No leavesies!

Halden is a 75 acre complex consisting of many buildings. It opened in 2010 and received the Arnstein Arneberg Award for its interior design. It facilitates around 250 guests.

Each 110 square foot living unit contains a private bathroom, TV, desk, mini-fridge and a tall window for plenty of natural light.

There are more than a dozen common areas each with fully-equipped kitchen, dining area, couches and a video game system.

The site also offers such amenities as sports and gym facilities, jogging trails, a library (books, films and music), chapel, English lessons and other education programs, counselling and even a music studio with broadcast functions.

There is also a fully-featured chalet guesthouse where a tenant can entertain their entire family for a 24-hour visit.

Staff areas are small and spartan because staff spend most of their time forming a community with the residents. It’s like a small village with a balanced focus on living, working and recreation.

Hmm... Are you wondering if this might be… the world’s most liberal prison or something! Well, I assure you there are no weapons here. No watchtowers, barbed wire or electric fences, and the only surveillance cameras are outdoors.

There is however a very big wall around the place and guests are confined to their rooms at certain hours.

Yes, it is a prison, widely considered the most liberal. It’s in Norway, and it houses inmates of the most serious and dangerous kind as well as a bevy of drug offenders. And yes Norway is in Scandinavia, that magical land where they are always decades ahead of the rest of the messed-up world in terms of social intelligence.

I was first exposed to Halden Prison in a Michael Moore film. It has the feel of a Canadian half-way house (I have visited such places in volunteer roles), as if the convicted have skipped prison and gone straight to a parole circumstance but without unescorted leave privileges. Halden Prison shocks a lot of people because a lot of people really have little clue how to think critically, quite frankly. Some people assume that they are somehow innately superior to convicted criminals as opposed to privileged benefactors of advantageous environment, circumstance and/or mental health. And some people assume that criminals deserve all the punishment they can get without realizing quite how bad they actually have it or how badly it aggravates and harms society when we bend more toward revenge as opposed to rehabilitation. The revenge model, rarely so determinedly celebrated than in the United states of America where incarceration has become a self-propelling Big Fucking Profitable Business, creates such a chasm between the convicted and the non-convicted and such barriers to re-normalization, that the so-called “released” have almost no choice but to seek the aid of their criminal associates whom the justice system has so eagerly afforded them, thus increasing crime rates.

But my god, how dreary I am of explaining this shit. I once worked in a Community Corrections Centre (a step between prison and half-way houses) and I can absolutely assure you that a slight majority of guards at this particular shit-hole were far more despicable human scum than most of the tenants. I would sometimes stare at certain coworkers in awe thinking I can’t believe you’re on this side of the glass.

To be fair there were some most-excellent human beings among the guards as well, and they have remained good friends.

The last time I checked: In a list of 223 nations Canada ranked around 85th best in terms of incarceration rate at around .107%. That’s about 32,000 inmates. Nothing to celebrate.

At all.

I think the nation of Liechtenstein had two at the time. Two whole inmates! I mean, it’s a tiny nation, sure. But two! Perhaps they’re simply the nicest people ever or maybe all their convicts are quietly murdered after a couple nights. I don’t know.

India was ranked about 12th best with around .03%

Norway, you ask? Around 30th best at .06%

The USA ranks a distant dead last with a staggering .655% or more than two million inmates. I’m pretty sure they are going about things the Wrongest Way Possible.

I saw how badly the Community Corrections Centre residents were treated in subtle terms; the environment, the policies, the vampiric management style (not so much the way they were spoken to in normal moments necessarily) and I started to understand how challenging it was for convicts to embrace rehabilitation efforts with sincerity. I could see how easy it would be to fall back on the criminal community for support; the community which gave them more respect quite frankly. The community which was pushed together by society’s determination to marginalize them. When I saw this I knew I had to volunteer. I knew how much better our helping hands had to be, than the alternative, in order to win them over to our side, and to the long hard road to attain a normalized life again despite all the barriers, many of them permanent.

