention academically. However, many aspects of our culture could be interpreted as representative of those distinctly adult developmental stages and so, inversely, by studying these aspects of cultural expression, we can potentially learn about the stages of development which gave rise to them.
Age 24: The Magic Average, The Peak of Male Personality
A curve can be drawn to represent the development and degradation of a man.* The growth of the body and that of the mind represented as the rising of a line, through chronology and capacity. There, however, will inevitably come a point in a man's life where those growth stages are completed -- physically, neurologically, cognitively, this is the peak of the male identity. Inevitably, this zenith of identity passes, and the sun of a man's life begins to set. This can be observed as the fluid and flexible aspects of personality gradually becoming more concertized and rigid in routine, the open minded youth becoming the inflexible elderly man of stereotype. That is, there are the formative years of a man's personality, and then there is the crystallization of those ideas, skills, and behaviors. While there is little formal research as to the exact time in one's life when that peak of identity is reached, it can safely be assumed it is in the early adulthood years, between 23 and 27. I have found 24, specifically, to be an especially powerful and meaningful year in the personality and creative output of a man. Let me describe a few ways by which I came to acknowledge the significance of this year.
For every musical artist with an extensive discography, you can look at what is considered by the majority of critics to be their most culturally significant work -- the peak of their career. If we consider classic rock for instance, for David Bowie, this is peak album is unanimously Ziggy Stardust. For Pink Floyd, this is unanimously Darkside of The Moon. For Led Zeppelin, this is IV. For Jethro Tull, this is Aqualung. I began to informally research, looking at how old each artist was when they created what is considered their "best" work. I did not want to believe that our culture was driven by 20-somethings (as I was, at that point, reaching 25 myself, and was fighting the acknowledgment of my own adulthood.) Yet, time and time again, the math was clear: "Born in 1949, that would make him...23," "25," "24," "24."
I began to look outside of music, to other areas of culture. While not every field and realm of achievement is youth clearly evident as it is in music, Bill Gates formed Microsoft at 24. Likewise, the peak defined by Citizen Kane for Orson Welles, or the early acting career of Marlon Brando could be used as non-musical examples of this.
It is not that older men do not still make very meaningful and rewarding works. Authors, musicians, and men in other fields often create their best work in their twilight years -- often only because they got a late start in their career, for whatever reason, and did not create until later adulthood. But the developmental stage is discrete and exists whether or not the individual has creative output during it. Yet, there is another way to explain the creative output of prolific men in their 30s and 40s...
*I say "man" in this instance, as the evolutionary role of a man, from the standpoint of procreation, is very different from that of a female. The need to impress a female mate has a dramatic influence over the development of a male personality, be that a human male competing monetarily, or a young Alpha male lion, competing against the old leader of the pride, the right to mate with the choice females is earned; it is a powerful force which fuels, to one degree or another, the creative development of every aspect human culture.
The Chronology of Self-Awareness
Around age 20, according to Erikson, we begin to ask questions like "Who am I?" and "What am I to be?" This is, coincidentally, when many young men begin to think of their ego, authenticity, and social roles. It is the formative period of one's identity, when the personality is fluid and the future open. With so much potential, considering different careers and weighing what it is that they are truly good at and enjoy doing, important choices are often made at this point, at the end of high school. The defining ideas, skills, and behaviors of a man's life are typically carved out during this period of formative self-searching. Yet, gradually over the period of several years, the wide range of potential directions for self-development begins to narrow -- one has either made their choice, or not. The flexibility of that formative period of one's identity begins to "harden" and crystallize into a distinct personality.
The male in his 40s who writes a meaningful and culturally recognized book or piece of music is, if you pay close attention to the whole body of his work, often actually REworking techniques and ideas, which were created during his early formative period, in a new way. This is not creativity, per se, but more rehashing of old territory. Those ideas which were once radical and outlandish when first forged can be made more palpable and accessible when re-expressed with the softening of maturity. Yet, this quieter, softer, more mature work does not define the peak of that man's identity -- that height of physical, sexual, and mental prowess, whose work has the trademark characteristic of a high degree of energy. This is the "Piss and Vinegar" energy, the "Old College Try" energy.
