A Boyfriend is Not A Husband

My romantic past has been something of keen interest to my social circles, a notion verified by the funny fact that historically my most popular posts have been those regarding my fraught filled dalliances. Today’s post falls in line with the pursuit of intimacy but is a little different than usual: over the weekend I reached out to a good friend of mine who had recently experienced some love woes and her response to my email was a suggestion that I give a particular topic some quality thought.

Sprawled across my cell phone screen was a simple statement with profound implications: DON’T PRAISE YOUR BOYFRIENDS. The message then went on to say:

“Don’t give a boyfriend the benefits deserving of a husband because he won’t have anything to marry you for, anything that he must continually work for — nothing to fight for. Until the night of your honeymoon, he is simply auditioning for the part.”

Heavy, indeed.

I actually spent most of today in a completely different contemplative domain; the blog I authored this morning had more to do with the frivolity and shortsightedness of ideology, an article I’ll likely publish tomorrow, and therefore, the construction of this post comes from an unusual perspective, but hopefully you readers have come to expect this from me.

As a high functioning narcissist with a nagging superiority complex, much of my life has actually been a journey of discovery into myself, rather than the exploration of the world around me. My relationship history has been volatile and unstable, the kinds of things found in lifetime movies. Fraught with the fear that I may be the culpable common denominator to my much touted romantic failures, I recently decided that I would take a step back and try to look at things, matters of the heart especially, from ever more objective stances.

A chief problem that I see rear its ugly head far too often is actually a core component of the domain in which I took residence earlier, the complexity of the brain and as a result, consciousness. Earlier I wrote, “Ideology is implemented to illuminate the objective truths of life, but life, or at least the human expression of life, will conform and mold to the subjective limits of a person’s ideology,” a curious oddity that has long-reaching implications. Many of us who consider ourselves deep thinkers believe that in-depth contemplative thought leads one to discovering the truth — the objective truth or at least some component of it — and thus is a pursuit that renders one enlightened. The tricky part is that this is not wholly backed by science; contemplative thought does render some deeper insight which can be considered a form of enlightenment, but the brain more or less operates by restructuring itself as opposed to a rigorous molting and greater flourishing.

Think of it this way: you are given a plain box and told that whatever you find in it is the objective key to happiness. You open the box and find something that you were thinking about last week. You are obviously elated and take to the various forms of communication to herald your discovery. Then some events happen and you open the box a few days later only to find out that its contents have changed; the box is now filled with something else closely related to the lessons learned throughout those past few days.

Although many won’t see the problem with this, remember that I said you would find the objective key to happiness. Therefore, it follows that whatever is inside is some form of universal good, a lesson that could be extended to all mankind, a concept you supported by trumpeting your good news. By seeing what makes you happy, you could in theory help someone else find that which makes them happy and so forth. However, if what is inside the box keeps shifting and changing per the subjective shifts in your own life, how could you hope to find meaningful objectivity?

A bit abstract, but with some time it will make sense. Quickly stated, the brain ultimately learns by restructuring itself and, as aforementioned, this has serious implications on all matters of life.

One major implication is that I cannot tell anyone what a boyfriend or a girlfriend should or should not do nor can I legitimately tell anyone how to treat their significant other. Taking a game theoretical position to its hilt, the best I can proffer is a schema that allows one to probe and survey their significant other and understand what it is that is needed, but even this is rife with subjective flourishes unique to my understanding.

However, for the sake of time and my sanity, I will put out a few suggestions.

Last week, my mom and I got into a lively conversation about how dating has changed from when she was in her 20s to now. She is unnerved by our lack of impulse control when dating one another; even though many in her generation (and those preceding her) dated for notoriously short periods of time, they, in her opinion, exercised more control or wisdom over their emotions. They didn’t give in and fall in love after a week and all the things of that like. While I could’ve eviscerated her point from a variety of different vantages, mostly that her arguments were fallacious, I gave her the benefit of the doubt because I did fundamentally understand where she was coming from and I offered this explanation:

Technology has made it possible for two people to be connected literally every waking moment, whereas, those from earlier generations were bound by the limits of communication in their time. We have no need for impulse control because a person can be instantly gratified at any time. We are supplied with a fresh set of photos, fresh set of life updates, and fresh lines of specified communication at literally the tips of our fingers. This extreme hyperbolic discounting has seemingly given way to unsettling trends tied to such realities.

Thus, the perils experienced by my friend over the weekend went hand in hand with the concerns from my mother, our generation isn’t wise when it comes to imposing limits.

Allow me to add this caveat, humans aren’t very wise when it comes to self-imposed limits. This isn’t an issue of age, creed, or culture, its a problem intrinsic to all manner of humanity.

A boyfriend is not a husband and although this is clear from a common-sense standpoint, common-sense is usually supplanted by intense emotion in matters of the heart. Call it competing motivations from genuinely quixotic individuals. Many of us so desperately want love, acceptance, and the emotional high that comes with these that we will readily sacrifice our usual sense for the next sensation. Although many women are sober and calculating in many aspects of their life, a competing cognition such as the prospect of romantic bliss will be as an EMP to their analytical computer. The same can be said of many men, ::cough:: me.

We are all aware of the benefits of love and we feel intuitively that by becoming a superconductor for the emotive persuasions, we are priming a situation for better vitality, we are maximizing our chances of enjoying true love. However, time and time again, we see that this is just simply not the case and again, we can point to competing motivations as the culprit.

