Aside: Fallacies of Utterance

Many things were not meant to be uttered, for utterance perturbs the immaterial nature of man.

Man is in all actuality, a spiritual being whose physical or virtual self is the construction of his or her own making. The Supreme Creator, God, or Jehovah — depending on your inclination — has meted to every man and woman the ability to co-direct their narrative. As a person ascends into higher states of understanding, drawn closer and closer to The Lord, they understand that fate and choice are unitary, effectively occupying the same space and mimicking one another.

Simultaneously to a man’s spiritual growth, is his growth as an imagined physical body in what we have come to believe is the world. In this world, the only means of navigation are agreements within one’s own surroundings and we will find ourselves having to sacrifice during the forging of those agreements. We will water down the widest agreement, language, in order to communicate with one another.

Utterance tends to consternate the verity of existence.

God tends to address man through his spiritual ear, as opposed to his natural. Why? Because the natural ear must be in line with his natural mind or conscious, which if undeveloped, can lead to all manner of ignorance. Moreover, the human conscious in its raw form is known as the “lying brain” because of its ability to fabricate realities that are inconsistent or simply untrue.

The power of the conscious mind to lead one astray is as potent as its ability to find the noble track.

Thus, the power lies squarely in the spirit, which the mind must see as its wellspring. Colloquially speaking, the mind is the sub- and unconscious, the unexplored arenas of the deepest self. Intuition and instinct will awake from the lowest chasms of our preconscious to bring a person light without conscious meddling.

Utterance is the eventuality of the conscious mind, therefore, it is imperative that one search the guiding hand of The Lord before the believe they are speaking truth. The Lord needs no human agreement to Be, He simply is, therefore all manner of human linearity, the conscious creation of structures can trap the fledgling individual in a world of false images.

I seek Christ for myself, I search after his light through my own faculties; there is no need for me utter my relationship with brethren unless I am prompted to do so. The assemble, as powerful as it is, is meant to be a time of jubilation, fraternity, uplifting, and possibly warfare, where one’s spirit can be recharged for the days coming or released from the days past.

The Breath, The Notion, and The Thought

Every few months, a word or phrase gets lodged in my mind and I will ponder over it until I reach some understanding. 2011 was Wisdom and Patience, 2012 was about the Mind, 2013 has been dominated by Life’s Ambiguity and The UNreality of Existence. For the last few months a new term has taken root in my meditative soils, Uncertainty, and it has proven be quite the quandary for me. This term has acted as a sort of mental polymer between these vast topics, connecting and filling in the cracks for my grand philosophies.

Every philosopher has taken a concept and built empires around it. Immanuel Kant with his categorical imperative. Anaximander had The Apeiron. Ibn Rushd found unity between religion and philosphy. Paramhansa Yogananda fell in lockstep with Kriya Yoga. Musashi had the way of the sword.

Thinkers who brought meaning to their own universe through the meticulous study of one of its facets.

For myself, I have found meaning by examining the principles of uncertainty. If I were to go back in time and look at every single moment at which I found myself at a crossroads, they would all undeniably be instances where I was uncertain. This may not seem like much to anyone else, but for myself this is nothing short of groundbreaking. See, since childhood, I have been an extraordinarily deliberate individual; everything I found myself doing had a purpose. I was a concrete thinker, a pragmatist, and someone who preferred the diminition (if not complete eradication) of risk. Therefore, I was an amateur strategist before I even understood what strategy was.

I hated uncertainty; to me, there was always a way of knowing, if I couldn’t reason rationally then I would employ the superrationality of Christian spirituality. Therefore, I could always know or at least intuit the answers to any conceivable question.

As I progressed through college, faced with a myriad of obstacles and victories, I continued to observe my surroundings, the impetuses sustaining them, and subsequently my responses to all of their stimuli. I found myself contemplating people, emotions, love, God, science, and academia, trying to make sense of this hodgepodge of “things” that seemed to be so normal to everyone else. In neurology, RAS or Reticular Activation System, the brain begins to ignore a stimulus that is repeatedly presented, a phenomena known as habituation. For instance, even though you are still sitting on a chair or resting your shoulder against a wall while you read this, you are not consciously aware of it (well, at least until I just told you). The mind is an overwhelmingly complex mechanism. In the same way it can drown out the chair, many people cease thinking about regular occurrences such as love, emotions, or people…

We simply adjust or adapt to them.

I couldn’t do that.

Instead, I began connecting the dots from this situation and that, reading wholly into comments made by a certain kind of thinker and those contrasting with another. I constructed many mental scatter plots and attempted to fashion as many regression lines to help understand propensities and tendencies. I took my own failures and juxtaposed them against my successes to create cogent thought lines about what works and does not work.

What began to emerge were these highly subjective patterns that somewhat resembled one another but never fully repeated. The truly ponderous part was that most people did not see things that way. We understand that universality is mostly impossible, yet we are still trying to create these standardized methods of thinking and teach each other “the right way to do things”. We try to create these agreements (I talk about linearities later) so that we can all consistently trade information and relate to one another; the more effective the process, the more it “seems” to be the “right” way to do something…

Hell, I’ve been trying to teach people the “right” way to do things since I can remember.

But why are there no “rights” and “wrongs” outside of traditional morals and ethics (which are in and of themselves debatable)?

