Skyscrapers of bullshit

I dare you to challenge me in my intensity.  I dare you to penetrate my intensity with your reality.  I'm not talking about an aggressively emphatic positivity or cynicism or sophistication, I'm talking about the shamelessly awkward and the painfully beautiful and the mystery.

Cos I can do bullshit, I've done bullshit.  It takes a lot of energy but when it works it is wonderful.  But I can never sustain it.  My physical body communicates loudly and clearly with my bullshit body and consistently undermines my illusions.  My physical body is a living aspect of this living world and it flows and cycles with the rhythms of nature. 

I guess sometimes I'm in dream or in entheogenesis or between incarnate lifetimes and - who knows - maybe there I can project realities out into the world, but here I am on Earth, channelling soil and water and air as food through my metabolism, channelling the same food as all the other creatures in this world.

Yes, I live in this contrived world called City, but I'm not confident of its absolutism.  I'm not sure its existence is acknowledged throughout my entire body or throughout the rest of nature.  Are you real, City?  Or perhaps a more pertinent question, can I believe in you sufficiently?  At least sufficiently to participate, to belong, to have a career maybe?  Is it possible to believe that much?  Is it possible to defy what my body communicates in order to participate, to be a part of things? 

The real world calls out to me and my body yearns to dance barefoot on the naked earth and dive into cold rivers early in the morning and to make love under the midday sun until our bums are burned red.  But I am told the city is where it's all happening.  This is where history is unfolding and the future will be made.  This is where the hopeful and the hopeless people have congregated and where they pool their hope and hopelessness, trying to find some revolution or long-term relationship.  I guess this is where it's easiest to project our majestic and pathetic fantasies onto reality.

So why did I come here to City?  To create a beautiful fantasy of bullshit that I can not only believe in but live in?  Or to destroy illusion, break down my own rural bullshit, use the gifts of my primitivism to undermine your urban bullshit of media, entertainment, enforced civility and sterility.

Can we discover each other beyond the divide of our idiosyncratic unrealities?  Surely we're really here, manifest in the same tangible reality.  Can we touch each other in this reality?  Can we trust each other?  Are we brave enough to reveal the nakedness of our undeniably warm fleshy vulnerable bodies?

I don't know what happened.  I was disappointed, I was disillusioned, I was confronted.  I'm afraid my bullshit was penetrated by people with whom I shared trust and whose trust I betrayed.  And now I stand naked and alone, despite my friends and the real love we share, despite these absurd fabrics hanging off my body, despite this blessed opportunity to address you beautiful, gentle and intelligent people.

I don't know whether I'm trapped now in my own bubble of unreality or whether I'm wandering illicitly in the wilderness.  I'm searching for an oasis in the desert, I'm ready for a ray of sunlight to break through the dense foliage, or to come across a warm hut in the dark night, or a body whose scent reassures me and I can breathe in peace for a moment knowing that no fantasy is necessary to sustain a human embrace.

“Truth” is the word we use to distance ourselves from anything that could more legitimately be labelled truth

“To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.”
Terence McKenna, Psychedelic Salon podcast

http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=680

Terence is a genius freak.

He will raise your intelligence to another level if you are ready for it, beyond the illusion that we can make statements that are either true or false.

All truths are only half truths at best.  It was a mathematician who said that!

How we decided that sounds we make with our mouth can somehow correlate to a reality beyond the perception of our senses is beyond my comprehension. “Truth” is simply something that resonates in our body in a certain way. Historically this has always been myth. I believe we used to have a healthy understanding that “truth” is a good myth. Today we seem to marginalise myth as primitive and give our modern myths great names like Science, and claim that they are True cos they have been Proven. It is simply a continuation of the exact illusion religion perpetuated at its worst.

Agreed brother. I have often been at ends with those that rationalise their dogmas as “scientific truths” when the scientific method says that all possibilities must be considered and even when “proven” are only really probabilistic assumptions.