Because our brains are mapping and remapping themselves at trillions of connections per second, our internal workings are exorbitantly complex. Few, if any, of us are truly privy to our inner mechanisms and as a result, we are a hotbed of hidden motivations. The unconscious and conscious minds are not always in synch, thus we are not completely who we think we are and we are certainly not always who we display ourselves to be. For some, this is inadvertent and for others it is an intentional malicious lie of omission; irrespective, the result is the same.

A husband should be a man whom you have established a friendship with, first and foremost. Within a friendship the bounds of rationale and response can be tested. Friendships are often more objective, even if only slightly, allowing two people to observe one another in scores of changing environments and if the brain is good for anything its flourishing in change. When a man is your friend, he is less likely to hide things from you; better yet, less capable of doing so. A woman’s razor sharp intuition is of high value here. You all know when your male friends are full of shit when you see him deal with other less assuming women, employ that logic here.

After you’ve become excited about a man, mentally take a step back. A man that cares for you and wants things to work will understand and see the value in taking a step back as well. There’s an adage going around that whatever relationship you’re in now will either end in a breakup or in a marriage; thats a serious investment. In the time that you’ve established a friendship, you should be able to step back and audit your emotions just as one would do a business or investment proposal. In this time you are able to freely and fluidly explore the why’s and how’s of your feelings and he should be doing the same. Instead of compulsively talking to one another, see how it feels to meditate alone for a day or two. Remember your me time will greatly affect your us time. If you or he are unable to be alone, you are preparing to enter a parasitic relationship and that’s a dangerous reality.

Engage in meaningful dialogue about your future then watch what he does to bring that future into fruition. Many men have smooth tongues, but actions will always speak louder than words. Moreover, make sure he actualizes things to an interfaceable reality. Don’t be quick to fall for “let’s go to the ring shop,” or “I love you and we should go look for churches.” He shouldn’t be lip service and great potential, but someone that sees things to their logical end. A husband is a man of his word and not just empty ones. Hold him to that.

Potential is great, but you must date a man’s reality. You should always stick close to a good man, even if his trappings aren’t all there. However, you should push him to become the best person he can. A husband should seek a wife that draws out and helps actualize his potential. A man that constantly dwells in what he can be is a man of empty words. In the friend phase encourage and push him and watch whether he grows, stagnates, or stultifies.

In your communication, establish the rules of your connection: the downfall of far too many relationships, especially young ones, is that things are not explicitly stated. Goals are ambiguous and major changes bring major confusion. Understand that a boyfriend is trivial, but a husband should be someone you honestly hope to spend a lifetime with. Express your feelings with rapt vitality and go from there. Everything stated should be more or less understood.

Religious antics aside, a marriage is a partnership. If you are passive be prepared to let your husband lead and if you are aggressive, be prepared to discuss the power dynamics. We obviously live in a society where aggressive and dominate women are frowned upon, however, you know you and if a man loves you, you must explain you to him. In an optimal partnership information is symmetrical and equally accessible, both parties must know as much as possible prior to making serious investments.

Be conscientious that there is another brain attempting to make sense of yours. Take nothing for granted, treat your husband as an extension of yourself. You’ll be all the happier for it.

A husband is not a functional counterpart and a marriage is not an economic transaction. From an evolutionary perspective, you’ve probably chosen an individual from an instinctual, preconscious desire to reproduce and maximize fitness; however, as an advanced being, this does not necessitate cut and cry transactional decorum. A husband should be the man that you are vulnerable with, the man that knows you all too well. A husband is your primary support system and your physical refuge: in your deepest moments of desperation he should be the one you run to and he should want to be that person, every damn day.

I can go on ad infinitum but suffice to say that none of these things define a boyfriend. As is clear, I kept all of this perfectly symmetrical so that at any point you could substitute “girlfriend” and still have the same result. A wife and a husband should be interested in the deeper experiences of the human condition; the relationships I’ve seen last are based on considerably deeper foundations than those that didn’t. Therefore, it follows that there should be some limits on the expressions given to a boyfriend/girlfriend connection. Does this mean hold back and play games with one another? Of course not, but there should be places reserved for the man or woman who has stated that they want to be your forever and acted accordingly. Those deeper feelings of intimacy should be for the person that consistently earns it.

Emotional maturity is important for these types of connections because at this very moment I know many readers are defending their unconditional displays towards boyfriends and girlfriends. I do sincerely hope those trysts work out, but I will stick to my guns and say that certain intimacies are best saved for one’s partner for life. With no investment, no skin in the game, nothing to lose except a few tears, too many people are fine with just walking away. Far too many predators, far too many broken individuals, and far too many people who don’t know or understand themselves stalk these streets. It is better to consciously work through the whole of a person and hold off on the emotional histrionics than give way to someone who can potentially do severe damage, intentional or not.

bryce

What Do I Actually Do?

I am often asked what it is that I do to make a living. Let me be clear right from the get-go: I do not “make a living” in the traditional sense, much to the chagrin of some investors and Sallie Mae. My job is to be a human and explore this experience to the best of my abilities.

What is doing anyway? Generally speaking, its activity for which one gets paid. But “generally” here refers to the generality of a particular group, namely Americans. I have grown away from the notion of “doing” things to get paid, I prefer to do things because I have a burning need to understand the underpinnings of the human condition…

Let me start from the beginning, a retrograde that is necessary to explain the panopticon that has become my mentality. When I was a kid there was no doubt in my mind that I would eventually become successful. I was naturally gifted in a variety of subjects, but for the most part, uninterested in any of them. As far as education goes, I more so reveled in my ability to not have to work, rather than feel some pull towards this subject or that. I did, however, have a rapt affinity for the conditions of others and I often times found myself as the willing ear to a myriad of my friends problems. People opened up to me and I eagerly absorbed it all, methodically codifying every story, every misplaced emotional particle, and every pubescent modicum of existence with fastidious care.