For the last 2 years I have considered this question in its every emanation. I put myself in others’ shoes and looked back on my own thoughts and actions, created decisional matrices, and continually underwent intense introspection; all the while, I had a piercing sensation that I wasn’t progressing any closer to my quarry.

Thats when it hit me, I couldn’t take my processes and expect identical results in someone else because life would not give them identical circumstances. Their life tracks were outrageously divergent from mine, they had not experienced the same things as me, even though we may be virtually identical to one another genetically, we are wildly divergent metaphysically.

These deviations from one another in the realm of choice, mixed in with the universal constant that is chance, create a potent brew of uncertainty, one of the major progenitors of the human race.

All the dot-connecting in the world could not change that fact.

So what then? Do we simply throw up our hands, say, “well life is not promised”, and “YOLO” our way through? Do we concede that life offers little to no constants and throw ourselves to fatalism? Perhaps a lesser mind find those to be a fitting practices and to which I will say “to each his own”. However, my understanding of the mind is that we are poignant co-creators in our life track, our living narrative, therefore, I can continually influence this world to help bring things into fruition.

I speak a lot about “linearities” which are agreements between people. The more people are involved in a linearity, a paradoxical trend arises: the agreement becomes stronger in the center, weaker towards the fringes and it becomes controversial as more and more are pushed towards the fringe. Just look at religion: Christianity as a theocracy flourished from the 4th century until the Enlightenment period in Europe, however, the more influential it grew, the more unstable it became because God, an intensely individuated understanding, cannot fathomably be universally agreed upon. As people began experiencing The Lord in various manners and through various worship methods, agreements were no longer tenable. Legislation is the same way: more and more people will agree that murder is wrong, however, given enough time and enough people, a crime of passion or a slaying in self-defense will arise, causing schisms along the formerly stark lines of morality and ethics.

When talking about “creating” one’s life track and forging their own robust existence, concrete thinkers will instantly go back to large linear agreements to challenge such a belief. You are a part of society, you can’t do this, you can’t do that, when have you ever seen God come down and do ______________. These large social agreements carry what I call “social inertia” and their influence over a populace is significant; there is no easy way of breaking them down.

However, social anythings are plastic, they are capable of being bent or broken, depending on the ingenuity of the thinker. As the thinker accretes more and more knowledge on the nature of being, he or she becomes adept at bursting through these so-called rules of a community. However, chance, uncertainty, and ambiguity will still be there, rearing their ugly heads.

You must stop seeing life as three-dimensional. That is an illusion so that your physical sensory organs can make sense of the world around it. Instead, see life as multivariate with dimensions occupying the same space. That is the best way for me to explain uncertainty and ambiguous concepts, it is why nothing in life can truly be known or understood because while you may be burrowing deep into one facet of understanding, there are infinite others that are just a valid exerting force on the world around you.

The perennial strategist understand this, he or she then doesn’t concern themselves with trying to forge some consistent, “universal” understanding of life, but opens themselves up to many different ways of viewing their life track and the life tracks of others. Chance is the one thing that they can’t control, so they prepare themselves for as many potentialities and eventualities as possible, deftly dealing with them in the moment. There are no books, no theorems, no “ways of thinking” that enmesh a true strategist, he or she is as fluid as the wind, employing whatever and whenever they can at any moment to pull them closer to their perceived goal.

A perfect strategist has no goal, has no destination, has no purpose, for those are all dangerously concrete; they do not mire themselves with such frivolities. No, the superior strategist has nothing more than The Breath and The Notion which precipitate The Thought. The Breath is his willingness to engage and The Notion is the willingness to progress. The Thought then arises as instantaneous will.

They will themselves into being, they harmonically move with their environment, for as co-creators they trust that the environment reflects their deepest needs.

Thus, fate nor choice, destiny nor decision, truly concern the strategist, for the two are one and the same.

In a world of uncertainty, a place of extant ambiguity which nothing can be truly known, the strategist focuses wholly on the moment before the present, poised and ready, ever vigilant for the next move.

bryce

God Moments

Fate or choice? Am I destined or do I choose?

It is hardwired into our DNA to want to win. Between Natural Selection, Darwinism, and most individuals’ need to find themselves in the world, we are predisposed, genetically and socially, to want to win.

Now, winning is a very broad word which encompasses a variety of different personal, interpersonal, spiritual, and other -al’s, but they all have a similar thing in common: pleasure or at least the illusion of it. Winning can be anything from attaining money to securing that dream career, it can be finding love or it can be traveling the world; winning is the sensation of ‘beating your odds’ conditionally speaking, the competition is direct and indirect with you trying to achieve as much as you can within the circumstances you deem ideal.

It is the process of choosing your ideals and actually working them into fruition.

Now, per the usual, I am leaving these parameters intentionally vague because winning for one person may not be winning for another. Therefore, there is a heavy, heavy emphasis on choosing those ideals. But again, that poses a problem for human beings, the epitome of nonlinearity, whose cognitive patterns are in constant flux, whose consciouses are constantly being bombarded by information, whose circumstances are constantly changing, what they choose one day may not be what they choose on another. Even the most obstinate of individuals are susceptible to these changes of heart, humans are dynamic creatures.

So choosing the ideals and the prize that one wants to compete for are virtual decisions whose structures are always debatable….