Pretty mind boggling to think how well refined the human brain is to be able to decode multiple sensory fields. “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

“Never let reality get in the way of a good trip.”

I reckon truth is real and always will be, it's love/God/the original vibration, the absolute. It is our minds that are only capable of grasping a few aspects at a time. Which is why people say there are many truths, or truth depends on perspective.

To insist that science prove the nonexistence of something is endless and silly, especially if it doesn't exist. Remember science serves us pretty well most of the time.

Science is theoretically a great way of looking at the world. The problem with science is that even theoretically it is built upon a culture of dogma, where the truth was handed down to the masses from the authority, The Church, The State, Science. This is why science is so reactionary against religion; Dorkins, for example, one of the leading science writers in the world, writing a fuck-you-religion book. In reality, science is compromised by a lot of petty people with their petty little ideologies, trying to prove what they think they already know about the world, a perspective often completely culturally-sanctioned. And today, science is increasingly being commissioned by institutions to support the "facts" they need to justify their financial gains. This is well-documented in Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre, how drug companies fund and control all the “scientific” tests utilised to prove that their drugs are safe so they can get them out on the market as soon as possible, regardless of their efficacy or safety.

As Mark suggests, reality is real, we assume. We don't really know, but it seems likely that their is a real reality out there. However, all we have is our perception. There are theories of perception that include more than five senses, but ultimately, the only source of information we have on the physical world in which we exist physically, are the physical senses of our physical bodies. Everything else is rumour and speculation; and anybody who is trying to convince you otherwise is trying to convince you of something.

The only reason we can talk about the possibility of “Truth” existing or “God” existing is because we have words for these concepts. God definitely exists. God is a character in a myth, in some cases. God is a word we use to describe an experience, in other cases. In fact, “God” is a word we project onto a myriad of confusing and complex experiences. “Ghost”, “alien” and “illuminati” are also words that we project onto a hugely diverse range of experiences, simply because we don't have a complex vocabulary to talk about these things.

Contemplating the possible utility of the word “truth” pointing to something in the reality I experience, I would consider that, rather than guaranteeing for me that something “exists” in “reality”, “truth” is an experience of resonance in the body. My body is my only source of information about this world we share, so when I feel this resonance in my body, this “yes”, I call this “truth”. I could get this feeling equally from a drama film as a documentary, from a conversation as a scientific discovery, from some wild theory of Terence McKenna or from some simple rational humanistic assertion.

Ben considers science serves us most of the time, Terence McKenna would suggest that this is only because science makes us nice toys. I definitely concede that religion did not bring us iphones.

By that reckoning, truth is intuition, and I agree. But don't shoot the messenger: science is simply a vessel by which we enhance our senses to explore the universe. It is not its triumphs or travesties. Iphones, nukes and dodgey pharma is human abuse of science.

Sure we each perceive reality differently, and its fun to pretend that this could be the Matrix or the underbelly of a cosmic squid, but unless you're high or ill, we disregard that in favour of evidence and common consensus. Sometimes your intuition fails you, and a group of eyes swear something is majestic, but science enhances that intuition and hey presto! Rainbows are just water, not magic. I heard a good phrase last night that I can apply here, “Even bullshit is high in fibre.” Be open minded, but keep your feet on the ground.

Science is a field of study, and the language and body of infomation constructed from it. Science doesn't hand down truth, or dogma or rules on how to live and treat people. The Church does impose dogma or rules on how to live and treat people. The State does also. Science does not, but some scientists do or the scientific community does at times. To me it's a real shame the subject of science is tarnished by the way it is used by some. I think it should be treated and thought of as what it is, and kept about information gathering and verifying, kept impartial. I really think some scientists use of it as a weapon against Christianity and Islam are detrimental to the subject's repute. It's like using a nuke to blow up a performance of Hamlet. It certainly is good for the destruction of religion, but I do think to use it in a serious manner is overkill and really just to satisfy the feelings of vengence against religion.

