#sorry if i'm giving you headaches. i'm giving myself one. it's unstoppable

[cyanpeacock]

Realtalk(tm): Some Shit About Meditation, Space Ships, Personal History, And Buddha(?). 

Subtitle(R): Mostly This One Sounds Like I Did Too Much Acid In The 60s, Except I Wasn’t Alive Back Then, But They All Do Now Anyways, Except The Ones That Don’t

Subsubtitle: It’s long. It’s hard. It’s not my dick, because I don’t have one, but it might be Mark’s, except he can’t write very well. He just scrawls and it’s ugly and painful, which is why I do the writing. It’s not a dick, it’s a piece of writing, and the pen and the sword are both phallic symbols if you ask Freud, but we’re all just wanking off this mortal coil anyway. Things of (no) consequence under the jump. 

you know, like, thinking about it, this is the natural way of things for this vessel, except it’s completely fucked

as a youngling, you know, like, early teens and onwards? in the periods it wasn’t too actively traumatic, and sometimes in the periods it was, i’d whack on some binaural beats or the schumann frequency or whatever and just, lie there, float off for an hour or two or three if i was lucky and uninterrupted, forget i had a body.

didn’t occur to me until now that that’s, like, meditation, man. that’s like, uh, dude, that’s getting into a trance, and all that. i was doing that already? that thing that takes a lot of people years of conscious effort to accomplish?

a lot of me is like, dude, whatever, it’s just listening to music and lying really still, everyone does it sometimes. visions? pah, it’s imagination, everybody makes up their own music videos sometimes, right?

but then another part of me is like, dude, actually, some people never bother. they don’t need or want to, or they can’t, or they would, but something else is more important, their entire life. 

and another part of me is like, well, mate, some people spend their entire lives trying to reach that plane, and they never do, or miss the moments they do. they find a different plane they can notice along the way, one i don’t know shit about, because i’m not their body? but if i talked about the planes we’re each flying too hard with them, we’d get jealous of each other, and maybe fight. mostly because my plane wants to be another plane, and i’d like to fly an awesome fighter jet, but i’m in a cessna 195. and they wish they could just fly the cessna, but they’re in the shitty fighter jet. and dude, you hung out there for ages, they only got to see it once. it’s messy like that. 

and another little homunculus motherfucker says, uh, g, we’re all flying a plane. 

and the rest of us go, woah. because out here, we are all flying a plane, or a ship, or a rocket, and so on so forth. and while you gotta get to know your vessel, once it’s out there, they all gotta do most of the same things? i mean, if you can’t stop/start the engines, or refuel, you’re gonna have to get a new ship, or go down with it. i think i wanna go down with mine, that sounds neat, but who knows? maybe it won’t happen! 

but yeah. I guess i’ve been trying to get back home! like-- i did it physically, i thought, can i get back on the train, can i go back to that house, the First One? i didn’t make it far. it wasn’t time yet? somebody else lives there, maybe? i don’t actually know, perhaps he does still live there. curiosity, that little rover, is sending me messages, and i don’t know if her sensors are off, but god damn it the potential for data is interesting. maybe we’ll send a man out there? how do we do that? dunno yet.

but UH. yeah. here, define “home”: home being, alone, in The Room, in a daze, with the screaming and plates breaking and all the noise and fear outside, after the Frenzy where i tore the material world apart. i went so far inside my head, i couldn’t sense fuck all! but then when i could again, it was like, WOAH, what the fuck, i have no idea what to do with this!

and it’s still like that. this is literally no different to being there. or there, or there, or there, or there. but it is different to being There, because There, i was trying to be a self, and not, you know, an indeterminate amount of egos and a laboratory accident(s???) trying to tell a ship with a mind of its own where to go. 

on my whole, you know, Wikipedia Adventures, it has been made apparent to me that a lot of this shit i have arrived at is fundamental to various interpretations of buddhist scripture. 

