My Meditative Place

I sit high atop a cosmic cliff,
With the heaven sprawled out before me.
A nebula dominates my anterior view.
God’s nebula.
The seat of creation.
In the midst of the nebula a gaping maw begins to swirl.
This celestial maelstrom emits a steady flow of unusual substance.
It swirls out towards me like the tail f a tornado.
As it approaches it’s pointed tip arches above my eyes and descends towards
My forehead.
My ajna lights up.
My eyes are full of light.
I am connected to the Source.
The Lord my God who sits high above the heavens.
His spirit appears above the celestial cone;
A white dove, flapping outside of time,
Perfectly poised, perfectly calm.
Wisdom flows forth like honey from a turgid comb.
Enlightenment through prayer.
Revelation trough meditation.

On Love

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud” – 1 Corinthians 13:4

Since I was a child, I have always had a particular interest in the nature of intimate love. It has honestly been one of the most consistent impetuses as I’ve made decisions. My understanding of it has grown and evolved, my interfacing with it has waxed and waned, yet, I have remained steadfast in attempting to have it for myself.

For those of you who follow my blog, you may recall my revelation that I have only been in love once. It took a year and a half and drained me of a significant portion of my ego, thus connecting me to the scripture I opened this post with. A boastful or haughty soul has a difficult time discovering love, for self-absorption fundamentally distorts the nature of true love.

I am single now and I’ve taken a large portion of time to reflect upon what love has come to mean to me. I have pressed and pressed over the years to make my longing for intimacy the protean bond between myself and another creature, but as we all know this is not the way to go about it. I have taken times to let love come to me and even then, I was only permitted to enjoy that bliss for a fleeting moment — a pain that is virtually indescribable.

There is nothing more — save a cogent encounter with God — that I want more than a substantive relationship with a woman whom I share my completeness with. Nothing, again outside of spiritual awakening, I have ever felt has stabilized and energized me more than those brief dalliances with an ineffable intimacy. I do not covet the bonds between other people, but I literally praise them for finding that incarnation of oneness and I honor them with words of fortification.

Love is an elevated state, with romantic or intimate love being an emanation of this divine expression. The conjoining of a man and woman, in spirit and in flesh, is about a recursive support system that withstands the barrage of debris life inevitably throws at you. It is about the relinquishing of ego, the permanent stay of self, so that the unified body that emerges from the amalgamation, sustains itself without selfish ambition or concerns for power. Love is the realization that you belong to another, just as you belong to God, and that willingness to give in causes you to be reborn.

When a man truly loves his spouse, he is no longer just a man. He furthers his production as the Microcosm, openly accepting his place in the cosmos at large. He takes charge of his universe by bequeathing it in full to her, exchanging his heart and his soul for the protection and edification of hers. The consummate interchange is the quintessence of love, he lives for her while she lives for him.

Love is a teacher, guiding us beyond the limits of our limited perceptions and into the higher grounds of objective truth. Love obliterates the drive for selfish gain, instead replacing the instinct to consume with the instinct to provide. When a man truly loves, he is no longer bound to the reality of “real time”, but sits suspended in timelessness truly at one with himself and the self of his counterpart.

This supernatural interplay is exceptionally hard to create in our ultra connected society. Not only are the voices of discord all the more audible, but the voices of our own insecurities are amplified by our social awareness. We see the defeats of others, we hear the Sirens of distraction, of ambition and the will to transcend through the vehicle of love becomes laughable. Love is relegated to institutions, marriage for the sake of taxes and estates replace, unions for the sake of oneness. Young people are dissuaded by the sins of their elders and instead of attacking the action they attack the intention. Carnal consumption desensitizes and what used to be discrete exploration of physical bodies becomes the tangible fantasy none of us can escape from. Nothing is scared, nothing is surprising.

Man diminishes to function and proofs and the ecstasy of love flees further and further from our fingertips.

To live in an impassioned state, bound by willing commitment and bilateral exchange opens the channels of the heart to express things that cannot be described in words. This state is impervious to the instability of this world; a man and woman who are bound by love can lose every physical thing, lose the respect of their peers, their status, yet, the unwavering cleaving to one another will withstand it all.