Esoterica, Magick, Supernatural: God

I have found myself over the years studying various forms of esoterica from early Hermeticism to freemasonry to Qabbalah to Christian mysticism. Each of these have certain principles and tenets on which the science is founded, however, their goals are consistent: helping a man achieve a higher place in the universe.

Illuminati lore and conspiracy theories abound greatly in arenas where the ideals and prizes are fame and fortune. Why is this? Why is it that Jay-Z, Michael Jackson, Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson (the whole 27 Club for that matter) are all associated with “back-room” deals with powers beyond this dimension? Sure, many of these individuals clearly exhibit symbols and supposed practices of ancient mysteries, but even that begs the question, why would one had even needed mysticism to attain anything in the first place?

Why do we need God or spirits or energies or soul mates or study body language (the language of the unconscious)? Why do we need psychoanalysis or hypnosis or any of the studies of the cognitive realms beneath conscious understanding?

Because all of those things are forces that cannot be muddied by our own machinations. We didn’t have to think about them. They fall outside of conscious control and thusly wield great power.

In a world where one can literally fall in love with anyone else, would it not be simpler to believe that there was a soul mate out there? A one of one that would satisfy all of your intimate needs? Someone who no matter how much bullshit would be worth it day in and day out? How about energy and body language? Would it not be dope to know who to avoid and who to click with without even thinking about it? That there was an already understood framework which one could work that would provide predictable results?

Wouldn’t that make life a hell of a lot easier?

I call these things ‘God Moments’ because they appeal to the parts of our mind that are tired of the inherent ambiguity that life offers incessantly by providing us concretion. They are ‘super-linearities’ whose components are free of flawed human logic, they are indisputable.

As I get older, I realize that most people believe in God not because they’ve taken time to fathom the glory of the Creator, but because He offers them ‘cliff’s notes’ to this mostly intractable problem of being alive. If you believe that God has a man for you, then you will stave off discouragement for longer than someone without that conviction if you find yourself single for a long period of time. If you believe that God ordained you to be a CEO, you will take more risks regardless of the consequences, because for you the ends will justify the means.

If you believe that Jay-Z or Beyonce sold their soul to the devil, it helps justify why they’ve gotten to where they are while other people struggle.

Its a cogent, irrefutable framework of subjective fairness.

As we are all attempting to win at various levels of our life, God Moments because more and more tantalizing to us. No longer to we need to consciously think up something new to do or motivate ourselves to get up, our minds can’t even alter a God Moment because they are free of human construction. (Supposedly, at least.)

God Moments create significance in a world of opinion.

Now, as someone who believes heavily in God, spirituality, and esoterica as a whole, I am definitely someone who has looked for significance in everything I find myself engaged in. I try to maximize every moment to the point by squeezing out the essence of every moment, deciphering every datum I can get my mental fingers on, and praying excessively for understanding, because understanding supersedes opinion (supposedly).

God Moments are easy to synthesize, easy to personally identify with, yet need no other person’s agreement to enact, this explains the very foundation of religion. A theology needs no agreement for someone who is zealous for that religion; they have created so many agreements within themselves that it is as real to them as their own body. That is the quintessential God Moment.

We want to relinquish control — well, many of us — because it allows us to experience life with less pressure. Ir is impossible to discern significance in the moment, however, if something, i.e. a god or code of conduct, determines this for you, you are free to exist within the very predictable, understandable parameters of that deterministic system. Fate and choice are superimposed over one another, each exerting equal force on the individual.

The diminution of choice is our nature’s way of reducing the infinitude of human error; we know that we cannot determine what will make us happy tomorrow, but if we can jump into some clear, especially virtuous construct, then our actions are much more meaningful at every moment.

And meaning is the first step to winning (supposedly).

Few people in the world are truly pioneers. Sure, there are those that brave the unknown in commerce or those that push the limits of musical creativity. There are those that step on lands never seen by the world and those that push the sciences into magnitudes so small, that they are almost purely theoretical. Although some of them may actually be pioneers existentially speaking, many of them were recipients of good fortune or one particular inquiry, few of them pushed the limits of discovering what being a human really means.

Therein lies the complexity of the God Moment, on one end, it simplifies the human condition by placing much of the decisional process on fate or destined, yet the truest intent is to push the mind and body beyond the limits of this world. As I have taken survey after survey of human behavior and seen it to be a hopeless task of ‘sweeping the dirt from the part of the room to the other’, for me God Moments are not about discovering what is fated or destined, but choosing to exist in a world that provides clarity.

In order for something to be meaningful, one must be clear about it.

There are two (or more if you want to get really crazy) sides to every aspect of the human condition; most people see God Moments as pathetic attempts to assuage that natural panic that arises when one realizes the futility of being alive, however, that is a shortsighted and rather hubristic approach to the topic. No, God Moments are the purest attempts at discovering how we can win: discovering the ideals and the subsequent prizes that we hold near and dear. We will use them to find embedded motivation or assign some greater purpose to a particular task in life:

God Moments represent freedom.

Freedom to coauthor our lives with whatever powers a person aligns themselves with. Purification of the mind comes from purification of intentions and purification of intentions only comes from clarity.

God Moments are many of our tools for clarity.

Sheep and Wolves

Why don’t sheep ever know that they are sheep?

You and I can clearly identify other people we believe are sheep; they are as obvious to us as night is from the day. They believe the things they see on TV; they religiously listen to the radio; relentlessly sucking up all the things they hear from their friends and neighbors.

