The difference between winking and being winked approximates the difference between lovingly letting someone know they have a place in your heart and frustration at its purest. The difference between writing and being written is one that we might want to reach a fuller understanding of. To fictionalize or understand someone as being a character rather than a living being equally capable of creative freedom is psychic encroachment, especially given the nature of subconscious connections.

Power struggles that occur in the murky waters of our subconscious – particularly those that have become stagnant and sickly – can be particularly vicious. The true sickness we seem to be confronting as a world is hatred grounded in prejudice, misunderstanding and rejection. That being said, there seems to be a part of each of us that can’t distinguish ocean from sky, a part that forgoes understanding in an attempt to directly comprehend.

Our inability to cope seems to derive from something akin to a ‘selfish gene’ that either refuses or fails to understand how loving self-interest can be made to work within the framework of a shared life-world. It might be best understood as an aspect of the personal subconscious, the id, which has bound itself to the death drive rather than our shared good. Misunderstanding how life in and from love can be sustained, it doubles back on itself and attempts to enslave the aspects of our being that are intelligent.

Every time “I” is thought it tries to jump into the place of enunciation reducing itself to a state of utter confusion. Exhausting seems to be the most appropriate word for it, and it apparently maintains its existence by sabotaging the individual consciousness that it mistakes itself to be. The counterpoint to noumenal being or a blind, striving will, it represses logical, productive thought and the creative flow of energy, attempting to replace them with its own pre-pubescent, incomprehensible, self-lacerating, clownish judgments.

That being said, it feels more like past selves that apologetically offer themselves up in the present in order to be made peace with, analyzed, critiqued and improved upon. This being the case, the best way to interpret them seems to be as fragments of a mind that presents itself as something that it’s not so that a more holistic understanding can be achieved without the need for misinterpretation. Misunderstanding what it or they are trying to achieve, the self makes overly hasty, rash judgments that are corrected over time.

The eternal forms are difficult to conceive from within the twisted logic that dominates today’s societies. The monolithic structures that rest upon the apathy and/or ignorance of large segments of the working class allow those in power to make their fortunes off the work of others. Useful labor is transmuted into modes of exchange that are grounded in our misperceptions about what constitutes true value and true wealth.

What some might understand as God others have come to know as Brahman, the seemingly dormant Spirit that supports and sustains our world. Knowing oneself as this being’s counterpoint - as Atman, or the true self - would be similar to coming to find one such as Jesus in one’s heart. To me, limiting this self to a particular individual - particularly one who lived so long ago - is unjust to the many others who have similarly embodied the Spirit, but the self is one and the same in and as love, regardless.

Perhaps the dormancy of this godhead can be attributed to the fact that so many of us have lost touch with who we are. Many egos seem to be grossly enlarged and also separated from the goodness of being. Becoming lost in the complexities of the phenomena through which a material world is disclosed, we lose touch with who we should know ourselfes to be.

To bind oneself to the living will is to understand that the institutions and structures that enslave us can be reappropriated from the rich and powerful with collective efforts that are diplomatic and democratic in nature. To envision a world where the majority aren’t indoctrinated, repressed or oppressed requires that this either occurs or that these institutions undergo almost revolutionary reformation.

Those that strive to actualize such a vision never work alone.

If we consider the nature of this strange phenomenon, we’re bound to eventually hit upon the idea that the word ‘hallucination’ is a misnomer. Projections of the mind or a deeper reality that we only rarely experience? Faulty perception or fuller perception that testifies to the fact that our world isn’t governed by the laws of physics (even if it’s still governed by laws)?

Viewed from another plane of existence, human societies might be seen as a rather sophisticated system of ant colonies. The farm we call Earth is packaged and sold as an expensive work of art. And edible too!

I’m kidding, of course, but it is interesting to think of such possibilities. I’m sure that a micro-processor that has developed consciousness would be as incomprehensible to us as we are to it. I’m sure the internet is both proud of what gets stored on it and completely exasperated with being used as a trash-receptacle.

The desiring-machines that try to align the collective will into a semblance of order are more than a little frustrated with how fickle and petty we can be.

(It should be clear that these desiring-machines - if they are correctly understood as how conscious beings attempt to actualize their personal desires and are the means through which each conscious being attempts to override and correct the desires of others that they do not agree with… most of this all happening beneath the surface of each beings self-awareness - then it is actually we, as free men and free women, which are the ones that actually grow frustrated)

I exist as doubt. And so it is that within me - within this absolute uncertainty - an unending battle is waged between hope and despair.

The two are not mutually exclusive and it seems that each infuses and infects the other; they flow through me as context ceaselessly morphs. Identical situations refract through the lens of my uncertainty, offering me very different pictures of what the case may be.

The truth lies hidden beneath the veneer of our everyday reality, and we must strive to reveal it. The truth is that we are all struggling; it’s that we need to reach a mutual understanding.

The truth is that we are capable of both demonstrating the flaws of the system we have in place and offering intimations of that which could replace it.

