Will not neglect this...

Time to write for an imaginary audience... Usually I just write in a journal. About 95 percent of the time. And I'm an intensely private person when it comes to how I write in it. I go through paranoid precautions just to make sure no one reads what is inside. All of the perverted and neurotic little secrets that I carry along with me, that no one can know about. So when I write here, even thought I know most likely no one will read it, the dynamic is changed a bit. There's still that added possibility that someone could read it. I mean, there are so many out there, why would anyone want to read mine. I have nothing to offer except subjective dribble. I don't comment on others blogs, I don't really specialize in anything like health food or christianity. I am a lonely cab driver, whose sole source of entertainment is my own thoughts. Sure I'm social enough not to be considered a hermit, but just decidedly anti-social and disconnected. The only thing I could really offer is some occasional philosophical musings that may or may not be profound. More than likely it will be nonsense. Yet still, that little change has an effect on me. The awareness that I am deliberately writing this so that others may read it. Now it needs to be revised, at least once, to make sure there aren't any blatant grammatical errors. I can't help being a solipsistic bleeding heart though. I wouldn't want to stop that anyway. Maybe just write with a little more direction, and not repeat myself over and over. The addition of people into the mix means that your work will be judged. And maybe that's my fear which I assume I share with many.

For one thing, I most certainly want to work my way up to writing very intentional and topical stuff. Break out of the shell of isolation. Eventually I would very much desire to be paid for writing something, but I have a while till I should start worrying about that. I'm all about very gradual change. Moderation. Most of the time I like to tell myself that my life isn't as bad as it once was, say last year. I've totally matured more, I don't have as many logical fallacies floating around, I'm more outgoing than I once was, and so forth. Maybe I'm missing the point or something, because life never seems ideal. Always there's uncertainties and ambiguities, and I'm very lazy which doesn't help for anything. I rarely complete the day satisfied of my productivity. But it gets much darker than this at my rough patches. Where my journals read nothing but the most pure form of self loathing. Where I'm overflowing with every negative emotion. the most anti-cathartic activated, stuck feelings, that don't leave you graced with supply of endorphins and good sleep. But restlessness, insomnia, drug abuse, and endless tension and boredom.

When I say drug abuse, in my case I'm specifically referring to marijuana. I also take prozac and xanax (when I need it), but I don't abuse those medications. I'm pretty embracive with them actually. I do abuse pot though, which I guess isn't a big deal right now, but it will become one if I don't stop. I'll stop though.

Fleeting thoughts attempt at capture

Right now I'm listening to Stuart Davis's Universe Communion. If anyone who happens to be reading this knows of Ken Wilber, than they might know who Stuart Davis. He's a musician who incorporates a lot of neo-spirituality into his lyrics. And I'm not sure if he is anti science, but one of lyrics makes me think he has something in him that doesn't like science. Which I'll forgive now, I mean a simple song is a lot different from philosophical treatise. Ii can only speculate on what he means, and that's not so much the point of this writing... I felt like writing because just sitting here listening to it got me thinking about a lot of things that I haven't thought about in a while. Some good thoughts, maybe, that I wanna get out of my head into some form of external reality.

Anyone the one thought that was most prevalent had to do with psychology. I've been thinking a lot lately about getting another masters in psychology. Not sure what I want to do with it though. I would most definitely like to be a theorist above all, possibly a therapist, but then again I also adore cognitive psychology and love the idea of me sitting in a lab zapping someone for telling a lie a recording their physiological and emotional responses...Who knows, maybe I could do all of that...

Sometimes I think I have way too many interests. Presently the two thinkers who I've been studying the most are Bertrand Russell, and Carl Jung. Two guys who couldn't be further apart as far as their philosophy goes. But then again, maybe they aren't so different, at least in some ways. I would love to go into great depth contrasting the two, the stream of consciousness style I've got here I don't think will allow it. But I'll try anyway... One difference to point out right off the bat is that Bertrand Russell pretty much hated mysticism, while Jung was very open it. I mean their views are very complicated and layered, and they both lived very long lives and their views changed a lot over time; what I mean is, I don't want to pigeonhole them so fast. Needless to say Russel on more than one occasion denounced mysticism, while I know for a fact Jung embraced it fully to his death (whatever that means, really).

However, sometimes I notice that Russell says some things that could easily have come out of the mouth of any spiritual guru. For instance, "love is wise, hatred is foolish'. I can so imagine jesus saying that. And I know that Jung was pretty scientific, that is he was very objective in his writings and analyses, even in the mist of losing his damn mind...