One of my ex-girlfriends used to call them ‘drones’ & ‘droids’…

But there’s an oddity about all of this ‘identification’: when one calls another a sheep or follower, they are indirectly stating that they themselves are not cut from the same cloth; yet, there is undoubtedly someone who considers them exactly that.

A sheep. A follower. A brainless cog in a societal machine.

Now, I am consumed with winning, hence why I started a business in strategy; I pour over Sun Tzu and Clausewitz and drive to understand the labyrinthine mind that was Napoleon’s. As such, I have charged myself with the task of understanding the world to best of human abilities for the sake of taking that knowledge to battle. Therefore, these peculiarities in human interaction are paramount to me; they supply many channels for a strategist to exploit, while simultaneously requiring that he or she systematically review themselves to see if they are falling prey to these pervasive existential maladies.

Perspective is preceded by vantage point.

I talk a lot about perception, perspective, and how those two affect the complexity of individual and aggregate human behavior; however, I have in recent weeks began much of my meditation not on perspective, but on its progenitor, vantage. Vantage is the literal AND mental ‘location’ where we process information. Vantage precedes perspective because a person tends to perceive the world based on their surroundings. In other words, the environment in which a person is processing sensory data have a direct effect on their subsequent conclusions and related actions.

The greatest salesmen understand this and successful marketing is literally about infiltrating the sanctum sanctora of our cognitive faculties, so that we take their brands and products to all vantage points. If we are bombarded by certain images then they consume us and our vantage points are skewed ever so slightly. Back in the ’50s, salesmen would walk up to your door for the purpose of “getting their foot in the door”. Under any other circumstances, a woman would not let a stranger, a strange man at that, into her household. Yet, under the aegis of “conducting business”, the vantage points changed, strangers were welcomed in and commerce as we knew it changed yet again.

Vantage is the fulcrum on which judgments are passed; identical information will provide divergent results in different environments

If the situation happens in a church, a person will say that another is being “indoctrinated” by the fallacies of organized religion. Perhaps the conversation is politics, which an individual with a penchant for conspiracy calls a conventional citizen a ‘sheep’ because he or she still believes that America is bipartisan. Perhaps you get called a sheep by an entrepreneur because you are fully engaged in the corporate “rat race”. In all of these situations, the locale changed, providing different basis points (vantages) for one observer to view something. The tricky part is that we are all engaged in many, many locations in our lifetimes, some of them overlapping in the process. The feelings associated with each of these is different, so even if the basic information remains the same, the perception of the observer changes. As the cognitive environment, a derivative of a physical or social environment, changes, so often does the responses from an observer..

Information readily available to the mind is so often related to particular sensory phenomena: think about how the scent of a particular cologne makes you think of a ex-flame or how the sound of police sirens remind you of the neighborhood you grew up in; these simple examples provide the basic framework for how we view and interpret the world.

As these simple constructs grow and evolve into complex social metropolises, the linear agreements also grow and evolve, providing a cacophony of different vantage points for humans to utilize. In a later blog, I will break down the differences between linear agreements with fixed, variable, and hybrid being the main variations, but in essence, these variations create extremely complex cognitive systems which are presented as bias, hypocrisy, bigotry, and prejudice, all of which are forms of ignorance…

So the question remains, why doesn’t a sheep realize that it is a sheep?

Because, the information that we use to weigh the decisions of the others, the vantage points that we are viewing from are not the same that we use to understand our own. The classic ‘ignorant’ person is one that does not realize that he is identical to the subject of his prejudice (“look at the teapot calling the kettle black”). The average person understands, intimately might I add, the cascade of logic they employ for their own purposes, yet they do not have a clue about the logic used by others. Thus, the triggers unique to one person in a particular environment are not identical to another, allowing them to view an external entity as X without seeing that they are just as much as X as the former.

The fact of the matter is that reality is best described as a series of extraordinarily complex best guesses, with each contributor’s guess coming from their discreet analysis of vantage and subsequent perceptive processes. As we are all ensconced in this deeply ambiguous guessing game, the differences between yours and another’s decisions create friction and this friction is the root of all judgment (especially judgments out of ignorance).

Every single holy tradition states that the easiest path to God or any elevated consciousness is to remove themselves from masses of people. Why? Because no longer are you subjected to the abject guesswork of any particular community; your senses become attuned to the frequencies of God, nature, or whatever connection to the universe you are trying to forge.

I, unfortunately, can not live an ascetic’s life at this time; it is implausible and impractical for where I find myself at this stage of my life. So how do I defeat this natural tendency to be blind to one’s own circumstances, how can I find a vantage which exposes myself to my own biased conscious? How can I definitely guard myself against the eventual onslaught of ill will that labels me this way or that? How can I win in an argument of ambivalent information?

How can I stave off abject ignorance in the form of hypocrisy or bias?

One achieves this by carefully combing through every single thought they have, running their decisions and actions through a matrix that stresses objectivity over “wants or wills”, and by constantly locating one’s self in real time. You must know where you are, as opposed to stressing over where you were, where you would like to be, or most destructively, where you think you are. All of the people that I have passed unfriendly judgments against are the victims of their own mental ineptitudes, their focus is not consistent with their expression, they spew confusion in every direction, or they are diminishing ‘reality’ by deluding themselves about the reality of others (hypocrisy).

