A concert away from the earth

The entire red rocks amphitheatre stuffed to the brim and parking lots full of drug crazed loons.  I was in the 6th row and images of 10,000 days album art was being projected onto the clouds.  The bonds that were made between all the people lost in the music together were beyond words.  All we could do was look at each other and shake hands with our dumbfounded looks.  Now I am sitting here and all I want is to go back.  This really sucks,  every time we feel something amazing our capacity for normal life just becomes so shot.  All we want is more.  As if life was something to have and posses.  I don't have the time or the desire to buy a bunch of souvenirs.  Such a beautiful experience,  the whole night afterwards was great.  Some of the most unappreciated people are the ones that should be appreciated the most.  Adam and Maggie;  I will never forget taking turns being in the drivers seat.  hahaha.

I hate, that is all I do.

I hate when you are so angry and drunk that the only thing you can do is go to sleep to feel better.  How debilitating.  Too angry to express myself in any form other than just breaking down and crying.  Fuck this feeling. 

Meditation

Is better than any drug I have ever taken by tens of thousands of leagues beyond any idea I could possibly have thought was satisfaction. 

I just came out of a deep hour and a half experience and several things happened:

I couldn't hear my breathing and I didn't feel it either.  Breath was completely void.  I slowly left my body,  most of what happened is almost impossible to remember.  It was pure serenity is all I can tell you.  I had some things revealed to me that were troubling and lots of self repair was in order. 

After this portion however I got the craziest feeling I have ever gotten in my life,  I feel a hand pushing on my forehead.  I started to focus on the feeling and it was starting to get painful,  I felt my forehead right above my eyes but in the center being pried apart and it was like my brain was radiating out.  Then I felt a growing sensation which I would like to say is similar to an eye busting out of your head.  The pain started to get ridiculously unbearable and the eye was now boring into my head in this giant spiral.  I started trying to find ways to alleviate the pain,  first was maybe to look through this eye and see what was out there.  Nothing but strange things.  Then I felt like I walked around my head until I found a sort of tumor and I cut it out.  Then the pain went away,  I heard a sort of bell noise.  and slowly regained consciousness. 

All I can say is WOW!  Meditation is very, VERY powerful.  and this is coming from one of the biggest skeptics you can find.  My forehead still feels sore and my mind utterly fucked and dumbfounded.
Several of my fearful questions have been answered. 

The post that never posted, careful it is long and religious.

Sometimes when I am starting to wake up and reach a half awake and half asleep state, I feel like I can occupy every corner of the objects around me and the room itself. Then I bounce back and forth between them in a sort of dance. It can be quite blissful even though I do not quite understand it.  Maybe I am accessing the part of my subconscious mind that passively measures all of the dimensions around me and then the constant dancing between the points is the harmony that ties the room together.




 I think that is why I believe I prefer to be outside than inside because it is then that my mind flies off to vast distances to dance between the farthest reaches of the universe and the deepest facets of the earth and my own inner world.  This shape in my mind is definitely not of a square room,  maybe a giant sphere I am not sure.  I simply love the harmony of disharmony (hahaha),  to me it is simply conflicting forces that give each other purpose like a ying yang.  But I am not going to delve into that.  I am going to be more personal; introspective for a moment.



So I have reached a realization that I have been dire of finding for these past 9 months or so.  Ever since I had my first psychedelic experience at the end of last summer I have been exponentially spiraling more and more outward into mass paranoia,  a very negative space.  I have these recurring thoughts about life and what exactly it means in relation to the universe.  Now I don't believe these things entirely,  I simply feel afraid of them.  Most of you wouldn't know me to be a believer of most things,  everything must be examined and understood for me.  That is just who I am. 



But anyways I have these several drug induced paranoia's that have spiraled out of control,  one of them being the thought that life is a virus.  Or let's say a very small part of a giant organism,  that is killing it.  I am not sure if there ever was a virus that could have become self aware and ultimately kill itself in a noble act of martyrdom.  I think that this action is unprecedented in nature,  it simply would not suffice for evolution.  The act of living or growing for any organism is what drives us to survive,  to love each other (in most cases our own species over most.)  Considering in theory that life emerged from simple single celled organisms it would not suffice for a virus to become self aware. 



