It is generally realized that I have a natural aptitude for psychotropic substances of questionable origin. Particularly those that may or may not cause one to question his own mental stability. Or instability.

Knowing this about yourself is sort of comforting. Only not very.

My friend and I call them wondrous molecular compositions. Stuff that can make you lose the ability to can. Although the phenomena of "losing one's ability to can" can be sort of scary, it's why people say “I can’t even,” in the first place.

Jolly good, then.

I lie to myself by telling myself that this aptitude is due to a particularly cunning morphic resonance cascading down (or up) through the dimensional fields until the matter in my brain-meat is stimulated to the point of "Yeah, why not, let's see where this takes me."

This sort of thinking usually does not end well. At least that's what others would like me to think. But I regret nothing. Not yet.

I was not high up on a mountain this time. Not physically, in any case.

No.

All that happened happened quite suddenly and without warning. Which is how things usually happen anyway. Unless you're a turtle.

So there I was, minding my own business (slacking), when suddenly a wild molecule called DMT appeared.

The dosage I used would make the wise frown with disapproval, so it was good that none of them were strutting about. 

I inhaled and, for a while I felt very, "Myes, Quite, Indeed," until my mind went mad.

Okay, madder.

The universe sang to me. Literally. All right, not literally, but I did hear an odd hum of synchronous rhythm resonating at a pitch I had not encountered before. The odd thing about it though, is that it came accompanied by a distinct sense that, while the sound was indeed within Myself, it was also out there, in the void, as it were.

It was the void.

Not as a normal sound is, but so deeply embedded into intrinsic reality that it goes by unnoticed while the mind is looking and I had, by inhaling, managed to coax it out of its little hole. Although that hole is actually infinitely big. 

I stopped looking and it in turn looked at me.

I would have been scared if it wasn’t for the fact that I was not. Doesn’t make much sense, does it?

In these instances it is funny how one’s mind conjures up all sorts of stupid ideas about what is happening.

While the explanation that the sound I am hearing is nothing more than a change in my natural ear pressure and the resulting hum is fine and all, it is not as fantastic as the thought that I had heard the sound of creation. Or the sound of background radiation. Or the hum of a cosmic TV tuned to a dead channel and finding out it's not actually dead. Or the sound of space expanding. Or even the Great Om. For all I know all of these are actually one and the same thing. Anyway, it (the sound) kept pulling me towards something. Something both an infinite distance away and at the same time right here, now, everywhere.

Perhaps my lotus position made me see what I saw next, or at least put the idea of it in my head.

I saw Me.

And I was laughing at me.

Here is how it happened.

From the kaleidoscopic pattern of shifting, concave circles, a red-blue Me appeared sitting in the same position I was sitting, pulsing and looking at me since the beginning of all things and mind-casting that he will be sitting there until I get a grip and realize I don't have a grip. And even then I/Him/Me shall still be sitting there for some obscure reason. A reason that was probably not so terribly important. Or the most important. Probably both.

I resisted the sound’s pull because that's what dumb apes do. I resisted until all of a sudden there was no more point to it.

I stayed right there yet was somewhere else.

But that's not the weirdest part. After the universe had ceased its song, a new one appeared. I say appeared because sound seemed to enjoy being a visual menace. It didn't hurt, it was just that sound itself decided it will act all weird for a bit. Probably to freak me out. 

It worked.

Fortunately only for a second, because a shape which looked remarkably (and by remarkably a mean exactly) like Shiva, appeared before me. HeShe stood on one leg with the other bent as though sitting, and began to do this weird dance. It made me smile.

The above GIF looks exactly what the dude was doing.

His motions created all that was me and all that will ever be. And all of that was also me. And I thought to myself, "Hmm, that's rather odd, that. But in the best way possible."

The whole thing felt profoundly fantastic.

After it was over I was somewhat disappointed. Not because of the fact that I did it, but because despite all greatness, I couldn't help but feel that I have experienced profoundly more subtle feelings of bliss and wonder while in meditation – not high at all. At least not propelled to such height by any substance I had taken. I loved the experience even more because of this fact.

In its own way it showed me how we already have the best things inside us already, we simply need to learn how to access them. Work at them. Being able to do it only on occasion somehow adds an extra thrill to existence. It makes you strive. 

It adds a certain subtle element of danger. 

Short cuts to insights that most of us are looking for simply don't exist. At least not in a truly meaningful sense. You begin to rely on drugs to bring you to that place again, forgetting it is always there.