By the time I got to high school, I was on full cruise control. Within my first year I had more or less found my lane and even though its duration would bring a few social changes, I thrived in my own bubble. Again, this bubble warranted no predilection in academia and I found my stride as an above average student who existentially did the minimum.

Music was a staple of my childhood, but it was an escape and I had no interest in sullying it with the necessary demands of a life dedicated to it.

College was a nightmare, as many of my close friends have heard me say. My chosen institution was and still is the incarnation of almost every failure I have ever endured. From academia to socialization, I made every mistake that one is warned about in freshman orientation. I chose a major that wasn’t thought through, I got a girlfriend within my first week of school, and I isolated myself socially, a trend that would plague me for the next 5 years. However, these persistent failures forced me into a mode of thinking that would catapult me into the individual I am now; they would come to serve as a benchmark against many of the experiences to come. Everything has a lesson embedded and I had to learn the bittersweetness of failure if I ever hoped to break the trends I was mired in.

I left my first college and embarked on what can be thought of as a sabbatical at a drastically different school. A public institution in the middle of nowhere, I was reinvigorated by the notion of possibility. In a new place where I knew no one, I was allowed the particular solitude of self-reflection; I made new friends, forged healthy alliances and tried new things.

I was discovering what it meant to be a human.

This question, what does it mean to be human, would be the implicit impetus that drove me. Upon my return to my first college, I would begin to understand myself and my need for creative freedom. This creativity was not founded on any principles of aesthetic or classic sensual qualia, but instead would be founded on something proto-sensual. It was focused intensely on the nature of meaning itself.

Meaning presupposes aesthetic; one cannot know beauty until they know what it means to them. For most of my life, I didn’t know what life meant to me. I was going through the motions laid out by the society that provided me a framework. I was an automaton whose actions coincided with the necessities of contribution and therefore meaning was simply a hand-me-down.

My senior year of college I founded my first business and as I got my hands wet with entrepreneurship, I would go into business with a good friend of mine.

This is honestly where the journey of “what does bryce do” begins.

For years I tried to explain what I did, but words usually failed me because I honestly didn’t know what I was doing. I knew that I was injecting somendimension into the social order, but this gossamer answer wouldn’t suffice as an elevator speech. I had no deliverables, I had no proof of efficacy; I could only transfer a feeling.

In this regard, I was your classic Millennial. I was truthfully selling myself as an asset and telling a client to probe me as an objective entity. I tried to teach people how to be a myriad of things and this ultimately led me down the seminal paths to who I am now. It was through my work as a consultant of human nature, what it means to be a human, that I came across those concepts that sparked the proverbial “aha!” moment deep inside my being.

My proclivity is people, even though I am disparaged by who we are at this time. People have, much to the discomfort of millions, siphoned off but a sliver of the human condition and have attempted to pass this off as life. Thus we force our children into flawed educational systems, we swear by illusory bipartisan politics, we argue various religions, and talk through a variety of emotions, all in the name of “reality.”

Let me make this clear, what we experience is not reality as we proclaim it to be. It is a reality, but it is not the reality. This delineation is of paramount purpose.

Everything around you is the eventuality of a universe that began 13 billion years ago. Whether you believe in a supreme creator or not, this is a point that cannot be lost on you. Scientists, scholars, theologians, and philosophers have debated about the course of events leading to now, but the fact remains indelibly pure, this human condition is amazing.

Our brain is plastic; it is an apparatus that not only responds to sensory information, but attentional or mental information. It is in a state of flux, constantly changing and rearranging itself. It is an evolutionary marvel, a testament to life’s resolve to survive, yet, we try to pigeonhole it in the name of arbitrarily created rules and conventions.

This is why I get so up in arms dealing with individuals. In a world where nothing has to be, but so much is extant, the idea that rigid rules or ideas must be is laughable to me.

So, what I have done for a living is continually probe the human condition as a means of discovering what I believe it means to be apart of this condition. My answer is as labyrinthine as you’d expect, the meaning of being a human is the process of creating meaning. This encompasses all walks of life and does not place any pursuit over another; the homeless man is just as entitled to his way of life as the CEO woman.

What I do is make sense of life for myself and attempt to explain that in a cogent framework with a little inconsistency as possible. The obvious result is that it is impossible; life is far too complex and humans are still too far in the existential dark for us to really make ground breaking headway into this massive universe.

Simply stated, I have gotten paid to think about how to help form new modes of thinking in the hopes of inspiring new humans. Every business on the earth is obsessed with making life better for humans, but who, really, has been interested in making better humans for life? I mean, over the millennia we have essentially embodied various types of deterministic societies in which the “have’s” and “have-not’s” were the result of the natural order of things. In this mentalistic society, myself and others like me, have taken up the charge to develop new methods of thinking about age old ideas in the hopes of inspiring regenerative thought.

Social evolution, if I may.

The notion that everyone must be doing something contributive to the economy or to society is one of the major obfuscations for so many. We often times don’t get the opportunity to learn and explore since everything must have a direct “purpose” at any given time. Don’t get me wrong, capitalism is a useful concept, but unfortunately, it contains much disuse once one extracts themselves from the rat race that is society. It amplifies triviality and forces people to make snap decisions. It is fundamentally unhuman.