Or is it the other case?  Haven't we heard of all these miracle cures,  leaving doctors puzzled as to how the hell something just happened?  Regardless this is one of the paranoias I have,  usually I can reason my way out of it but paranoia is quite tricky.  It will not listen to reason,  because one can become paranoid of what reason exactly is.  Maybe I was taught to believe it?



My second paranoia is that of a religious zeal,  from a drug episode in which I thought that I went to hell.  And then when I came out of it I thought I never left.  But this was even more maniacal in the fact that I believed I was born into hell.  The worst kind of hell for any human being is that they were born there,  and that everyone is born there eternally for all generations to suffer. 



See this isn't a far step to conclusions if you already believe in heaven or hell.  Because if you believe these things then there is absolutely no certainty that you are not already in one of those places,  where is the transition?  I don't think someone comes up to you and says, "Hi Dom,  this is heaven!"  or "guess what?  Your in hell now."  The first reaction would be denial,  because any person off the street at this very moment could tell me that.  Trust is a scary thing,  not trusting yourself is even scarier.  That is my definition of paranoia,  not trusting yourself.  Regardless every time I am in some sort of room and lots of people are staring at me I feel this fear.  Like it is my personal hell in which everyone I love suffers as well.  Regardless of whether it is physically true. Especially when I am at a party where people are doing lots of drugs,  I feel this fear that this was our downfall or at least my own.



*Tangent* FUCK D.A.R.E,  it does not teach you anything but ignorance and not only that but to develop a fear of understanding.  They better get rid of that program in elementary schools if have kids.  I didn't even know what drugs were until I took those stupid classes,  I would have been drug free much longer.  But regardless not all drugs are bad,  excess is what is bad.  In just about everything,  but they will never preach that to children of course not.  This is the U.S mother fucking A! *Tangent*



That is my second paranoia,  the third is a little more subtle and hard to describe but I really have trouble getting around it.  I have continued to spiral out into the weird as you can tell for this next one.  My next fear was from the experience that made me quit everything except alcohol for the past couple of months.  Basically it is a process that delineates reality,  I get a feeling of perpetual non-solidarity.  That we consist of a flat image of reality twisting and contorting into a perpetual gaseous state.  We are not aware that we are running in a perpetual loop of time.  It is like an atheist hell,  where there was no higher beings to save us and life survived long enough to approach a sort of never ending black hole.  Where the universe starts in a big bang,  expands,  contracts,  and approaches a compressing anomaly that ultimately doomed any sort of progress.  I take this fear as a fear that progress has no solidarity,  which is an analogy for the very likely possibility that it does not.  I just simply have to come to terms with it. Which brings me to what I was writing about in the first place. 



I basically have been unable to get past the aftermath  of all of these bad trips for a while now.  I decided I cannot leave that realm on a bad note and have the ingredients for the mother of all brews; ayahuasca, yage, whatever you wish to call it.  It is the most spiritual of concoctions and there are religions based around this substance that has been brewed in the deep heart of the world in primevil Amazonia for centuries.  So when I was looking up experience reports I found one that mentioned one word, "kundalini experience."  I was very curious to see what that was. 



I went to some yoga site that gave a basic format for it and all that chakra business.  I started to read about how to meditate and I have always been curious as to how it works.  basically being a man of logic it was hard at first,  but I believe that when it comes to yoga changing words like "prana" to say balance of breathing and balance of mind makes the transition easier.  I got into the second stage of the process and balanced my breathing to flow through both nostrils which is actually quite hard,  and the outcome was that I was fully rejuvenated.  I had a calming feeling of a wave of energy or "breath" coursing through my body.  I was just at body worlds today and after seeing all the ridiculously small and intricate alveoli of the lungs I could feel the air penetrate into all of the branches of my lungs and I realized a sense of reality.  A sense of resolve and reason about my life.  This I realised should be steps I should take before my next and final psychotropic experience.  I must master meditation to calm myself before the inevitable plunge and resolve the demons that have manifested in my mind so I do not simply enter the loop of negativity once more and continue my perpetual paranoia.  I feel confident and ready now.  Now I can get back to painting.

