Something More

“No”, I thought, there’s something more. There is still further. There is still stuff left undiscovered, and undone. It has not yet been unraveled. I knew it because I felt it very clear, and it felt like one thing, something I’ve felt my entire life, so when it’s here, it’s basically unmistakable. I know it too well. What’s that descriptive word? Just one. Fear. And fucking hell, there it was. There was still something to fear, some pattern that I’d yet to see through. There was a rabbit hole I’d been unwilling to drop down into. How well had I hidden it from my myself I wondered. How do we hide anything from ourselves in this life? We don’t think of it, and then, we do. We see the machinery, the subtle clues that still bind us, that we still have some naive belief in, as if we are masters at convincing ourselves of whatever we’d like to believe in, even when to all outward appearances, we know we don’t, not really. Our fantasies are such that we can easily convince ourselves of just about anything anymore. The matrix seems to support this, but mind alone isn’t enough, if your body doesn’t believe it, you’re not going anywhere. There are hidden structures, binding agreements with reality itself, that still paints all sorts of hopes on the wall, so that you never pass through it. It’s so convincing, but why? Because the entire population is on board with keeping them as far from the surface of ordinary life as possible. Be normal. Be kind. Be responsible. Be ordinary. Be quiet. Be less. Be as you are, but is that what you really are? Are you but an impotent little traveler surfing on the dark sea of awareness oblivious to the dangers and pitfalls, the hidden pockets of despair, unease, empty sink holes, to where do they lead? You’ve heard, no where, but is that true? Who do you know who’s gone down them? Is anyone’s matrix like the next one or is every journey and traveler traversing a totally unknown maze which no one but you will ever see, nor ever be able to traverse? Fuck, can anyone alive or dead actually tell you anything about where you’re heading, the experiences you might have, the places you might see? I don’t think so. I very much doubt it. We like to believe in the stories of others when they say, “Come on follow me, I know where this goes”, but how can they ever know where your mind will take you? Are they in there? Are they in your body? Can they feel it? No, we are easy to slap a platitude, a definition that we say isn’t one, it’s just a vague abstraction but you get the idea. No, I don’t. I don’t get your idea. I get the one that comes up here, and that has to be my own. You can go wherever you want, but you can’t come here, only I can be with this, with what I am, and all the podcasts, all the speakers who speak with an air of authority, don’t know shit about that. There are no similarities, no timelines that coincide with anyone else’s, it’s just you here, and you either deal with it, or you pretend you have and repeat the rewards of that, of not seeing what you might have looked at.

When you were born, you weren’t a blank slate, your identity already had certain tendencies, certain characteristics, both physical, emotional, and most certainly mental. There were already embedded patterns that would emerge, that you would mistake yourself as. We think in our hubris that we’ve created our own lives, that it’s we that either made something happen, perhaps worked for something or didn’t, perhaps we fucked off, maybe we didn’t follow our parents advice what ever that was. Most of us didn’t even get advice, usually we grow up only with a vague sense of what’s being asked or required of us in whatever environments we are born into. Let’s be clear here, most family units are already so confused as to not be coherent at all. They exhibit endless pandemoniums in a most nonlinear, chaotic, and unpredictable way. Probably as a child you sense there’s got to be something here that you can rely on, some structure of civility or even support, but you can’t get that from anyone lost in delusion, and everyone is. The chances of being born to parents who had any sense at all of what they were actually navigating is slim to fucking none if you ask me. I’m not saying it can’t or doesn’t happen but if you’re reading this, it probably didn’t. Those ones are living in mountain villages that no one has ever heard of, just maybe they exist, I don’t say they don’t but that’s neither here nor there. Suffice it to say, you were born and then an identity was created that you would live within and from for usually the rest of your life. I’ve read a few places that this whole structure, that is what you’ve always called me is basically forged and cemented in by the time you turn seven years old. Maybe that’s speculation or just imagination, I don’t know. I think it’s possible certain conditions, such as being caught up in the immediate area of a war zone, or the death of a parent, basically something terrible even if it’s later on can alter or accelerate certain aspects to the forefront, and leave other ones totally in the dark, perhaps to surface later on as some other traumatic event or experience. A person is a wild mix of shit that’s for sure. There are mental movements, bodily sensations and malfunctions, endless human abuses and humiliations even many appearing as normal social conventions that are nothing of the sort. Endless subtle pathologies of one kind or the other are running like a current of electricity through every moment of your life. We only notice them through events or other people, how they respond to us whether favorably or not so nicely all goes into the mix, it’s all recorded within as the memory of the dreamer of your life.