The miserable little child in me that spent 7+ hours per week in church meetings and Bible studies, forced to sit still and silent when I just wanted to draw and play and read something other than the Bible; that had to pray at least 7 times a day; that had to carry a card that said I was not allowed a blood transfusion, that had to be ready to say I was happy to die rather than have one; that never had a birthday celebration; that wasn't allowed a hot cross bun while all the other kids in class had them and I was hungry and had to pray for them cos damn those buns were the work of Satan; that was told spiky hair was demonic, that having long hair was too; that was taught Satan was everywhere in everyone always trying to attack me and take over my body and mind, even second hand purchases had to be prayed over in case they were posessed by Satan; that gay people were sick disgusting abominations that deserved to be punished and the gleefully told story of Sodom and Gomorrah; that anyone who isn't in my religion is a potential threat, a sinner, unclean, wrong and to be avoided; the fear of life that had me waking from nightmares everynight sometimes twice or more, often pissing my bed from fear, even seeing or feeling Satan trying to get to me after I woke; the sad, miserable, terrified child in me loves Dawkins, he is my hero for what he does. However, thats the little child in me. Understand it's not impartial science, it's personal.

I feel hesitant to challenge such a personal visceral account of the violence of religion.

First of all, I don't believe Science exists outside of what we say about it and how we practice it. Just like I don't believe God exists outside of our images of it and how we use it to relate to one another. So when I talk about science, I am not talking about some truth-encompassing perfect concept that we humans, in our imperfection, can only approximate. I am talking about the actual practice of science, how it is practised in our world, in our time.

The main problem I have with what science is becoming in our cultural world, is that it carries the delusion directly from religion: that sounds we make with our mouths, and transliterations of these sounds, can somehow correlate to an objective reality. Language is a complex system of symbols that we place significance on, that we share understandings of, that exist culturally, not naturally. We can refer to natural phenomena with language, but we cannot replicate it or contain it, or capture every perceptual angle for an objective view outside of our limited ability to interpret from our own point-of-view.

The way religion sought to control us with its dogma, claimed to be “ true” , is exactly the way government now controls us. It has created an unreadable literature called The Law that is supposedly real because it has been spoken into existence by those who have been ordained by Democracy.

The collapse of religion does not herald the liberation of humankind from dogma. It persists unchallenged to this day, only it has changed form. Just like Roman Paganism seamlessly became Roman Catholicism, there is a continuity today between the Christian dogmas that we have struggled with for generations and the dogmas of Government, Industy, Ownership, racial and political superiority that continue to oppress us. As long as science is claimed to be “ true” and used to justify anything, good or bad, it perpetuates this illusion, this confusion of language, the dogma inherent in the way we speak from day to day.

If we cannot become aware of how we hypnotise ourselves and each other with our language, we can never overcome it to experience the beauty and peace of the real world, where we can live together in harmony with all life on this planet.

Terence McKenna

Two links that could change your life or explain a lot.  Here are many audio files to be downloaded and listened to at your leisure, talks by Terence McKenna.

https://www.dmt-nexus.me/Files.aspx?Filetype=Audio

Terence McKenna is a great artist and his art is to speak.

He speaks a lot about psychedelics, how they disolve boundaries; but to listen to the best of his talks is to have a psychedelic experience, to watch as more boundaries dissolve than you thought was possible.  For me it is exciting to see my petty comforts dissolve and watch as the vast landscape begins to appear to me.

http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/
This is the podcast, Psychedelic Salon, that introduced me to the linguistic fluidity and profundity of Terence McKenna.  There is also hundreds of others podcasts on psychedelics, freedom of thought and other topics that promote the development of human life.

http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=235
"Nature is the centre of the mandala."  This is the best of the many Terence McKenna talks I have listened to.  He cuts to the core of the modern urban digitised human condition.

http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=262
This is also first-class Terence McKenna.  He goes through his theory of human evolution in relation to psylocibin mushrooms.