Love drives a man to let go of everything he once held near and dear so that the baggage of his mind doesn’t obstruct him from reaching her. He will die to himself if it means being reborn nearer to her. His pride is secondary to his prize, her, and he opens himself up to the extant possibilities.

Love is long-suffering. It does not strive for affirmation or confirmation, but elevation.

bryce

On Evolution

Humans have an obsession with generalization and categorization. These two activities lead to much cleaner results when contemplating the overwhelming complexity of life. Since every individual is a discrete set of probabilities, instead of trying to tediously evaluate each one, it makes much more sense to lump them into larger packets and search for deep connections to others. This tendency to look for patterns is one of the fundamental bases for complex social constructs, but it is also what tends to hold us back.

Imagine that we travel to a distant star system where we discover another species that is not quite as evolved as we are. They are sentient and dominate on their planet, yet their social structures are still tribal or even hunter gatherer. Now, lets say that these beings posses 7 senses as opposed to our 5, they have 2 extra glandular systems with appropriate physiological structures which allow them to sense things that we cannot.

How would a human be able to understand them describing that?

Its asking a blind person to describe what the color red is.

For the last few weeks I have been working on a thought framework called General Specificity in order to glean deep insight into the nature and condition of man. Most people think and learn in terms of analogy, if we can see create a parallel between this concept and that, then our ability to understand even the most abstract becomes all the more tenable. When looking at a neighborhood, one neighbor may judge the nature of his neighbor by their attention to their lawn, ascribing this correlation as a principle of character, “a person that takes care of their lawn takes care of their life.” And so on.

Yet, time and time again, we are reminded that any rubric we create is flawed from the start. These large generalizations, as easy and organic as they are, rarely paint a sustainable picture of human interactivity. The places where they break down tend to multiply into conflict quickly, just look at the political and religious arenas — although the differences between candidates or policies, priests or doctrines differ slightly, they turn into full on schisms and conflagrations as more people pour into those intellectual impasses.

When I listen to one person talk about another, what I tend to hear is that neither of these people really understand one another. There is no deep penetrating framework that allows for congruent, symmetrical analysis. Thus, the result is a world in which the eyes of the individual viewer create the cosmos and all things must be subject to them. Beauty is in the eye of this beholder. General Specificity is a tremendous undertaking which borrows from the natural ease of analogous thinking, but instead of creating loose categories, fights to lock in as much information into a statement as possible. In other words, its never “black people do this” or “why do women do that”, but instead a meaningful insightful observation into the varying identities at play in society.

What I am attempting to create is a new sense and this is why I remain in abstract thought for so long. To bring things into gross terms undermines my ability to be imaginative in describing something I’ve never seen. My hopes are that I help rid people of natural bias and prejudice by expanding their understandings and contracting their frivolous words.

Evolution is a tricky concept because no matter how much one may believe they know whats going to happen next, the very nature of evolution is the emergence of something new. That new thing may be, like General Specificity, the amalgam of many previously understood concepts or it could be spontaneous occurence, a completely unfathomable occasion.

There are literally thousands of dimensions by which one could measure a human, psychological, economical, astrological, chronological, cultural, ethnic, developmental, emotional, physiological and so on. As you listen to people discuss things with one another, they jump from dimension to dimensional with wanton disregard for order or tractability, creating divergences between themselves and their environment. As their cognitive biases kick into overdrive, that human is intellectually blind to their alienation. They are now operating at peak inefficiency, yet deluding themselves to believe they are “right”.

That sets the stage for many pedantic discussions on the nature of ethics or “correctness”, but those ancillary conversations are nothing more than derivatives of discordant thought processes.

As I attempt to reconcile human nature and human condition, even if its the slightest movement towards the middle, I find myself connecting deeply with the cosmos at large. I have begun to understand God and Christ, I understand interstellar phenomena, and the massive concepts that cause most people to cower in intellectual defeat. I have begun to understand social structures as a whole, power dynamics and fluxes in information. Things have begun to be just a little less torpid

And thats amazing. It permits me the luxury of analyzing massive amounts of data and creating “couture” responses to problems, which is the definition of General Specificity. Big data set that can churn out specific responses in random, chaotic, or frontier environments as with humans. Humans are nonlinear, our responses are a uncertain mishmash of unpredictable and predictable outputs, therefore, any attempt at discussing concepts as generalizations or weak analogies is laughable.

