Saturday, May 28, 2011

Ain't that a trip.

hi there sweets. how have you been?

tired. mostly. you?

Learning mostly. And searching for balance.

how so, lady?

Well I've learned a lot about myself. And I've taken a lot of weight off my shoulders recently. Ya know... cleanin out the closet and purifying the spirit. I haven't balanced all my elements yet.
But I'm close to being at peace with myself.

I hear a lot of people going through that same thing right now

I've become fascinated with self editing.

how so?

I can change every aspect of myself. Cept maybe my natural born instincts. Haven't tried that yet. It's exhilarating honestly. I can be anything.
My problem is focusing on one thing at a time. I'm sporadic. What I get for being born a dire sign.

do you have a practice?

Fire*
What you mean?

well some people call it a spiritual practice, but really, it's any kind of practice. I have a friend that expresses the same sentiment you are now talking about. his practice is lifting weights.
know what I mean?

In that case I have many practices. I write I walk I meditate I use deep breathing. I sing in the shower and I wake up a new person every new day. Recently I have gotten into the tarot. I'm getting my own cards soon. I'm excited.

it certainly helps to have some sort of discipline to it.
I have a mix of crossfit (olympic lifting, squats, etc), a hermetic tradition (which is what inspired the first renaissance) and taoism
I say the first renaissance because I think this is the second one, right now

well it certainly does help to have discipline. that is one aspect of myself i'm still working on. you know me, i've got works in progress laying around everywhere. but i don't like routine. it makes me yawn.

routine is destructive

so i try and mix it up. find something new every day to teach me something about myself.
or i go through phases.

what I like about crossfit is that it's anti-routine. there are some pillars of truth that I lean on to help me develop in the way I want to go
first, honesty. if i'm honest about how I feel or how I act, I can change it much easier. good feedback improves the quality of assessing what has to change

I use my sixth sense. I'm not sure what else to call it. There's this force inside me that lets me know when I'm headed in the right direction. Women's intuition may let me down sometimes, but faith in Karma and the ability to find a silver lining in every situation keeps me going.
right now i'm at a crossroads, though, honestly. i have some choices to make, but i'm not sure what i want, yet.

it's always a crossroads. haha

well, i say crossroads, but really i feel like...
i've been wandering in the middle of the forest for some years, just gathering all kinds of experience and shit, and now here i am in the middle of a clearing, this little circle where everything outside of it is constantly shifting and changing depending on which way i turn and with what sort of attitude and ambitions.
i can go anywhere i want to but the problem is i don't know where i want to go.
i'm not lost or anything, i just don't know what i wanna be when i grow up.

what do you want to be right now?

I wanna be a lot of things, actually. I just don't know where to start.
I wanna be immortal.
That one I got down, though.
I just gotta keep writing. After all, writing makes me The Voice Of Creation.
And it will make me immortal some day.


where are you getting this language?

What do you mean?

the "voice of creation", wanting to be immortal, editing yourself... are you reading this somewhere?

nope. all me.
Actually, I'm getting a tattoo that has to do with The Voice Of Creation.

you'd be surprised how close what you're saying is to many thousand year old practices. it's quite entertaining.

Monday, May 23, 2011

I can't believe it's not butter.

"Free3 Wells Fargo MobileSM Banking4"

If you use three notations for five words, you're not communicating very efficiently. How about, fuck, I don't know... just "Free Banking" or maybe even just "Banking" and then, as soon as they enter the door, you could yell "Free Banking!"
You'd all get really good at it, too and every time I went to the bank, this orchestra of beautiful bankers will play me an ode to free banking.
No. No, instead I've got a PLATINUM DEBIT CARD.
Every time I look at the thing I want to vomit. Valid, Authorized, here is your PERSONAL NUMBER. Don't let anyone see it! Keep it hidden in your pants! Yes, I think we've all heard this before.

Mr. Clean

What are you going to practice today?

Cleaning room.
Yard work.
Helpfulness.
Diet.


On this path, there is no making it to LA. Step up.

The point where what you become, becomes part of you. I am the universe. There is no self. My god, I love cleaning.

Hermes

You start to ask about the petty stuff. Wow, that was real dumb. You start to look at how much you ACTUALLY do verses how much you say. You start to notice the vast failures that you roll across. You look at all that and you realize the sheer quantity of petty action. It's not just sometimes poor, it's always poor. I'm capable of doing better in every moment of every day. We start to drive just a little bit faster, watch a little more television, build up virtual worlds- mock replicas, we obsess about the small stuff; we give up everything to just dull it out that much more.

You open your eyes and brave the tundra before you. Struck like a dear in headlights over the plumes of dust in your face. Rendered retarded by the perfectness of it's awesome mechanisms. You realize that in this world, where you get to only by personal honesty, you can adequately gage your actions and correct them. I just realized that the volume I listen to my music terrifies me. It's the sensitivity, it's the feeling of being naked again. My nose is wet and cold, so are my fingers. These clothes are not particularly comfortable and my room is a mess. Most people I know live in this state of personal apathy and do nothing about it. There are many things in my life I've let go of- some I've missed. I let the dishes pile up and it pisses me off. The funny thing is that when I'm doing the dishes- the actual act of it, I rather enjoy myself. The last time I did them I was kind of hoping I had made more of a mess to clean. BUT! The very moment before I do them, I think I will never want to do that.