I guess listening to some of this stuff as I spent days wandering the beaches of Sydney changed the way I see the world forever.  There is the risk that everything will change for you as a result of listening to material that does not distract you from reality but actually confronts you with it and many of its strangest implications.

http://ia700208.us.archive.org/10/items/PsychedeliaRawArchivesOfTerenceMckennaTalks/
Another archive of McKenna audio material I have found.

Non-paradoxical access to a clean past via holographic time travel

Due to new discoveries in the fractal nature of space-time and the informational nature of the universe as described in morphogenesis and string theory it has become possible to visit and interact with proximitous environments in a manner similar to time travel.

Developments in digital holographic technology have made it possible to not only program and create complex realities from the imagination but also to recreate pre-existing realities based on access to the seemingly infinite but theoretically finite informational content found in photons.  High-speed computer processing allows huge numbers of equations to recreate random photons from a desired space-time context that, after huge amounts of data have been collated, begin to resemble tangible realities that equate with the past in an increasingly complex manner.

When sufficient data has been collated by the incorporation of random photons it is possible to access and interact with the past in a manner that provokes no causality violations due to being completely causally distinct from our universe.  Because of the large amount of data necessary to create an environment it has been necessary so far only to recreate realities that are proximious in both time and space.

The area that was focused on is a small beach in Sydney called Tamarama over the previous 120 years.  The density of detail created make it possible for this to be the first past reality to be interacted with, detail significantly diminishing as we move further from this time and place.  Some suggest that detail is effectively infinite and we will never have the computer processing ability to produce enough detail for a complete mapping of even a contained portion of space-time, but experimental interactions with the created reality report a satisfyingly rich experience of the environment and even rewarding communications with local people.

Within the hologram time can be experience in the experientially linear fashion we are familiar with and can also be adjusted with a sliding spectrum similar to a digital media player.  It has been speculated that the individual encountering this recreated reality, who is metabolically distinct from it, may experience unpredictable states of disorientation through the readjustment of time or sensation of the fragmented edges of the reality.  It is also possible that through sufficient interaction with local people the individual will find an area of the local person that is unrelated to the time and place mapped and therefore not included in the limited complexity of the created reality.  However, it is possible that with increasing complexity being programmed into the created reality these problems will become increasingly unlikely.

As opposed to other, theoretical, approaches to time travel this system proposes no causation paradoxes and even provides the luxury of not coming across historically anomalous fellow time travellers.  In the same way that viewing a digital film does not leave a mark visible to future viewers, multiple time travellers can access the reality simultaneously and each experience a "clean" reality with themselves being the only historical anomaly present.

It has been suggested that further exploration into fractal time and chaos theory will allow access to the future in the same way that we now have access to the past and that with the development of computers with sufficient processing speed and capacity we can map in perfect detail all of space-time touched by the photons currently in circulation in our present reality.

The terrifying simplicity of the world we call real

Every day is like an eternity these days.  I don't wear a wrist-watch and so am always precisely on time.  Time manages to encompass vast quantities and qualities of life, and yet the days rush by like leaves that have fallen on a rushing river.  Sometimes people ask me what I have done today and I honestly can't remember.  The last two hours have demanded my attention to such an extent that the preceding ten hours have become like a dream barely remembered.

I woke up with a dream this morning.  I woke up via cellphone alarm during the REM stage of my sleep-cycle and what I had completely accepted as real was readjusted by my logical brain into a distinct, seperate non-reality as the surprising nature of my real reality flooded back.  Yesterday morning I woke up in a soggy tent on the sand and this morning I was suprised to find myself in a warm dry bed in a house with my family.  The fluctuations of time are as dramatic as the drastic and repetitive shifts from day to night to day.