I am a strong proponent for the notion that ‘reality’ is unreal, however, my assertion is not based in concretion; I am not saying that these things are not occuring as they are, but instead I am illuminating the fluidity of consciousness. Although things are occurring, we are processing them differently, providing kindling for all sorts of emergent potentialities in the next moment. I am, in effect, breaking down the idea that there is one way to do things, one inexorable life-track; I am pushing towards the preternatural by highlighting the ability to alter things instantaneously.

Because things change, especially one’s usage of cognitive vantage points, there are no sheep and we are all sheep to something. Because we can affect massive, instantaneous change in a world in flux, we are no things and all things simultaneously, especially as certain people exert influence over other people and things. All of us are followers of something, effectively rendering all of us sheep ready for existential slaughter.

If you give your life over to any mode of thinking, you are a follower, for few of us have the ability to spontaneously create something we have not learned yet. All thoughts have already been thought, I believe by a Supreme Creator, so any spontaneous knowledge, STILL renders you a slave to causality.

You are a sheep AND you are a wolf, at the same damn time. The best thing for you to do now is figure out when is it best to be either.

Quantum Superposition Principle at its final.

I Found Love

Nothing is anything, yet everything must be. Everything that you think you know is nothing and nothing is truly ever known.

In my last post, I explained the love I feel towards the woman that holds my heart; this new experience is nothing short of exotic for me, I am enthralled and infinitely perplexed about what to do. Most of the time there are just no words that can really capture what I’m experiencing.

And thats okay.

This need to explain ourselves alludes to the human propensity to believe we “know” anything at all. Our conscious space believes that everything can be subordinated into 3 or 4 dimensional space, that all occurrences and phenomena can be reduced to intelligible responses. The very nature of academia is to create “super linearity” or bullet proof agreements that overcome the nasty little quirks of individual sentience; it is the pursuit of fabricating a network of knowledge which cannot be disproven, can point to better futures for all men, which help explain the complex world around us.

This is why I have always been a fan of academia; academically rigorous courses or pursuits required discipline, creativity, and a mind that can grasp multivariable concepts for the sake of synthesis.

However, lately I’ve been more focused on another synthesis: the blending of esoterica, hidden knowledge, with exoterica, common knowledge, which most of academia falls under.

I have found myself asking this question over and over again: What is it that I am trying to get? Get in this instance means everything from the literal attaining or “getting something” and its mental counterpart, understanding. I have been drilling myself with this question for a little over a year, pushing my cognitive faculties to brink trying to understand what it is I’m trying to accomplish with my limited time here. I immediately went to my tendencies as a person, what do I tend to like, what do I tend to dislike, as sources of my partially submerged, intended trajectory.

That’s when it began hitting me: I want every aspect of my life to be a testament to excellence.

I tend to deconstruct the arguments of others because I feel that few people go through the process of understanding understanding the way that I have. Most of us, especially the brilliant few, are those who can make sense of created information, never really questioning what created it or how it got to us. We engage in all the -ologies without taking the time to ask why. Why are we doing this? Why do our sciences and liberal arts change so frequently? What is underpinning our cognition on individual and aggregate levels?

Why are we?!

Many people ask “how did we get here” or “what made us”. But those to me are inferior to understanding the why of humanity. Throughout recorded history, we have made the same mistakes over and over, have made the same victories over and over, and each version of this performance has been seen as misstep or progression.

My internals beg to differ. There is no misstep, no progression. Really there is nothing and that nothing creates a vacuum for everything to have purpose. It is a drama — a production of sorts — with the major parameters being time and choice.

It is so easy to look back in time and say what the Greeks or Songhai empires did right or wrong, but that same simple lens will be applied to our time now but our descendants in the future! Our right now is plagued by chance and the innumerable factors that are active in our every moment.

For this reason, I have made esoterica and exoterica equal in importance; one cannot exist on secret knowledge and still expect to play a normal role in society nor can one indulge only on common knowledge and expect to be better than mediocre.

Why am I in love?

Angela is everything that I want and need and many things that I never even knew existed. She is the incarnation of known-knowns, known-unknowns, and unknown-unknowns, things that you don’t know that you don’t know. She is my complimentary star in a binary system of deep intimacy and the very thought of her sends chills, physically and nonphysically, through my being. I don’t lust after her, I long for her, and when I’m near her I try to drink in her essence, she is a most intoxicating brew.

Does she piss me off? Yes. Does she make me feel like I’m the greatest man on earth? Yes.

Common knowledge says that no love is perfect, there will be ups and downs. Secret knowledge explains the linkage between two beings, without the crutches of science or art. They are two sides of the same coin; they give the thinker dexterity in whatever arena he or she may find themselves.

Yet, even these assertions are nothing more than fallacy, as I am attempting to explain the inexplicable with words and agreements. Love, in its purest esoteric form, is harmonizing. It is not felt. It isn’t even known. It is a pervasive experience of multilateral harmony.

Sure, science can come along as say, “hey, the sensation of love triggers x and y occurs”, but ask anyone who has ever been in love and that explanation is nothing short of a laughing stock. Creating linearity, a inter-faceable agreement, or system of thought for something that transcends the “whats” of life is impossible. This is why I am consumed by the “why”.

Why are we?