now, i’m like, hmm, calling it buddhism, isn’t it a bit funny to exalt one guy? both funny ha-ha and funny suspicious. but, well, it’s also all the guys who came before and after him who reached similar-same conclusions, they’re all buddhas. what’s the deal with these guys who had to, you know, learn the books? what’s the deal with the guys who wrote the books in the first place? can’t just anyone get there on their own, with a bit of thought?

turns out, yes and no, because thought is an entity separate(ish) to a body, and it’s communal and cooperative. it’s eusociality, but because human eusociality is messy from where we’re standing, not many people are willing to call it eusociality, because a beehive looks So structured compared to our cities. but if you’re the 50ft Woman looking down at New York, isn’t it obvious humans are no different to ants? squares within squares, tunnels within tunnels, honeycombs, stars, and tiny little shapes scurrying about frantically - it’s all the same, more or less or more. 

so, back to the books - the books are thought, for bodies that interpret thought that way. there are some flavours of thought i interpret that way! hard science, for example. gotta go to the books for that one. it’s fascinating. other people’s stories, you know. work is life is story is work is fact is life etc etc etc...

back to buddha. if the story of buddha is your story, and he lived everybody’s life, except the people whose lives he didn’t, so he is everybody’s story, and nobody’s, because he was just a guy named Gautama - then what’s the point in getting a plane to Tibet and sitting in a room on bare boards in an orange robe thinking-not-thinking about nothingness until you go crazy, under the watchful eye of somebody who’s Been There Before? i did that on my own, in my bedroom, as a kid. nobody watched me. i wouldn’t be me if i’d been observed! you know, like schrodinger’s cat?

sadly, all the cats I’ve had have been Schrodinger’s cat. they all are, until-unless they’re a dog. 

so, this guy Gautama went off on his own, no food, no friends, no roof, no light, no thought, no feelings, no nothing, no everything, and then he had all of it, and it all happened at the same time. 

and because i haven’t learned the books, what i say is a complete bastardization! but then, even within (any faith, but including) buddhism, there’s “debate” (or, vicious infighting, or civil disagreement) over Exactly What Happened. 

the thing is - Exactly What Happened is gone, forever, because even a witness does not witness it all. the only witness who sees it all is the universe itself, and does the universe talk to us? well, yeah, but it’s so much bigger than us, we can’t actually comprehend it all. 

so! did Gautama actually manifest wings of flame, and rivers of water from his feet? I Don’t Know.

science says that’s impossible. faith says, anything can happen, if you believe! common sense says he faked it, somehow, it was a stunt. He bribed the audience, or drugged them, or he had water bottles up his trouser legs and matches hidden in his robes. 

then science says, well, that’s possible. faith agrees, but doesn’t like it, because faith loves a miracle. common sense hates a miracle, says it’s all explainable by science. science loves that, says, well, of course, we just haven’t done enough work yet! and, well, faith loves getting used by science, not that either of them admit it often, and common sense goes very quiet about that. they’re all banging each other, it’s a three-way hatefuck and they can never satisfy all three of them at once, until they’re happy with it being that way! it’s a Fucking Mess!

unfortunately, Exactly What Happened is not gone forever, because the universe would seem to exist, and time would seem to be An Entity. i’ve talked about time already, in the past, and the future, and again right now, not that right now has meaning, because it’s always changing, and it’s always the beginning and the end, of another right now, until it’s not.

so, Exactly What Happened is happening right now. our g gautama did perform the miracle at sravasti, because some people need that story for them to Live, or, you know, momentarily survive with all their needs met, until they acquire a new need. 

and, he didn’t. somebody made that up, because somebody else needs that story in order to Live, as arbitrarily defined above. 

and in the end, isn’t everyone right, and wrong? or they were, at the beginning.

i was raised Christian, as in, i went to a Church of England school, I sang hymns every morning, I was exposed repeatedly to God and Jesus and his (fit?) mother Mary who (didn’t) bang(ed) a (fit?) carpenter named Joseph and an angel (Perfect?) named Gabriel, and popped out a bastard son in a trough of hay in a dingy room, or a holy cradle shining with glorious light, who always was and never was a man/god/sage/idiot/danger/stronghold.

