A Question and A Discussion

I spent the morning in meditation and conversation with God, it was wonderful. But that is not what I want to write about now. What I want to say is about a question that came up last night when we went to Chipotle. And about a conversation I had today.

Does the Universe have the ability to create its own reality? This question leads me to ask; what gives something the ability to define its own reality? If one can not or does not have a consciousness about themselves than the idea of them defining their own reality seems far from possible. If something is conscious of itself then I feel that it has the ability to realize that it is different from individuals around it and then realize that it might see the world a bit differently. I feel this possibility is what gives way to different individual realities. The question then becomes is the universe conscious of itself? One could say that humanity and other intelligent beings (if there are any). Would be considered the universe trying to be conscious of itself and learn about itself. How then can one consciousness be divided? The same way a multiple personality mine is divided. Sorry that is not funny. There is another way of putting it. The consciousness of the universe is part of something more, something greater. God

That was the question stuff. But I left a large chunk of what I wrote about it out. I did this because I realized that I do something when I think. I prove something and then I toss something in that leaves a question. I do that same thing when I talk to people. I really do not have a solid place to start form when I am in a discussion so I just say things. Most of the time I go back and think about what I said and tare it to shreds. It reminds me of a rollercoaster. It is fun and you think that you are doing something but you are not. In a much more crude way; it is “mental masturbation.”

Much of the time I find myself saying things that I really only say to get people thinking differently. I find this is the only real way to get off the roller coaster and do something. There are only three other people that I have talked to that uses this technique. The person that taught it to me is dead now. He showed me its powers when we use to work on cars. And he encouraged me to use it. Sense his death I have had a fear of using it but I did use it without thinking. It was not until resent years that my brothers and I started to talk as peers and I found they uses the same pattern of speech. One of them has stopped talking in public like that but my other brother and I only talk like this. Both of us fighting to get the other to think more deeply and in a different way. I have found good and interesting things come from it. I have started to use the technique on purpose. I just need to remember not to get caught up in what I say and avoid believing that what I say is what I believe.

And if anybody would like to see the chunk I left out of the first part I’d be more than willing to share it.

Leave my Head Alone

I’m starting to worry. Last night I was playing disk with some friends and something happened. It has happened before but this was different. My attitude towards everybody suddenly changed to the negative side. I felt like there was not a scrap of love in me anymore and it was horrible. I felt like dieing. I felt like hurting somebody. I had to get away, so I just walked away. The others that I was with tried to follow but I lost them quickly. As I walked I noticed a growing pain just behind my eye. It built the rest of the night. It was odd because normally my headaches come in my temples. This however was forward. It started behind the right eye and grew into the front right side of my head. The head ache scared me a bit. I have gotten headaches that have resulted in a mood change but I have never had a mood change that was so drastic that it caused a headache. It makes me think that it was not just mood but something more chemical than that. Stuff like that does run in my family.

Dam, I miss the mountains so much. I miss being a hermit and only needing to deal with the politics of one mind rather than dozens of others minds. I miss the freedom that cement and brick and a solid roof cannot offer. I miss having to do physical work to stay alive. Perhaps that is what it is. I do not have to struggle to stay alive when I am in the city, it not the challenge that I feel life should be, so I make it a challenge. I need the forest. I would rather struggle with the forest than my own mind.

A new kind of writing for me

I have not been keeping up with my journal or my blog lately I’m hoping that this can fix some of that. I have been distracted by something else. I have found that writing is very much a huge outlet for me. It is a powerful thing being faced with your thoughts. I guess that I face them a little too much but I have realized that I hide things from myself. I keep my self from seeing things by hiding them behind other things. I distract myself while things grow in the under world of my mind.

I feel like one of these hiding things has popped to the surface. It seems like it is moving slowly but I feel like it is fast. Faster than I would have thought at lease. I am very surprised by the way that it is coming to the surface. In the past when these things come up they are violent bursts of pain and require a shift of who I am. This is different though. This coming out in the form of inspiration. In the past two and a half days I have written ten chapters of a book. They are not the longest chapters ever but they are chapters. I doubt that it will be published but it is a book and it is the first writing I have done other than this blog that I would like people to read. I have a long way to go before it is finished but I can only hope that this thing that was hiding keeps coming up until it is done.

It is strange, most of the time I do not know why I start writing something. But with this book I know that one thing that I said in a blog that I posted on Saturday. “I could have written books on our discussions.” It is not all about her but I must say that thinking about what she taught me triggered much of the beginning parts of the book. Well I’m going to get back to it. Peace all.