My love for Angela is the truest thing I have ever sensed and I will never try to teach someone how to love like we do; love is far too personal, far too close to home for me to delude myself into that type of thinking. What I can translate is the “why” we work, the “why” we overcame rather tremendous odds, the “why” we are able to have the connection we have despite the undoubtable trickery we’ve navigated. I can’t even explain to you the “what”, only the why.

Angela and I have created meaning and creating meaning is the most human activity that most humans do not understand. We all do it constantly, the moment you begin thinking about something, whether you’re for it or against it, is the moment you’ve established a meaning that thing has for you. Nothing is anything, yet everything must be; that “must be” is the process of creating a meaning. Nothing intrinsically matters, not even life itself, yet whatever you choose to let matter must bow to your will. That is the power of the conscious mind, that is the purest explanation of perception, the choosing of data to form your understanding of the world around you.

Well, if all I have to do is think something, then why is everything I want not occurring? Okay, Bryce, you’re in love but I’m not, how is that fair? My bills need to be paid and I am actively thinking about money/starting a business/working extra hard, but I’m still broke, how is that fair?

First off, fairness doesn’t exist. Second of all, the universe, God, Jesus — whatever force you believe powers the framework of existing — is hands down THE MOST fair vehicle known to the senses. The reason you have not received love or money or that scholarship or that promotion is because those things are controlled by the wills of other people as well. Everything that operates within the system is simultaneously controlled by the perceptions and wills of another person, so the key isn’t trying to pry things out of people’s hands, but to pry people out. Get them to align with what you want; strive for influence, not things.

Slight digression: love is different, but operates on the same principles. You cannot exercise influence and get someone to love you, that is the mistake most powerful men make; the women may love the money, the lifestyle you give them, but still have no feelings of adoration towards that man. The way to get love is, as cliche as it sounds, to love one’s self. Self love gives a person a certain radiance and all humans are attracted to that kind of light. If you want to find the truest of love, you must love yourself in the truest of ways, only then will you discover YOUR path to the person that can share in your completeness. So in a sense, you are still playing for influence, but instead of influencing others, your first target is yourself.

Okay, Bryce, how do I do that? Influencing others? Influencing myself? How in the hell does this help me? Well that, dear readers, is how I make a living, I’d be more than happy to work with you on a one on one basis.

Take home: this life is virtual, it bends to the human that is experiencing it. Most of us, unfortunately, remain ignorant to our ability to design and create, instead we focus on the mundane aspects of being a citizen: going to work, going to school, taking care of our families, paying bills, obeying the law. We rarely make influential decisions. Its easy to stick to the conventions of academia or the diluted knowledge of the world’s religions; those are simplistic ways to live a comfortable life. You create nothing, you follow the rules, you have ups and you have downs. Bada-bing. Bada-boom.

Well, I don’t view the world this way. I can’t view it this way. If I can fall in love with a woman as amazing as Angela and create a business as amazing as VB ICON, why would I not want to continue creating meaning to this vacuous universe? If one can choose to accept the meaning told them by others or simply create a tailored, enriching meaning for themselves, why would anyone choose the former? Nothing is anything because what I believe it to be may not be what you believe it to be. And thats okay. Hell, that’s great.

Get into the mode of inquiring about the “why’s”, for those are a wealth of understanding for those that receive (or create) answers. Understand that the agreements among men are not the end all, nor are agreements within yourself; in order to dexterously navigate through this life you must balance, precariously might I add, both of these worlds. Individuation is important and cooperation is important, neither are mutually exclusive, and neither matter without the other. A pure individual is a cancer and a pure cooperator is a mindless robot.

Create meaning, folks. Question everything, after all what you think you know is only partially true today and even less so tomorrow. Each day presents one with the opportunity to let go of everything they thought yesterday and create something anew all over again. THAT my friends has become my meaning of life and with it I intend to win as much as I can until I am no more.

bryce

The Night I Fell In Love

Being in love has always been a mystery to me. I could tell you what it looked like. I could tell you how you were supposed to attain it. I could tell you what impeded two people from falling in.

At least twice in my life I thought I was in love. I felt intense connections from individuals from my past and reconnections with them stoked fires that I had long believed were dormant. Reintroduction to such feelings sent me into a talespin, I questioned if this was the ever elusive “being in love” that so many had rhapsodized about since the beginning of recorded history. What I felt was a longing for companionship, a genuine interest in these young women being happy, and doing whatever was necessary to make them comfortable dealing with someone like me.

I was not in love with any of them.

Interestingly enough, I’ve been in love for a little over a year and a half. Perhaps two if you trace back to the moment I met Angela Marie Presta, the woman who has come to represent the quintessence of “partner”.

My sister, my best friend, and I were out on a bender in South Long Beach a few weeks after my 23rd birthday. After getting very, very good on a bottle of cheap brandy in the car, we stumbled into a bar so that my sister (who did not partake in much imbibing as the DD) could get a real drink, preferably one paid for her by a fellow inebriated suitor. So, per the usual, my best friend (Vaughan) and I decided to make our rounds while Nicole headed to the bar. Also per the usual, Vaughan, being more of a social butterfly than myself, started dancing and conversing with some ladies in the lounge area while I stood by in my typical awkward manner. As the night began to wane, I used my height to spot my sister, who was dancing with a freshly bought drink, so I signaled to V and we made our way over.

Just a little background.

This is where it began.