And it hurt to watch and I cried,
the world cried for you, America.
But you grew accustomed to our pity,
and you used it as leverage,
After our faces had dried.
Stream of water.
Stream of thought.
Stream of knowing,
... you are sought.
Beneath the ground,
are the roots.
In the sunlight,
is the truth.
Folded and hidden, contained in Its bands,
Not just lives, but layers - each a whole land.
And if we could see all the life that light brings,
We'd never feel lonely, knowing They, within things.
The current, in-fluent,
the course of the stream.
Guides within the moment,
our life just a theme.
Dan Gaylinnmake the invisible visible.
<input ... ><input ... ><input ... ><input ... >
Kaleb SmithTo see what nobody else sees, you gotta have your windows cleaner than theirs.
Lets build a day out of these things.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REkbY-eE
All of the symbols and icons we associate with Christmas celebrations are derived from the shamanistic traditions of the tribal peoples of pre-Christian Northern Europe.
The sacred mushroom of these people was the red and white Amanita Muscaria mushroom, also known as "fly agaric." These mushrooms are now commonly seen in books of fairy tales, and are usually associated with magic and fairies. This is because they contain potent hallucinogenic compounds, and were used by ancient peoples for insight and transcendental experiences.
The major elements of the modern Christmas celebration, such as Father Christmas, Christmas trees, magical reindeer and the giving of gifts, are originally based upon the traditions surrounding the harvest and consumption of these most sacred mushrooms.
These ancient peoples, including the Lapps of modern-day Finland, and the Koyak tribes of the central Russian steppes, believed in the idea of a World Tree. The World Tree was seen as a kind of cosmic axis, onto which the planes of the universe are fixed. The roots of the World Tree stretch down into the underworld, its trunk is the "middle earth" of everyday existence, and its branches reach upwards into the heavenly realm.
The Amanita Muscaria mushrooms grow only under 2 types of trees, Firs and Evergreens. The mushroom caps are the fruit of the larger Mycelium beneath the soil which exists in a symbiotic relationship with the roots of the tree. To ancient people, these mushrooms were literally "the fruit of the tree."
The North Star was also considered sacred, since all other stars in the sky revolved around its fixed point. They associated this "Pole Star" with the World Tree and the central axis of the universe. The top of the World Tree touched the North Star, and the spirit of the shaman would climb the metaphorical tree, thereby passing into the realm of the gods. This is the true meaning of the star on top of the modern Christmas tree, and also the reason that the Super-Shaman Father Christmas makes his home at the North Pole.
Ancient peoples were amazed at how these magical mushrooms sprang from the earth without any visible seed. They considered this "virgin birth" to have been the result of the morning dew, which was seen as the semen of the deity. The silver tinsel we drape onto our modern Christmas tree represents this divine fluid.
The active ingredients of the amanita mushrooms are not metabolised by the body, and so they remain active in the urine. It is safer to drink the urine of one who has consumed the mushrooms than to eat the mushrooms directly, as many of the toxic compounds are processed and eliminated on the first pass through the body.
It was common practice among ancient people to recycle the potent effects of the mushroom by drinking each other's urine. The amanita's ingredients can remain potent even after six passes through the human body. This is the origin of the phrase "to get pissed," as this urine-drinking activity preceded alcohol by thousands of years.
Reindeer were the sacred animals of these semi-nomadic people, as the reindeer provided food, shelter, clothing and other necessities. Reindeer are also fond of eating the amanita mushrooms; they will seek them out, then prance about while under their influence. The urine of tripped-out reindeer would be consumed for its psychedelic effects.
This effect goes the other way too, as reindeer also enjoy the urine of a human, especially one who has consumed the mushrooms. In fact, reindeer will seek out human urine to drink, and some tribesmen carry sealskin containers of their own collected Wee, which they use to attract stray reindeer back into the herd.
The effects of the amanita mushroom usually include sensations of size distortion and flying. The feeling of flying accounts for the legends of flying reindeer, and legends of shamanic journeys included stories of winged reindeer, transporting their riders up to the highest branches of the World Tree.