The Beauty of a Point

I have spent a good amount of time thinking tonight. This book just inspires reflection on my part. I spent a long time thinking on the space between when a photon hits my eye and my seeing. I did not say time and I did not say distance, I said space. It is not a physical space that I am talking about it is the separation between science and emotion. And where those two connect. Much of Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig has to do with that junction. It is more than the junction between science and emotion, many things meet at this point, two in particular I want to focus on, the future and the past. The “present” in which you can never truly live because it is not there. It is always just out of reach. This point is where it seems that all my indefinables exist; Love, God, Truth, Reality, and so on. I can not define them because I can not reach them. And that is exactly their propose. There is a beauty to the fact that we call this point between future and past the present. It is a gift. A gift that allows for the world to perpetuate itself. It is where the mystical happens. It is where rules do not matter and where the rules come from.

This point is the point that truly baffles the human mind. In physics there is such thing as a light cone. To those of you that are not into math, it would be two cones placed point to point. Along the axis of this cone is time (or space but then it would not be a light cone it would be… something else). This light cone helps physicist to say what is possible to describe in the past and in the future. And it all comes together into the reality at that point that the future and past touch. I find this interesting not because of the physics but because philosophy has created the same thing. A point that the past and future meet. The difference is that philosophers have realized that all realization occurs slightly behind reality and that point that can never be reached.

This point…this indefinable point that is always right in front of use but just out of reach, like a carrot on a stick, it is reality. The problem is that we can not exist in reality because nothing can exist in a point. But like the Big Bang, everything can come from a point. Perhaps the origin of this universe where, God put his finger into the nothingness and everything formed, perhaps this moment… this point is not in the past but just out of reach in the true present. God’s present. God’s gift. One of many.

Memories

I was riding in a car in the mountains today. It was my old romping grounds. Not far from Mt. Massive and Leadville. As we drove some memories came back to me that always bring back a deep longing for the older days; the old days were a year ago now. My heart has made a great deal of hurt over the fact that I am not still living like that. The memories reminded me of the great pain I now feel. It was not a pain at the time. It was a pin prick but I did not take care of it. I let it fester and grow into some gangrenous thing. Really it is not that bad. I look back on those memories with fondness but also regret for not doing what I should have done. For not going where my heart was leading.

The pin prick was a girl; it was not a girl but it is about a girl. I doubt that anybody reading this would know her. She was a wonderful girl, technically my boss but things like that get thrown out the window on the mountain. We spent a long time working together just the two of us, working and talking. We talked about everything; the world, life, and how it all fits into everything else. I could have written books on our discussions. I started to feel something for her then and I started to notice some of the same from her. Like I always do I convinced myself that it was all in my head (what isn't these days?) and I ignored my heart. Hell I ignored my brain too. It was not until she left for Antarctica that I found out that she really did have feeling for me.

That was the pin prick. The fact that I knew all along and I did nothing. I just sat there in fear of being wrong and I did nothing. This fact seeped into me and has torn me apart countless times. I blame none but myself. I could have stopped this before it started. It has gotten deep enough that I think of this girl almost every day. Random things just trigger he face to pop into my head and that is all there is. I worry about her often but I still do nothing. I almost took the year and went to Antarctica with her, but “I got hunger for knowledge again.” That is a horrible way of saying it; I got scared and ran back to the safest place I know, school.

Earlier today when these memories hit me I was surprised; they had not hit me like that ever. It must have been the mood or something but they hit hard and I really did not feel like dealing with them at that time. My body and mind seemed to just kind of shut off and I managed not to deal them. Then I realized that they need to be dealt with. It has been neglected for to long.

Regret is the root of all sins against ones self.

On Love

So I talk about love a great deal. It is one of those essentials to life that you can not live without. I talk about how it is needed and how I need it and how I want to show it but I never talk about what it is. To tell you the truth I’m not sure that I will be able to tell what it is. I have no complete definition of it. It is a powerful feeling of connection. But then again all feelings are of connection. Hated is a wish that you did not have a connection. Happiness is a sense of connection with what is around you. Somehow love seems different from all of those it seems deeper and more real.

When I look at the world I see illusions and my senses remotely interpreting what might not be there at all. When I look at the love I have in my life, the love that I know to be true, I see something more solid that the greatest of mountains. I see something that is more powerful that the sun. Something so brilliant that you think that it will kill you but it does not it sustains you.

This real love is not the most common thing, in face it is rare. People fake love and you can tell. People mistake lesser forms of love for this because they have never experienced this greater kind of love. But when you find this love it becomes uncontrollable and lashes out to all that are around. It is a powerful thing of goodness.

I digress, I have not done what I set out to do I have described love and have given features to recognize it but I have not told what it is. For me love is my soul reaching out into the darkness that is left when physical reality see as it is, fake. Love is when my soul finds something of light in that darkness and together with that other we reach out to more. In the end we are all lone souls holding dearly onto each other. In the end we are all one.