Anyway, I had another fleeting though: how can I contribute to the field of psychology? I mean, I know a pretty decent amount, and sometimes I have some good insights. What can I to do to add to the conversation. I'm 27 years old, and I still feel unborn in this way. In general... I always thought that I would be some kind of renowned intellectual. I always thought that it would just happen somehow, and I still do. I'm still very young. Many very important intellectuals remained obscure even at the time of their death. I'm certainly not going to let myself think that the dream is all over. I've been studying for years now, I know a lot about a whole lot of things. I should write a book or something. Get my name out there.

That's all for now.

Recently I have rediscovered Koontz and King, those author guys. I have to say, it is definitley a refreshing break from the heavy non-fiction I've been so engrossed in. I can just flow through the pages, letting the prose build images in my mind. Right know I'm reading Dreamcatchers, by King, and it's going pretty good. I just finished reading "The Face" by Koontz, and despite all the fantasy I can still pick out the authors philosophy, and I'm not sure if I like it.

I have kind of always thought that an author cannot escape expressing his values in his or her writing. I'm pretty sure Koontz believe in God, doesn't like the concept of memes, or universties, and I'm willing to bet that he can't stand deconstructionist philosophy... I mean I couldn't care less about deconstructionist philoopshy, but memes? Come on Koontz... I still like the guy, his work is igniting a lost part of myself: my imagination. And I like seeing the philosophy in the fiction, it's uniting worlds for me even, however, it just makes me twinge when a beloved concept of mine is held with disdain by one of my favorite authors... I mean, we're suppose to agree on stuff.

I need to vent for a bit...

So my social skills have never been excellent, and right now I feel a particular breed of social frustration and injustice and I just need to freakin write about it a bit, to express it, to resolve it, to do whatever the hell I can with this pent up animosity...

So petty the triggers. In this case it involves a former friend and his post on my facebook status. Recently I have taken up watching the show 'Mad Men', so to bring this precious gift of knowledge to my peers I write of it on my wall: "Mad Men; another good show". To which my asshole friend responds: "From the title alone, I'm sure it's something you can relate to"... (long aggravated sigh)... Okay and then he goes non sequitur, describing some kind of gigabyte collection that he's working on and how Mad Men is the next on his list; an obvious change of subject to counter something which he knows is a veiled insult.

Perhaps I'm not providing the right context. This former friend has been a friend of mine for ages and it's just this and other similar slights that have officially scraped him off of my mental buddy list. I don't know where it all started to go wrong, but I sense it has something to do with my abrupt lust for the metaphysics that strangled my life for a good 3 years. Let's be clear though: I am not mad. I've been up and down psychiatric circuit and my problems mental issues however prevalent in their own way, do not fall under the schizotypal spectrum. My friends' predilections are based on fallacious reasoning; one direct event of excessive inspiration that resulted in my awakening of him in the middle of the night; as well as some suspected stories that my paranoid mind deduces are floating around the decadent social circles my friend inhabits...

Let me be honest here, I was once diagnosed as bipolar. Once. And it was by a hack psychiatrist who only had to here that I had recently experienced some kind of unusual state of happiness and energy. This particular experience hardly resembled any kind of psychotic break. There were no hallucinations of any kind, no resistance to authority, no overtly disorganized or violent behavior... My experience spanned about 3 days, fallowing the stay at a weeklong personal meditation retreat at an Advaita Vedanta (hindusim) ashram. The circumstances were understandable, and 3 subsequent psychiatrists have assured me this as well... I need not get into too much details about the experience. That would require another post.

All I want to say is that I know I am not insane. My asshole friend is more neurotic than I ever was and ever will be, and fuck him and his whiny arrogance. His childishly witty remarks, however punctual to the idiocy of facebook social standards, fall flat under the truth of my experience. I know I'll never convince him of this, he'll go on comparing me to John Lennon, and calling me a creeper to his other spineless friends. To me he resembles everything about the collective consciousness that I seek to abandon.

I know this is spiteful, and I know there's a lot going on underneath. However, these feelings are evidently not without the anchor of reason; which is why I am not crazy. I wish I could synthesize this all in a balanced and biting retort that would render my friend speechless, but I know that's not going to happen, so I write about it here, where I know they won't find it, where probably no one will.

Apples and Dionyseses

I dread the new day. The death of the night and the rebirth of work and strife and all that is starting over again. It's an inevitable burden, and as I sit encapsulated and entranced with Greek mythology and the sound of Jim Morrison I wish the night never ended.

