Limits of an Infinite Self

It goes almost without saying that I've been going through a very transformative time lately. What else is new, right? (grin) This time I feel I'm really making progress in some fundamental areas. My whole sense of reality has begun to shift on an ever-deeper level, beyond mere intellectual awareness and into the level of basic belief and manifest experience.

The last time I wrote, my breakthrough was the laying of a particular foundational rock, the ability to stand firm in the knowledge that I AM, therefore I AM. The implications of this knowledge are far-reaching. If I Am as the Infinite Is, then truly I am the Infinite. (As are you and as is everything in existence.) My conscious, egoic mind now has a way to become a tool and a partner in life, such that it might eventually know its place and be able to be called up and used or set aside at will.

After this epiphany, it was natural for me to attract to myself the next piece of the puzzle. It's a piece that I've always had with me; again, this was simply a matter of having it clarified and brought home in a more personally meaningful and relevant way.

The re-Minder (re-Hearter) in this case was David Icke's Tales from the Time Loop, specifically the latter portion. David, in his inimitably down-to-earth style, makes very clear his understanding that “Infinite Love is the only truth; everything else is illusion.” He reduces our seeming reality into the vibrations of energy that it fundamentally is. We are infinite consciousness choosing to have an experience of being human. Our five senses function to receive vibrational signals and construct an immersive virtual reality experience that we then like to think is perfectly real and solid and existing, in an absolute sense, independently of ourselves. Wrong!

Where did all that vibrating energy come from? It came from consciousness to begin with! So what we are observing as this seeming world “out there” is in fact a direct reflection of the thoughts that consciousness is having. Thoughts become things through the alchemy of creation. By thinking something, consciousness also creates it. Because it's all just a virtual reality, right? So, then... what's the power behind it all???

It's Love, silly! That's the whole reason for creating anything in the first place. Love is what makes up and sustains everything that is. And the Love of Prime Creator is a perfect, all-encompassing Love that is the only thing that really exists in an absolute and eternal sense. When we speak of Oneness, we are speaking of Infinite Love. They are the same thing.

Oneness does not vibrate, because there are no two different states for it to oscillate between. It is totally still. It simply IS. David Icke puts it so well when he describes how to get in touch with Infinite Love. All it takes is stillness. He doesn't feel the need to “meditate,” but he often does simply “sit quietly,” allowing all illusory thoughts to recede from his mind, allowing stillness to enter in. In that place of peace and stillness is the awareness of Infinite Love.


In my very limited experience, I have found that David's method can work to at least some degree. I have personally, however, had more success (i.e. a more “spectacular” experience) by placing my hands over my heart chakra and visualizing it opening like a flower with layer upon layer of petals, becoming ever more exposed and vulnerable. At the same time, I let go of ego as best I can and focus my being on just surrendering to the awesome truth of what is, to the experience of divine Love. With this method, I've been able to feel half-second bursts of the most incredible feeling I could imagine. And yet, I know that all I've allowed myself to feel has been the merest shadow, the faintest holographic imprint, of what Infinite Love really is. If I felt much more than that, I think I'd blow every fuse in my body. (grin)



I've been exposed to the idea of “You create your own reality” in an explicit way only since I read an e-book on “manifesting” using the so-called “Law of Attraction” a couple of years ago. However, that book didn't really seem to convey a full grasp of it all, in a practicable way, now that I compare it to Montalk's excellent summary on reality creation (Part 1, Part 2). You'll want to read that one for sure.

Reality creation is nothing more than the use of certain metaphysical principles to influence a given reality into being. Key factors are conscious intent (confidently deciding something, declaring it as your intent), attraction (holding thoughts that resonate with the desired reality), appropriate action (meeting reality halfway, creating possibilities for manifestation), and non-anticipation (anticipating something energetically blocks it from occurring in the way anticipated). Anxiety and doubt are obstacles to manifestation, whereas a nonchalant attitude of confidence and simple trust is key.

I have had at least one quite persuasive, though small-scale, success with reality creation. I once had a veritable clan of indestructible warts on my feet that persisted for many years, far longer than warts are supposed to last, despite my every attempt to scour them away with whatever wart cures the pharmacy had to offer. Finally, I decided, “Heck with it, I might as well try some of this voodoo, woo-woo stuff.” I put myself into as deep a trance state as I could achieve and thought wart-free thoughts as fervently as I could muster. For the next two weeks, I took “appropriate action” by eating a strict raw-foods, vegan diet. I hardly thought about my warts. I was emotionally detached from the results of the whole endeavour. Lo and behold, one morning I took a look at my feet: not a single wart nor any sign that I'd ever had one. As far as I'm concerned, that was reality creation at work, by the book. For a long time, I kind of half-dismissed the whole thing as an unrepeatable fluke, but I'm now hoping to use it to manifest progressively more spectacular results.



