Ego.

As I sit here on my front porch, I feel like I am misunderstood.

For much of my life, my mind has been less than an open door.  It could be more accurately likened to an open tank; one from which any person could add to or take from as they pleased.

That tank is locked and covered now.  It’s amusing to see the reactions on people’s faces when they go to pour their ideas into my head, only to see them splash and drip all down the sides of my smiling, youthful face.  Looks of anger, surprise, and animal fear replace the former looks of control and authority they mistakenly thought they possessed, and I realize (not without some pleasure of my own) that fucking with my mind has begun to fuck with theirs.

It’s easy to miss the point at which a child no longer needs someone to tell them what to do and why to do it, or, in other words, when a child becomes an adult (in mind).

I guess I’m writing this to let the people know I’ve passed that point.  My mind is a closed door.  Good luck fucking with it.

Nowhere, Somewhere.

It’s been a while since I’ve written much of anything about myself.  This is partly because I’ve been dramatically changing in the past few months, and partly because I’ve not had time.  My beliefs, ideals, and lifestyle have been so dynamic, in fact, that up until this point I really wouldn’t have known what to say about myself even if I had tried.  It hasn’t been until now that I’m finally starting to realize where this ship was headed to begin with.  Whether or not I’ve caught sight of land is to be decided sometime sooner or later.

Let me begin my story with a quote which seems to me to be the best description of what I’ve been feeling in recent weeks that I’ve yet been able to find.

I slipped out of time altogether into eternity.  I felt myself in the presence of some tremendous influence for good or evil.  I felt as though I had been born–I don’t know whether you know what I mean.  I can’t help it, but I can’t put in any different.

It’s like this:  nothing had ever happened to me in my life before.  You know how it is when you come out of ether or nitrous oxide at the dentist’s–you come back to somewhere, a familiar somewhere; but the place from which you have come is nowhere, and yet you have been there.

That is what happened to me.

-From The Diary of a Drug Fiend by Aleister Crowley

It’s difficult when one realizes that the life they have lived up until that point is not their own.  The first instinct for many is to hide these realizations; to mark them up as hallucinations which are merely the product of a brain falsely accused and undeservingly weighed down with much more than one thinks it can handle.

Certainly this can be the case.  But it was not my case.

What I so long interpreted as childlike whines from a mind just trying to ease itself of stress and over-encumbrance were really none of these things.  I have since come to understand that I was really just deceiving myself.  I was scared to think that the things I had been living for my entire life were not really for me.  I was scared to think of what might become of me were I to follow the ghosts which haunted me in my sleep.

These ghosts were created in my head.  Everything we sense, whether asleep or awake, is not real.  Our brains are middlemen, taking what is real and delivering us their own interpretations of those realities.  I knew I was not in my element, but at the same time I didn’t want to.

Trying to force myself to be someone I wasn’t was a nightmare.  A very lucid nightmare.

I decided that I would live two lives at once.  In one life, I would be the nice, diligent, Christian boy that everyone knew (and, unfortunately, loved) and in the other I would be the drifting, confused, unbelieving druggy that nobody knew (and, unfortunately, would one day hate).

This worked OK at first.  But my mind was neither built for compromise, nor for lying (except to myself).  This fell apart within weeks.  It was at this point I was forced to make a final decision.  I had been dreading this decision for months.  Behind one door lied a safe, prosperous, successful life surrounded by many of the same.  These same people would look at me and say, “There is a happy person.”  But in reality, this would be a lie.  Behind the second door lied a chaotic mess of drugs, sex, and questions of existence, all strewn about in the most random fashion one could imagine, and for absolutely no reason at all.

I sat awake all night.

The next night, I walked through the second door, which happened to be the front door of my house.  The chaotic mess of confusion and random events just so happened to be the world right outside of that door.

I felt at home without a home.  For the past few weeks I’ve been around.  I don’t where I’ll end up each day.  Each day is a new adventure.  A new day means new people.  A new day means new experiences.

I don’t apologize for doing what I feel I have to do.  If you’re shocked, then be shocked.