Although the modern image of Father Christmas was created by the advertising department of Coca-Cola, in truth his appearance, clothing, mannerisms and companions all mark him as the reincarnation of these ancient mushroom-gathering shamans.
One of the side effects of eating amanita mushrooms is that the skin and facial features take on a flushed, ruddy glow. This is why Father Christmas is always shown with glowing red cheeks and nose, even his jolly "Ho, ho, ho!" is the euphoric laugh of one who has indulged in the magic fungus.
Father Christmas also dresses like a mushroom gatherer. When it was time to go out and harvest the magical mushrooms, the ancient shamans would dress much like Father Christmas, wearing red and white fur-trimmed coats and long black boots.
After gathering the mushrooms from under the sacred trees where they appeared, the shamans would fill their sacks and return home, then climb down the chimney they would then share out the mushroom's gifts with those within.
The amanita mushroom needs to be dried before being consumed; the drying process reduces the mushroom's toxicity while increasing its potency. The shaman would guide the group in stringing the mushrooms and hanging them around the hearth-fire to dry.
The psychedelic journeys taken under the influence of the amanita were also symbolised by a stick reaching up through the 'Chimney' in the top of the yurt. The 'Chimney' was the portal where the spirit of the shaman exited the physical plane.
Father Christmas's famous magical journey, where his sleigh takes him around the whole planet in a single night, is developed from the "heavenly chariot," used by the gods from whom Father Christmas and other shamanic figures are descended. The chariot of Odin, Thor and even the Egyptian god Osiris is now known as the Big Dipper, which circles around the North Star in a 24-hour period.
In the ancient story, the chariot was pulled by reindeer. As the reindeers grow exhausted, their mingled spit and blood falls to the ground, forming the amanita mushrooms.
Saint Nicholas is a legendary figure who supposedly lived during the fourth Century. His cult spread quickly and Nicholas became the patron saint of many varied groups, including judges, pawnbrokers, criminals, merchants, sailors, bakers, travelers, the poor, and children.
Religious historians agree that St Nicholas did not actually exist as a real person, and was instead a Christianised version of earlier Pagan gods. Nicholas' legends were mainly created out of stories about the Teutonic god called Hold Nickar, known as Poseidon to the Greeks. This powerful sea god was known to gallop through the sky during the winter solstice, granting boons to his worshippers below.
When the Catholic Church created the character of St Nicholas, they took his name from "Nickar" and gave him Poseidon's title of "the Sailor." There are thousands of churches named in St Nicholas' honor, which were also converted from temples to Poseidon and Hold Nickar. (As the ancient pagan deities were demonised by the Christian church, Hold Nickar's name also became associated with Satan, known as "Old Nick!")
Local traditions were incorporated into the new Christian holidays to make them acceptable to the new converts. To these early Christians, Saint Nicholas became a sort of "super-shaman" who was overlaid upon their own shamanic cultural practices. Images of Saint Nicholas from these early times show him wearing red and white, or standing in front of a red background with white spots, the design of the amanita mushroom.
St Nicholas also adopted some of the qualities of the legendary "Grandmother Befana" from Italy, who filled children's stockings with gifts. Her shrine at Bari, Italy, became a shrine to St Nicholas.
Some psychologists have discussed the "cognitive dissonance" which occurs when children are encouraged to believe in the literal existence of Father Christmas, only to have their parents' lie revealed when they are older. By so deceiving our children we rob them of a richer heritage, for the actual origin of these ancient rituals is rooted deep in our history and what Jung would call "our Collective Unconscious". By better understanding the truths within these popular celebrations, we can better understand the modern world, and our place in it.
Many people have rejected Christmas as being too commercial, claiming that this ritual of giving is actually a celebration of materialism and greed. Some Socialists say that "Christmas is a pernicious racist-imperialist construct, an unholy alliance of Catholicism, Coca Cola and capitalism whose only function is the exploitation and repression of the international working classes."Yet the true spirit of this winter festival lies not in the exchange of plastic toys, but in celebrating a gift from the earth: the fruiting top of a magical mushroom, and the revelatory experiences it can provide.
