some_kind_of_journey Dafremen (To the blather_gods and blathers caretakers: I have a very nice 80 Gig HD that you could have if it's of any use to you. I also have a brand-new 40 Gig Western Digital. You could have that too. Email me with details if you're interested.) It's been so long since the last time I wrote here. I don't mean cut and pasted stuff from another site. No, really wrote here. Blather, you know what you are to my ego. You are to the self and the mind what the Creation is to the soul and the spirit. You are "me"'s place to be real. For over two years now, a struggle has been going on. My reaction has been to suppress the ego and to some extent, this is well and good. But when the ego is strong (ie. as in my case), this can be a dangerous game to play. The ego does not want to be brought under submission, and it certainly does not wish to be eradicated completely. It is the animal self and its reaction is to seize, dominate and maintain control, its gut notion is to survive..against all odds. (This is the "quest for immortality." The ego isn't immortal because it is a product of the material brain. The true self IS immortal but the ego is either unaware of or chooses to disregard this.) So one dilemma, after the experience, was being put at the mercy of a pissed off ego. Reaction? To suppress it. Result? Ego fought back harder. Then came yesterday. Could it be that we've come to an agreement of sorts? Blather could be this place where "I" gets to be. A pasture of sorts to let the burro and his little brain run around a bit? Hmm I wonders. 050728 ... Death of a Rose i also offer $100.00 CAD to the blather_gods and blather_caretakers (read: sage and dallas) for allowing me to fill your sanctified temple with the usual drivel that i bring to the blather_table. just let me know. 050728 ... daf Ok so here's the jist of what happened without the really good parts. I set out to find truth a very, very long time ago. It's not hard to want to know..when things seem so insane to a little boy. The world doesn't whirl around our heads in a maelstrom very often. Society's a daily hurricane. So the quest began early. Learned a lot of lessons along the way. One was not to trust the way things seemed, because that was just the shell of it all and anyone (including and especially me) could put on any shell they wanted to, consciously or unconsciously and then you wouldn't know what you were dealing with. I learned early on (around foster home number 6 I bet) that what seemed to be wasn't always what was and what you believed to be true today was a lie by the following weekend. Still there was a reason. This I felt to the core of me. There was something going on and it was my FIRST order of business to discover what, and my SECOND to figure out what I was supposed to do. I sh*t you not when I tell you that if it had been that I was supposed to pump gas for the mayor on one Thursday in August, that would have been fine by me. (A bit disappointing, but fine.) The point wasn't to invent greatness, distort facts into what I needed them to be to engineer my own reality. That was make-believe and make-believe was for kids with food in their bellies all the time. The point was to find my place in the machine like a good little gear and be of some use. Period. Education was a farce. Science was useful, and fairly accurate, but limited in its scope. I latched onto it anyhow. Computers were my first real friends from the age of 9 onward. I fell in love in 7th grade. She was an OSI 1P with 1000 whole bytes of RAM. This was me. This is me. This is how I am and what I am and truly who I am. I am purposeful but cautious. Afraid that I might fail, but determined to take care of my business, to make sure that MY loose ends are all tied up before I'm out of time. And I'm thorough. And I care so deeply about getting it right but I'm not willing to let that paralyze me like it used to. You have to take a fork in the road to the left or to the right and sometimes you don't know which is best or even correct. But only action gets you anywhere. Forging on... Religion, particularly organized religion was a paradox from early on. There were obviously SOME answers there, but there was obviously a lot of horsesh*t too and so I always maintained my distance. It was some 20 years later that I'd learned enough about the various philosophies and theologies around the world, weighed them...threw out what didn't hold water, kept what worked and was ready to find the key.. That key was astrology. Astrology taught me a VERY important skill that any seeker after truth must learn. Astrology taught me to watch and observe how things are the SAME. This is something I'd been doing subconsciously for years, but astrology helped me to hone that ability. It was then that the simple rules came popping out like big flashing yellow signs. The majority of the religions that attracted people were saying the same things: - Reduce consumption. - Don't