You’d almost think, fuck there’s no way to sort all this shit out. It feels like an immense impossibility to deconstruct it all, and render it mute and ultimately benign thereby emerging with an actual blank slate which you can then use to create whatever it is you like. I’d say at the first hint of trouble, the walls of this prison planet look way too high, way to ominous, and too dangerous. You can’t actually draw outside the lines, can you? Is that even allowed? No, of course not, that’s how you always keep to yourself after a certain threshold has been crossed. You can’t expect anyone to support this movement, since it will only highlight their own self imposed limitations. Never forget the crabs in the bucket. They’re caught and they’re going to be boiled alive in a pot and eaten. And yet, the one crab that could climb up and out is pulled back down again and again by the ones at the bottom. Probably they are feeling something like, “Look we’re in this nice round space now, it’s cozy, and we have each other, if we let you scale the bucket wall, we’ll probably never see you again, which will make us sad, but also you’ll be out there on your own all alone, and who knows what the fuck is out there? This is for your own good. We’re safe right now.” By the time they make it into the pot they won’t know what the fuck happened and that’s most lives. Probably, it always has been, except for those very rare deep depressive dark thinkers and feelers who were like, “I can’t accept this. Let me go out and find my own ways, if it doesn’t work okay, but at least I gave it a shot.”

So yeah, it starts with a list. You start by making a chart of sorts of all the places you have ever lived, and later fill in all the people and events of basically your entire fucking life till now. Sound like fun? No, right? Why would I do that? I’m trying to forget my fucking past, not go back to it. That’s really the whole problem with the time equation, there isn’t any, so whatever is back there, isn’t actually back anywhere. It’s just taking up space in your energy configuration, usually weighing you down like a fucking anchor holds a boat to one spot, the rough seas are bouncing it up and down, to and fro, the winds are fucking whipping the sails like they are paper thin soap bubbles, ripping new jagged edges to the whole structure, but no, the anchor is saving it. It could have just been carried off to who knows where, lost at sea maybe forever, but flowing nonetheless along with the tides and weather. You want to unhook yourself, but you don’t want to do what’s required for this unhooking. I get it. No one does. That’s the real reason anyone wants to wake up. What we really want to do is leave that shitty life we led behind and somehow move on to one that actually fucking works. We want to quiet our mind of the past do we not? We literally want to sit there and pretend that yesterday or last year or the whole of your life never fucking happened, so we can get away from it. Just one problem, meditation doesn’t vanish it, it might silence it for awhile, you might use your mind to focus on something nice instead, even a blank wall is better than going within to where all the shit hides. No, that’s called therapy, but you don’t really want to be your own therapist, you want to pretend that you’re doing something higher than that, you’re chasing a more sublime peace filled type of consciousness, this is something enlightened people do so they can look down their noses at all the ignorance and claim it has nothing to do with them anymore. If you could just learn to be in the moment, where will all that other crap be? It will be gone right? No it won’t, it hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s right where it’s always been, all around you all the time, it’s called your unique perception, how you perceive and the lens that perceiving happens through. Doesn’t practicing silence subdue it? Sure, it subdues it, but again, for how long and for what, why do you want to subdue yourself? Can’t you live your entire life from the domain of silence? Maybe, but is that the goal, to live as if life was utter emptiness and to have nothing more to do with the fullness it can also bring forth? I’m not saying you don’t need silence either, most people have never even tasted this so you do, but you also need the other side of silence, the active messy side of life. To balance both of them, you need to start over with a clean structure that allows you to have them to begin with, and that’s the identity. Believe it or not, you can not be nobody. You have to have some sort of identity no matter how fleeting or invisible it is. You have to think of yourself as someone or you won’t be anything, and being nothing doesn’t produce a life, it just denies there is one.

So yeah, even after all this writing, all this investigation, I made my list, or I’m starting to. It gets filled in as the memories of your life are basically revealed or surface to the top of your memory. Did I want to do it? No, not really, but I’m not a fan of leaving any stone unturned. I actually knew I was going to do it one day, I just didn’t know when. And it’s not actually therapy. Therapy is a practice of learning to act in a way in which the world’s conventions support and reward, which is not the goal here. Here the only goal is to free up your own agency, your relationship with intent and the will to use it, this has to be developed. So it’s actually more like a course in dreaming, the way it might be done, not because it works out in the world according to the social order, although it might do this, it probably will, but that would be a side consequence of being in alignment with your own unique life configuration and what life can do with that. I think one of the greatest deceptions is the idea that life blocks us from living our best life, we end up believing in the worldly events so often presented to us as undeniable facts, instead of believing in what we are to bring us to where we need to be, which is really just in our lives, as life, not as spectators but as active participants.