Instead of just perpetuating outdated and confusing holiday myths, it might be more fulfilling to return to the original source of these seasonal celebrations. How about getting back to basics and enjoying some magical mushrooms with your friends & loved ones this solstice? What better gift can a family share than a little piece of love and enlightenment? "Ho Ho Ho". Merry Christmas and wishing you all a Truly Wonderful Solstice!
because, as a rule, the dead don't care about much of anything.
The mediumship via soma with the physical disconnection of hypnagogia via a sleep aid.
God, the issues surrounding small busy self-conscious thinking.
Its like being on the beach, all the time.
*beach_metaphor.gif*
I want to photograph someone exactly in the shape as the Shame figure, beneath -- lying in a bed.
The idea of leaving your body, rising out of shame, judgment, and self-consciousness.
Rising out of the shell of ego, free of all its restraints.
Fears are tied to the body, mostly. Only the remnants of fear remain after death.
I respect my authorities. I respect my authorities.
I respect the face, I respect the body.
I respect the restraint over behavior and thought,
I respect the fellow man left beaten for dead.
I respect the sound of explosions, the sound of subversion.
I say that out of respect for authority.
Respect for authority.
I felt the cold before, I know it.
I felt isolation and know the growling sound of hate, expressed to a child.
Misfortune will not cling itself to me, as I know the path and follow it.
I've learned through sickness how it is to be punished for your gifts.
I must stay sensitive to the course, and the balance of control for it as it comes.
Meditation is my greatest strength and weakness, it brings more than my attention span can withstand.
I surrender respect to the inner authority.
I relate back, course troubled with a knot of self-consciousness.
It grows back, the self-consciousness but acts as a sort of fuel,
a compressed resonant loop back onto one's self, oscillating.
Release selected works as collections.
Begin and follow through with your efforts.
Close yourself to negative influences, remaining on the pure track.
These are the instructions we'd given you, when you angered us.
Close, open flow open and recieve
There is a way to let your hands feel without the conscious effort which bind them to thought,
There is a way to hold a breath BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM...BAM BAM!
I begin to exhale as writing about the exhale, and my chest becomes vibrant with incredible energy....
There is someone wailing... in the distance.
"HOLY SHIT!"
"You heard it, Charlie??"
It's happening. They're here. Now angry screaming, and a pounding sound. Singing... "AUGHH!!!"
I am without a care in the world. I am without a care in the world.
I am a central magnetic force, I feel myself fill a space beyond my body.
I strengthen this with focus, dedicated breath, and inward tone.
Ah, ch, ah, ch...
I am sorry that I got distracted, this room is so cold.
My breath pumps with my fast beating heart.
It pumps so hard!
Damn music, damn clothes clothsets.
Damn amphetamines, damn response curves.
Damn epidermal growth hormones, damn negative feedback loops.
There's a story for every angry raging demon being starved of his host's hospitality.
I know of a less garnished follower who may serve you better,
I know of a swine without the focus, without the resolve or discernment to cleanse through till the end.
I do not know of an exorcist.
Trace models of modes of interaction, traced lines, both dotted and solid.
Both physical and imaginary, we must draw these lines within the world.
For there is consciousness and then there is our perception of it,
like there is a stream and there is a cup.
Please empty my cup, I wish to drink from the stream.
Please show me the art of pottery, so that I may learn the expanses afforded by vessels.
My place, my place, please give me a place
in your company, oh spirits, in your company.
The musicians convened on the overpass of the old freeway outside of the city, in a post-apocalyptic future where I was running from the authorities and so many of us sought some form of nostalgia to comfort us on Christmas. In the decay and cold, the formally trained musicians dressed as nutcrackers. Very gay, flaming gay, all of the men were. Yet they were, too, part of an underground illegal network and knew the times and synchronized their watches just like the rebels and the metalheads and their black leather snarls.