“Flow” is a related concept, also relevant to my current situation. I've been more or less pretty well in it lately, except for a few rough patches. Flow happens when you're following the path of least resistance. Conventional wisdom might call this laziness, but I call it not being a stupid goat-head, bashing yourself against the fence when you could just walk around it. One of David Icke's aphorisms is “Flow equals Go; Stuck equals Chuck (or change).” Being in the Flow is simply a sign that you're on the right track in life, doing what you're meant to be doing. Life isn't meant to be a miserable cycle of soul-sucking drudgery and failure; if that's your experience, then UR DOIN IT RONG. Either that or you actually signed up for such an experience before coming here; in that case, don't complain. (grin)

It's absolutely essential, if you want to get into the Flow and stay there, to follow your intuition. It'll never steer you wrong if you just cultivate the ability to hear what it's actually saying. Your intuition comes from the part of you, the non-egoic part, that's connected with all things and knows all things. It may come as the merest whisper or nudge, but you ignore it at your peril. The logical, reasoning mind can only see to the next bend, but the intuitive mind sees the whole route at once. It's there to guide you, so make use of it.

Remember the Little Engine that Could? He believed he could, and so that was his reality. If he'd believed the opposite, then he'd have gotten the opposite reality, “can't” instead of “can.” Believing makes it so. Be careful what you believe, what you tell yourself, and what you let others tell you. Your core beliefs are more than just the lens through which you view reality; they ultimately create that reality.

That's all I've got this time. Thanks for tuning in!

Human experience follows a limited set of archetypes. One of the best-known models of this set is laid out in the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot. Card XVI, The Tower, represents the archetype of the Dark Night of the Soul.

I just passed through a Dark Night of the Soul experience, and am still very much in the process of learning from it, seeking and assimilating the wisdom to be gained. I am grateful to several individuals in particular for helping me pull through. One of them is a public figure, rapper KRS-ONE. His lecture Hip Hop Beyond Entertainment was instrumental in bringing about the personal epiphany that brought this most recent Dark Night experience of mine to a definitive close.

KRS-ONE re-minded me (re-HEARTed is more like it) of the primal significance of the realization that I AM. That's where our true power comes from, the power to truly end slavery – to end the entire idea, the very consciousness behind slavery. To paraphrase the hip hop philosopher, as long as you're looking outside yourself for validation, you are FREED – not FREE. Freedom – self-actualization – is what gives someone the ability to take a worthless rag, tie it around their head, walk around in public like that rag is worth ten thousand bucks, and end up having other people actually pay ten thousand bucks to have one just like it.

And that's pretty much what hip hop did. It came out of seemingly hopeless circumstances: war overseas, fatherless families, an epidemic of heroin, substandard education, and a cycle of poverty. That generation, in order to survive in a world where it was effectively excluded from the mainstream of society, had to self-create its own identity outside the mainstream. If they'd waited for permission to have a culture, or to join the wider, established culture, they'd still be waiting. Except they'd probably be dead. It was Do or die, so the ones who refused to die... Did. Lacking instruments, they made their own music with what they did have. Lacking approved venues for their visual art, they used the surfaces that were there, whether they had permission or not; hence, graffiti. Their solution to the impossibility of their situation was to reject the reality of their parents' generation and replace it with their own reality, one that they could understand and that reflected their own values. Hip hop didn't need approval, it approved itself... and flourished. By the same token, FREE human beings don't need to earn the right to exist, they have that right intrinsically, because they exist. I AM, therefore I AM.

What value do you place on yourself? Are you worth more if you own more real estate or have a bigger bank account? Are you more human because you have a family and other people who care about you? If you don't value your soul, does it have worth? Are you less than completely you if you lack the university degree or the job you want? Does your self-worth depend on someone else's say-so? And who is responsible for you? Do you want somebody to protect you from your own choices, or are you willing to face the consequences without blinking? If you say you're going to do something, and then don't hold yourself to it, what was the point? Your existence either means something, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then you might as well not exist. And would you choose that, really? Because it is a choice. You may not have to earn your right to exist, but you sure as hell ought to claim it. Because if you don't own your life, someone else will.