Because sadly, drugs will always lie to you. You are easy to lie to yourself. They can give you a false sense that answers lie out there. Somewhere. They hide this truth because they wrap it in their own self. They forge you into a lie that is searching for truth.

But answers are already here. Within. We fear to look because the lie can be more comforting. A comforting tale. But still only a tale.

They happened when I heard this book put in the same boat as The Name of the Wind. They happened again when I actually read the damn thing. They happened hard. 

The problem with the boat analogy, however, is that in my opinion, The Name of the Wind scrubs the deck so that better books may walk it and tell the poor deck-scrubber to get out of the sodden way. 

This is not that "other book". But neither is it a bad book. 

I was swept away by the wind just as I was with Blood Song, and I will be checking out the sequel, Tower Lord. Yet there's just something missing...

While the book tells a story well and puts forth character development over everything else, it is not unique or spectacular in any shape or form. Sorry, it's just not.

Just like when I began reading The Wind (and the slightly worse Wise Man's Fear), I was really hoping for something phenomenal in terms of what actually happens in the book. But contrary to popular thinking, seeing is not believing, seeing is where belief stops because there's no more need to it. When I read this book I stopped believing that "coming of age" stories are something I should put my fate it. Or even read at all.

The prose is so rudimentary it (at times) almost felt as though I was reading 50 Shades in fantasy form. Sometimes this is great, while here it just comes off as lacking. That feels like a pretty bad insult, but god dammit that's how it felt! Come on! Do at least one complex sentence. We're not bloody children that can't paint an image in their heads unless the sentence gets slightly less simplistic!

Still, the book is OK. I know the above paragraphs don't make it seem so, but it has its charms. Namely that it's a terrific timesink.

7/10

"They don’t want cars or brand name handbags or luxury boots. To many of them, travel beyond the known and local is expensive and potentially dangerous. They work part-time jobs—because that is what they’ve been offered—and live at home long after they graduate. They’re not getting married or having kids. They’re not even sure if they want to be in romantic relationships. Why? Too much hassle. Oh, and too expensive."

CHAPTER 14

Dreams are ever a place where your fears find you.

A man can hide from many things. He can hide from other men and from the world. But fears are a part of him, they are him, and there is no hiding from oneself. But my dreams are like some great leveler. I suppose all men feel like this – that their dreams are something that can shatter them – I don’t know. All I know is this: dreams don’t care who you are or what you are. They care only about what you did, what you do, and what you intend to do. They use what you thought and what you think and know you better than you know yourself. They show you the true intentions behind your actions. And unlike men who want to see you hurt, dreams don’t spit in your face and leave you beaten in the dirt, gasping for air through broken lungs. Dreams speak to you through faces that you recognize but grow to hate for the foulness of their words. They know exactly what to say and say that which hurts most. They toss you into a pit and, in the darkness, show you why the darkness should be feared. Their ways are subtle.

But this day, my dreams are different. I dream of the sky. There is something out there, further even than the sky and immeasurably big. It floats towards the planet on currents of unknown technology. I blink and the scene shifts. I find myself upon a slab. I want to wake up. A pain like my spine being pulled apart shoots through me. I am bound. I am alone, but not myself. For I cannot be myself and be this afraid, can I? Can any man feel this much pain and still draw breath? The lower part of my body is gone. I observe them. I watch men in wide-brimmed hats that look more like heads that aren’t heads floating from the darkness and whispering secrets to me. My blood runs cold. Their breath is hot upon my ears as they tell me of the end. My end. Tell me how the one thing I love will fade and die. I see it happen and I scream. I scream and in this state of screaming, I awake.

They’ve heard me. How could they have not? Calyx has me by the shoulders, shaking me.

“Wake the fuck up, you bastard,” I hear her. Yet even her voice sounds weak and I tether on the edge of waking. I feel like I’ve been a part of something. As though my dream was not only a dream. I remember the words of the man, the ghost, “Dreams are never mere dreams.” I feel as if someone is collecting names, my names, all of them. From my true name to my dream-name to the name I’m known for and all the names I had been whispered in the dark. Lovers have given me names too, although there have not been many, and even fewer who didn’t try to kill me. My eyes adjust and I fully awake with a sense that,  should find my real name, my father-given name, they will have me – come for me.

“We have to go back to the man in the box,” I tell her.

“What man? What box?” Ty asks.