Now, the goal of academia is specificity. If you are carrying out an experiment, you better damn sure well be coming up with specific, insightful studies. However, general specificity is as paradoxical as its namesake — I have no interest in the rigidity of physical, social, or commercial sciences. I am fully embracing the unknown and the known, adhering tightly to the principles of cosmic balance. The beautiful thing about yin and yang are that they aren’t just half black and half white, but that in the center of each half is a little piece of the other.

General Specificity is built for antimonious arguments and for overall contradiction, because the nature of man isn’t to be this or that. We must consciously hold on to all nascent possibilities, eschewing one while agreeing with it simultaneously.

That is an evolved way of thinking; notoriously difficult, yet amazing once one gets the hang of it

bryce

Deep Considerations on the Nature of Power

“Absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely” – Lord Acton

Human nature is a beast trapped within the delusions of its own making. It is the recursive cycling of mirrors and as that discrete packet of life expression persists, it becomes evermore insistent on its efficacy.

Power, ironically, is word frowned upon by the masses, yet, the majority of us feel that way because we believe that power corrupts. We do not see things for what they are. It is not power that leads to corruption, but the very nature of a man himself.

Most of my readership will scoff at this notion, yet deep down inside you will understand exactly what I mean. You have felt it since the moment you began reflecting while reading this blog. You have begun to see yourself not as the pillar of sentience, but as something more amorphous, something clandestine, a nagging feeling of uncertainty that sits in the bottom of your gut.

As you go out and attack the world at large, whether professionally or personally, you also feel this sense that all is not right. Its facile to chalk the negative aspects of the world to a corrupt elitist cabal at the top — nothing makes me chuckle more than the belief that the leaders of the world are unerringly Luciferic. But, as one begins the study the movements of such a social being as man, the patterns one observes are unmistakable.

In an existence where there is no ultimate goal outside of the pure creation of one’s own meaning, interpretations and opinions begin affecting each other in nasty ways. Suddenly, women and men who must fend for what they believe to be right — noble or no — rise to the occasion, forging their peculiar sense of destiny in the process.

Whether you are after the protection of your children or the abject notion of greed, you have already initiated courtship with the imminent coquette that is power.

Machiavellian considerations of power are generally the first thoughts when influence of this nature are contemplated, but this delineation is the feeble attempt of a self absorbed creature to ablate him or herself of the absolute truth: that we wish to have power and that power is universal regardless of our chosen medium.

Life is a struggle of ideals, images, and interaction; the more one tears into the absurdity of this extant game, the more one begins to divorce themselves of the ideals and the images, simply using them for the optimization of the interactions. That is the quintessence of power. That is the epitome of what we all — albeit tacit — truly feel deep down inside.

The nagging urge to create.

Power, succinctly stated, is the ability to create. It is the ability to create whatever one wants, even if that is the obstruction of someone else’s creation. Though negative undertones beleaguer most considerations of power on high levels, the fact of the matter remains the same:

Most peopler are angry that their lives are not their own.

They may sit around and dream of the days when they have freedom over themselves, but in the present it is much easier to project blame on those who seem to play the games of influence with defter fingers.

I am of a generation of misguided martyrs who believe themselves to be champions for a better world. Their intentions may be noble, their deepest insights beautiful, but they tend to skip over this dark secret.

Humans are not capable of unity and only half capable of harmony. We are good at imagery, but we are dismal at interaction, thus those among us who posses some semblance of prescience step to the fore and move pawns around at will, playing their game to the best of their ability. Power does not corrupt, for the body of the host is already corrupted. Something that is already corrupted can not be corrupted any further. It may seem to change in the eye of the observer whose limited knowledge permits them the privilege of imagination, however, the host was already rotten.

bryce

A Clearer Lens on the Nature of Human Interaction

In my last post I posited the antimonious opinion that life can only be understood by looking at multiple discrete entities, however, life can only be expressed through the lens of a single subjective entity. In other words, objectivity [multiple subjectives] lays out the appropriate framework for life as a whole, yet, that framework does not truly make sense until you it through a single subjective source.