Life is a funny prospect and I don't always believe in it.  Yesterday I saw my beautiful sister and her beautiful children for the first time in 18 months and I thought about all I have experienced and changed since then.  The last home in which I visited my sister was not only 20 months ago but in a different country, across a vast and desolate ocean and yet thanks to the immense power of global connectivity I am sitting in literally the same chair I was there.  Time and space have not impeded my family's ability to retain the same furniture.  So what are these cavernous distances in time or space I have crossed since our last meeting?

I travelled to the other side of the planet and back in that time, fell in love a few times, discovered new and wonderful aspects of myself and my world I could not have conceived of back then.  The world is infinitely more complex and vast and exciting than my previous self would have hoped for.  Now, today, as I attempt to contain the expanse of this simple feeling in my stomach within a series of words, I know for sure that the world is at my feet and beyond my imagination.  Oh well, I'll only contain as much as I can within the collection of words I compose today.  I will try again tomorrow and either encompass more with less words or simply multiply and complexify the collected works of me, my life's work in literature.  If I have anything to offer the world it is my attempt to experience as much as possible and share it in as few words as possible.  If I succeed in this I will assist the universe's task of expanding and contracting all information to a single point, which, I presume, is the end-point of this wonderful thing called the internet.

My sophistication and intelligence are, of course, improving and yet I am still here, my body is as dense as ever though more toned and strong than it was and I am not sure whether I have reached enlightenment yet.  I will keep typing until the voice in my head tells me to stop and choose a title that sums up all the distances my creative mind has taken my fingertips over the last hour I have been writing.  Until then I will accept the strangeness and beauty of my expression and trust that there is someone in the world who will benefit from me being as honest and present as I can and seeking to express the overwhleming complexity of experience of the terrifying simplicity of this world we call real.

Immanentize the eschaton, please

I will continue to tell you that the end is nigh because this is my job.  I am a prophet and a wordsmith.  As a prophet I smell something in the air and have no desire to deny the reality of my perceptions.  As a wordsmith I utilise irony and suggest through exaggeration that you don't believe me about all this apocalypse shit cos it's all a joke.  I use puns and undermine myself by saying the end is night, no no no, the end is night.  Of course the end is night.

When the sun goes down and it gets dark everybody knows that it gets cold and everybody knows that's when the freaks come out, that's when things really get dangerous.  We all know the world is a dangerous place and at any moment someone could attack you and at night this is almost certain.  Because the night is nigh and the end is night.  When you see that red glow in the sky that you have always associated with the setting sun you will realise that this time the tones are different and this time that red sky symbolises everything you desperately cling to in your pathetic life burning in front of your face and you standing there with a single glass of water wondering whether you should futilely pour the water on the raging fire or drink the precious liquid and enrich your body.  This is the moment when you decide what is really important to you.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life and those old cliches are so comforting maybe they even contain some degree of truth.  But then I realise their truth is entirely bound up in their ability to comfort me and nothing else matters and nothing else holds any meaning, certainly not the symbols on this screen that I use to feel better about my life, these collections of symbols I present in a way that makes me feel productive, like I matter in this world when really I know that I matter more than anyone cos after the end has come none of this will matter.

Now I speak as the prophet and tell you that everything will collapse and nothing will remain and you will finally understand so many things you did not could not chose not to before because all the illusion will vanish and all we will have left is a reality to share, an environment in which to live together and an abundance of life and love to do something with.  Perhaps we will spend another 100,000 years developing a lovely Christian capitalist democratic society with antidepressants and polystyrene or maybe we will do something else. 

All I know, and as the prophet I really do know, and as the wordsmith I am just typing in hope and faith, eternity is not such a long time.  I also know that as things intensify around here you will notice one of two things happening to you and this is very important to observe.  You will notice that everything either gets a lot funnier or much more serious, and the rate of increase is exponential. 

If you find things getting funnier you are on the right track, don't worry about it.  You already realise that everything that is created will soon be destroyed; you already know that so much of it is illusion and reality is so much more simple and nice than all this hysteria suggests.  You're noticing that silence and space and presence and peace is imbued always with a subtle powerful energy that can only be described as love.  Forgive the restrictions of the English language but if we had a better word for that which I am referring to as "love" it would certainly go a little further to destroying this precious energy that preferably is not even thought about, just experienced and appreciated.