Face to face with Calyx, I see for the first time how sad her face is. She has that look as though smiling is not something she does often. Perhaps my face looks the same, perhaps even worse, I’m not sure. The last time I saw my face was two years ago. I saw it in a broken mirror after I had killed a man who stabbed me in the arm. He had crashed into that mirror and painted its fragments red. In retrospect, he should have gone for something more vital than my limb. I spent a week recovering from what could have cost me my left appendage, with the memory of those alien eyes looking at me. I spent that week wandering the wastes, the sky yellow and indifferent above me. All I truly remember is me shaking. 
In my wanderings, I forgot those eyes, remembered them only when the heat in me was at its most vicious and that gaze came to haunt me. I see those very eyes now, reflected in Calyx, and it feels like some old friend long dead had come back to haunt and taunt me.

I get up and walk outside. The night weights heavy on me and I realize I had not slept at all. The two follow me to the old man’s house.

***

The walls echo as our footfall passes.

“This place reeks,” Ty spits. We had looked around, but all the corridors of the four-story building and all the doors look the same. I open one. It has a look of familiarity. But what meets us on the other side is something quite different than what I had expected. A swirling vortex made of grey mist and electricity fades in and out of focus, as though not fully in phase with this dimension. It twists like a heart of time out of which all reality is emanating from. Tearing like fabric, the air about it seems to stretch and contract with each pulse of the thing.

“Merde,” Ty mumbles. “Right, I think we shouldn’t go in there.”

“Calyx?” I say as I see her moving towards it.

“Father?” she whispers, looking intently into the swirling maw.

“Cal?” says Ty.

“Calyx!” I yell, seeing her walk closer.

You might consider someone a rational, intelligent person, yet when that note of emotion is struck within such an individual, rational thinking is a thing forgotten. What remains is a babbling and incoherent idiot who once again reminds you people are stupid. We believe what we want to believe and the greatest lies we tell are those we tell to ourselves. And the most intelligent people craft for themselves the most ingenious lies. In times like these, I know that, truly, the greatest enemy of mankind is man. Calyx extends a hand towards whatever she sees and whatever image of her father the vortex has conjured up in her mind. I can see the need in her eyes.

“I’m here, father. How did you get here?” I jump to her, but her hand is already within. It swirls and twists, thin as hair. She too begins to bend and extend. I grab her and extend with her. Ty grabs me and extends with us both. There is no pain as we are sucked inside, only a sense of the universe coming to an end. I scream a silent shriek and realize pain would be a thing more welcome.

We find the man standing there, middle-aged. He tells us what we see, his words creating landscapes. He waits looking at a horizon in flames.

“I was young,” he began. “That day I was young for the last time. The sky was dark, but not the type of dark of the night, this was the kind of dark you could smell. The kind of dark that bites your lungs and fills your nostrils shut. Snow had fallen that day. It had fallen and kept falling for a thousand years. I knew that day we had killed it. Killed the one thing we should never have killed. We killed humanity. We killed the world. I walked alone that evening. The ash-covered streets were empty. To expect anything else would be pretty rediculous. My footprints faded behind me just like I knew the memories of a better world will fade along with me. But I was determined, you see. I had predicted this, saw it happen, felt it happening. But the stasis chamber I had built needed to be improved upon, and I had little time left. When the evening faded and night fell, the distant booming of destruction at my heels, I realized this was the end. I didn’t want to accept it. I fought it until I could fight no more. I built my own coffin and buried myself from the world.”

“How did you do this?” I ask as we begin to walk ahead. Visibility is high and I can see far into the distance. Almost as if someone fashioned my view so I could see it all. There’s an explosion out there, building a twisting red and yellow spire into the sky.

“Nomad?” Ty says, his voice uncertain, afraid. Ash falls from a layer above us the color of night, from clouds that are thick and thundering. A heat reaches us and I can smell it, like a thousand dead bodies. We stand in the light of it and all I see of the others is their black silhouettes surrounded by white. I look at Calyx, I gaze at Ty. They are silent, caught in a state like me, between marvel and utter terror. Our skin begins to burn. The pain is total, all-encamping. But it soon fades. What remains is light. And in that light, I am them, they are me, we are one. I see their black bones in the light but those too are wiped away like shapes in sand.

We come back to it beside the black box as the body – a shrivelled corpse – spills out from its confines. Fluid drips from the floating coffin, over the body and down on the floor. The corpse doesn’t move, its eyes are dead, although I imagine they had been dead for a long while. The smell makes my head spin.

“What the hell happened?” Ty asks.

“I must have asked the right question,” I answer.

And perhaps  this unpermitted knowledge which ascribes the every-day reality and its ultimate function as fiction, illusion, Maya, – is so unlikable, or even unsuited to humans, that we cannot accept it unless in a subtly enlightened state of consciousness. Perhaps it’s because of this that we ourselves keep us in a state of ignorance, rather than seeing the whole terrible truth.