Standing next to my sister, two-stepping to the music, Vaughan ushers two women to our little area; he pushes Angela towards me and I responded by gesturing to them both that I okay, I was just chilling, there was no need to feel any pressure. I didn’t want her to think I was trying to be a snake and get at her simply because my boy was dancing with her friend. It was at that moment that I experienced what would be a long history of dealing with my love: her face twists up and she mocks me, questioning why I would gesture that I didn’t want to dance with her; she thought I was rude. I attempted to back-pedal, explaining to her to her that I meant no disrespect; she was very attractive and I just didn’t want her to feel any pressure.

We danced to a few songs then the DJ announced that the night was ending. My sister and Angela’s friend hit it off and we were invited to her apartment to keep the good times rolling.

My friend Kevin met us there. We drank spiced rum. I smoked some weed out of college ruled paper. I got sick as a fucking dog and passed out on the bathroom floor.

Great first impression, right?

Angela took me home the next morning, peppering me with questions; with my fingers in my temples, I tried to figure out what had happened the night prior.

Every time I looked over it seemed like her radiant blue eyes were staring into my soul.

I liked her. A lot.

The next few months would bring very high-highs and, unfortunately, very low-lows that would cause us to be estranged until the following spring when she visited me at my apartment. However, it never seemed like we lost contact.

That summer, a few days after her birthday, I had to leave my Marina Del Rey penthouse and move back home on to my parent’s couch. Discouraged, frustrated, and vexed beyond compare, Angela again became my refuge.

She picked me up on that first weekend back and took me to dinner, where we talked a bunch about life and what it had been bringing. I would look over at her across the table and, feeling butterflies, lol away.

That was the night I fell in love.

That summer would deepen our bond, but we still were “just friends”.

Some might ask, for one as hellbent on love as you, how could you have missed the signs? Why did it take so long? Well, our lives are quite different, our pursuits quite different. Hell, WE are quite different.

Nevertheless, she’s everything I had ever asked God for. She loved me purely throughout everything. She was and is my bestfriend, someone who I could confide in about everything. She was the WOMAN that I needed and everything that I wanted. Beautiful, intelligent, and committed. Hilarious, humble, and inquisitive. Crazy.

I live my life for this woman. There are many, many things that I have to address as a young entrepreneur before I can physically accommodate a life partner, but every move I make, every decisional process is conducted with her as a foundational given.

The night I fell in love, I looked deeply into Angela’s eyes and my heart was no longer my own. Since that night, not a single moment passes when I am not thinking about her and what I can do to help make her happy. Since that night, I have found what I have so desperately searched for: a lover and a friend. Someone to go into tomorrow with no regrets, no fears, no concerns for what lies ahead. If she’s with me, then I am in the arms of perfection.

My heart, much like my mind, is a hotbed of complexity. I can wiggle myself out of virtually any connection and second guess to the point of obsolescence, any feeling I may harbor. Yet, this woman is the light of my world. No doubt about it.

She is my one and only.

Love is realizing that the words someone else says are never for malintent. Its setting aside your ego so that your mind and heart have more free space to consider the wants and needs of this other person. Love is seeing a woman in your dreams and waking up besides her. Love is a kiss that resonates through your entire being. Love is the free exchange of ideas between two people that truly want to see the other improve. Love is making sacrifices without thinking; there is no “weighing” of pros and cons, there is only the consideration of your partner.

bryce

The Secret: Accessing the Hyperreal

Cruising at about 30 miles per hour on a metal contraption high above Northwestern Long Beach, a highly theoretical and amorphous conversation ensues between two young philosophers. The subject, cognition and super-cognition in multivariable hyperspace, draws both speakers’ deepest thoughts about discrete creation of existence, how individuals become authors and coauthors of what we have come to term as life. The setting is unusual, both men draw curious stares from other passengers as the enthralling discourse weaves and tumbles through all manner of hypothetical thought. All the while, the young thinkers trek on, hoping to tap a mysterious power, known only to few humans throughout recorded history.

The last 3 months of my life have been absolutely surreal; no other word can really describe it. Surreality is not good or bad, it is indeed both, an admixture that feels like one is living in an extremely vivid dream. In this timeframe, my failures have led to threats of lawsuits, many an uneasy email/text message exchange, and other moments of unwavering discomfort. My successes have led to great nights on the town with friends, extraordinary progress as a business owner & consultant, and opportunities that are so tantalizing I sometimes forget that only months ago I was operating on a dollar and a dream (minus the dollar).

What changed? My prayer life.

I don’t pray like a traditional Christian; I am not a traditional Christian. I meditate on deep considerations of the Universe, I contemplate a Creator who could make that all possible. I ponder the true makeup of my religion’s interdimensional liaison, the man we have come to call Christ. When I open my lips to make praise or utter supplication, I do it from a place of extreme humility, and extreme non-humanity. My foundation is not to make utterance to Christ as a man, but as a spirit who has also has a physical emanation.

Extant expression is ubiquitous in this world, as all of us are alive. Being alive, being able to express life, is comprised of several factors that can be lumped into two arenas that I have spent many blog posts enumerating: linearity and nonlinearity. Linearity is an agreement between two or more people in an effort to produce predictable outcomes, whereas nonlinearity is the individualized state of man which produces no predictable or only partially predictable results. Most of the physical realm, what we have come to term as reality, are attempts at creating linearity. We as individuals in larger social structures must come to agree with one another in order to coexist harmoniously; yet, the components of those linear attempts are nonlinear bodies, humans, whose overly complex nature creates the ambiguous, ever-changing world that we are all doing our best to navigate.