The car had to be there at a certain time, stolen away and being sought by police, we made it in time and a conductor led the individual musicians through the game. Four colored boxes lit as the song was played, each a sort of big band era/Jeopardy contestant podium, each lighting up in reference to a score that that musician had attained for his performance. Conductors were many, and it was a saught-after position, with music writers competing over the opportunity to lead the rebels through . Additionally, there were OTHER scoring systems, in addition to the main Jeopardy podium score which some musicians adhered to while others did not acknowledge. The fine arts kids did not care for the "white" score, which the punks and metal boys took very seriously. Above each jeopardy podium, the white score appeared as segments of green/white hardened paste/frosting/cum in the shape of rhythmic phrasings in the conductor's music. Very tight and syncopated performances created a very high set of white points, which looked almost like tall buildings or blocks of impressive caked score, based on how much volume, machismo, anger, and testosterone you pumped into the performance. The fine arts kids distanced themselves from this display, not wanting to be associated with crude cum-shooting competitions between snotty boys, but there I was, performing under one of them on a freeway overpass in a dying abandoned world.
The whole thing was about militaristic marching -- very strong machismo, chunky perfect rhythms, and a lot of forward-moving anger about it. Fucking diseased as well, which turned the whole white structure above the podiums a sickly green. It was goddamned Nazi UFO war machine secret base music and as soon as I took part in performing it, I started getting white points, whether I liked them or not, and all these unwanted associations began popping up on my youtube and facebook links. Neo-Nazi white pride UFO historian links.
"What the fuck is this shit??!" I said to my friends, who got me to perform this guy's piece. "Now I'm getting all these Nazi UFO freaks contacting me? Nice job! I don't give a shit about the points, this guy's a creep."
In storage were so many machines, streamlined 1950s beauties; typewriters, jukeboxes, cars in cars. I wanted something to write on. I wanted to lay on a hamburger.
The incredibly fast car ride escape approached huge broken teeth, a wall of a larger scale, and I pulled back and then we were riding upthem. The girls were terrified, but smiled as they screamed. Another huge hood of a 1950's Buick loomed up ahead of us, was it opened this time? We were going too fast! We pulled back and rode up it.
Two women, in the booths of an old fashioned diner. Jiang Hui watched me from behind, in a corner booth with another girl. This moment was held in time, frozen there. I could not escape and wished I could somehow tell her that I would come and sit with her if only I could escape this booth with this other girl, but to her it seemed I simply did not want to sit with her, that I had chosen another and was even flirting with her in front of her. But I could not -- the thought of her eyes watching burned a hole in the back of my head.
A metaphor I like for this masking phenomenon of the overactive mind is minnows near the mouth of a stream. Standing knee-deep near the inlet of a stream into a lake, minnows could be nibbling on my toes but, looking down, I would be unable to see them through the water. The water from the stream is very agitated and, even on a nice sunny day, the surface of the water would be too busy for me to see what was happening beneath. Very Jungian metaphor, but this is very much like the frenzied highly-active mind which prevents the penetration of introspection and memory, across the differing levels of consciousness, to what is happening down below. Yet, if I wade further along the beach, away from the inlet of the stream, the water would become calmer and I can see clearly down through it, observe the sand and items in it, and see the minnows as they move and nibble at my toes. This, too, is like the clarity of a calm waking state of consciousness in that it allows for deep-penetrating levels of introspection. The stillness of meditation assures that no facets of ones self are obscured from one's self -- even the deepest parts are visible and can be understood.
Marry Christ, Massive As He Is.
Love him anyway, try to wrap your arms around him.
He's been takin it easy since his stint in the desert,
he's surrendered his ego, let go of his social self
...and man, has he EVER let himself go!
Red and Green Window Stickers,
the smell of latex on Rudolph's collar.
Get tired and wish the kitchen was empty.
Marry Christ, Massive As He Is.
Love him anyway, try to wrap your arms around him.
He's been takin it easy since his stint in the desert,
he's surrendered his ego, let go of his social self
...and man, has he EVER let himself go!
Red and Green Window Stickers,
the smell of latex on Rudolph's collar.
Get tired and wish the kitchen was empty.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ4uH_rvx
This ended up being one of those inspirational life-organizing highs. I love when you can get a perspective on what you aren't doing, and then simply draw out the steps to doing it.