In psychology the word “projecting” is thrown around a lot. An individual with extreme self-esteem issues or emotional trauma may find themselves projecting their diminished views onto others. They expect others to act like them or see the world as they do or sometimes judge people based exclusively on these distorted views of reality. This example paints the initial picture of my position about objectivity-subjectivity.

Our thoughts are the closest things to our souls, they are generated from within and even if we find ourselves thinking things we don’t fully understand, our proximity to these thoughts creates an intimacy and subsequently a sacrosanctity that set up our cognitive biases. Cognitive bias is also a well studied, frequently discussed phenomenon, but given my proclivity for metaphysics working in tandem with consciouses in a physical sense, I present them in a manner you probably won’t find in a textbook.

As we observe live in an outside entity, i.e. another human, many of us succumb to the intense gravity of personal opinion. Even if we are not directly critiquing or commenting, us “walking a mile in another’s moccasins” is a quasi transference of how we see things into the circumstances of others. “How we see things” is the definition of cognitive bias and cognitive bias is the progenitor of personal opinion or subjectivity. We access our sanctum sanctorum of personal belief so often that nothing outside of that thought matrix is even plausible and the only things that jar us out of long stated opinion are tableau scenes or some jolting introduction of previously unseen or misunderstood information.

As all of these independent containers of personal opinion (humans) interact with each other, it becomes painfully apparent that what one thinks or another thinks is really of no consequence; it is not until many of these discrete units agree that any semblance of “objective” or empirical truth comes to fruition.

Here’s where things get tricky, many things that are passed off as objective truth are nothing more than strongly stated opinions backed by reasonable, yet distorted facts. But separating objectivity and reasonable subjectivity is a rather Herculean task. The academic world is based around discovering the truth, yet even in these hallowed institutions, powerful personal beliefs retain experimental sovereignty.

To believe that our species, in its present state, will ever truly interface with pure objective truth is rather laughable right now. We, as my aforementioned position states, need subjectivity in order to express humanity, life as exhibited through Homo sapiens. The sheer amount of information present, our obsession with categorization, our need for proof, yet our nagging intuition are all compounded infinitely by the gift of independent cognition, which allows us to have differing opinions.

Thus, attempting to look through someone else’s eyes results more often than not in an abject exercise in mental projection.

And almost all projections are reasonable.

Outside of emotionally disturbed, intellectually challenged, or otherwise disabled persons, the thoughts and beliefs of those around you are not hard to understand, even when you vehemently denounce them. You may call them sheep or ignorant or just plain ineffiicient, yet, any exploration into their lifestyles and personal history clearly paints a picture of why they feel the way they do. Another dimension that few fail to truly grasp is the notion that something that is imminently important to you may not even register on the mind of another. Someone may come to this blog and say, “bryce, what I don’t understand is your fixation on some Objective Truth, its almost as if you want people to think exactly the same. Harmony can be created in other ways, such as the eradication of currency…….” The very problems that eat you alive, that you dedicate gargantuan efforts towards may be farcical to another. It literally means nothing to them or the solution you are one with is dross to another.

Therein lies the paradox of a being who must balance objectivity and subjectivity AND all the permutations that come with them. The most subjective, the most doggedly determined individuals do wind up changing the world’s condition, yet the fallibility of human nature merely reemerges under different circumstances. The most objective, philosophically inert people wind up wasting their time pondering the intangibles of the universe.

This is no clean cut dichotomy. There is no “either or” scenario here. The only way to understand life is to embrace as many opinions as you can, widening your horizons; YET, the only way to express life is to develop opinions of your own. It is for this very same reason that wisdom tends to contradict itself. There are countless examples, “question everything” juxtaposed against, “have faith”.