This summarizes quite concisely why as a kid I was never intrigued by most professions. It took failure, academically, socially, financially, entrepreneurially, and so forth, for me to really get to the bottom of what confounded me. Although my life has been met by very many blessings and a greta number of victories, the lessons learned in my moments of depression, fear, or discomfort elucidated my interests. I’ve never cared much about money, never cared much about tangible things, never cared much about the physical world, quite frankly, but deep within me has been a drive to organize thought in ways that would inspire harmonizing conversation. Discourse that would inspire multilateral disarmament of destructive ideological arsenals. We have been at war with ourselves and our brothers and sisters by proxy since the beginning of recorded history. So much so that we still believe there’s nothing that can be done.

Religious wars, economic wars, ideological wars.

I’ve traversed these last 5 years in search of deeper connections and now that this nomadic journey is coming to an end I have already ascertain the first bits of its chosen successor, an in depth foray into the formal understanding of the human psyche and its physiological counterpart the brain. With neuropsychology I have elected to commit to a series of still arbitrary rules, however, their contrivance is in the name of universal understanding. It is my goal to continually unlock the mysteries of the human condition to the best of my ability, suspending judgment, bias, and ego in the hopes of inspiring the next generation of thinkers.

At times my journey has seemed resolutely impossible, many of my friends and former friends have experienced the ugly side of such a transient existence. However, I am confident that this won’t all be for nought and I am excited about what the endless tomorrow may hold for me.

bryce

The Anatomy of True Love

I really intended not to write anything on the topic of love for some time, however, a certain mood has stricken me and I feel it necessary to address love’s “dimensions.”

Humans are a myriad of things; by our very nature, we are all things and no things. That is to say, much like the light we visually perceive, we embody almost any mental state. At any given time in abstract perceptual space, one can configure a “location” that loosely correlates to happiness, sadness, anger, and so forth; it is imperative that we understand this principle. As opposed to searching for “exact”, point-positions we should opt for models of human behavior that see people as millions of dialectical processes. The dialectic points to a fluidity of human expression as opposed to a strict, “James is a ________,” or “I am a ________.”

When considering the equally abstract dimensions of love, the same rules must be applied. We tend to equate love to a very regimented set of principles of exchange; there is a time, there is an emotional component, there is an illogical component, and so forth. We attempt to wager with reality when discussing how we are to fall in love or what exactly it even is.

A human is rife with internal mechanisms he or she does not truly understand. When they inevitably effervesce, the individual is then charged with the task of reconciling these ambiguous motivations. Deep within all of us there are anxieties and compulsions, idiosyncrasies and virtues, which will volcanically burst free as we continue to engage life. They are like latent mechanisms, coming to the fore only after some vaguely understood period of gestation, and making sense of them is a battle for even the most adroit thinker.

Due to these intractable issues of self-knowledge, interaction between two people generally becomes a game of power and a market for exchange. There are utility functions and values assigned to all points of interaction; a woman makes you feel good about your appearance or a man is there to listen to your problems after a long day. Romantic encounters are like job interviews or trips to the supermarket; we go in searching for something and try to create reciprocal value systems.

This, in my humble opinion, is the progenitor of the dismal romantic environment we humans tend to create. Whether it is organized marriage between families or the madhouse of “dating” we have in the West today, love is a domain where humans attempt to trade value. It is “point-specific”; I exchange this for this. I expect this for this. You do this and I this. We fall into roles and typifications and we continue to operate as individual selves cooperating tangentially with this significant other for some attainable end.

I have had to end this crazy cycle for myself. I, too, saw romantic interactions as forays into value creation; I saw the women I dated as little more than functions, albeit highly important ones, to achieve an expected end. When I say, “function,” I need you to understand that I do not mean this in a rote or materialistic way. Functions can be anything from emotive to supportive, they are dimensional models to express some unique expectation out of that person. For me, the functions that these women tended to embody were my need to have an important object of desire and collaborator in life. As someone who is emotionally detached and very reserved in my affective capital, these women became the incarnation of what I desired to be the apex of human creation. They were muses and co-creators of reality.

However, I still treated them as individual agents of trade. I still expected reciprocity and a particular exchange rate. I still expected to pinpoint them in perceptual space and engage in some ongoing dialogue about optimality. I still expected things out of them which dictated my perception of their usage in my life. Those who stopped inspiring me, those who stopped serving that function were effectively useless. They were functionally obsolete and I discarded them as such. Perhaps I would be sad, experience a bout of melancholy, but I always assured myself that I made the “best” decision for myself.

It wasn’t until my last girlfriend that I began to do away with this mechanized model of engagement, but old habits die hard. We still expected things out of one another and acted with strict adherence to our modes of discipline. Thus, we were inevitably doomed to simply serve as useful or un-useful with respect to one another.

I see this in almost every interaction I see; I see it in the interactions I am involved with now. There is a distinct need to preserve one’s self while simulating the process of giving in to another because of some misunderstood feeling. Even when someone “good” comes into our lives, we sober ourselves behind a well thought out exchange system in which we are “ready” or “not ready.”