Death

Just this moment I was thinking about what I will leave behind me when I die;  a fairly large corpse, thousands of words,  millions of footprints,  several metric tons of junk tallied up over the years,  a car,  all the money I spent,  all the trash I have thrown away,  the billions of yard trimmings stuffed into black trash bags(which never made sense to me by the way.),  not to mention the thousands of breaths I stole from the world and yet I feel myself wanting more. 

we are all living the American dream;  to leave behind a lifetimes' supply of junk. 

All I really feel like I left behind that is worthwhile is my writing,  my paintings, and my experiences with people.  Sooner or latter we all realise that it all is communication,  a painting left unobserved is like a shout in the wind.  Yes maybe it felt good to shout,  but it would have been better to be heard.  The things that we feel are worthwhile in our lives are the things that impact people,  otherwise it is lost among the pile of rocks and trash. 

Now what does the common deer have to worry about when it dies of old age?  It does not have to have health insurance,  it doesn't have to worry about its children who pranced off into the woods long ago,  it has no heaping pile of trash in its wake;  a deers legacy is simply itself.  A beautiful beast capable of perfect survival for eons.  and it is not stingy with it.  The deer does not care if its legacy gets ravaged by wolves,  buried in dirt and decomposed.  The deers legacy is that it provided vital energy for the creatures around it.  Ah nature,  I envy you.

Stability is something you should never seek in your life,  it is impossible.  Yes I sound absolutely bat shit crazy to say that but it is true.  It is an unspoken agreement that we do not speak of stability in such a way.  If it were up to human beings we would encase ourselves in diamonds to be appreciated forever,  but even diamonds can be smashed to dust in time.  we cannot preach stability when we are living under a giant ball of fire that threatens to explode and dissolve any semblance of a living earth from the cosmic record.  So yes I will say it again,  nothing is permanent.  Leaving a  Legacy is a fools quest for immortality,  I am sure somebody has said that before me.  We should give each other meaning,  because in this tiny pocket of the universe all we have is each other. 

Brave optimism

Every single one of us has a demon and an angel within, and they are constantly at battle until we die. If christianity stands correct than we are standing in the middle of a giant war. This giant war as christianity would have it is what gives the earth its existence. So when we look at ourselves we only see a product of war. Which we should, because not only are we a product of battle but every single easy going creature on this green earth is. Evolution is a battle of life against a non-living existence. Evolution is also a battle of life vs. life. It is all a very simple analogy to the bible, and the bible a simple analogy of life. god is the first species, satan is the species that breaks off from it. satan is deemed evil simply because he left. Satan is deemed evil simply because he wanted to grow, to change. For the better? But what is the difference between that and desiring strength, power. Mastery over each other. In the game of mastery, Hydrogen wins by far. The impact and number of humans pales in comparison.




The explanation for the bible is fairly simple actually, people living on this earth, especially the philosophers were thoroughly opposed to life being war. They were opposed to engaging in total indulgence, they simply wanted to preach temperance. Which isn't bad, but the idea of hell isn't necessary. Most of the philosophers who preach temperance, preach it with an authority that if we engage in excess there is consequences. Which still goes back to survivalism, the great battle that is existence. If you are enjoying more than me, you should pay for it. Sibling rivalry. Christians are right, we are all brothers and sisters. With God as our father and Satan as our mother. Yes I said it, blasphemy, talking back to my parents. I had to reach spiritual puberty sometime.



I call satan our mother because he supposedly played a part in our becoming according to chrisitianity. ( In Conjunction with god. Sounds a lot like reproduction to me) Otherwise we would all be in gods house right now with no “evil”. I think God was a word we humans have made up to simply describe, “the beginning.” So I would rather call him the start, not god. Anyways what I am trying to get at here is that we can only see the world through our eyes, we can only evaluate what we see with our brains, we can only hear what we are capable of hearing and when we try to go beyond that we make up our own answers. We lie. Religion is not a lie, it is an analogy; the lie is that religion is reality. Reality is a concept that is quite beyond us and in my opinion is the craziest concept known in the human dictionary. Reality is also something that we believe we can establish through other people, but we must realise that the one who makes it up is the one who dictates what is real. Knowledge in itself is also a lie, knowledge is the imagination of human beings built on itself over time. Knowledge in itself can be good or it can be bad. It can limit us incredibly and make us incredibly sterile if we only trust our own understanding, but it can also cause unwanted destruction, manipulation, and slavery if we listen to the wrong people.