Life is not a straightforward task in the least. It is an all-pervasive, anfractuous, inter-dimensional wave of ever shifting probability.

bryce

The Meaning of Life

DOUBLETHINK AND THE JANUS THOUGHT

Our world is complex, comprised of an inextricable medley of opinion and concrete fact all competing for intellectual supremacy. There lies innumerable strata for a thinker to perch himself upon, he can fancy himself a physicalist, spiritualist, scientist, empiricist, or creative. He can venture into the bowels of extant thought through practically any vehicle he can surmise; this, of course, lays the foundation for the aberrant confusion in the world. For a man, or woman, or child, can fancy him or her self anything and create any existence per the delineations of their character.

Several posts ago, I enumerated one of my thought frameworks, Quantum Superposition, that posited that men and women are all things possible — intellectually, emotionally, characteristically, et. al — but our development and overall perception cause us to identify with a particular set of traits or normalcies that define who we believe ourselves to be. An example would be that every person at any given moment is happy, sad, anxious, relaxed, AND eager; yet, our conscious faculties function by choosing packets of information, per our “personalities” or current experience, which cause us to inwardly observe a particular emotion and display it outward.

This is the easiest way to calm a person down: if you can understand although that a person may be frustrated or anxious, they are also happy elsewhere in their conscious, you can dredge up the positive images that can override the negative inputs which are causing them distress.

Easier said then done, I know, but the principle remains the same.

Quantum Superposition, a tenuous allusion to the superposition principle of quantum mechanics, is amplified when you look at people one larger scales, especially open forums like social networks. What becomes increasingly evident is that people are not as concrete as they delude themselves to believe, many times the very same ideals they hold near and dear in one moment are diametrically opposed to their positions in the next. Over time an observer can see how a shift of “vantage point” or more precisely, a shift in information, can cause even the most conservative to become liberal.

There is no algorithm to predict this change in behavior nor am I positing that any sort of rigor is being applied to my observations. Moreover, if you have made it this far you already know exactly what I’m talking about. People tend to contradict themselves all the time.

I have also come to embrace the Orwellian paradox of “doublethink” as it so deftly explains the confusion that runs rampant in our species.

Many of us hold on to mutual exclusive belief systems, especially when we cannot see the corollaries between concepts in our mind. For instance, a person have a clearly defined ‘loyalty’ in their dealings with friends or family, but are perfectly accepting of disloyalty towards their spouse or significant other. They will eviscerate lies or dishonor in one arena then fully embody dishonor in another. Many of us understand cognitive bias, but our very understanding of cognitive biases are biased!

Man is such a peculiar creature as he can bring life to any concept, even one that is untrue. Therein lies the sole purpose of the sciences, to rectify and reconcile man with truth, yet, everyday we hear of some experiment that is beleaguered by the corrupted touch of opinion.

Look at the corruption that bothers us the most — deception and lying at high governmental or corporate positions. But one must ask themselves, why does this motif seem to replay itself? Is it that these people truly believe themselves above the law or is it that the very nature of man creates these abject inconsistencies that allow those with influence the power to supersede them

We are both corrupt and corrigible!

Man is both redeemed and unredeemed, positive and negative, per the principles of cosmic balance that many of us acknowledge and understand.

The societies we create exhibit this duality without fail; we cannot create anything that is eternally stable, for the vehicles which power us are fundamentally unstable. Although there is much good in the world, it is always offset by equal bad; although things may seem terrible, there is always that light at the end of the tunnel.

We vacillate between the dualities present in us and as we create social structures, those constructs are as shaky as the creatures, us humans, that created them.

Time, the spatiotemporal passing in the physical sense, is practically imperceptible as many of us are far too focused on what we believe to be occuring. Due to this myopic view of the universe, we create blinders which impair us from viewing things as they are. We fail to see the world for what it is and even as information repeats itself — as many of us clearly understand i.e. “history repeats itself — we still continue the traditions of flawed mindsets.

What happens over time is that the mind forgets the recurring objective and folds upon itself, especially in moments of high emotional or intellectual content. Our lives are happening and we can no longer ponder the infinite philosophical questions that have no value in a healthy society. Many of us abandon exploratory, inquisitive thought in favor of a honing in on “effective” thoughts. Thoughts that produce what we believe to be positive results. Our mind folds inward. That “folding” sets the individual up for a heavy reliance on subjectivity or their self-evident opinion. They are consumed by how they feel, how they think, and how they believe. As this folding continues, they are no longer concerned with opinions or viewpoints that don’t mirror theirs, they label these people as stupid or “blind” (irony intended). As they start to feel stronger and stronger about their opinions other social phenomena occur, inertia begins to pick up and others start to respond with dogma inevitably being forged.