I don’t see myself as ready or not ready any longer. I’m not concerned with if a woman is ready or not ready any longer. There is no such thing as ready or not ready; there is only a will to do or a will not to do. If someone chooses to do something, it is now on the shoulders of both individuals to create an environment in which they dimensionally harmonize. If you think you are “not ready” to do something, it is because you do not want to do it. Don’t ascribe power to ambiguous emotions and compulsions that are nothing more than derivatives of your will. You can and will do what you want to do. You will not do what you do not want to do.

Most of us are completely fine with engaging in functional love, but complain when these interactions fail to thrive. True love needs no function; it is a pure reality in which two people choose (with all definitions of choose being extant) to engage one another. The only exchange that occurs is one’s self for the other’s self; true love is not a Chinese takeout menu. You take the entire combination or you do not take the entire combination.

Functional love has its place in the greater domain of love; many people have no will to truly give in to another. However, for those that delude themselves into believing true love, yet only cultivate functional exchanges, their time is being wasted. True love is purely holistic, it explicitly requires the relinquishing of self and ego for the greater superstructure of harmony. There is no “I” or “you,” there is “us.” When a person begins to frustrate or chafe the other, true love, again, cannot be a conversation about “pro’s” and “cons.” You will choose to continue or you will choose not to.

Functional love is more about having an object to denote than it is about having an extension of one’s self. Functional love preserves the self and preserves individual motivations and rates of exchange; it is true to its name.

If one loves another truly, they are not concerned about the things they like or dislike; those aren’t even terms that matter. There is a requisite need for that other like a vital organ or lifeblood. If there are things that aren’t liked, they are treated as minor annoyances; you don’t sell the house because there is a fly in the kitchen, you work through the process of killing the fly and closing the door behind you when you go in or out. Even the problems that seem unbearable are minor annoyances; there is always a solution if you love each other truly.

If there is asymmetry, if one loves true and the other functionally, it is again a question of will. There is no right, wrong, or otherwise. If you choose to, then you will.

This is the anatomy of true love or how I see it. I say all of this out of a heavy heart because I myself am being forced to see how my construction of reality has precluded me from tasting the delicious fruits of a peaceful mind and soul. I have been so tethered to the notion of exchange that I go veritably mad when I experience even the slightest bit of hesitation from my clearly thought out, rational exchange system. When I feel a woman hesitate or regress I am incensed to the point of madness. I have experienced the pain of abandonment too often and I attempt to avoid that unbearable pain by upholding a strict marketplace of reciprocal value. I, historically, cannot and will not continue to engage a woman unless she is equal with me in terms of expression and content. I use this parity as a standard of our vitality; a disparity signals a failing economy and I am the first to abandon ship. I have, thusly, never experienced true love because I have never laid the foundation for it.

Lets face it, my real problem is trust. I have refused to trust someone to do things I cannot see. I don’t trust moves that are three or four turns ahead because in the back of my mind, if things were to go awry I will say, “I shouldn’t have done this.” There is a nagging pessimism in my mind because I cannot trust other people’s mental states. I fully embody introspection illusion; I trust my own excavations into mental space, but I place absolutely no value on anyone else’s ability to do so.

So, instead of putting my faith in these shifting sands, I created a mental framework of pure, beautiful symmetry; you do this and I do this. We do this together. A beautiful harmony based on latent trust; a functional love. When that function ceased to function, it was time to move on.

I am now shackled to this scarier — no, terrifying — form of intimacy. One in which I completely fall backwards into an abstract space from which I may not be able to escape. I’m not concerned about finding “the one” or “a soul mate” because as I fall, that person will be presented to me, in all her existential glory.

bryce

Embracing Your Struggle

In your youth struggle is your job.

It is your occupation and you should very well give the entirety of your effort to it.

The gripe a preceding generation always has with its successor is that they are too headstrong; the kids think they know better because they have calculated and adjusted for the errors of their parents. One of the prevailing mantras of parenthood is to raise your kids to be better than yourself; a mantra that like so many idiosyncrasies in verbal communication veils some difficult truths to swallow.

There are many problems endemic to human interaction but it is my belief that chief among them — and I’m not using that with creative license, I do indeed mean chief — is our persistent belief that life is linear. We spend a significant portion of our time trying to creative predictable results with education, legislature, religion, politics and the like, that we start to put our independent beliefs above the veritable panoply of interpretation that exists adjacent and opposite to us.

In order to gain peace with the world we must learn to get over ourselves. A task much easier said than done.

Our generation has experienced things that no other group on earth ever has and as much as we herald that in our communicative channels, I do not believe many understand the gravity of that. We are a more informed cohort, but we are not necessarily any more advanced than those before us. We may have more opportunities than those before us, but that doesn’t mean that those opportunities come without a fight. The conditions of human experience have changed, but the nature, as always, remains aberrantly persistent.

We believe that wisdom can be bought or expedited because we have learned from those who toiled in the decades before we were even thought of. This precludes us from ever truly understanding what youth is about. To add consternation to chaos, our parents do not have clear understandings either; they may possess a tacit, learned understanding, but to translate that into meaningful terms is lost on many people.

So young people go through these early years trying to forge their way into a system, only to be indelibly whittled down by inevitability.

You MUST struggle now. That is your job.

You cannot look to particular conditions, those are meaningless in the eyes of objective reality. You cannot say, “I’m going to change corporate America by starting my own business”, that is a clear contradiction. It is not until you struggle and learn why corporate America is fucked that you stand even a shadow of a chance of any meaningful reform.

The struggle of learning is the constant because it reflects the nature of humanity. No one can deny that the specifics of our culture and ancient Egypt were different, however, an adept eye can see that the generalities, the larger scope of human expression is unyielding. If we focus only on the micro then we remain in our delusion, fighting wars of ego and redundancy while swearing we are making changes.