Usually we have patterns that hold us back and we don’t even know how they are doing this, going back over the events of our lives gives us a clear perspective of how we were deceived, how we were led to believe certain things not just about the world but about ourselves and our truest abilities that just weren’t true, and to correct this faulty perception. Even insight alone is not enough. There are other forces at play in the universe, and we’d be wise to know what they are, and how to use them, because if we don’t, you can be sure that they will instead use us or something will. We really give up our lives too easily. When we are young we rebel, we fight against it all, but we’re sadly outnumbered and totally outsourced at that time. We think other people need to agree and validate us, and when they don’t we’re prone to depression or worse, destructive tendencies develop, in essence as we are defeated by the world’s suggestions, maybe we are outcast or whatever, we learn to defeat ourselves. We think winning means the world will recognize our valiant efforts to be ourselves, but we don’t give any credence to how we might recognize our own efforts with or without support from the world or anyone else in it. Basically, we start to doubt ourselves, then as we get older, we read all sorts of books designed to help us overcome this or that and after numerous attempts to find some solution we either become convinced there isn’t one or that even if there is, we would never be able to utilize it. We know ourselves as defeated people and if you walk around, you’ll see this malady is almost everywhere now. It’s actually practically normal to be this way. That’s the real reason politeness or spiritual or even political correctness is so popular, we seek to be seen as something we know we’re not, or to convince ourselves that some moral rightness is all that matters, all the while doing nothing to actually change neither ourselves nor anything else. Luckily for us, the world we live in still changes, if nothing else, structures fail and fall, and something new takes it’s place continuously, just what that will be, whether it will be better or worse than what preceded it remains a dicy proposition since patterns tend to repeat and we can only build on what we know about the world we believe we are in, which isn’t much, very little if you ask me. If we’ve made it to even 5% percent of what we could actually know about this thing called life, I’d be surprised as hell. Instead of some evolutionary happily ever after story unfolding, I think there really is a small chance this will all go to hell in a hand basket, something will wipe out most of the population eventually, and the whole rebuilding process will likely start again. Somewhere in time, someone will dig up an airplane and declare it to be one of those ignorant things that travel required thousands of years ago, kind of how we dig up old farming utensils, and say, “Oh this was for that.” Our true capacities as living beings is being curtailed, not expanded. We think we’re smarter now, more intellectual, but we’ve lost our senses in the process. Our inner strength as a species wanes, as does our ability to intend, to will ourselves into the life we really want. The list is really aimed at recovering all of this, our true abilities, which were lost to not just us, but to everyone. This is not even something that we can see happening in the world around us, it has to do with forces that we can’t see or even think of. There are such energetic forces which produce reality as we know it, and unless we know how that works and work in alignment with it energetically, we can never actually be free. We may succeed in convincing ourselves that we are and many people do, in fact, many prominent spiritual voices I’m sure have done just that, they haven’t actually freed themselves and that’s how they don’t ever really help anyone else get free. The evidence for this basically speaks for itself. I’m not free yet either, but at least, if I can console myself of anything, it’s that I know it. If you don’t know this, you won’t seek freedom which is probably how almost no one does. They take their cues from those they think are free and just try to model their own lives around what they think a spiritual life looks like. Personally, I’m not even interested in having a spiritual life, I don’t care about that at all anymore. All I want is freedom, and I’ll know it when I actually achieve it even if I have no clue right now what it might entail or look like. My only advantage right now is that I don’t bullshit myself into thinking I am. I’ve engaged that mistake before, but it isn’t here right now, which I suppose is all that really matters to me.

If you think about being a person in today’s world, it doesn’t really work anymore. The story of human beings is basically already a sort of prison sentence and we absorb this just by proximity of all the dreams and images that surround us on a daily basis. The trap has gotten more devious obviously, it’s more encompassing in how it reduces a person to a data set and then surrounds you with images that reinforce this data set. That’s really what the algorithm is. It takes whatever inclinations you give it and repeats them back to you in a hundred different ways that convince you of their legitimacy. Getting out of this trap, takes more than just insight then, it takes an inner force of such determination that few are able to conjure it even when that’s their intention. Then when they can’t do it, they conclude that it didn’t matter or it wasn’t meant to be, perhaps it isn’t natural but it’s natural all right. To me it’s the only thing worth doing, since being born into this is the most unnatural fucking thing there is. Being born at all is basically a prison sentence right from the start if you ask me. I actually think now that it’s not a matter of acceptance or just letting go. These are kind of lowly uneventful and too easy things to do. It’s something you do when you feel you’ve got no other alternative, your back is against a wall and you don’t see another way, but that’s the rub, isn’t it? Just because you don’t see another way right now, doesn’t mean there isn’t one. It really just means you can’t see it, but I think there’s always another way, if only you persevere towards finding it. One thing I know for sure, this realm isn’t so cut and dry, it’s malleable even when the whole world claims it’s not. Once you’ve seen this for yourself, how can you forget it? You won’t, any failure to escape can only be a lack of your own volition, nothing more. Circumstances are not set in stone, because there are no stones, just energetic configurations that your mind has been trained to reduce to unchanging solid objects or data but even stones are changing. We might not be able to see how they are because of their timelines, it might take a stone thousands of years to change but not so with us. We are basically changing all the time, that’s the real beauty of being human, our ability to change never actually goes away but it can be buried. We are taught now to give up, surrender to what is, and there’s a Truth to this mechanism, but if you don’t fully understand what it is asking of you, you’ll most likely do something closer to becoming apathetic and there’s a difference. This difference isn’t some arbitrary and insignificant distinction, it’s usually the difference between life and death. One way grants you a life and the other unknowingly and unwittingly takes it from you. You’d be wise to know the difference because these distinctly different movements are easily mistaken one for the other, and it’s often too late before you recognize it. Under the guise of surrender or even letting go, many have perished since they failed to understand the dangers between them.