A co-volunteer (and self-starting organizer) in this community, who once started out a brief inmate himself for frankly preposterous reasons, is one of my favourite people ever. I call him the Noble Punster. His life is now deeply dedicated to helping ex-convicts reach their potential in every way possible including spiritually, where applicable.

I had hardly known him on the occasion he asked me what I needed in order to get out of the very difficult circumstances life had squeezed me into at the time.

“Honestly,” I said. “I need seven hundred dollars for car repairs. I don’t know where I can get it.”

He wrote me the cheque on the spot, and was eternally gracious while it took me a year and a half to pay it off.

And today, for N day he requested:

Norwegian prisons

Victimhood

I worked, by contract, in the criminal justice system for a few years and now I work, by contract, for a corporation which commits terrible crimes daily but they are crimes that are not detailed in the criminal justice system of this nation because they are crimes which injure everyone and everything – BUT – those of the injuries which are inflicted on you and me and the rest of Western society are delayed enough that in our collective insanity we can easily ignore them – or – for most people I suspect, remain consciously unaware of them.

I still do volunteer work in the criminal justice community and I don’t think of myself as being any better than the murderers and child rapists I have worked with, And I don’t mean that in the bullshit phony way that many others might delight in saying. I am in fact no better. I’ve never directly killed a human being nor had sexual contact with a child and I’m pretty damn confident that I will never do either of those things. These are not my areas of weakness. There is no appeal.

However I regularly inflict death and violence upon the Earth and its mammals and even upon human beings who don’t live around here. I do it all the time. Daily. I do it when I eat many of the things I eat. I do it when I buy a new laptop. I do it when I fill the tank with gas. I am an extremely harmful person. I know this with perfect clarity on my best days and on those best days I also reflect upon my total insanity of the previous days wherein my instincts had been duping my consciousness or when I’d been rationalizing my way to a benign self image which is bullshit.

I am no saint. I was not made “in His own image” and neither was anyone else. Humans are beasts the same as wolves and trees and mosquitoes and precisely like wolves and trees and mosquitoes, just about everything we do satisfies our instinctive survival instincts which, besides food and sex and protection, has evolved very largely to manifest as survival within the society which equals REPUTATION, which often includes MONEY (for money is simply a ledger of reputation). Just like the wolf, tree or mosquito, nearly everything we do is bent on our own needs at the expense of any other species. Wolves, trees and mosquitoes – and bunny rabbits and petunias are all, if you open your eyes and pay attention – entirely evil. They kill in order to live. Just like us. And just like the peacock’s tail and many other phenomena of evolution, we have our own unlikely elaborate errant evolutionary feature. It is in the human mind and it encompasses our cleverness, our perversely social infatuation and our illusion of consciousness.

When I keep that in mind I look around at all the nice things we are doing on the surface and it’s very easy to realize that these nice things do not make us angels; do not make us benevolent; do not make us innocent and certainly don’t make us better than murderers and rapists except within a childish viewpoint. Because all the nice things we do reward our vicious survival instincts. They improve our reputation. Nice deeds that we do, feed our own greed.

Now – does every single nice thing we do necessarily come solely from selfish desire or from the master instinctive mind’s need to fool our own consciousness (for we have to fool ourselves in order to effectively fool others)? I won’t suggest that. I like to imagine otherwise but the fact is, it is very simple to map all our good deeds to greedy beastly motives and pretty much impossible to prove otherwise…

BUT…!

So what?

I’m not trying to say that we are all terrible. Oh, I felt that way for a while, years ago. I thought we were all devils. All Satan. Satans in drag as gods. And for the record I suspect that the God mythology stems from that idea; that originally this personification of the source of the universe was set up like that: that Satan is the creator and God is his disguise. But that doesn’t matter. And I’m not here to slag religion today, even though it has perpetrated two of the primary nails in the coffin of humanity – the twin omnipresent fatal ideas – and I mean fatal to our species, literally: one, that we were made in his own image and two, that Earth is not heaven, that some improved heaven resides somewhere else. This is why humans do not understand that we are killers – we are killing machines above all else and why we don’t understand that Earth is the paradise and that we are mercilessly killing it and there is very little time remaining. By Earth I really mean the biosphere, not the crust, mantle, core and all the other bits and pieces. I mean the forests, wetlands and top soil and water systems and air and underground filtration – all of which we have massively crippled or destroyed in a tiny infinitesimal blip of time by any real (universal) perspective or context outside the illusion of our puny lifespans.