The worst thing that can happen to a young person is that they find success early. They will self destruct because it is a commonplace tendency for humans to grow complacent and rigid when they think their system of operations works. They will more than likely create even more egregious errors than their predecessors; they’re actions will be identical, however the ever increasingly scrutiny by society mixed with the greater abundance of information will amplify their ignobility.

You must sit in your struggle and confront it daily. You must soak in its astringent acids everyday for it will burn completely the useless necrotic tissue of youthful ignorance. The skin will rejuvenate and instead of coming back as it was or simply coming back thicker, it will be tailor made for the life you have chosen. You won’t just be tougher because certain situations don’t call for ubiquitous toughness; you will be dynamic.

The dynamism is the calling card of the elite thinker, the knower that traverses the land as adroit observer.

What you think you know, what I think I know is of no consequence to the life force that animates us. What you feel or what convicts you is a fly to a whale; not only is it inconsequential, it exists in a completely different medium. The dimension of wisdom and the dimension of opinion do not exist on the same plane; you must divorce yourself from yourself.

In your struggle, you must employ all of your wit, all of your faith, and all of your deepest stratagems to unlock the secrets of your own existence. Whether you call upon a higher power or not, there are secrets that are only revealed after one has suffered to gain them. That suffering is your sacrifice, it is your toll to a realm that moves superior to our own.

Do not pray for your struggle to end; pray for you to outmatch your struggle. Pray for the skill to outwit your obstacles and outperform your rivals. Match that skill against all the things you have learned falling down and getting back up and then, only then, will you taste the delicacy of wisdom.

We all believe that the opposite side of struggle is some earthly success. That my struggle ends when I get paid or my struggle ends when I get married to the person of my dreams. But those will be ripped from your hands if you have not filled yourself with the thoughts of wisdom. Proverbs 8:11 says it best

“For wisdom is better than rubies and all the things that may be desired are not to be compared unto it.

It goes on to say in verses 17-18:

“I love them that love me: and those that seek me early shall find me.
Riches and honor are with me; yea, durable riches and righteousness.

Wisdom is the opposite of struggle, not some expression of success. Wisdom is success. Some people say wisdom is knowing what to do with the information you receive; I don’t care how one defines it, I just know that when they get there they act differently. Many people believe they are wise, yet, their actions are foolish. That is not to say that wise people don’t make mistakes, but their actions taken as a whole will be different.

In closing, Balthasar Gracian famously said in his Art of Worldly Wisdom that one should, “think with the few and speak with the many.” What one should see is that, yes, there will be those that are incapable of wisdom, but the more invidious aspect is that even those that are “wise” will find themselves at odds with one another. Wisdom, especially that of this world, is an infinite a realm of consideration as that of folly, to engage others is dangerous to your own progression.

Thus, the conditions change, but the nature of man remains the same; tribalized, divided, and perennially conquerable.

But all that matter is conquering one’s struggle.

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

Abundant Living: Self-Control

Many people say cleanliness is next to godliness, but I posit that self-control is the true godlike virtue. Self-control is a topic that has been discussed since the beginning of time; it is the crux of virtually every religious system, life philosophy, and legislative guideline ever generated. However, my recent meditations on its applicability to our high octane western culture has revealed that not only do we not live controlled lives, we don’t even really aspire to.

One of my long-term goals is to establish a Self Mastery Institute here in Southern California. I’m no master of self, however, my intense study of varying life philosophies has afforded me much freedom that I have been able to translate into profit. By profit I don’t exclusively mean money, my goal in life has very little to do with tangible wealth, but that is neither here nor there. The Self Mastery Institute would be a place where individuals from all walks of life would learn some of the basic precepts of abundant living.

Few people in our American culture live freely or abundantly.

Most of the reigning doctrine on self-control center around self-denial. Religion tells you not to have premarital sex while certain philosophies tell you not to engage in activities that have no greater good. These sort of mechanical inculcations make self-control seem like only a monk can master him or her self as these unidimensional teachings are seeded into cultural practices.

However, self-control is much less about behavior and more about mental or spiritual health. Behavior is mechanical, it can be falsified, it happens in a realm of pure illusion and really doesn’t reflect whether a person is virtuous or villainous. Recall all the stories of mobsters that would gun down their enemies only to attend church the next morning to ask for forgiveness. Those men had not an ounce of remorse in their petition for salvation, they simply went through the perfunctory motions to satisfy a deep set cultural belief.

The mind of a person who has self-control is still.

This stillness is the founding principle of not only Christianity but virtually every religion and philosophy around the world. Psalm 46:10 states, “be still and know that I am God”. This is because the chaotic mind of the unstable person is incapable of hearing the wisdom of the Spirit. For those agnostic or even atheistic individuals, the principle still remains the same: an unstable mind is incapable of finding solutions.

The West is afflicted by many things, but hyperproductivity is probably chief among them. We want results and we want them yesterday. Everyone talks about how we have became slaves to consumerism, but we’ve become slaves to it all: bringing home the bacon, eating it, coveting the bacon of our neighbor, hoarding the bacon, then passing it.

We are controlled by the environments around us. We are controlled by our pasts. We are controlled by the hopes of the future.

We are controlled by culture. Period.

Self-control is about the taking inventory of who and what you are versus who and want you want to be. As opposed to consuming everything you think, everything you hear, or the opposite of everything you hear (which has gain popularity in recent times), self-control isn’t about what you are doing, but how you are doing it.