I myself have been in a type of holding pattern. I told myself that it was for the benefit of the children that I kept this most stable household, that I worked as hard as I could on their behalf, or even for the writing, for the ongoing insights and the slow difficult task of thoroughly and completely changing one’s mind and maybe that’s true. That’s how it went, but I know in my heart, I could have done more. I too thought I was surrendering to what was just my life as it was unfolding, but life I realize now isn’t something you acquiesce yourself to. It’s something you fearlessly live, taking risk after risk, going on adventure after adventure, following your most precious desires to live as you’d want to live not shunning them. I know I fucked up there, but that’s also what life is for, fucking up is going to happen. It’s not a matter of blame, it never is, it’s always only a matter of where do I go from here and how do I get there.

Movement to me was always measured in means of money. You had to have the funds for the plane ticket or they don’t let you on the plane and where or how are you going to live even if you do reach your destination? As far as I was concerned none of these opportunities ever arrived. I have struggled financially my whole life it seems. I just couldn’t get my ideas of money whatever they are or were out of my head. They just seemed too real for some reason and of course, I told myself that I had enough, which in reality, I did. No dog or human in my home has ever gone without food or even medical treatment if they needed it. Add some very fucking fast internet and up to snuff electronics to the mix and what was there to complain about? I had nothing. Even my body seemed to cooperate, I could work long hours now and still stay up half the night writing, my energy was almost unlimited in some strange way, or at the very least, heightened to unusual even extraordinary heights. Yes, on some days there were exceptions, I’d fall low for a few hours here and there, or need a good night’s rest to mark the erratic sleep cycle I seemed to have. My diet was strange too. I didn’t seem to need much food, but I needed some. I haven’t practiced the whole mealtime thing in years except for the occasional holiday thing, I eat very small portions through out the day and night. A single piece of toast with peanut butter can last me for a most of the day if I want it to. So there were changes, just not enough, and not truly shocking ones. Perhaps those are yet to come.

Perceptual changes tend to form and come gradually. To truly see that all people are gazing out through their own unique tunnels and that we don’t really share our realities as clearly and as uniformly as we think we do takes time to sink it. It’s not a matter of just noticing it once and having it stay this way. The mind habitually returns to its ordinary and customary ways, mainly because you forget to notice. Noticing takes a certain kind of intensity, almost a different sort of energy, to pay attention takes quite frankly quotas of attention, the kind of quotas that most don’t possess at all. It’s much easier to just let the mind do what it’s been trained to do. It’s used to this. It happens without effort, without expending energy but to truly see requires a certain focus that must be developed. The focus to notice doesn’t come naturally anymore. It’s gone off in another direction, basically a sloppy one, and that’s how it stays without the discipline to bring it back again and again to something new, something that no one else sees but that you know is there. And that’s what I’ve really been doing all these years with this writing. I saw it. I knew what it was so I know what it is, and the mind went back to it’s usual perceptions again and again. It was the writing that held the new position steady. It explored, it investigated, it tried to find other explanations even, even when it knew there were none. It was what it was, but it had also lost a lot of its qualities this new attention had to be not reformatted, but retrieved. Ultimately maybe sometimes circumstances assist with that, and sometimes they don’t. Mine did but I just couldn’t see this yet. I’m seeing it now.

And just further, as always, not because you’re ever going to arrive anywhere, but because that is what you are impelled to do. That is not your mind chasing a dream though, that is a dream chasing you.

Now, here's a song from my youth. Wow, can't believe I found it. I remember searching for it before and coming up empty. Thanks AI. I used to listen to this song over and over again when I was about 17 years old. I had it on a cassette tape if anyone remembers those. I guess I was already near the edge way back then. I was walking a thin line between my own reality and the one I thought I was supposed to have, I know that. Back then I would reject anything anyone told me. I think I just walked around and whatever I'd come across, I'd just think, "What the fuck is this? No thanks, maybe go fuck yourself instead. Leave me out of it. Just leave me alone. I'll find my own fucking way." Yeah, I haven't changed all that much. I think I'm finally really starting to like that girl, whoever she was.