Look – all of this is natural. This is the natural state of humanity. It’s nothing to cry or rage about.

And it is okay to wake up from our insanity. It is okay to face up to the beasts that we are. We have every opportunity to evolve. We can close the gap between instinct and consciousness; between the devil and angel if you prefer. I have reliably witnessed this functionality. We humans did not ask for this circumstance. We were born into it without choice. We did not ask for this illusion of consciousness which is – in a sense – an evolutionary precursor to genuine consciousness. We learned to kill to survive because we had to. We are beautiful for this opportunity to become the first species of harmony. We are beautiful for this terrible struggle that we must endure. We are beautiful for our potential and for the suffering we inflict upon our selves.

I am human and I am okay with that. I am not a single entity. I know that. There is a beast in me and there is a weak pitiful beautiful consciousness as well. And when I look around I don’t see single human creatures. When I look at you I see two of you. It has become my normal everyday perception. Unfortunately when I talk to you I must talk to both of you at the same time and that makes things tricky and I confess, I don’t often treat that challenge with utmost diligence. Generally I am not keeping track of what I want each of you to hear; you and your evil twin! Creeped out? Still want to do lunch?

So this piece (if anyone is still reading it) was not planned in any way. It’s strictly a stream-of-consciousness ramble which was intended for one reason only:

I have many associates who open up to me and there is one who is trying to get together with me, largely to express something which they find terrible to contemplate; a suffering. A couple hints have been dropped and I am going out on a limb and I am suspecting that some kind of molestation has been brought to light. I am going to guess a child molestation which has severed – or potentially severed – close relationships. And while it can be very difficult for me to express certain ideas to someone who is looking to me for comfort, because they may not want to accept them and may be looking for other comforts which I regard as artificial comforts, and I may not play the blame game to their liking, I am safe in ruminating here in this anonymous space.

And to anyone who is watching their family break apart because someone they loved has been revealed a victim and another revealed a monster and just can’t wrap their head around it and just doesn’t know what to do or who to support in what way…

The answer, by my accounting, is not difficult to conceive:

You forgive because forgiveness is the only sane option. To forgive is to confess that what has happened was inevitable. All of causality is connected. All happenings are inevitable. There is no logic with which to escape this certainty.

You forgive the conscious entity in the perpetrator. It was the beast which was compelled to act, not the conscious person whom you loved and whom you can still love if you are strong enough; if you understand enough; if you are on board with these understandings enough.

You forgive but that forgiveness is not with impunity. You forgive but you do not forget. You accept that there must be consequences for the instinctive presence whose survival mechanisms dictated the act (probably multiple acts) while fooling the consciousness or rationalizing. For the sake of community safety and the victim’s well-being, there must be consequences. Those consequences could ideally take many forms but for most of us we don’t have the opportunity to manufacture ideal justice and we must trust the police and courts and prison system – as horrifically flawed as they are – to do the best they can.

You love and support the conscious perpetrator if you are strong enough – perhaps after a required hiatus from them – or else you tell them honestly, “I wish I could support you but I am not strong enough. I am only strong enough to try to support the victim if I can. If I grow in strength in the future, then I will return to you. For now I must abandon you for my own well being.”

You also have to support yourself by understanding the above ideas and remembering that we are all molesters; we are all killers; we all leave victims in our wake: the Earth (our only conduit to the survival of our children and descendants), the animals, the people of poor countries whom our masters have brutally exploited through the Western imperialism which gives us our impossible cars and furnaces and iPhones which we gladly accept; blindly or deviously or otherwise.

You support yourself by suppressing the urge to see yourself as a collateral victim.