Hopefully some day when my psyche is stable enough I can cherish the never-ending beginning of the day, but not it is despised as it represents the end of my current rhythm. Soon I'll be yearning for sleep and drop into a stupor, my mind will numb and I will push on hoping to avoid the passing time.

Lately I've been hallucinating, which hasn't happened before, or at least not as consciously. The other morning I saw a spider crawl the wall which most certainly wasn't there. And above my friend an Indian shaman man blinking in and out existence. I check, I'm still awake;the dream state thrust itself onto my waking reality, forcing the acceptance of everything I don't want.

Thirty Three

When I younger I couldn't pronounce my threes; a fact I remembered just the other night. So I was made fun of it routinely for it until one day a friend confronted me and just got me pronounce it correctly, and just like that I could pronounce my threes...

I remember other kids constantly trying to get me to say thirty three, which I guess is partially why it's been my favorite number all these years. My dads football jersey in high school, as well as mine, was thirty three, and now it's like the family number. Everybody uses it in their email adresses...

Right now I'm listening to smashing pumpkins, thirty three: a great song.

"Speak to me in a language I can hear"

Death Tendency

So I have this old friend who I secretly really don't like... He's the posessor of qualities that I despise: he's stubborn, arrogant, unkind, chauvanistic, with delusions of grandeur, and the mind of an ant...

And his dad just died... Another friend told me this morning. Now everyone's exagerating how awesome this "friend" is; How he's always been there for us, and how he's such a great guy, and on and on...

So I guess I'll just keep my mouth shut about it. I'm not going to entertain the dishonesty. This guy is a complete dick, and though everyone deserves a little compassion in times like this, I'm not going to pretend that this guy is someone he's not...

I'll go to the wake and funeral and give him a hug and all, but afterwards it's back to avoiding his annoying ass...

Jesus blippin Christ

It really boggles my mind, this progressive Christianity thing, and I'm trying to understand it.

The apologetics has reached a point of such refinement that it becomes very tiresome and painful to engage in debate with anyone who practices it. They'll have a soundbyte comeback for every flair of doubt you scoff up, concede on the more blatant of biblical errors, and rationalize every damn verse...

This begs several questions, but let me try to just come up with just one: Is this what one has to do to be taken seriously as a Christian nowadays? To devote ones entire life, upsurped in mental acrobatics, clinging to whatever intellectual foothold you can muster up, just to be secure in your faith?

Okay, so maybe some spite got through on those last couple of lines, but I'm driving at something here... I'm a non-religious person for the most part. I have some spiritual inclinations from a haphazard spiritual phase I went though a couple years back, but when it comes to the major cliams of truth asserted in the old books, I am sincerely unconvinced. If I had to give an ad hoc probability I'd say that there is a 98.9 % chance that there is no such thing as an egoic God, there is no such thing as heaven or hell as described in the bible, mary wasn't no virgin (double negative), and snakes certainly cannot talk...

However, I know the specific breed of Christians I'm referring to here (well mostly the ones I see are Christians, but you can probably find these intellectual theists in all faiths) have ways around this kind of thing. I'd like to pick their brains a bit, and learn more, and hopefully not get frustrated in the process... In my opinion, religion as most people know it is a house built on sand that's already 3 quarters of the way sunk. And the progressive christians are those in some kind of complex transitional stage that humanity has to go through before we can be memetically perfected as a species...

Or something along those lines.

Meanderings

I always have what seems to me the most amazing ideas, and I write them down in my trusty notepad, and think about how awesome it will be to make a post about it... And when it comes to the time of writing there's always the wall of reluctance. A kind of mental stagnation and pain that comes from developing ones thoughts on the 'writing for an audience' level. I'm extremely hyper-graphic, finishing a journal a month. However, no one sees those journals, and if someone did I'd probably have a nervous breakdown... The reluctance comes when having to write for an audience, when you know your ideas can be judged.. But whatever, I'm just gonna write whatever...

-Right now I'm in the middle of writing a paper for a friend, on:
"The Scientific Revolution altered the world view of Science and challenged the religious beliefs and ideas of Christianity"

Easy Schmeezzy...I barely have to try to write this essay. A guaranteed 'A' for my friend... So let's try and think of some interesting angle to look at the scientific revolution...

The scientific revolution is generally thought to reflect a significant paradigm shift: a fundamental change in an individual or a society's view of how things work in the world.- This is what's most interesting about the scientific revolution. I start to think about memetics, and the evolution of ideas and knowledge. Mass changes in how we view the world... I can spend hours thinking about this stuff, writing in my journal profusely; trying to understand the complexity of human ranking systems, or why we feel the urge to urinate when hiding in a game of hide and seek, or how about contemplating the reason why I like boobs so much (because they resemble a beautiful ripe rump, ready for fertilization)... This is the kind of stuff that that amateur philosophers like me live for: the ecstasy of a brilliant ideas...