That dogma becomes “right” in the eyes of the thinker.

Recall that man brings “life” to whatever he or she focuses on, ala James Allen As A Man Thinketh. What the vast majority of people do is become the summation of their self-absorbed thoughts, stoking the intellectual fires of their comfort, following lives of their liking, without truly understanding their greater position. I really don’t care what individual we are discussion about, from the mainstream “sheep” to the counterculture “conspiracy theorist”, they are self-possessed agents of their own egos. Whether inimical to the conventional or the very picture of orthodoxy, the assertion that one way of living is different than the next is the hallmark of egoic man.

The bulk of you have read this far and probably still have no idea what I’m really attempting to explain, as you have not become aware of doublethink and just how far its roots are in your very own mind.

Things are not this or that, they are both. How you choose to define them is a potentiality then eventuality of your mind. Outside of physical occurrences, which are in reality the distant, permutated offspring of conscious concepts, the world is comprised of eventualities of individual conscious experiences.

To feel THIS way or THAT way is irrelevant, life is THISTHAT, it is always, unendingly BOTH.

THE PURPOSE OF LIFE IS TO CREATE MEANING FOR ONE’S SELF.

The nihilist in me states that because life is everything it is also nothing, therefore, it serves no greater purpose and is resolutely absurd. However, that would lead me straight to the nearest cliff, off of which I would promptly jump. Moreover, my response to something being intrinsically worthless is to ask where the source of the intrinsic factor was.

The only place that life makes sense is within a live body. The duality of objectivity is that if I constantly think of the world or the universe as a whole, I fail to actually create a discrete living entity. Without the subjective, there is no “life”, at least on this plane. Although we are a body of people, we do not share the same consciousness or conscious experience. Thus, the only place that makes sense to contemplate existence is within the confines of one’s own condition. A man creates his understanding of the universe through his own eyes.

A man creates his purpose of living, through the vehicles of his perception, which can be spiritual or intellectual, and his materail, his actual body.

But wait, bryce, you’re saying that the only way to understand life is to view it through the eyes of every conscious being, yet to do that renders life worthless; therefore I need to create intrinsic meaning through my own eyes, so that existence becomes purposeful?

Yes.

You are now beginning to understand doublethink.

Neither is more important than the other. Individual opinion is just as important and unimportant as aggregate consideration; together they form the Janus Thought.

Man is not solely logical, nor is he solely illogical. Let me put it in a way you have probably heard before, “man is not just body, he is also spirit.” Trying to observe a human as SOLELY this or SOLELY that, fundamentally undermines the reality of the infinitive conscious experience. If you are discussing yourself, then you can create the necessary illusions to convince yourself that YOU are solely body. If you are discussing yourself, then you can create the necessary illusions to convince yourself that YOU are solely spirit.

Yet, the moment you attempt to quantify the conscious experience of another, you offend the cardinal rule of existence, all things are all things and no things.

Doublethink.

bryce

Conversations on the Nature of Being II

The sheer immensity of the universe is positively spellbinding for me. Out of this terrifying awe of the macrocosm comes a version of absurdism, however, I have long since objected to the calcification of any particular way of thinking. In the past few weeks I have been perpending the principles of doublethink, the acceptance of two contradictory statements, as I view the relationships between man and man, man and nature, and speculatively, man and universe.

My deepest desire as a nascent being is to discover an optimized way of living — a putative effort, I’m aware — yet, I am constantly driven to this train of thought. As I burrowed deeper and deeper into this, I am interminably nagged by the realization that this “quest” I am on is no different than the quests that billions of people before me, concurrently with me, and after me will sojourn. As real as this optimized life is to me is as real as the other “holy grails” that add meaning to so many people’s lives.

I tailspin into nihilism.