You support yourself by looking at the victim and remembering that we are all victims and we all create victims and that what has happened to your beloved is not outside the normal mode of life. We all live by creating victims and for all of us our time comes when we are victimized; eventually to the extent of our death.

You support yourself by looking beyond the instinctive desire to see the victim as a tragic aberration though your instincts push you to see it that way. What has happened is essentially normal. (Do not think that this means that I suggest throwing in the towel. It can be our purpose in life to improve; to seek harmony, to reduce victimization of all sorts. We must endeavor to improve; of course.)

Unfortunately it is hard for me to suggest how to support the victim. The victim will have heightened instinctive survival forces working on her – or him. The ideal support is to absorb the above understandings but every victim will be in a different place psychologically and not ready for most of the above material. But ideally I would want to work toward those concepts as gently and patiently and slowly as required. Unfortunately it might be often best in the short term to trust the psychology community for help though that is far from ideal in terms of getting at the one true comfort in life; the comfort of truth; of genuine reality. Psychology will not rescue anyone from the Matrix but often they can do a decent job of navigating the Matrix.

The most valuable thing probably, for a victim to understand is that the victimization happened in the past and the past does not exist. The acts happened to a person who existed in the past who is no longer “you.” The only reason we seem eternally harmed by victimization is because we internally choose to. Our instinctive ego chooses not to let go of it because the pain of victimization becomes our identity and we cannot conceive of letting go of our identity – because we are all in the business of manufacturing identity instead of being real; a bi-product of the survival-by-reputation-and-denial game which the instinct forces upon the consciousness.

I suppose it is probably in actions that we can most-accessibly help victims: simply doing the things that demonstrate they are loved and without condition. But other than the pursuit of true consciousness and the resulting enlightenment which dispels the spectres of lasting pain and victimhood, which is evidently rare to achieve, the area of victim recovery is not my area of privilege; of strongest insight.

Me, you, your kids and dinosaurs

Well… here’s another blast of pessimism sure to scare away more readers! Good luck!

I am sometimes a little saddened by the eternal optimism of dear friends who are smarter than they allow themselves to be. Optimism that is ultimately disastrous as it results in hope, inaction and capitulation in the face of looming disaster. It is so painfully rare to meet someone who comes across as mentally unfettered, capable of perfectly clear thinking (a lot to ask, I know!) But people do not realize what impenetrable walls are built from everything we invest in (and I don’t pretend to have escaped that entirely). Career, reputation, wealth, property, marriage. Even children. Your children are a detriment to your rationality! The walls that are built in the process of parenthood will not allow you certain vantages; to fully entertain certain possibilities, because they are too threatening to that most dear. No matter the circumstances, no matter the evidence, the all-powerful ego that is a stranger to you but yet is the master you and tied ferociously to your children, will simply not allow the conscious you to open up to the possibility, for instance, that your children might have no future. It will cherry-pick arbitrary favorable evidence that suggests, for instance: that people are basically decent, so how wrong can we actually go?

My courageous period – and the only such period of my life (so far), culminated when I was sitting all evening in front of my desktop computer with a blank MS word document staring back at me and for the second night in a row, trying to understand the question that I was trying to ask myself. “How decent am I really? Am I evil?”

I finally came to understand the question and I strongly suspected that if I took one step further, that there would be no going back (I still get the piss-shivers every time I watch The Matrix blue pill-red pill scene). And there it occurred: my singular moment of triumph in this life:

“Yes. I am evil.”

I viciously turned myself inside out and counted the ways.

I cannot fully recall what the next few days were like. I recall I was deeply withdrawn, deeply horrified and strangely exhilarated to find myself in an alien place I would never have imagined existed. God knows what would have become of me if a sort-of final piece of the puzzle kind of event had not fallen into my hands some time later. It was Richard Dawkins’ suggestion of the selfish gene. Regardless the accuracy of that specific scientific testimony, it pointed me directly down the path I needed as I began discovering first-hand the evil inherent in every living thing and the original necessity for it and the actual beauty and miracle of our circumstance! But I digress!