Then, comes the fine tuning; the scientific method, experimentation, validation, etc. When all the initial glamor subsides and skepticism takes over. Here it's either prove it or lose it. It's one thing to just gawk over the unconfirmed profundity of these ideas; and another to really be able to accept something as truth. The ideas need to be clarified.--Evolutionary psychology is still a very young discipline, where there is still much diversity of opinion within. Naturally there will some controversy and contentions. Some dismiss any notion of the human mind having adapted by natural selection and mutation, while others, like Steven Pinker, can't stop pointing out how much our genes determine our behavior.

The next step usually results in some kind of compromise between then two; you'll often hear phrases like: "everybody knows it's both nature and nurture"... This perspective is appropriate only as a simple statement of general clarification. One needs to go deeper than that...

Kudos to Pinker for giving nurture its due where deserved, as well as his refusal to shrug off the evidence pointing to the biological bases... I find the the stock arguments presented in evolutionary psychology (innate language, color, shape, recognition, art, etc) to be both incredibly interesting, and speculative. On the one hand, I love learning about evolution, I accept wholeheartedly the ideas neodarwinism, and embrace the science of it all with passion and respect. It's really the best we've got in understanding why and how we are the way we are... However, the gears do change a little when you start thinking about the evolution of the mind. For me, it's not a question of whether or not the mind evolved. Of course it did. The question for me is how. For this I can offer no secure resolution... Yet...

-So trying to understand my own mind in terms of evolution is, in my opinion, one of the funnest things to think about. It's almost like the snake eating it's own tail thing: trying to understand why you're trying to understand things. It's like I can just get high off my own thoughts, i.e. eating myself... It's difficult to say what exactly I find so enthralling about it. I know that I can't really be completely certain of anything. Yet, I liberally hand myself over to probability. If I can surmise that the mind being adapted by natural selection/mutation has an 85% chance of being true, I can just bask in that 85 %, and be happy...

That's all for now.

Journal Entry #1

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Let’s write for a lilttle bit. Typing, I have to get used to typing and not looking at the keyboard. I think I could easily-- I mean, right now I’m not looking but right now is different that other times. So I must take advantage of my confident revery. I think it is a good time to instill in me that muscle memory so that when I’m in other brain states it will come back to me easier. At other times the instinctual muscle memory is unable to be tapped, so basically I have to learn to familiarize with this….

--Enough on that… I'm watching a very good movie, “The Dead Poets Society”. Amazing movie.. And it’s getting good and tense. I must divert some more attention to it… I’m also a little afraid of the janitors and cops here at school, it is getting late and I most liekly am being heard by someone here. But whatever. What’s the worst that could happen? I could talk my way out of most likely. I really hope no one comes thoug, I really don’t want to leave. I would even try to tlak my way into staying. I would say, “look I lost track of time, I’m not in good shape, my dads in the hospital. That sort of thing. And then hopefully find some comon ground.

Great movie. – A young Wilson;. What a charming reality.

I met with gary today, and my judgement has definitley changed for the better regarding his confrontation with dissent and mutuality. Last time we hung out I disagreed with something he said and he seemed to get frustrated. But tonight there was none of that, and we talked about a great many things...He’s really a decent guy, and not just in a fuzzy emotive type way. I mean ethicically he’s a real decent guy. … So it went realy well, and I’m surprisingly open with him, as he is with me. It’s easier to admit things when someone else is also admitting things. He started talking about his bipolar diagnoses first. Which just automatically made me comfortable enough to talk about my psyche issues/medication, etc.- We smoked up, and I'm still high from it now. I know I probably shouldn’t be doing it, but it felt right. However, I know I need to learn how to say no. Here’s a good thought to counter the temptation; We probably even had a better time, well at the least not any different, from whence we smoked. The convorsation was immensly great before we even smoked weed. With much positive feelings based soely on the interaction of ideas, and solidarity. I didn’t need any weed.. There was one point where I felt it strong in the nerves. An elation, a deep appreciation. That’s good enough for me. I don’t need drugs when I have access to that.

Next thought. Relax...
There’s something about the way weed affects your thinking. Ideas become more expansive, unifeid and more easily navigitable. With a greater demensionality to it. A greater depth/feeling in the nervous system. It would be difficult to say what exactly weed does as a baseline commonality for everybody. Maybe biochemically, but not so sure about the subjective phenomenal experience of emotion, and memory, etc.-