Thought Eighty Three

Sitting in my garage this morning smoking a cigar, drinking coffee, and feeling grumpy, I realized something.

I like it.

I like feeling rough and raw. Unshaven, the burn of a cigar and strong black coffee. The endless black that reaches out before us as we hurtle through space at forty percent of the speed of light.

Bugs on a rock.

This time aware of what I am. Knowing what matters and sometimes hating this whole human condition. The balance of all that pulls at us. Emotions like waves that constantly threaten to crash us against the rocks. The opportunity to learn to balance it all. The existence of emotionality tied so strongly through our bodies that seek constantly to control us. The ability to use our minds and perhaps across a thousand billion lives become something more than the traps that are the gods and daemons.

The gods and daemons are traps.

Traps of emotions. Traps of becoming an emotion that only owns itself in an endless spiral of nothingness. Two-sided coins that take us nowhere. That’s what a lot of the daemons and gods may be. Perhaps some are more.

Our bodies are machines. Machines that are dedicated to processing food, water and air. A fair amount of our brain is used to run the machine that is us. Beyond that comes emotions and thought. Emotions are from part from the mind, but largely from the body. Because the body remembers.

Bugs on a rock.

Then there is the mind. Right back where we started from. Struggling to overcome the emotional body and all that encompasses. Wisdom comes from reflection on a life of experience.

I often find truth in interesting places. Watching “Blacklist” on Netflix, the protagonist Ray Reddington said, “Wisdom is wasted on the old”.  The young don’t want to hear it. So you end up shouting to an empty room. But in my thoughts, the room isn’t empty. I am in it. So perhaps the wisdom is wasted at all. Perhaps my enjoyment of this wisdom, what I have learned over my life and self reflection makes it all worthwhile to me.

Bugs on this rock. Traveling at forty percent of the speed of light.

And the speed is increasing…

 

 

Thought Eighty Two

I am a pilot in my own mind and emotions.

I didn’t feel like I am the sense of ”I am” more and more of the time this last week, but just a pilot of this collection of emotions, PTSD, and many other things that seem to make up this mental compilation of me. It feels scary at times, a series of white water rapids that threatens to spill me off into the raging torrent. 

I remember decades ago when it was just me. The world out of control, people ”doing” things to me. It wasn’t good. I felt helpless. The direction of life going where it would. Now it feels much more like riding a wave. Piloting the consciousness that is me, riding this wave. Riding it until it breaks gently against the shore. Or crashes into the rocks. 

Either one is fine, on the other side of the black.

The river of dreams that is the black. All of the things we can’t remember life to life. The immense burden of the weight of our histories across a thousand million lives in parallels of the endless realities branching out. Too much for one mind or not? I don’t really know. Perhaps instead it is learning to pilot the mind of this entity that we are. Then maybe we can ingest all of this at once the way the gods do.

Coming back home, I feel reconnected back to my sweet loving wife, this my daily existence, work, etc. Still, it feels strange sitting here in my garage smoking a cigar and working on application issues with a group of people spread across the globe. In my mind, I build another model of application data flows as I have done so many times before. Like a temp table of a database, this too I shall dump once resolved. Eve6 plays “Small town trap” as I write this.

Changing gears:

Writing the characters in my novel is similar to piloting my consciousness, only maybe a bit harder. Inside my mind, it is a bit more like keeping yourself balanced while not being overwhelmed by the surge of emotions. The characters are all written by me.  They become like friends that you know and enjoy getting to know. Watching them change and grow, much like the people we love around us. But I do find it exhausting at times being in so many different heads. It kind of makes sense to me why so many novels have only a couple of main characters of protagonist and antagonist. But then life can be wearying. Why wouldn’t creating be also? Even in the Christian mythos god rested in the seventh day.

 

 

Thought Eighty One

Visiting my mother in California. We ate out at restaurants, went to the movies a few times and talked. As I traveled through the last five days (or revolutions of our planet), I felt my mind in exquisite detail. The engagement of my amygdala in freeze, flight or fight when we tried to capture her cat. To trim its claws as I felt a sympathetic response to the cat being in full-blown freeze, flight or fight. The feeling of just biding my time, escaping the worries that I have running in the background.

Our minds are strange and wild beasts. We may think we have control of our thoughts and directions, but it doesn’t take much to send us off our chosen trail, to wander lost in the woods of emotions. The emotions are often driven by our bodies and betray us. The thoughtful logical contemplativeness lost to a driving emotion. An emotion that is locked in place like the giant granite boulders in southern California. Possible to move and overcome, but like the boulders, only with much difficulty and effort. I wish it was easier.

That the body did not remember.

But it does.

Maybe that is the point. Overcoming the crushing histories that we carry within us. That sear and burn us until we screamingly escape into whatever it is that we escape into.

Bugs on a rock. Hurtling through space at forty percent of the speed of light outward. Living for a brief moment until we don’t. Nothing forgotten, nor remembered. Only the endless movement through the black.

 

Thought Eighty

January first, 2019.