I am always surrounded by evil unrecognized by the captive consciousness of the doer (myself included). Always. Every day. And mostly – on my good days – I do not dwell on the beastly half of the doer but love the self-victimized consciousness instead.

And I know some things you might say. Perhaps: No! I am not evil. I am good. I love my spouse even though he or she is such an asshole sometimes! And I love my kids even though they torment me! I buy fancy car seats for their safety and a big safe automobile for us and I buy us a big house and plenty of heat to keep them warm and I buy them the latest gadget so that I can be attached to them at any given moment and more of the latest gadgets so that their friends won’t think little of them (because their reputation equals my reputation equals my ego which is everything). Yes I love them and that love is magical and you people without kids – you will never know this magic!

But oddly there are those of us who have no kids and yet love your kids in a different way even if we barely know them, and, who even love your kids’ kids though they may yet be born.

I hope you won’t get me wrong. Some of my favorite people in the world are wonderful parents who I admire and I’m sure parenthood feels utterly amazing at times. I am regretful at times to not have experienced it in the direct way which many of you have, but that parental love is not enough!

Building a life around loving your kids so that they can build lives around loving their kids so that they will love theirs… no matter how good that feels it is a circular loop. It is not progress. It is not evolution. It is not enough to justify what you do and what you choose not to see! That circular formula will come to a crashing demise if our love for our kids and our desperation for (inevitably artificial) stability manifests itself in our killing the biosphere, in part directly and in part by sitting back in hope and inaction while the great powers around us – the industrial corporations and their politicians and their media and the so-called “environmental organizations” which they have quietly usurped and tamed and made into industry-compatible profit machines, entertain us and mollify us with their bunting and their elections and their promises which never come true and make us think that everything might just be okay because there supposedly is a battle going on between political parties and supposedly a battle going on between greens and industry and there is nothing you can do – we got it covered. There is a reason the promises don’t come true. These battles are theatre and the electoral changes in government become an excuse to exorcise the promises of the prior reign.

No civilization on planet Earth has ever had the remotest possibility of surviving its own flawed unsustainable architecture except for hunter-gatherer societies (not to suggest that nothing else is possible – I don’t know). But everything else has inexorably destroyed itself like a dumb-ass frog in a slowly boiling pot. And now we have the mother of all civilizations – the global industrial-military civilization, doing the very exact precise same thing, with the entire planet at stake and nowhere else for us to go. And here we are just farting around in the bubbles while the elite imperialists of the world, steeped in obscene wealth (mostly blossomed from old criminal origins abetted by politicians), love their children by amassing the wealth, power and privilege to eventually put them on whatever small ark of humanity or other limited eco-fix that technology might hopefully avail them at the eleventh hour.

If some version of the internet (and people) survive into the next age, will your great grandchildren look you up on the McFacebook Archives to see how you participated in the Great Eco-Struggle or the Global Market Meltdown of the 21^st century? And interpret that you spent it taking selfies and giggling at cats? Would you be okay with that?

Let us remember that it’s easy to love our kids; in fact unavoidable. It’s in our genes. It’s a biological imperative. The stupidest most pig-ignorant beer-swilling party-time hicks in the world – you know – the ones sticking firecrackers up their ass for youtube fame… love their kids. Even wolves and weasels love their kids.

Even dinosaurs loved their kids.

Hey, I’m out here! Can you see me?

When I started opening up to certain people about how I’d changed in my perceptions of things, it was very difficult. So much of the material was so uncommon and required so much explanation. It was hard to hold all of the relevant factors mentally at hand. Communication requires common experience and uncommon experiences demand skill and tenacity to relate effectively. I gave people a lot of wrong impressions I think. I believe my closest friendships were harmed in the process. Skepticism is another barrier perhaps though generally a very useful thing. Humans are generally very bad at knowing who to trust and who not to. Very bad. We constantly nurture our ability to rationalize while neglecting our capacity for logic.