If you find things are getting more serious, that is not a good sign.  I'm sorry to say that this is a strong indication that things are just going to get worse. Chaos will increase, you will lose control and understanding, you will be distraught, you will lose everything that matters to you.  You might as well start panicking now because this is a serious situation and you are going to be the victim as it gets worse and worse as we all head straight to the point of annihilation.  And after annihilation, nothing.  Existence will cease and there will be nothing.  I know you're afraid, you should be, but more importantly, be suspicious, do not trust anyone, and keep your passport and all your money in a small bag inside your clothes against your person at all times.  The world is going to destroy you.  Do not accept it.  Fight.  Do not die.  It will not be okay.

Either way, whichever category you find yourself fitting into over the next few months, things are going to change and intensify around here.  Maybe you will enjoy it and accept it; maybe you will worry and resist.  But I guarantee you will die.  I will die.  The internet will die.  Bill Gates and Elvis Presley will die.  The global economy and Western Civilisation will die.  Christianity and Islam will die.  The English language will die.  All the whales will die.  All humans will die.  My words will be forgotten.  Your gravestone will rot like a tomato in the sun and no one will remember your name.  Your ego will disintegrate and your worries will cease to exist.  Coffee will cease to exist and television will cease to exist.  One day you will go to work for the last time and all the data you have entered will be wiped and there will be nobody around to care or even notice.  Everything you memorised for school will rot into the earth with the fat of your brain and even the dirt itself will rot, into what I do not know.

I do not know because my role as prophet is to stand proudly with the confidence of my ignorance and so that's why my writing makes no logical sense.  My role as prophet is to stand in the strength of my vulnerability and the power of my simple faith.  I will lead you when the time comes, rest assured I will be ready when I am needed.  You won't know I'm leading you, but I will provide the guidance.  And there is one of you reading this who will help me.  You know who you are.  Of course most people are inactive and inadequate, but you too will be ready when the time comes and we will be the invisible leaders of the new dimension.  In our humble confidence we will secure all survivors with the simplicity of our faith in reality.

Reality will be my god and miracles will abound.  Now is the time.

Some jumbled manic thoughts

Rice expands my stomach and so although it is used to make meals feel filling it actually makes me hungrier.

I don't like this perverse attempt at control I am supposed to exert over my life, it is too boring and stressful for me.

I am the funniest person I know because I find extremely serious things to be funniest of all.

I can't get a literary agent because none of them can afford to put time and effort into "the financially unrewarding field of poetry".

I don't care whether I am successful or not because I am.

I am so happy that I don't really mind so much that I am not really fulfilling the plans I had planned for myself and my life.

I don't mind, I really don't.  So many people love me and there are so many places to go and so much to do that I couldn't conceive of boredom or loneliness except momentarily sometimes just to remind myself what it feels like cos I guess there are quite a few people in this world who experience these things and I want to empathise and I want to write about how they feel cos maybe I feel this way sometimes maybe I don't but I certainly used to feel this way and I got over it and maybe they can too. 

Maybe I am just arrogant and self-righteous.  Maybe I truly am from another planet.  Maybe we all are.  Maybe I am special.  Maybe we all are God, maybe we all are the reincarnation of the Son, the Christ, the Divine Manifest On Earth.  I don't know anything more than anyone and nobody knows much if anything.  I'm not sure whether my writing is a more accurate description of the universe when I lay my thoughts out clearly and structurally or when I go mental and have page-long sentences and thoughts that diverge into all sorts of directions.

Everything is just a big jumble of influences anyway isn't it.  We can observe this on a quantum level.  Things appear and disappear.  Influences come from all directions in time and space.  Reality is fluid, maleable, interesting.