My life, not yours.

As It Is.

And so then there’s a silence – and this is a deeper level of meditation – and in that silence, you suddenly begin to see the world as it is.  You don’t see any past, and you don’t see any future.  You don’t see any difference between yourself and the rest of it.  That’s just an idea.  You can’t put your hand on the difference between myself and you.  You can’t blow it, you can’t bounce it, you can’t pull it, it’s just an idea.  You can’t find any material body, because material body is an idea; so is spiritual body.  This is somebody’s philosophical notions.  See, reality isn’t material – that’s an idea.  Reality isn’t spiritual – that’s an idea.  Reality is [clap].  So, we find, if I’ve got to put it back into words, that we live in an eternal now.  You’ve got all the time in the world, because you’ve got all the time there is, which is now.

. . .

And then, we get this strange feeling that we have never had in our lives – except occasionally by accident, some people get a glimpse – that we are no longer this ‘poor little stranger, and afraid, in a world it never made’, but that you are this Universe, and you are creating it at every moment.  Because you see, it starts now.  It didn’t begin in the past.  There was no past.  If the Universe began in the past, when that happened it was now.  But it’s still now.  And the Universe is still beginning now, and it’s trailing off like the wake of a ship from now.  And as that wake of the ship fades out, so does the past.  – Alan Watts

I haven’t updated for a bit.  I’ve been busy, not so much with doing but with feeling, thinking, being.  Not much has happened recently, save the fact that I am slowly learning to be at peace with the fact that in all probability, I will never understand anything.  The bitterness I felt at first towards such a notion is gradually draining from my mind.  It’s such a tragic waste of time to continue trying to live one’s life according to the rules it knows are just feeble attempts at trying to make itself more divine than it really is, and all for comforts sake.  It’s no more practical to do this than it is to try and warm yourself by imagining you are wrapped in a blanket, when really there isn’t anything around you at all.  I’m better off simply learning to live in a world where not much will ever be known.  The negative feelings go away eventually.

The just man has no mind to seek happiness

Heaven therefore

Because of this mindlessness

Opens its inmost heart

The bad man busies himself

With avoiding misfortunes

Heaven therefore

Confounds him for this desire

How unsearchable are the ways of heaven

How useless the wisdom of men

- Koji Tse, Ts’ai-ken T’an (1624)

Besvær.

The power of the human mind astounds me.  The most beautiful thing about it is that for tens of thousands of years, it still remains unable to understand itself; its boundaries or its lack of them.

I’ve been struck with many big and interesting thoughts recently.

One example:  Is a line a circle?  Both are infinite in the fact that they have no beginning or end, but they also differ in their infinite nature.  How can there be two kinds of infinity?  And if there can’t be two different kinds, then are a circle and line the same?  If so, where does time fit into all of this?

This is one I’m particularly fond of:  What are the elements of pleasure?  What are the elements of happiness?  How enjoyable is a novel with no plot, a book with no problems to solve, a book with no conflict?  Not enjoyable at all.  In the same vein, how enjoyable is a world without pain, a world without problems to solve, a world without conflict?  In other words, is the perfect world one where all the problems have been solved, or is it the opposite?

What is sex, what are drugs, what is reading, what is writing, what is eating, what is drinking, what is learning?  These things we derive pleasure from, what are they all but a series of escapes from and solutions to the problems which surround us every day?

I don’t know what I would do in a world where questions, conflicts, and problems were a thing of the past.

Begrunnelser.

Why do people smile when they think of dying?  Why do people walk around, living their insignificant little lives, making decisions that do little to effect anyone’s well-being but their own, with some silly hope that after they take their last breath they’ll find themselves in some magical, happy place where pain and heartache no longer exist?  Why do people have any reason to believe that when they die, anything will happen?

I guess it makes one happy to believe that when they die they won’t be engulfed and suffocated by an infinite, black nothing.

All the sudden Grandma looked so terrified.  I didn’t know what to do.  She grabbed my hand and told me she didn’t want to go.  She looked so scared.  So I said, ‘Well, can you see God, or Heaven, or a light, or anything?’