But what does this all mean? You may ask, “is reality a lie than? Were we born into the slavery of reality? Are we all brainwashed zombies of some great entity?” Or are is it the opposite? Are we condemned eternally to a garden of paradise? Is the walls of our cage the only thing that protects us from the acrid, poisonous atmosphere outside? If we destroy everything for freedom will it only drown us? What is freedom other than a very large cage? If you find a door in the cage wouldn't it just lead to a bigger one? What is freedom? We can only dream, because once you leave the safety of the home to wander the trails of the universe you are still inside the confines of your body. Nothingness is freedom, a place without walls could be true freedom. But we like the freedom that is the cage, because in the cage we can do anything to no detriment. We trust that the walls will never come crashing down.



So in regards to the confines of our bodies, some would venture to say that you must have a body to experience anything. Some would say that you do not. What I say is how do we know that we are not just simply entering a new one after we die? Becoming something else. Assuming that you live after you die. Assuming that you are conscious of it. But essentially our bodies do not die, the atoms in our cells still radiate with energy. The detritus that is our decaying flesh is consumed by other forms of life, we essentially soak into the soil. Of course we would prefer to box it away from the world in a coffin, but one day the coffin too will wither away. If there is anything I would want to tell my children it is that you cannot build a wall to protect you from death without isolating yourself from the universe. If we want to live forever than we must isolate ourselves to the point of where we are essentially not a living creature anymore. If we wanted to preserve our legacy that is life forever within a book, it would make no difference until somebody came along latter to read it. Permanence is indefinite throughout time, as soon as matter comes into being it has permanence. We can theoretically say, “It existed.” What disturbs us the most about permanence is that we cannot feel complete until somebody appreciates us in our absence. Permanence and legacy only lives off of appreciation for it. The book of time can only serve a purpose as entertainment for the writer and the lucky person that can read it. We could only hope that reader has the patience to read it and the writer the inspiration to write it. I feel like the story of life and order would be the most repetitive parts and the grand chaos of everything else the most interesting.



If there ever was a creator out there I would have to say bravo, you have kept me interested.

A warning

This is just a warning, for the few that ever stumble upon this message. This is the writings of a crazy man, probably bi-polar. schizophrenic? I certainly hope not. although sometimes I feel like most of the random jargon I pump out in my daily routine just feels like a giant word salad.

I am at the Ericson's stage of my life where I am supposed to find my identity. what if I am afraid of what I predict to come? What am I going to call myself? Dom the starving artist? Dom the drug fiend? Or is there more to the picture? Dom the almost botanist, but full on drop out. Dom the almost criminal, but only a minor offender. I started out a menace so what do I become? A full blown terrorist? I wish it was that easy, I wish that the world played to our strengths but it doesn't.

wait. . . . who am I talking to here? Myself, or my future children?

Maybe you were right Joey, I am the rotten seed. I hope you continue to get everything handed to you your whole life. Everyone deserves that at least for a while. Just know that it drains me like a twisted rag, robbed of its essence so that it can be shoved face first into a wine stain.

I still feel like a child, I probably will until I move out. Whatever that means.

But I will satisfy my promise to myself, I will pursue my goals with everything I have got. If I fail then I will just admit defeat, withdraw my cards from the deck and say, "I tried my best." Whether or not that is good enough is up to chance. Chance is as bittersweet as it gets, chance can tell you that if you succeeded it was only luck. Predestination could be worse I suppose. But I firmly believe that luck is when preparation meets opportunity.

So I could be known for three things; Dom who had his chance but didn't take it, Dom who had a chance and thrived from it, or Dom who never got his chance and tried until utter failure. Ah, the sweet song of a failed musician. What other choice does he have but to play onward?

I have become the jester in the kings court once again. I have come around full circle, better fly straight when the clouds clear.