I'm terrified of putting my self out there to a new person. I thought I was so incredibly honest but I met someone I'm interested in and I found that I couldn't say this in person. Most people think it's a little much to start off with on a first date. I don't think a person deserves the best of you until they can take the worst. With that on my mind, I realize that a first date is always going to end in abject horror. If you can't be your worst, you also can't be your best because that is a tower supported by the ugly underwork. I haven't written anything in a while, I don't really know why. I thought it was becoming too familiar. I could hack away at these keys and lie to myself all day. I wrote something the other day in surprise on how little of my writing is honest. Once praised for my honesty it seems I got caught in kind of a plateau of just being mediocre.

A friend of mine wrote that I was "only half way there"

It seems like no matter how high I go, I'm always half way there. Every time I find a place to rest, my resting self tells me about how horrible the last experience was. Basically it is the left side of the brain communicating with the right side. It's funny that only now are they talking in science of the conversation between order and chaos. Equilibrium economics is an absolute joke. I laugh any time someone tells me they are an economic student. Look, our economics just went into the shitter. By the time they find something that actually works, you've had studied, for four years or more, all the ways that don't work. I mean, last I heard, they were still teaching macro and micro. They have no idea how to work a magnitude of scale- or even why one effects the other. American history is the one of a model airplane crashing into the ground after five minutes of flight. Sure, the fireball was larger than the others, but there are still folks burning in here.

Thoreau says "

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”


This is why having a practice really helps. If you try to engage in a spiritual quest without any real help, you'll have an experience in multiple disciplines and drift between them. True skills are honed over time and you can't reach mastery if you don't seriously take it up. 

That is what I'm trying to do. Get back on the horse. 






It's like so many people are stuck in the tar and the ones that sign up for clubs have these people rush over and help you. I've never found a club of people that I particularly enjoyed and so I couldn't get real help from any of them. Basically because I refused their help and I've decided to pull myself up. Thanks, but I got this. My friends lie to me about how I look or how I act because they are scared I will judge them critically in response instead of supporting them. It is the exact same complication as the prisoner's dilemma. Jesus, I've got a dictionary and a thesaurus (and I spelled it correctly the first time!) on friggin' speed dial. I just click a word twice to get it's meaning. Fantastic. I've really butchered my sense of self with this machine. 

You know, feeling crazy is a ... crazy feeling. I noticed, after thinking about the mechanisms that would drive one "insane" I realized that it's a cultural term that has absolutely nothing to do with the actual event, as I would imagine it. Socially crazy is anything beyond Rx, so do speak- beyond social barriers. Someone asked me today if I thought that they were crazy. I half considered if they wanted a formal (bullshit) answer or the "what's socially awkward" dance and ended with a "no, it's good."

That's why the mainstream is filled with people who socially police themselves and others to be "kind neighbors, hard workers, money earners, pleasant people"
What's funny is the Dharma basically says "I don't care about you. Forget about what you have, it's all broken and useless." and then it belches and walks away. It takes great determination to sit at that table. The balls to lay yourself out like that. I know you don't care! I'm going to sit down and make me a sandwich anyway! I know you think my feet are gross but your teeth aren't that good! We're this bunch of kindly disfigured souls bumbling around the blackberry bush. We dance around so long that we forget why we're dancing and so we miss the cosmic social cues and miss our turn to jump around to another place. 

And so, I've papa legba tattooed to my calf. Lord of Transition. 

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Something to get off my chest

Ok, I really hate organizing large bits of information in text like this but let's try to work backwards here.

Fluid intelligence helps you with things like problem solving, sorting things out while confused and pattern recognition while crystallized intelligence draws on previously formulated ideas (like the understanding of certain concepts or methods) and employs them.
People on the higher end of the autistic spectrum tend to be strong in fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence also allows for greater amounts and faster intake of information and helps create more crystallized intelligence.

dual n-back task (being presented with independent sequences of different kinds of stimuli), which helps build fluid intelligence, also develops higher density dopamine receptors in the cortex- which is interesting because!!!

Monoamine oxidase "MAO" (typically) works to break down dopamine. MAO inhibitors are a key ingredient in the oral consumption of DMT and 5-MeO-DMT for a hallucinogenic effect. (Don't let the hype fool you, DMT is produced endogenously in the body, but consult your local gardener before ingesting any MAOI's because some cannot be reversed- not that I advocate putting anything in your system). 


---


Blah, blah, blah... if you want the best high of your life, hack your brain and do so naturally. There are some simple daily exercises you can do to improve your performance and increase your happiness. Namely practicing non-action, mindfulness, selflessness, various meta cognitive tricks and a good workout at your local crossfit gym. 


/wordvomit

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

What spins my world

back squats, systemic emergence, metacognition, fresh laundry, nicknames, smiling in the face of adversity, laughter, jumping high, switches, early mornings, body language, reds doughnuts, sharp transitions, reasonable struggle, my height, fluid and crystallized intelligence, fringe culture, necessity, adaptation, reason, cooperation, righteous strength, drinking songs....