Melt [part I]

She knew nothing would happen.  It was stupid really.  She was old enough to have a computer when the Y2K paranoia had gripped the world.  As soon as she heard about it she changed the date and time on her computer to 31 December 1999 and 11.59 and watched it tick over to the new millennium as if it was any one minute ticking over to any other minute.  She knew people were stupid and needed something to fear and let them have their fear, she does not need it.

It's a dark winter morning and she is feeling claustrophobic inside the house.  She knows it's cold outside but she wants to go for a walk.  Snow is not going to stop her and paranoia certainly isn't.  She puts on as many clothes as possible and steps out into the crunchy snow.  She loves this time of year, the quiet days of Christmas when everyone goes off to their families and leaves her with the gift of some peaceful solitude.  She can't help thinking about all those years, all those myths and all that anticipation leading up to right about now.  Some of her friends were obsessed with these myths and talked about them constantly so she couldn't help thinking about them herself.

As she walks she enjoys the quiet and the solitude and the effect it has on her.  She feels a peace and a nice balance between her thoughts and her simple observations of the frozen winter forest she calls home.  The world isn't going to Hell so fast because she is able to live in the city and take a walk through the forest only minutes from her apartment.  The world is certainly an increasingly weird place of course, that's undeniable.  She doesn't follow any media but her friends are always telling her about the new Abstract Economy desperately trying to maintain capitalism and Character Politics and its attempt to retain people's interest in politicians.  This latter has apparently resulted in the election of someone calling himself Jesus Christ as US President, who promises 1000 years of peace.

The craziness doesn't usually make it into the forest though, a bit of rubbish sometimes, but she can simply pick that up and put it somewhere more appropriate.  Most people come here to visit her cos they want what she wants for a little while; a bit of peace and sanity.  She loves her friends so she accepts that they come for temporary peace from these crazy lives and then for some reason want to return to their crazy lives after having a wonderful time here with her.  There is change here in the forest too, but it's a change that need not be understood.  It makes sense without needing to know anything about it.  It is chaotic, unpredictable, uncontrollable, and this is natural.  It is good.

Today is the day the world is supposed to end yet here in the forest it's just another perfect day.  The world is frozen, but life continues.

She steps off the path to where the trees are thicker and notices the snow has melted here.  She turns behind her and sees thick white snow covering everything and yet here in front of her it's melted and the ground is slushy and wet.  She trudges through the thick slosh of mud and dead leaves and pine needles.  She looks down at her feet at where she is walking and suddenly feels a direct warmth like a hot ray of sun breaking through directly onto the skin of her face.  She looks up and sees not the bright yellow light of the sun but some white dull light that is somehow unbearably intense and can't be looked at.  It's all white up there in the sky, overcast, and yet she can't be sure cos suddenly it's so bright she can't direct her gaze in that direction.  She can't look at the snow because this intense light reflects off that too.  The light even glares through the gaps in the trees.  It is so bright the trees seem to be melting.  They even bend over like soft candles.  Slightly disoriented she leans her hand against a tree trunk to steady herself; it is soft and her hand leaves a five-fingered indentation.

She is a calm person and doesn't panic, but she does not understand what is happening cos she can't even think about it.  It doesn't confuse her even because there is no reference point to reality or at least what she usually refers to as reality.  She continues to walk, neither looking at nor avoiding the intense light and unusual physical phenomena.  It is not just the mud and half-rotten vegetation that is mushy beneath her feet, everything seems to be getting softer, losing its density but not really changing form, just bending a bit.  This doesn't seem as unusual as it should and she laughs at the thought that it could easily be a dream.  "What difference does it make?" she wonders.  "If this is the reality I find myself in, what difference does it make if I call it a dream of a wake?"