With practice, I became better at explaining myself. But as time goes on I think I’m getting worse again and I think it’s because I am losing track of the gap between my perceptions and the apparently normal ones. I’m losing memory of how I once was; how I once thought, and thus where my “audience” might be at. Where does common dogma end and the need for explanations start? These points are slow to show up on my radar these days. Without that mental mapping going on, conversations become unhinged. We don’t get what the other is saying. We just think we do.

The other day I wrote briefly about my alienation from the idea of being “Canadian” and yet I seemed not to have any idea how to explain that because I had no recollection of why some people do feel Canadian. Even at this moment nothing is coming to mind. Why do people feel that they’re Canadian? I suppose if I concentrated I’d figure all that stuff out again; what I regard as the fictions of nationalism, but in a verbal conversation there are no time-outs for figuring out.

I recently referenced my disassociation with “society” and I’m sure in hindsight that it was not understood.

I am physically present in society, yes. And I am largely participating in the accounting of society. I reap many benefits from society: physical protection, physical comfort, food, medicine, luxurious privileges etc.

But mostly society is a set of ideas or constructs which are not grounded in any physical fact but yet we subscribe to them as if they are. Some of them are completely ludicrous if you can free your mind from your instinctive desires and actually look at them objectively. All of the great structures of our society that deal in power and information are in essence unified in their purposes and employ pyramid schemes and slave models, blanket us in distraction, nurture stupidity and inhibit creative thinking while disguising all of it with bait that hooks our instinctive needs.

I don’t approve of the ruling structures of our society and I do not participate in them with my mind the way that most people seem to. I do not subscribe to the ideas and thus when I hear the most normal of conversations that go on by the millions every day, mired in the common perceptions spun by political, religious, corporate, pop-culture, media and formal education cultures, they seem completely insane to me.

I made good money and had a lot of laughs working in Information Technology for a marketing and merchandising company where everything looked shiny and happy on the surface and where the worst of evils were buried under layers and layers of deceit.

I had financial security which is what everyone thinks is the key to happiness. And don’t bother trying to deny it because I know you think that you don’t think that, but deep inside you sure as hell do. Your every damn behaviour gives you away. Our whole society revolves around money; especially the things that look like they don't.

I gave up the financial security, traded it for a crappy part-time security guard wage so that I could devote my life to work that I believed people needed, work that runs against society, work that society will not pay me for. That is a big reason I feel I am in essence outside of society. Of course it would be easier to sell that idea if I were far more productive and actually making an impact with these pursuits.

Yes, I was able to achieve one great thing in life and it was the courage to face myself for real. It was the courage to contemplate that Satan himself might be standing behind a door and I could either open it or run away and I fucking opened it. It was fucking terrifying and I did it because I was somehow addicted to the pursuit of truth. It was like a drug. That achievement knocked all kinds of walls down. It destroyed all the investments I’d ever made in the pursuits of wealth and toys and reputation and suddenly I was free to examine myself and people and society and the universe without any care for what I wanted to be true. I no longer needed any particular things to be true. If I could accept being the devil I could accept anything. It was a thrilling escape to access such an unimagined power of objectivity. And so I can perceive society from outside of it instead of from inside of it where I was previously blinded by the walls of investment; by instinctive need; by survival/domination instinct.

That is one way in which I operate outside of society. Physically I am inside society as a kind of prisoner-with-benefits, while mentally I perceive it from the outside. Idealistically I am outside of society because I would tear it all down in a heartbeat, had I the power (and not entirely without a rebuilding plan). And financially… (and finances is what it’s all about) I generally feel I am outside, because I gave up my financial interests so to spend my time and energy on something noble for which I have no intention or likelihood of financially profiting from (plus fairly concrete charitable plans just in case).

What do I sound like when I talk like this? Do I sound like I’m completely full of shit? I wouldn’t blame you if you assumed so. Do I sound elitist, like I think I’m better than everyone else? I hope not. I'm better at some of this stuff than other people because this is what I work at - at the expense of other things in my life which I neglect and so am not good at. I have my flaws for sure. In some ways I am a cheater and a hypocrite; I know. I’m aware of that. Sometimes I think about trying to defeat certain flaws; trying to set the angel in me fully free. But mostly I’m afraid that such an angel would just float around and not be able to relate to anyone.