covet material things/situations. - Appreciate existence - Master the self - Clear your mind of baser thoughts So I said...what the hey? Long as there's no priest, politician or banker involved, what can it hurt? But it was difficult. My ego is strong and my will to fight it can be weak at times. Then came the day. I don't know, I just..did it. I resolved to not think untruths. To speak reality as truthfully as I could. I didn't think lewd thoughts, stopped having sex for a very long time(bout 8 months.) (Pissed the missus off to no end.) I ate very little, never did drugs, smoked or drank alcohol. I just naturally started to avoid certain foods. It was quite strange. Something started guiding my movements and my behaviors. I would feel sick if I cut meat...and so I stopped eating meat. I would feel burned out if I ate foods with sugar in them. Eventually I went vegetarian and drank only water. This way of living was changing me in very real ways. I was more receptive to certain feelings or kinesthetic sensations that guided my decisions. And the whole thing got really, really weird. Skipping past the really,really,really weirdest of those details..there was the way things started happening in synchronicity...all of the time. Like every moment of every day for 3 weeks I couldn't hit a Don't Walk sign to save my life. They'd either be Walk already, or they'd change as soon as my foot hit the corner. Just plain weird. And I slapped myself and pinched myself and checked and double checked myself. I even took the missus along with me. She saw it too. We had an adventure that she'll never forget. She never criticized me about this stuff again. (She's still in denial about certain parts, but at least she's not forcing her denial off on me.) So anyhow...skipping more really, really, REALLY weird parts (and I mean REALLY weird!) I reach this sort of culmination one night of the whole experience. I was going to sleep and I took a deep breath. When I released it...there was a sensation much like "falling through a cotton silo" it was neither mental, nor was it physical..as strange as that sounds and as difficult as that may make it to categorize or imagine. It was something else..my body was gone..melted into the reality I was observing. Then, in a flash, I knew what the symbolic dragon swallowing its own tail means. And I knew something else too. It dropped me to my knees and I felt so foolish for having missed it all of this time. I posted about it on a site, then went to bed. When I woke the next morning it was still with me..but intensified. Colors were more vivid. Odors stronger. Everything was very pleasant and my back pain was gone. I walked out and knew EVERYONE I met. It wasn't that I met people I knew...it's that I knew them when I met them. Again, difficult to describe. I felt people coming around corners..sure enough...it was like X-Ray. But the strangest thing of all(that I can discuss here) was what I saw in their eyes..it was the same entity looking out from all of their eyes. Behind those personalities was something else..the same something else behind all of the different people. It was well...I think I've said this...it was weird. It was disconcerting. It shook my entire notion of what is and isn't to its very foundations. What I haven't mentioned here is what makes it so evident that it wasn't all just a micro-stroke or a bit of delusion brought on by wishful thinking and/or malnutrition. This was real. And as much as I didn't want that to be true...it was...and is. The final thing to say about the experience, and the piece that really explains everything that happened afterward, was what had happened to my "self", my ego..the part of me that says "I" and "me." It seemed to have disappeared. There was no "me." There was a whole expressing itself in many forms and activities of which I was a part. The entire "peak" of the experience lasted 6 hours. Then the ego began to fight back. The only reason it had gone along for the ride in the first place was that it didn't know what to expect. We had triggered some sort of change that did not fall into the ego's definition of desirable. In the end...it went away. I went back to smoking weed and eating sugary foods and chowing down on burgers. But I haven't stopped wondering what it all meant and how I can put it into perspective. I honestly believe that thousands if not hundreds of thousands of little nobodies like me have experienced this throughout the course of human history and only a few of them were ever remembered. No doubt I am destined to be one of those obscure footnotes, but not before I take care of whatever it is that I'm supposed to do first. So, that's the light stuff. Maybe we can discuss a few things about astrology next time. There's some pretty compelling things you can do that don't involve psychological tricks or anything. They just work. That's all. Thanks for reading. 050728 what's it to you? who go blather from