What did she say?

‘No.  There’s nothing.’

Words.

Slightly off balance as I sit in the air, blatantly barging in on spidery, wiry words in transit…

This is what I hear from the architecture student sitting six feet from me:

“Writing is a last resort, really. All the writers I know ended up writing because they found out it was the only thing they could do halfway decent.”

If I possessed the power and means to manage myself under such intense instances of conflicting consciences, I would have waltzed right up to her fair figure and decidedly dismantled her preposterous proposition. But such is not the case.

Instead, I contented myself with reflecting on how little the works of James Hoban, Louis le Vau, or Baccio Pontielli contributed to outcome of history as opposed to the literary monuments of Homer, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Dante, Hawthorne, and Emerson.

In the right hands, words contain a power greater than any humanity has ever witnessed. Maybe one day you’ll understand that, Miss Architecture Student.

And to all the architecture students I know (Lena!), please take no offense.  I’m not bashing architecture at all – I’ve always loved it, actually – but merely pointing out that as far as the development of the human mind goes, and in turn history, literature takes the cake.

Midt.

For the first time since I can remember, I have no center of my life.

It’s been religion.  It’s been books.  It’s been friends.  It’s been girls.  It’s been me.  But now, there is nothing.

I feel somewhat like what I would imagine a moon would feel, were the planet it had spent its entire existence flying around to decide to leave, guileless and without subterfuge; to stroll right out the front door, without even bothering to turn around and shut it.

The moon tries to spin around itself.  Poor thing.

In this tale of two cities, I live in neither.

Decisions.

Either way you stand, there will always be thousands of people telling you you’re right, and thousands telling you you’re wrong.  People are stupid.  Don’t let them get to you.

I’m a confused man.  Happy, but confused.  Happy, but scared.  The unknown has always unsettled me, ever since I was a little boy.  The people I’ve grown up with my entire life have been unable to answer my questions.  The beliefs I had been injected with since I was born were too weak to do any good.  For eighteen years I’ve been told these things were true.  And for eighteen years I’ve yet to receive any reason why I should think so.

Maybe I’m proud.  Maybe I’m blind.  Whatever I am, I can’t help it.  I’m tired of basing each and every decision I make on a big set of words which have proven themselves to be nothing other than fairytales to me.  Why not another set of words?  Why?  Yet another question which neither the words nor the people who adhere to them have been able to answer for me.

I could be like Blaise Pascal.  I could say that I’ve got nothing to lose.  I could scare myself into saying I believe.  But why not scare myself into believing something else?  There are plenty of other religions out there with consequences for unbelievers.

I look ahead and all I see is nothing.  Yes it’s scary.  But it’s exciting all the same.  I’m not finished looking for answers.  But for now, in the words of Solomon, I have “nothing better under the sun than to eat, drink, and be merry.”

Atten.

In a few days, I’ll be an adult.  Legally, of course.

Physically, not quite.  I was a late bloomer.  My beard has only now begun to grow in, for example.

Spiritually, yes.  It doesn’t take much in that regard.  All one must do is possess a belief system.  One of your own, not of your parents or whims.  You must sit down and systematically answer, with no logic but your own, the basic question of the Universe: What is true?

Mentally, I would like to think so.  Of course, there are many people out there that would think me silly for saying that.  “It just isn’t possible for someone of that age to be an adult,” they would say.  Maybe so.  It’s a difficult thing to judge, because the mind is always growing; always learning; always experiencing new things.  One cannot be deemed a child simply because they haven’t stopped changing.  Oh well.

Times are changing quickly.

Bright Eyes.

I wonder, did Orion have the right idea?

Hunting.  Being at home in the woods, simply killing things with his dogs.

You can look at the stars all night.  You can search the world over.  And who has the brightest eyes?

A dog.  A dog has the brightest eyes in the sky.

The stars are always there for me.

I’m so happy, I could die.

Hey, I’ve got nothin’ to do today but smile.

And here I am,

The only living boy in New York.

- The Only Living Boy in New York by Simon and Garfunkel