I want us all to set our angels free.

Happiness

Happiness is a neat idea. In a society where reputation is everything - even money is just a ledger of reputation if you think about it - and people are conditioned to judge themselves through the eye of the other instead of looking inward, I think a lot of people are playing a game. They believe themselves happy as long as they are succeeding in selling the image that they are happy.

I think a lot of people who kind of know they're not happy are at least content to interpret they're on a path to happiness or are at least fighting to get on that path. Of course the joke's on them if the things this society holds dear turn out to be charades.

I know I feel happy when I put my arms around someone beautiful - whether beautiful (by my appraisal) inwardly or outwardly or both. I know I'm happy with a steak on my plate and red wine in my glass; happier still when they get in my mouth - as long as I manage not to think of the cow, that is, otherwise I feel the guilt I deserve. And that's not bragging. The sinner who knows better is the worst sinner.

But there are things that trump happiness and here it gets hard to explain. Because when I start talking about freedom, harmony, peace and joy - that's where I imagine people stop listening. Because it sounds like religion or it sounds like people selling snake oil or it sounds like I'm deluded. But there are things I know well and I really wish more people would know more of them along with me.

Earth is a paradise and humans are magnificent with the rare (or unique) ability to evolve beyond the natural death-state of the universe. That alone gives us incredible joy which I experience regularly. But that miraculous evolution depends on the power of a healthy consciousness; one not fooled by the instinctive mind, and that is so very hard to find. Because consciousness is a new evolution. It's in its infancy by universal standards. It's power is a baby-power but we don't realize that. Because our conscious self is the only self we know, it feels like everything to us. It is our totality, and this illusion - of our baby consciousness being a master brain - is the chief illusion which stems all others. And all these illusions separate us from the joy of our existence. They hold us prisoner. We don't know ourselves. Our master brain is a stranger to us and we barely know it exists. Our master brain can not trust our baby consciousness by handing over the steering wheel. Our master brain can not trust our baby consciousness to adhere to our all-powerful survival instincts which almost all normal human activity can be easily logically mapped to.

I had to be courageous and patient and strong (qualities not easy for me to access) for a long time in order to decipher the truth of myself and to grow comfortable with it, and the rewards are magnificent. My master brain has witnessed the intentional (far from perfect or complete) evolution of my consciousness and has surrendered some degree of control.  Those things we call sins - the simple manifestations of survival (domination) instinct have been diminished to varying degrees. One of them obviously remains strong unfortunately (gluttony - its no secret) and another remains somewhat relevant though diminished (lust if you must know) and I have little doubt I might defeat them if I were to dedicate enough effort to it but... I'm not ready and may never be. That's a subject for another time.

As killer instincts are diminished, beautiful things happen. Illusions fall apart and reality is much more graspable and this reality - lo and behold - is the paradise. And it's so transparent how some religions refer to it and it really is a lovely joke how these religions over the centuries have misguidedly strayed from whatever beautiful poetic enlightenment either inspired them or was manipulated by them to their ends (the former I hope) and painted this paradise of reality as some place in the clouds you go to after you die. It is such a sad insanity really. To think you must die to find paradise when in fact  it is a mental journey you must take, one which in fact feels like a rebirth. The memory of my former self is growing more alien to me all the time.

When illusions fall the societal ills that are born of illusions fall with them:

depression
lonesomeness
embarrassment
jealousy
anger
guilt
anxiety
sadness
insult
suspicion (not skepticism)
betrayal
impatience...

I know there are many more on the list though they don't come immediately to mind - probably because I haven't experienced them, at all or but in small measure, for a long time now.

The result is freedom in many forms: freedom from so many ills and from circumstances dictating one's feelings. The result is joy. The result is clarity and strength of mind and desire for (and easy access to) integrity, honesty and generosity. The result is death to the eye of the other; falling out of the reputation game and being motivated only by your own courageous examination of yourself.