The advent of technology has provided me something that many of my enlightenment forerunners did not have: the access to terabytes of data to analysis, weigh, and ruminate. I have a much broader view of the world than say Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Socrates. Yet, the fundamental inquiries into the nature of being remain the same.

The duality between the physical and the metaphysical, the meaning of this physical existence, and the roads to travel. No matter how far along we’ve come, we are still a relatively inchoate species; many of the answers we’ve been asking since the beginning of recorded history are still unanswered today.

To many, this document and its contents are quality foolishness, completely impractical and worthless to any extent. My response isn’t to refute nor affirm their position, but to point to their place on the larger map of human experience. The fact that we can exist as so many variations on one extant theme is both inspiring and maddening, sometimes I feel like I am being crushed under the weight of so many opinions. Opinions are the very crux of doublethink, as most humans are unabashed hypocrites. We hold on to stark antinomies , affirming something and also affirming its diametrical opposite, especially when life passes rapidly. We will say things like, “have faith in God” then turn around and say, “I’m the type to go get what I just prayed for.” That person is not acting in faith, yet their BELIEF in faith also provides some intangible substance which contributes to their overall fitness.

The response to the complexity of opinion is to then consummately do away with one aspect and commit wholly to the other, enter the atheist or hardline zealot. However, that is only if we are discussing matters of faith, as we shift the focus of life’s microscope, we continually find more and more inconsistencies in the expression of the human condition. You will have a man cry, “equality for all” and in the next breath he eviscerates the practices of a perceived cultural enemy. You’ll have a person swear that they are independent, yet they thrive on the welfare provided by their government.

Liberty seems much a farce as true freedom mimics either utter chaos or social apathy, both of which ignore pivotal needs of individual humans.

Information, while purportedly neutral, tends to be passed through subjective lenses, gobbled up by one fraction of the populace and derided by the other. Physical events are relegated to the parameters of the power players and that which is objective becomes tainted by the subjective.

All of that is fine, I can’t even really address those realities because I am far too consumed by the parasol which umbrellas these ancillary realities.

What strikes me as peculiar again and again, is that there CAN be this many variations on the single theme of living. That literally every moment provides heaps and heaps of more information which, after properly subjected to the filters of individual humans, then groups, then societies at large, reap even more packets of partially hydrogenated information. It isn’t that life is THIS or THAT it is life is THIS and THAT, THISTHAT, THIS and sometimes THAT, and every other version in between.

We exist, precariously might I add, in world where objective truth and subjective fallacies are indistinguishable from one another. This creates the very grounds for someone to read this post and say, “all of this is trivial”. Would they be right? In a sense yes. But then again, all manner of human expression is a version of pure frivolity as nothing we do is untainted by the trickery inherent to individual contemplation.

Some might posit that it is best then to do away with the “soft” sciences and opt for the stringent paths of math or science, yet, the frontier of these noble pursuits are always steeped in the theoretical and are constantly subrogated as the next generation of science creates more elegant ways to explore itself.

Moreover, science, magic, and spirituality are virtually indecipherable when one removes objective biases and views them with nothing more than faint curiosity. Science may hinge upon provability, yet, the principles of magic and spirituality are about exploration of the self, the intangible self, which varies from person to person and ergo needs no manner of empirical data to affirm the user. As one delves deep into the anomalous and downright wacky world of the unconscious, even more of these inconsistencies rear their ugly heads as people harbor secret motivations which directly contradict their everyday words and actions. We harbor doublethink, then inimically give way to doublespeak.

How complex this creature called man!

So we sue each other, we feel affronted, we feel varying emotional waves of this and that, in this partially understood world. We settle on one version of thinking or the other, we persecute and judge one another, we consume data and information, yet the ineluctable truth seems to evade us all:

Life is _________________________.

No matter how you answer that, your response is rife with subjection. It is a guttural response from your viewpoint and it is rendered virtually meaningless in the void that is shared reality. One can never truly intimate the meaning of life as any such concept would be lost in the translation from consciousness to brain, which would in turn have to rationalize it against what it already knows and has sensed. Albert Camus saw belief in God as ‘philosophical suicide’, as a sort of deus ex machina which provided an individual little more than a poison pill; I am not concerned with whether he is right or wrong, I merely gawk abjectly at the reality of this thing we call free choice.