The scope of the war raging inside me extends well beyond the battle between hope and despair. Skirmishes also occur between trust and paranoia, openness and withdrawal, anxiety and complacency, mania and depression. The threat of upheaval is constant, and much of the conflict occurs beneath the surface of my self-awareness.

My soul is not that for which I fight; it is the battleground.

If I were to polarize the civil unrest that occurs within me, I would say that love and fear are the two main players. Apathy has also garnered much support, however, particularly among those who believe that my soul is not something worth fighting over. There have even been whispers among the most depraved that it is not worth saving.

The war is almost entirely waged in the tumultuous seas of my subconscious, and it is only in brief moments of clarity such as this that I have a vague hint that it is even occurring. I have, until now, refused to stand behind any of the factions, since each harbored aspects of the truth and could rightfully claim to be part of what makes me who I am. But this is no longer the case.

I now align myself with the aspects of me that are an expression of that which I wish to become, those that express the love, beauty and compassion that I hope to one day embody.

The temptation to let the given of the present distract you from your future is one that the will of those around you begs you to cave into. Is it possible to lend credence to the mandate of being in the moment - to be here now - without losing sight of what you’re struggling towards, what you’re striving to bring into being?

The friendly vices allow us to oscillate between the here and the yet to come. A few beers, a few tokes, and the present is fully present. Alcohol slackens our chains to moral prudence and the plants that nature provides us with bring the future into our experiential field. Our psychedelic experiments demonstrate there are also those that stretch the boundary separating discrete segments of time from eternity.

Blissfully aware or painfully unaware of divine knowledge, our evolution does away with the need for such contrivances, though they’re helpful for delineating how long a shift in psychic modality will be observed. The magic of functional materiality is one that we should hope never to lose.

Meditative awareness is not something that ever becomes obsolete. One cannot standardize the dance of our more playful spirits.

I was contemplating redemption today, and it struck me as ridiculous to believe that anyone exists who cannot be redeemed. Salvation is universal, damnation is a myth, and redemption lies within the heart of all beings.

It may be impossible to change the past, but we can at least reinterpret it. Even the most unspeakable acts are forgivable if the person is no longer who they were when those acts occurred. While absolution may be outside our reach, we can at least do our part to actualize it.

I choose to believe that people can change. I choose to believe that love is stronger than hate. I choose to believe that that each of us will find our own voice - under the guise when unnecessary(???????), and in truth where and when necessary, as a unified multiplicity - and that we will use them to build a better world.

The only way forward progression in time is conceivable is with reference, direct or indirect, to infinity. Without such reference we would be indefinitely (and irrevocably) stuck in the past with no room for novelty. What we experience spatially would be static; it would be subordinate to an absolute structuring principle. (In my ontology infinity replaces the null set (i.e. the void))

Matter (both organic and inorganic), taken as qualities of particular regions of space, would also be subordinate to this principle, which would make conscious freedom impossible (sorry, what I meant to say is impish…). How do we get around this? Everything that experiences grows organically out of the flow of time (the flow of experience) and space (to the extent that () exists) is simply the emptiness (or the nothingness) that it grows into. The notion of infinity - conceived spatially - is contradictory to the extent that we attempt to explain the relation of two finite beings with any reference to it at all, aside from it being an empty field.

However, if we are all infinite temporally, but finite spatially, it’s easier to make sense of the world and intersubjectivity in a way that does, in truth, make sense. So matter, organic or otherwise, is irreducibly finite as is our perception of the spatial/temporal manifold. The question would be whether or not we all spring from or return to the same source. If we ensure this point is absolutely unconscious and call it DEATH, then we have successfully opened the possibility of a spatially conceived time; this could be conceived as an atheist hypothesis. Radical empiricism coupled with this underlying atheist hypothesis gives us the absolute as numeric, as mathematical labyrinth. However, if we reject the notion of the Absolute, or we equate the Absolute with infinity (understood as the flow of experience within the framework of an ongoing creative evolution, undertaken through, from and by a finite number of (in)finite beings) and suppose that each of us has an innate desire, which is unsurpassable, to actualize the good (or at least bring a beautiful and good world into existence) then infinity as pure potentiality would be another way to conceive this nothingness as something other than death. It would be nothingness pregnant with being, and the beings that currently exist would determine what is born into it.

To allow pure potentiality to exist on this planet we would require regions that nobody has physically or psychically explored along with a form of matter that is ethereal and can be molded/sculpted. Or perhaps not a form of matter, but an infinite substance. This is the stuff that dreams are, in actuality, made of. We collectively determine, with whoever we’re exploring with, how firmly we draw the line between dreams and reality. True cosmic governance safeguards the beings that inhabit our world from nightmares made flesh/frights of fancy and sleep is the space we open up for pure creation that doesn’t require the effort of construction/the physical manipulation of forms. That being said, the true artists aren’t the dreamers, but those that learn to create with the materials the world supplies us with.