Many of us go through the motions of life like mobsters, living duplicitously without taking the time to understand why they are what they are. Matthew 6:24, “No one can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other…”. This lays the framework for self-control, an instrumental step towards self-mastery.

When dealing with the linear agreements in the world around us, many people get sucked in by the social gravity of the goings-on’s. Instead of taking the time to think about the various potentialities or potential realities, they allow emotion or coercion to become the dominant cognitive facility. Linear agreements are highly, highly, HIGHLY attractive; do not fool yourself by believing they are some easily surmounted obstacle. They are generally organic, they feel natural; often times they arise out of necessity or an intense desire to promote peace. However, the blind acceptance of them will bring people to the brink of inefficiency as they become slaves to the world around them.

Self-control acknowledges the world around one’s self and attempts to make decisions with as many factors as possible in mind. From there, the position to change or remain stationary is one consistent with the mind or spirit of that individual. This is why I explicitly state that self-control has less to do with behavior than it does with the mental fortitude of the individual.

A man with self-control can never be victimized by a “system”. You will never hear him speak of the inability of himself or the preferred ability of someone else. He doesn’t complain about a religious construct or how his government is screwing him. He is the master of his own universe and he will do whatever is necessary to harmonize himself with his surroundings.

When I listen to people talk all I tend to hear people spew is defeat, then devise myopic schemes based around myopic life philosophies. The government, their significant other, their neighbor. They disdain God because He is supposed to ______________. They have become so enslaved by the illusions of the world around them that they forget they have the power to create options for themselves. They turn their back on previously sworn on beliefs because those no longer suit them or have let them down in some perceived way. They obsess over frivolities like money, status, or fame.

They play such limited games that they cannot see the bigger picture.

Those people, dear reader, are the epitome of a person with no self-control. They are not on the path of self-mastery.

I want you to see yourself as a mass of light, not a flesh and bone being. Light cannot be limited; it is constant, ineluctable, undeniable, regardless of the circumstances surrounding it. You have been infused with the breath of life; I don’t care whether you are spiritual of light. You can believe we came forth from the divine intellect of God or you can believe that we are eventuality of billions of years of evolution, the fact remains the same: our sentience has given us unprecedented control over ourselves and over our surroundings

You do not have to accept life as what it is, especially if you are in the West; you can create it. You should create it. You should search yourself so thoroughly that the existence you want is the existence you live. At that point there is no rat-race, there is no hyper-productivity, there is what you choose to produce and how you choose to produce. Proverbs 18:16 says, “your gift will make room for you”! If you are living a life of self-control, actively tilling your mind and spirit, your external environment will reflect your internal environment.

No longer are you a slave to culture, but you will taste and sample culture all around the world. You will discover the things you wish to discover in life. You will find the man or woman you want. Work your passion.

The longer you remained enslaved to your limited notions of reality, the longer you defeatedly accept the linear agreements of the world around you, the longer you will merely exist. You’ll work that job just to barely make ends meet each month. You’ll do things because your parents instructed you. You’ll marry that safe suitor.

And you know what? Thats a perfectly acceptable way to live. Billions of people will do that and no one will judge them. But for those that want to squeeze a bit more out of life, pass on a legacy of abundance to their progeny, self-control is a means of doing that.

bryce

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

Revelations: Life, The Canvas

Life is an amalgamation of images, shadows, and derivations of solids. Everything we hold to be real is subject to change, for change is the only thing promised.

Our four dimensional world (with the fourth dimension being time), is virtually inexplicable by human terms. When we communicate we attempt to create consistent explanations and logic, however, existence offers no such simplicity. Every affirmation will be accompanied by a cluster of contradictions and those will be further muddied by the interpretations of each individual.

The key is in then changing the way one views being alive.

For a very long time I absolutely hated it here. I wasn’t unhappy or selfish enough to seriously contemplate suicide, but I was certainly disillusioned enough to consider inappropriate modes of escape. The problem is that when I was younger I was taught a very concrete way of living dominated by Christian morals and views but as I got older I was relentlessly reminded that life is anything but concrete. It is purely diaphanous, volatile, and subject to a complex mélange of variables which may or may not be affecting outcomes at any given moment. I found myself sinking more and more into abject hatred of this entire realm and all its inhabitants, to me everyone here — including myself — was outrageously delusional with no possible remedy to be found.

However, out of this bleak outlook on being, I have begun creating some semblance of existential freedom. I have slowly begun liberating myself from the inefficient postures taken by a world so confused. It is out of this slow emancipation that I have begun maximizing my efficiency across the board, as a business owner, as a friend etc. The plasticity of existence means that one, through very delicate and persistent means, can begin to rewrite the rules on how to be here.

When you see the world as a hodgepodge of illusions, you are better able to manipulate those illusions for your greater good (and hopefully the greater good for humanity by proxy).

Lets take a quick look at love. In this day and age deception is more prevalent than dedication. We are like the Greek economic crisis where one person doesn’t pay his taxes because he believes that his neighbor isn’t. So many of us harbor these intense reservoirs of distrust that we end up hurting all of those who are around us who are simply acting along the same parameters that we are. Thus, young men cheat on young women, young women play games with other young men, and the vicious cycle of nonsense continues.

But imagine, seeing the world as a canvas in which you could choose to love wholeheartedly. Imagine taking all of the distrust you feel and reworking it into something else. Imagine being able to understand the fucked up aspects of this dimension and still being able to continue on as the virtuous man or woman you know you could be?