Reality continues to melt and she continues to walk.  She considers her friend, the one constantly speculating with excitement about what would happen at the appointed time when everyone knew something would inevitably happen.  He had some good ideas and she told him many times to write a novel but he claimed he wouldn't be able to complete it and get it published in time and so there is no point.  She pulls apart two close trees like a curtain and he is standing in front of her smiling.  "I told you," he grinned.  "You never predicted this," she looks around.  They hug and their bodies coalesce without losing their own form.  They move in and out of each others' form with casual amused curiosity.  She sees her friend's skin seems to be glowing and he appears so much more beautiful to her than he ever has before.  She touches his face and feels a wave of intense love for him that feels like sadness but a good sadness.  The feeling is reflected in his face and they don't even need to smile at each other anymore.

She remembers that he is supposed to be on the other side of the planet, far away in some other country.  She doesn't know how he got here but can't even remember what country he's supposed to come from anyway.  She thinks she should know more, but can't even remember his name or how she knows him.  But she loves him so much and must've known him her whole life.  She can't imagine not knowing him.  Even the idea of her country and his country sound a bit silly and she wonders where she got this idea from.  The whole universe is here, it is them and this sphere of tangible environment around them.  Nothing else needs to exist and these types of thoughts start to fade anyway.

She notices the differentiation around her slowly disappearing.  The tree tops and the sky begin to look similar.  She can no longer tell the difference between snow and mud.  She looks at him and he seems to be observing the slow changes with the same detached curiosity as her.  They make eye contact and their silent expressionless faces communicate something.  It is like the bright white light is continuing to brighten but the glare is no longer harsh on the eyes and there is no associated heat, just a pleasant warmth, just like she is cozy in her warm winter clothes.  It's like she's drifting into sleep.

I am Kristus Kirkko

How do we decide who we are going to be today?  Last night I relaxed into the bath, knowing that when I woke up in the morning I would be a different person.  I have woken up now and my beard is gone and I know I am different, but what this difference will look like has not yet been defined.  I am still free at this early hour to define who I am going to be today.  It is of course easier when I am meeting people who do not know me and therefore do not harbour any expectations of me.  I have spent many years searching within for the Real Me and found nothing.  I know that if I find out who I really am then there will be no more confusion about how to act and what to do because I will simply know my character and understand my morality and act with the integrity of the person I have always been and will always be.  However I have never noticed any evidence that there is a consistent person within me.  All I see is potential and experience and the hope that is the mixing of these two in the present moment.  All I can do in this moment I am experiencing is mix a little bit of experience with a little bit of potential and see what I am capable of.  This seems to change from day to day based on what food I eat and the people I associate with and the environment I expose myself to.  Otherwise I am an open book, a notebook in which anything can be written, from the most banal drivel to the most profound literature with the power to shock the world into catharsis with its novelty.  It seems to me, at least from the outside, that some adults find a persona they enjoy and try to stick with it throughout their life.  Will I too find such a successful and enjoyable persona that I will hold onto it for the duration of this lifetime until a physical death ends my ego and my lifetime and my career?  Or will another kind of death come along every few months or every few days and kill the person I am trying to be, forcing me to look around and build a better version based on the information and resources around me?  It is just a shame that I feel so silly and pretentious changing my name all the time when really it is supremely appropriate because "Chris Kirk" has too many connotations for me to receive too severe a re-imagining.  Do I have the integrity to undermine myself and start introducing myself as Kristus Kirkko and therefore figure out who I can be under that name?  I am the manifestation of my own fantasy.  I am a mythological being inhabiting a physical body and until I leave this body behind I have forced myself to deal with the reality or unreality of this world.  I personally can't tell whether it is reality or unreality.  I am not sure whether the image I use my senses to gather and my mind to correlate and project is in fact reality because it differs significantly from the reality of even those closest to me who I am able to communicate well with.  If my experience of this world is so different from another human being then how different is my experience from that of a tree, another life form, who my communication with is less certain?  I no longer claim that the holographic image of reality that I project onto the world is in any way accurate, but it is what I have to work with here and I am happy to see such a beautiful sky when I wake up in the morning.  It reminds me of the vast limits of even my limited sphere of this universe.