It’s exactly the same. It isn’t the same at all. 

I once had a long conversation on the bus about Islam, with a gentleman whose name I’ve forgotten and whose accent I struggled to understand. We both walked away from each other smiling like hell, knowing neither of us understood everything, but we understood enough of everything to understand there’s nothing and everything to fear, in that situation from faith, so we just have to keep on teaching/learning/teaching.

I had many conversations with a girl who caught fire, and didn’t, about Science, capital S, exalted. It turned out, science and god were the same thing, but not. It scared us just enough to be confused.

I walk past the temples where I live, and there are many, and when they sing I hear the same scales I hear in the trap music that blares from kitted-out Range Rovers, carrying young men who carry knives and an ounce of the good shit, who don’t sing because their throats are raw from screaming.

I never did like heavy metal, but it’s still good music. 

So--

Some people’s egos die so easily they never notice it. In their sleep, as it were. Easy death, easy life, hard death, hard life? Call them “normal,” “average,” “singlet.” “Good-enough” parenting, that whole shtick. 

Some people’s egos don’t exactly die, but they reproduce, because something demands it, and it changes the one that was(n’t) there in the first place, and the one(s) that come after. It’s DID, or a system, depending on who looks at it, when? Schrodinger’s back, oh yes/no. 

Back to figuring out where I do and do not stand, which will and won’t ever stop.

“I” copied my own ego so many times.(/?/!) They look the same, ish, but some of them are robots, some holograms, they all serve a purpose, they all pass as one, but then, is it just one ego? Debatable. It’s called dissociation, clinically speaking. We all do it, to varying extremes and awarenesses and levels of “control” or “communication.” Like a very smart idiot, I took the hood off and started tinkering without properly reading the manual, to try and stop the engine screaming. Learned about the parts, clumsily, made some new ones consciously-unconsciously. Now I can ask to let a robot out, or he comes out on his own, equally with the holograms. They’re not me, just copies that look and act enough like me to fool you into thinking they’re all me. 

I/something made another one, by accident, and on purpose, to cope. He got out, I kicked him in, I kicked him out, he got in, I asked him to leave, he did, he asked me if he could come back, I let him. Glass bottles still get hurled against the door, but only when it’s absolutely necessary, or a laugh. There are enough copies of me now to keep him in check, most of the time, because god damn it, the ship has to fly.

So by my argument and perspective, I’ve got dissociative identity. How else can I function, other than by making I nonexistent, except when it needs to be? It’s a body, the body, my body, but it’s not, because I’m not in control of it, it just gets flung about by the environment, and I’m part of the environment, unfortunately, or fortunately, or just.

So-- to my grandfather, you’re wrong and you’re right. To you, right then, there’s nothing “diagnosably” “wrong” with me. You might have had a different mind if I’d had words for the structures I’d already made when I was, what, 12, and told you about it then. Thirty different psychiatrists would have thirty different, or the same, opinions on what to call this. Thirty more would and wouldn’t help. It’s all about sample size and interpretation of data. Your data point is valuable. Statistics is fake science, but we need it, because it’s useful, so it’s great science. Exalt it or not. We need all of it and none of it. 

ben goldacre said something about science as “intellectual S&M” in his book “I Think You’ll Find It’s a Bit More Complicated Than That.” I dig it. It’s also bullshit. and the book sits next to me right now, in two halves, because I tore it apart in a repeat of the Frenzy, between pages 230 and 231. when I have a mind to, i’ll tape it back together, or not, and read it cover to cover, or not. 

it’s all an endless argument, or discussion. it’s all the same ! and now, frankly, one me says this post got far too long and confusing, so the rest of me agree to leave it at that.