- Write Formal Essay Describing “Spectral Model of Consciousness”
- Shamanic Conference Presentation Revision
- Remove Personal Account
- Install Open Office For Making Youtube of Slides
- Open Office => PPT Conversion?
- Software for Monitor to Video
- Ayahuasca Focus – Hypersensitivity
- Brainwave/State of Consciousness Relationship Sources?
- Yoga Descriptions of “Radio Frequency” Consciousness (Additional Paper?)
- Yogananda’s Yukteswar -- Cabbage “Transmission/Reception”
- The Holy Science?
- Contact MSU Brahmin
- Shamanic Conference Presentation Revision
- Audio Production
- Kolby Early Jam – “Time To Get Away” Drum Submix => Layers
- Learn Construction of .REX files/Kontakt Sample Maps for Keyboard
- Learn Assignment of Drum Loops into Ableton using MPC
- Extract King Tubby Loops from “Scrubby Dubz”
- Upload Selected Vocalization Tracks -- Separate Album (Name?)
- Kolby Early Jam – “Time To Get Away” Drum Submix => Layers
- CIIS Registration Information
- Clinical Master’s
- Credit Transfer ITP?
- GRE Requirements?
- Clinical Master’s
- Storage/Archival
- Organize “SMOKEY” Drive
- Send to Mom For Safe Keeping (w/ Master’s)
- Prepare New Drive – Post-SMOKEY Backup
- DVD Burns For All Material 2010-2011
- Organize “SMOKEY” Drive
- Fitness
- Find EPA or PA YMCA Card
- $3/day Downtown Oakland Y (OR price quote at 24 Hr. Fitness)
- No Meat (Casein) From December 18th to Jan 18th
- Find EPA or PA YMCA Card
Success is the result of performing a series of non-predictable action steps, each one of which is usually "wrong."
Duncan Riach Success
at any level is constructed from repeated failure at a lower level. A
successful life is full of failure. The failure of death is part of a
larger success.- Kaleb Smith I like the last sentence of your comment a lot.
And, yes, success is a composition of failure, but the composing,
itself, is a function of a certain state-of-consciousness or attitude;
that buoyant resilience to failure, the thick skin of ego's defense
that lets you plow through your mistakes without losing momentum.
The hypersensitive are often overwhelmed by what, for others, are simply
minor shortcomings or setbacks. There needs to be a sort of
stubbornness, an insistence on success.
Duncan Riach Sometimes the next action step is to pay attention to the sensations in the body and say to yourself, "You sweet, sensitive little thing! It's okay to feel these strong feelings, to feel overwhelmed by them. This is your loveliness and your specialness right now and it's okay to let this happen. Soon you will feel different."and knots of cyclical neurotic thinking will form in the slack.
Insistent thoughts of minor things,
small barricades lined up carefully in rows of defense around you.
These concentric walls radiate outwards, like ripples,
maintaining control over a certain set of frequencies.
In this way, my ego allows me to focus, by wielding the mind,
rearing it to ignore those extraneous things which do not serve.
Self-consciousness, pull my reins back once more ,
keep me looking at where I should feel.
keep me closed in and safe, to the edge of suffocation,
to the verge of cutting off circulation to all which is concealed.
I am aware now of the place where I lay.
I can look around, and see this location in relation to the path.
I am afforded a momentary glimpse of a perspective of height,
And I can see the grand expanse of landscape as it truly is.
Gotta gut all that filth out and wait for what's always been there to surface from the quiet.
"I know. I'm sorry. Is it too late?"
Your disease is a track on a slope that grows steeper with every day you let pass through idle hands. You feel it now, years later, rising up through your thoughts, settling into your very musculature. We never wanted it to progress this far, but we cannot heal you if you are not ready to be healed. You forget the voracity of that anger as it sleeps inside you, as you serve it all the comforts flesh can afford; gracious host, your grace is depleted.
"Forgive me for being misguided, for allowing distraction to bury the light you gave me to carry. I was not wholly yours.
My breath is hot with inflammation, my sacred center red with blood. There is no hiding it. Heat rises."
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turboswami- Kaleb Smith
- Subtle Density
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