As my business partner and I engaged each other in one of our philosophical discourses, the effects of my meditative practices became readily apparent. We, two nonlinear beings, began experiencing each other from a true platform of expression, a place where no agreement was necessary because it superseded the very consciousnesses that perceive and analyze information. Thus, our nonlinearity simply melted into this higher ordered thought and we became aligned with what I can only call energies that occurred in this exotic place.

Linearity is only as pure, strong, or capable as the nonlinear components that comprise it’s ability to construct.

Where my friend and I got to needed no construction, its pillars were more mathematically perfect than the greatest Palladian structures and its ground was fertile for true extant thought.

I had been entering — perhaps a better word would be foraying — into this world, what I call hyperreality, more and more as of recent. I can only describe it as being a place of intense focus, where the very world around you seems converge on a single point, a potent thought, that permeates one’s entire being. With a thought that potent, the conscious and subconscious, mind and spirit, become attuned and a single person can create a multo-entity agreement within themselves.

Fuck.

Thats some heavy stuff, no?

See, the world is consumed with figuring out the “secrets” and “shortcuts” to this and that. We want to know what is the “secret” to success, what is the “fastest way” to wealth, and what is the “secret” to happiness. We are looking to creating a linear system which has no flaws! That, unfortunately, is impossible; remember, a linear agreement is only as effective or good as the nonlinear components agreeing upon it and since no human is perfect in his physical or even conscious expression, any linearity we create will be inexorably flawed. The secondary reason that no “system” can be created, no secret uttered, no shortcut fabricated, is because as nonlinear beings interacting with one another, there are infinity plus infinity variables interacting at any given moment, which leads to more and more unpredictable outcomes, the very essence of nonlinearity. In other words, what works for you may not work for me, and vice versa. There can be no cohesive, universal, “secret” process or application.

THERE IS NO SECRET

So how, then, does one create the necessary traction to accomplish anything? How do we “win” at this game called life.

While there is no secret, there is a way that one can maximize their time here on this physical plane. Creating an agreement with one’s self. This was the lesson that was revealed to me by my friend during our conversation. Most of us are at war with ourselves; our mind wants on thing, our heart wants another, and our spirit is all but muted during a typical day. Reality, or at least our perception of what is occurring around us, poses the greatest threat to success. Reality is mundane and its prosaicness becomes rarely sensed as being important or of any particular value. Reality will drive you quickly into mediocrity as it is comprised as an average of linearities around you. Therefore, reality is blah. It comes and goes. Its unpredictable, yet you are taught from birth strategies to mitigate risk and capitalize on opportunity. Go to college, get a job, get married, pay your bills by working hard.

All of those taken become the very basis for losing at life.

Humans are unique. We are amalgams of spirit and flesh. How is it that we think we can create systems and all thrive within them? How is it that we think we can all agree and all will flourish? How is it that we make incongruous projections about the future without understanding what is currently going on or even worse, how humans tends to react to things?

College, marriage, working hard are not inherently wrong nor are they inherently right, is it up to the person to agree mentally, spiritually, and physically as to whether they are right for them!

How does one discern what is right or wrong? When one actively seeks out the supermundane, the ‘higher realm’, they are in fact setting themselves up for alignment. There is no systematic way to “getting there”, as every person will find themselves traversing a slightly different road to this manner of enlightenment. My tip is to meditate by sitting in absolute silence while thinking one thought. That thought can be anything from considering the magnitude of the universe to pondering that you yourself are a universe. The depth and complexity of your inner world is a wellspring of fuel for enlightenment.

As you ponder the implicit and explicit complexities of the universe(s), you will naturally begin to see yourself as a citizen of all known and unknown realities, infinitely large and infinitesimally small; you will be a formless, dimensionless being which has a subordinated expression in the physical world. You will see the unreality of the physical world and be drawn to the pervasive “real” framework of the invisible dimensions. This will create the beginnings of “inner linearity”.

Inner agreement.

Inner peace.

One might say, “bryce, are you not laying out a secret? What you’re proposing, is this not a system of thought that leads to predictable results?” I have no response to that because to validate or invalidate that statement would be to breathe life into that belief. Accessing the hyperreal has one frustrating aspect to it, the hyperreal has no concept of time. Some people will die before they experience a full immersion. Some will never make it. Some will try to make it work so that they can pay a bill on Tuesday and will cast it down as too imprecise, too ineffectual if that bill is not paid. Hyperreality is not about creating a system to win in a consciously perceived world, but instead having the consciously perceived world be subordinated to the hyperreal. Its about discovering true dimensionless thought, not turning that dimensionless thought into profit. The profits will come, but how those profits will manifest physically is not for me to say.

You will begin seeing this world with different eyes, my friend. Eyes that actually see, not passively view. No longer will it be “go to college to be successful”, but you will understand that college is a cultural agreement and with it comes rewards, but those rewards are not automatic as the extent of this agreement cannot accommodate supply and demand nor the intrinsic confusion of 18-22 year olds. College is set up as a catapult into professionalism, yet professionalism is a linear agreement with a series of components. These types of greater understandings increase the value of your time and efforts in college or in the work force; they increase your influence over your surroundings and the people in it.

It opens the universe to you and opens you to the universe.