The result for me is lovingness; loving motivation instead of selfish motivation. The hitch is - will lovingness be the result for anyone who follows a similar path? That I can't be sure of just now. I don't even have a theory currently - how to figure that out. It isn't really on my to-do list.

There was a time in my life - years - where I suffered so much of these usual societal ills, which people sadly pass off as the normal (okay), unavoidable (wrong) side-effects of living, that I would routinely feel unease; a mild foreboding during solitary moments - usually when driving, and sometimes this unease would come over me in a vague way and I would have to poke around in my head for a moment to remember what thing or things were going on to feel bad about. And sometimes there was nothing bad going on and I would realize that I was only feeling vaguely bad out of habit: sad but a relief.

In more recent times I would find myself driving and forgetting why I felt so happy; an anticipation, and searching my brain, I would realize that there was nothing special going on to be delighted about; that it was just my habit to feel good. A very happy realization each occasion and not a disappointment!

These days I'm much accustomed to feeling good. It never surprises me anymore. I do still feel a full range of emotions but many of them are confined to moments of empathy. I will feel your sadness or your anger or your anxiety because my empathy touches you at your state of perception; not my own.

And I know that there are opportunities for me to feel better still. If I could rectify my self-inflicted health issues, sleep issues, energy level issues and thus productivity issues, I could accomplish more usefulness.

And maybe even evolve a little more: knock those remaining "sins" down a little.

Can't wait for the next bash?

Interesting the dominant recreation of our society; a sport really. This endless tournament where the prize is reputation. Points are scored by claiming opinions; by seeming knowledgeable. The more opinions the better and the less thought-out they are, the better - for they are established quicker thus we collect more. More and more nuggets of fool's gold which we treat as real gold, for fool's gold is just as valuable when the buyer doesn't know the difference.

But oh, how much quicker; how easier it is to dismiss those people and things which we yet have no fondness for, then to have to explain why you are fond of those which you are - so dominant are the instinctual criteria of which our consciousness is not fully informed.

So why give anything a second chance? With such a massive wealth of humans and their endeavors available to explore in this troublesomely uninhibited global marketplace, why waste more than a minute on any one thing? So much swifter to write stuff off when the first possible connection fails. Throw it on the scoreboard. Score another point. Appear to climb the ladder by throwing down those around you.

On the balance: A sea of negativity. Everyone's a jerk for one reason; everyone a bastard for another. Every book, film and song and every creator sucks for one lonely little reason or another.

"I hate Blues...", I heard today.

Ah, but you've never witnessed the raw, honest, solid rhythyms of the Madd Scientists singing themselves hoarse for love; not money, have you? And what else haven't you heard?

"Oh, I can't stand R&B," says he who's never heard the creative explorations and fuzions of the open-hearted "The Show" while they still believed in their dreams. And what else has he not heard?

"...that Newfie kitchen fiddle music..."

But what about Quagmyre? That delicate frenzy of fiddle precision, jumping and popping with more electricity than a lightning storm. Fit that into your kitchen with a hundred more East coast bands you've never heard.

Conversations not mired in pointless negativity are the exception and so rare. Well, I've long been painfully bored with the game. It's far too easy. As interesting and challenging as Tic-Tac-Toe. Whoever you are: It's long past time I confess: I do not give a damn what things you don't like. Why won't you tell me what you like instead?

Why won't you tell me about the song that makes you have to get up and dance despite your usual self-consciousness? How about the songs you can't help but sing in the shower? What music was on the radio when you lost your cherry in the back-seat of a car and how do you feel when you hear it now? What song was playing at your wedding? What band's music do you get lost in when you listen by headphones in the dark with a joint or a six-pack? What songs remind you of you; remind you of who you used to be; remind you of who you once wanted to be?

What songs make you cry?

How about we try to cut back on the bullshit, and I mean bullshit in its most primary meanings; claims both counterfeit and trivial. Why don't we lose the bullshit and share a little more life instead? And be a little more alive?



"The only way to win is not to play."
- Joshua (Film: Wargames)
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