We are given nuggets, yet are shown nothing.


So each mind keeps on playing its own chords, striking its own tunes and viewing through its own sensual apparatus, perceiving through its own reality-tunnel, each morning forgetting there are things we can do and did which now seem unfathomable, simply because we forget the basic truth of our own intrinsic power.

I've ran Ubuntu before, but then decided XP is good enough for my needs. Plus I can't do shit on Linux without hassle when it comes to *.exe. However I recently began to use Linux for writing, since it boots in seconds. Also, Linux is, unlike windows, cross-platform in that it is able to read the Windows partition as well, so files can be easily saved and accessed. This is more useful than you might think. That is to say Linux is great if all you want to do is write. 

A minimalistic approach was what I was after and I didn't much like Debian's interface, even though I knew it could be altered, so I chose Elementary OS (Luna), since it seems stable and quite lovely. 

In a nutshell, I found a Minimalistic Elementary OS Theme I really liked and wanted to use, but in the end managed to devote quite a bit of time setting it up. 

I want to save you the trouble I had to go through. I am that nice. Plus, what good is a nice looking theme if you can't shove it in people's faces.

The main issue with setup was that Things just did not work. And while Linux tends to be a system where you can do everything in the terminal, and while this is true, it can still be a royal pain in the actual ass for the inexperienced. Namely me.

First the easy steps:

1. Download Token Light Icons

2. Install Elementary Tweaks in Terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) 

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:versable/elementary-update

sudo apt-get install elementary-tweaks

That's it. Obviously you need internet access for the weather station to work...

I still want to test out if there's any difference in battery usage between the two systems so I might update this post very soon.

Good luck.

Zen is not a philosophy or religion. It is not some esoteric teaching that will illuminate you with deep thoughts and koans that you must understand in order to attain some illusory goal. Zen is a way of liberation from a life run by your thoughts. Zen is Now.

Two students ask the master, as they look upon a waving flag in the distance:

Student 1: Look, the wind is moving, it is beautiful.

Student 2: No, the wind is erratic, it is the flag that moves.

Master: Both the flag and the wind simply are. It is mind that moves.

There is a certain group of people you shall come across in your life towards whom you'll feel an immediate thread of possibility, connecting you. You'll almost never realize what has caught your "eye", because most of the time it's never a superficial thing. You'll rarely recognize what the feeling is, but you will always feel it. This event of interconnection may happen by chance encounters with strangers, associates of friends, relatives, etc.

Sometimes it's their visual appearance which sets the net of possibility in motion, sometimes it is their personality, sometimes you cannot  pinpoint what it is.

In most cases, your immediate, gut reaction upon seeing these fields of vibration may consist of you not wishing to have anything to do with the person in question. But like a slumping glacier, you'll be powerless to stop the motion of events, for the interwoven paths have already been set by the mere presence or sight of them, or by the mere idea of them.
You do not feel a possibility that might be, but a possibility that will be, one which has already been laid out. It is up to you to decide how the events within this constellation of chance will play out. But play out they will, in all the universes, in all times, over and over, through lifetimes and through infinite paths.

They will play out because they are the possibilities which you need to tread. Minds do not shape themselves, they are shaped by other minds. And the mind knows this, it searches for this. It craves this. It is elevated by this and brought high by this.
The only trick is to learn how to sense and recognize this feeling.

Reality-thinking, autistic thinking, and that logically necessary empty category, the unconscious continuum, are all of a piece. You cannot have one without the other. Each implies the other; none are the other; none can be except by or in the other. The process of reality is an interaction between the three. They are not discontinuous. They merge slowly and imperceptibly into each other.

- A Crack in the Cosmic Egg

It can solidify and dissipate as ice and vapor.

It can be metered out in measurements

or experienced as unending fields flooding over consciousness.

Perception is the lens through which time collapses or expands. 

As I make the marks that define how the cycles of the stars are seen.

I look to the newborn, for in each breath a universe emerges.

And I remember that time is truly defined in the blink of an eye."

"In the civilizations I have created there are worlds within worlds and dimensions unseen. Mechanisms are made to perceive the interrelations among them. Networks interweaving and influencing in ways unexpected and often misunderstood. 

The perceptions left to senses are rich, abundant and heavy with weight. But the threads that form the fullness of reality’s fabric are mixed with microcosmic instances of emptiness. These gaps feed the understanding done between and beyond the senses and defy the gravity they inherently define."

http://creatingcivilizations.tumblr.com/