It begs the question: is there any answer in free choice? Or does the ability to choose merely sustain itself? In other words, is there an objective truth to be found or does the immersion of our subjective reality, expressed as free choice through development, simply allow a person to continue thinking ad infinitum until they expire from this earth?

I divorce myself from trying to find any meaning in life and instead attempt to draw corollaries between my experience of existence and another human being. What I have come to find is that we are a rather species creature, full of creative merit and boundless energy, yet our advancement is still incunabula and unfortunately these answers remain out of reach in the dimensionless, inexplicable void of the Absurd.

bryce

Solipsism

I am the firstborn of a mindset of DOUBLETHINK,
To know and to not know, like rejecting water from running sink.
My language is that of DOUBLESPEAK,
To say and not to say.

Yes, I am the children of those who thought they knew,
Made possible by all that they didn’t know.
But to balance, I have to acknowledge that I am ignorant,
So that I may have my eyes shut open.

Let’s talk about that third eye,
That bird eye,
That sees everything from the dirt to the skies,
Turns regular guys to sages and yogis.

We gotta make academia delicious like macadamias for the masses,
Because to explain balance in clear terms just don’t make sense,
Individuality and aggregation are antimonious,
So let’s celebrate illusory empiricism within hallowed walls sanctimonious.

Parsimonious is my mind when giving credit,
I’m hoarding my dollar because if I bet it,
I’ll be gambling on a game that has no purpose,
At least not objectively.

Not to be misconstrued, I’m no nihilist,
I’m just the childless child of DOUBLETHINK,
I know what I don’t know and I don’t know what I know,
Because to observe is to alter.

And to alter this game is to falter,
So I father these febrile, yea fatuous thoughts.
Honor the pragmatist inside of me,
Honor the spirit inside of me.

Whew.

They say they say things realer than the TV screens,
But to me it seems they speak only DOUBLESPEAK,
That Janus talk that loves to be seen,
Yet hides beneath the smooth sheen,

Like a cool veneer, but I don’t scoff or sneer,
Because I am aware of why we’re all here.
Shit, at least I pretend to know,
Such a scion of such opposing thoughts.

Such a child of ancillary recognizance,
The cogs are just… turning, so beautifully, so beautifully.
So assiduously I ascend the stairs of solitary solipsism,
For the battle wages, rages, blazes so certainly within the self

Daydreams

I used to dream about emerging from the center,
A king, a ruler, a sovereign in a land of perfectly understood,
I would play my part and play it well,
I used to stare out the window from my enigmatic window sill.

This nexus of nascence, showing you present moments,
You could never truly catch, a brewed batch,
Of fresh thoughts would take charge of my mentals,
Delicious little lentils like morsels on my dentals,

But the present moment wasn’t anything more than guesswork of those who passed,
The past was something like a hand whose complex die cast,
Set up the framework for this frame to work,
And the same work insane work, foolishly thinking this time would be different.

So here I am cynical, inimical, with sinister thoughts of extant heresy,
Dare I say that hearsay, seems to set sentience in motion?
I abdicate my original longed for throne,
And opt for alternative kingdoms among the interstices.

I can’t fully form the pro forma that would seem normal,
Since normalcy is the average of proximal guesses.
My eyes undress the supposedly sumptuous form of reality,
Only to find the etiolated husks of incarnated wants.

Speculator’s Curse

No one said it would be easy, they also never really said what the “it” was either.
So I’m the embodiment of extant temerity,
Chock full of creative severity,
Because the “it” is leaving my mark on Reality.

Surreality is more like it, really,
Sometimes I wonder if I can teleport to Chantilly,
Or change the topography of somewhere hilly,
To the ultimate flat.

So I sit in my stultified flat,
Wondering how to unlock the intimate desires of my mind,
And perhaps find, a kind of sign that clearly delineates whats mine,
Or whats possible, or whats plausible, or whats logical..

Because what if what’s logical is what’s magical,
And what’s actual is actually what’s radical,
How impractical it would be for a fellow to navigate,
Such a world to which one can only speculate….