Sadly my definition means nothing. I have not defined the majority of what I used to define love. I have declared that what I can define has the possibility of not being real and I am building a reality based on things that I can never fully define. There must be something wrong with this. I feel like I am building on sand but then again I can not define God either and I am building on him, I think I’m build on him.

A Favorite Quote

I’m rereading a book that has my favorite quote in it. It is a twisted book that analyzes faith and truth and most other aspects of the mind and the soul. What makes it twisted is that it looks at these things through the eye of a man that is not what the world would consider sane.

“Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away.” That is the quote from VALIS by Philip K. Dick. It is bad that I have looked it up so many times that I know what page it is on. But between this book and the others I am reading (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and The Bible) I have begun inspecting something I am surprised that I never looked at before. I have started to question reality itself. Put another way I have stopped believing in reality. Much to my surprise I see it crumbling before my eyes.

Sometimes it feels like I was riding out a storm on a large safe boat and suddenly that boat just is not there anymore and I am in the ocean being tossed about like that nothingness that was before it all. The chaos of nothingness is frightening sometimes. Perhaps it is better to simple believe in something for safety sake. There is no adrenaline when you are being safe. There is no spice. Besides I really like to ask question. So let reality crumble and we will see what the waves are like with no boat.

What has become my fear

I think about my sanity far more than it is healthy to. Every once and a while I meet somebody and think to myself “how do I know that this person is not just in my head.” Oddly it is not the idea of insanity that bothers me it is the fact that I can not longer trust reality. It is the fact that I could be perfectly sane and be condemned as insane. It is the fact that the person telling me that I am insane might not actually exist. It is not good that these are the things that I think about now. It is not good that this ill-trust of reality is the only thing that I can thing of that frightens me anymore. It is not good to fear your own mind. What am I hiding from myself?

Wrestling with God

I do this a lot. I war with God about everything, even his existence. War is not the right word. Wrestle is the best word that I have come up with. I try to pin him down and he slips away and I try to define him and he is gone from definition. So I take a route that is taken all the time is science. I do something and try to see the out come and then define the mechanism which resulted in that out come but the mechanism is always changing. I look at myself. For God made us in his image or perhaps that is what he want us to think of it. Anyway, I look to myself and those around me and I do not find what I am looking for. I look to the world that God created and I still do not find what I am looking for. I look to the world its interaction with people an peoples interaction with each other and I do not find it. Not because it is not there but because looking at everything I can, I realize that I have forgotten what I was looking for or if I was looking for anything at all.

The world is more abstract that we know and we try to rationalize what is not rational. And we try to make abstract the little that is rational. I feel like there are thing that we are not meant to see. Not because God does not want us to see them but because we don’t know to look for them.

In the bible the human race starts out by “messing up” and eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. I do not think that this was a mess up. I see this as the expression of the purpose of man. To seek out and devour knowledge. If God truly did not want it to happen he would have stopped it. We were just doing what we were meant to do.

So then I eat knowledge and I wrestle God and in the end I hope that it is all entertaining to God in some way. I figure if I did not then he would simple break my hip like Jacob. Ding ding. Let round two begin.

Insanity and Knowing Better

I have been thinking a great deal about insanity. It is an interesting thing and probably not the best thing to be thinking about for any extended period of time. It is not that I think I am going insane; it’s just that I do not see sanity anymore. When I look at myself I see chaos and I see the same when I look at the world. I can not think of a time that this was not true. I can remember times when I ignored the chaos or pretended it was something else. But was always there. I have been through much of this before. There have been times in my life when I run head long into the chaos hoping to pull out so kind of scrap of rational thought. I do sometimes other times the chaos just sucks me back in and I get trapped in it for a time. I think that it is a lot like death. The more you think about death the more appealing it sounds. The more I think about chaos and insanity the more appealing they are. In insanity I would be free to explore the nether regions of my mind. But just like death one can not force them selves into insanity or they will not reap any of the benefits.

Why go insane? Why explore the nether regions of my mind? Why explore the mountains? Why trespass? Why die? I don’t know about you but I do these things because they are exciting. Because I do not know what is in my head, or in the mountains or in on another person's land or beyond the gates of death. I do not know if there is a dog ready to bite or a man with a shot gun (both have happened a few times). I do some of the less intelligent things that I have done not because I don’t know any better but because I do know better. It gets my heart rate up and I know that I am alive when I’m doing them. It has been far to long since I have done any of that stuff.

How to build a LASER

It is said that the microcosm is a mirror to the macro and vic versa. I know that the world is screwed up some might even say that it is insane. But then what is it reflecting? What else could it be reflecting but the human mind. So does that mean that I am insane? Or simple that the majority of human minds are insane? Then again what is a mirror that reflects another? You can get no information from a system like that. You can get a LASER if you bend the mirrors right, put the right gas between them and illuminate them with the right frequency light.