Excuses cannot be made under this plastic view of existence, no one can be to blame for your missteps. It places responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the individual.

My best friend laid out a very interesting point to me the other day as he was explaining a conversation he recently had with an inquisitive young woman:

You could take all the skill, talent, basketball IQ, and footwork of Michael Jordan and put it into another person and they still would never become MJ. Why? Because none of them possess his mind. They do not possess the unique life experiences that molded him into an ultra-competitive workaholic that refused to accept failure. Mind you I am not saying the individual wouldn’t be as good as or even better than Jordan, I’m saying they would never be him. The mind controls everything.

The mind. The mind. The mind! All learned individuals very quickly figure out this ineluctable quiddity of human existence. Without venturing into a pedantic ontological discussion of mind vs. matter, I just want to emphasize the importance of mind-stuff. For most of us our mental acuity is inchoate and unfortunately remains in this nascent phase for the majority of our time here. We believe that matter is irrefragable truth and we approach society from those same suppositions. Thus the rigidity that I learned as a child serves as illusory stumbling block across the board. We believe in corporate cultures and racial partialities and all matter of “convention”. Creativity becomes less expansive, ambition is replaced by the need to please others, and before we know it we are inundated by what we think is real.

My humble request: do no be fooled to believe that life is anything but a persistently blank canvas. The human mind and spirit are the brushes and artistic implements, daily you can create masterpieces. You can change the world — truly.

But be warned, you are free to choose, free to create, but you are never free from the consequences of your choices. There are no excuses for the Awareness I am trying to initiate you into. You must choose and pursue all strategies to maximize the results of your choice, that is the path to fulfillment.

bryce

Colorless Love: Interracial Dating

My first girlfriend was white. My second girlfriend was white. My third girlfriend was Filipino. My fourth girlfriend was Mexican. My fifth girlfriend was black. The summer after my junior year in high school I dated a girl from Costa Rica. Then someone black & white. Then my senior year I was smitten by a girl who was mixed with more countries than a solid cocktail has ingredients.

I don’t discriminate.

I date who and what I want, regardless of race, creed, religion, or political affiliation. I simply love women.

Over the years, I have caught a lot of shit for not “giving black women a chance”. When I was a youngster, I would often get into a verbal altercation and try to prove that I indeed was interested in black females. However, as I’ve gotten older and I have truly dealt with women of all colors, I feel no need to apologize for my decisions or defend my choices.

It is what it is.

“Black women are just too strong for you, thats why you date them white and Asian women. They are more docile and easily controlled”.

This statement is fallacious on too many levels to really name, but the underlying truth is that it is generally perpetuated by women that have isolated themselves, not the other way around. I know plenty of non-black women that are apeshit crazy. I know plenty of black women that are meek as lambs.

So kill that noise and just admit that you’re probably hurt that the dude that scorned you didn’t like your personality and try again.

Being a science major in undergrad definitely gave me new perspectives on the “race” debate. Evolutionary biology has quite pointed proved that A) we all originated from the same gene pool B) we share a highly statistically significant amount of genetic information C) the variation we see in people comes from their distance from the Equator, no more, no less.

All other variation comes through culture, which is mental and absolutely not real. And to refresh your memory, “real” is defined as something that does not and can not be changed. Culture can be changed. The mind WILL be changed over time.

So as I bring this back to interracial dating, I try to force people to see the reality of how things are. We are all brothers and sisters on this planet, we are specks of dust on a speck of dust on the distal arm of a speck of dust in an infinitely expanding universe. Tell me again why race matters?

Oh that’s right because we are programmed to disdain ANY difference, no matter how menial.

Let me be crystal-fucking-clear: you are allowed — no — you deserve to date anyone you want, regardless of any manmade delineations between the two. We search much higher purposed than the color of our skin and we serve such minuscule purposes in the unfolding of the universe at large that is really doesn’t freakin matter. God made all people and if you don’t believe in God then we evolved from primitive species, therefore, there is no reason for the division beyond human’s infinite capacity for ignorance.

If you like black women, great, date them. If you like Persian women, holla. If you like Mexican women, straight like that. White, Japanese, Italian, Uruguayan, or a shorty from Mars — it does not matter.

I support interracial dating like Chester Cheeto supports artificially flavored cheese snacks and as this nascent acceptance of all colors/creeds/cultures becomes embraced, we will see more beauty and harmony come into the world.

A Good Man’s Heart

A man’s heart is nothing to play with,
Something to slay with seems to be the perception
Most women play with,
Broken hearts and broken dreams,
Reams streaked with streams,
Of dried tears shed from these queens,
Their kings abandoned their thrones,
At a moment’s notice so it seems.
He flirted with the sovereigns of other nations,
Such blatant disrespect pushed her patience,
Now her stations broadcast words cynical,
The cyclical, typical, physical emanation of critical
Postures towards love.
The bad man fucks over the good woman,
Now she’s a “bitch” at the flip of a switch
Confronting the good man….
But a man’s heart is nothing to play with.
A virtuous man’s heart is something you stay with,
Something you pray with, gray with,
Embark on a journey of faith with.
Just face it, if you traced it,
Back to the origins and spaces,
His graces & charms & arms are genuine reflections,
So don’t judge his collections on past connections,
Flawed predilections,
Truth is in his words, sincerity in his actions,
Destiny is in his eyes and with that satisfaction.

bryce