Last night at midnight, as my beautiful wife lay sleeping next to me, I thought about time. Our planet had completed yet another revolution around our sun. All while our galaxy speeds away at eighty percent of the speed of light from other galaxies far, far away. As we are moving with consistent motion, are we experiencing the relativistic effects or are they? For each revolution of our earth around our small sun, have they gone around thousands?

We all experience time differently. Our reality made up of the experience that our brain creates for us. Real, not real, who is to know?

Something to think about in this new year.

Thought Seventy Nine

Do the gods experience this terrible self-awareness? A self-awareness that seems to threaten the foundational construction and the very integrity of our minds. As we add and change the robes of our personality, sliding into ones we’re completely comfortable with and disregarding another that we’re not.

It is a terrible self-awareness. I wonder if the gods experience this. Did Shiva as he set about this destruction, his third eye planting like bullet holes to the foreheads of the dead as he arranges them on the ground, have this terrible self-awareness or does he simple act as an unstoppable force of nature. A hurricane of unstoppable proportions.

If Shiva experiences that terrible self-awareness of what he is, what he does, what his life is about. Does he yearn more something more? Is that the reasons for destruction over and over again across this and many other blocks of events/dimensions?

As I sit here completely triggered, yet wearing my beautiful robe of comfortability (work), I struggle internally. Recognizing that I am triggered and that it is the great destroyer. My destroyer.

The destructor of me, of my relationships, of my work and even my creativity. This CPTSD is the god Shiva in my life. Constantly re-experiencing the trauma that has been my experience over 80% of my life. This isn’t something you can easily explain to your loved ones, co-workers and friends. Instead, they see you as anxious when it is not needed, overly reactive when you should be calm, and not fully functional in the ways we should be.

Little do the people around us know, that we are walking on the edge of a crumbling precipice, bullets skimming by our skin. Some piercing our bodies causing massive collateral damage (recent hospitalization). Some damaging our relationships and careers.

Meanwhile, the people around us see us as normal, if a bit anxious. Never seeing the all-out war that rages within us. I have met the enemy and it is me. Today, tomorrow and moment by moment.

To know myself is to perhaps know the madness of the gods. Is the madness simply the conflict between what we are (our robes) and the learning becoming that we are?

Something to think about.

Talking about this has bled off some of the CPTSD (complex PTSD) I am living through this morning. But it is still a violence to my soul. A tear across my reality. Still softly padding across that edge of that crumbling precipice of an unknowable deep chasm.

 

 

Thought Seventy Eight

Last night I dreamed.

I dreamed Manya, and I had descended these rock stairs into an immense valley. But it wasn’t a valley, but something constructed. So vast were the walls when we were at the bottom, that you could barely see the top through the clouds. On these stone walls, were engraved symbols.

These symbols were larger than a house.

I was so moved by the immense size of this valley. Looking up so far to see the top, I almost tipped over backward. Then for just a moment, I could make out the top through a break in the clouds. I awoke to feel stunned and amazed.

While showering and still feeling in awe, I felt a thought come to me. Many cultures cremate the dead. They do this for religious, cultural and in the west for personal reasons. But it struck me that cremation takes us from a physical form to one of energy.

E=MC2

When we die, we no longer produce the electromechanical forces anymore. The electricity that we generate to power our brains, nerves, heart, and body is gone. So it stands to reason that we should also change our physical body to one of energy only.

In cremation in the west, the cremation facility turns down the heat so that there are ashes left for the family. Otherwise, there would be nothing left. The smoke going up from the industrial incinerator that consumed the body.

In some places in the east (Tibet and others), they have the “Sky Burial.” Your body is placed on a stand open to the sky for the carrion birds to feast on. Again, your body converted energy.

In some places in India, they cremate the deceased on a funeral pyre. Wood is stacked, and the dead is placed upon it to burn. I like that better than being burned in an industrial incinerator. But then energy is energy. And it doesn’t matter as you are dead, into the river of dreams, only to awaken anew and start over.

Not remembering.

 

Thought Seventy Seven

I am slowly becoming very aware of how much complex PTSD I have. It affects me about 85% of the time. With that in mind, I realize my coping skill must be applied during most of my waking moments. This includes work, my home life with my beloved Manya and everything in between. My daughter once said to me that we are all at war inside. That’s an apt description of how I feel much of the time. Fortunately, I have been at this for a very long time and my coping-fu skills are very strong. As is the steel of my will.

But what I have found is that I most desire peace. A peaceful existence, peace in my household, peace in my emotions.

Peace.

The old Roman adage “if you want peace, prepare for war” from the ancient tome “Epitoma Rei Militaris,” by Roman general Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus. So I must prepare myself for the constant and unending internal fight of CPTSD. Every emotion looked at through the unadulterated lense of my hyper-driven brain and overarching amygdala that would control my emotions.

In this season of Christmas, I find myself struggling with the mythology of Christmas. I don’t wish to encroach on other’s beliefs but often find that other’s beliefs encroach on me. Being a part of society makes this so, I would dangerously assume. I don’t enjoy it though. I wish I could, but mostly it feels weird and made up. Maybe make up a magical unicorn holiday where the multicolor unicorn spreads good cheer by way of it spraying skittles from its rear across the sky (taste the rainbow).

Back to tilting windmill my friends.

 

 

“Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum.”