Me, I'm still working on getting this through to myself. It's been four and a half years since the first time I consciously came to this realization. That time I ended up losing my nerve, sliding back. I reckon it's a case of “not being ready 'till you're ready.” But I think the point's been driven just a liiiittle closer to home this time. If it takes another Dark Night before I'm really ready, then so be it. But I'm not throwing away this chance.

Thank you, God, and thank me, God.

Espavo, Namasté, and peace out.

(This dream didn't seem very important at first. But the more I recalled of it, the more I realized how significant it might be – for its entertainment value, if nothing else. The following story is 95% straight from the dream, as close as I can get it and still have a coherent text.)

~

Buddy and I are messing around in the school gym. No one's around, so like the kids we are, we open up the bleachers and start running up and down, making kiddish little jokes. All of a sudden, I get this strong premonition, as if the fire alarm were sounding, even though nothing can be physically heard: “Danger, danger! Look outside!”

I run out, up the corridor, and through the two sets of glass doors to get outside. I look up. There's a gigantic thing in the sky, coming down. At first it's just a bunch of glowing straight lines, but as it slowly makes its spinning descent, its form becomes more solid. It's a friggin' alien spacecraft, and it does not feel friendly at all.

Before the thing even lands, I'm making to run inside to warn everybody, 'cause I got this huge adrenaline rush, fight-or-flight, and everything in me screams FLIGHT. But there's already a cascade of bodies piling out of the doors. People are going out to meet this thing. All they've got is curiosity and excitement, no idea that they're walking straight into the monster's jaws. I'm screaming at them as I fight the current to get back inside, but nobody pays any attention. I'm just an annoyance to them.

I watch helplessly as the crowd makes its way up to the ship, which has now landed on the grass of the playing field and opened up its large bay doors. A ramp bridges the divide between ship and schoolyard, nice and level. There's some kind of really weird mind control going on, like a voice in your head, and it seems to affect everyone but me. The message is basically that everything we could ever want and need is on board, and we'll all be so much happier if we leave our old lives behind and go along with the ship. It stinks to high heaven and I don't believe any of it for a second.

But everyone else is going. So what can I do except tag along?

~

I'm on the ship. It's a lot bigger on the inside, more like a city than a building. Earth is gone, we're stuck in outer space somewhere. Anywhere. Nowhere.

I have to say, they've got a pretty good set-up here. It's the perfect prison. There are no guards, no bars. But the conditioning! It was all done in stages, but now everyone's used to it. The meaningless jobs that they slave at for most of the day. The rules and regulations covering every aspect of their lives. The ugly, crowded accommodations. The sterile, artificial food.

I go visit my friend. He's still his happy old self. He's one of the first to have voluntarily moved to the new living quarters: a grid of concrete cells sunk about a metre and a half into the floor. Oh, but you can still move around freely, visit your neighbours. It's not that bad, really. He digs into his meal ration, a new and improved option: what looks like bread crumbs (but probably isn't), mixed with a chemical cocktail of different powders for enhanced flavour and nutrition and performance, with a little oil to make it stick together and go down. He offers me a taste. It's really good, he says, beaming. I decline.

Next day, there's an announcement: no work today. Just fun and good times. They call it Entertainment Day. They have these, what, once a month, once a year? Always a surprise, and it's such fun that nobody complains. Wouldn't dream of it. Aren't they so awesome for giving us Entertainment Day? I watch as everyone crowds into the coliseum. Not into the stands; their place is in the arena. Oh yeah, here they come: the bat-winged terror babies. Are they monkeys or babies? Whatever they are, we're all terrified of them. They swarm us and strafe us and swoop down to scrape us. We all run around like headless chickens, screaming, hooting and hollering. The masters love it. And somehow, so does everyone else. They like being terrorized.

I'm not like the others. I've never succumbed to any of the masters' conditioning. Oh, but I keep forgetting: they've got their own special conditioning just for me. You see, I serve them too. It has to be that way. In return, I get some pretty good perks. But I'm not a willing servant. I hate them for what they've done to us all. In my heart, I swear I will see their rule ended.

I suppose I should be thankful they let me keep at least part of my mind. I never remember any of the stuff I do for them, and maybe that's their sick idea of mercy. I'm not really human anymore; I'm something more... and less. I can appear in physical form, like the rare times I visit my old friends, but mostly I stay ghostly. It's a lot easier to explore places and observe what's going on when you don't have to explain your presence.

There are two of them, a male and a female. I belong to him, so I don't see as much of her. In my mind, I call them the Archons. Everyone loves them. Supposedly. Yeah, Big Mommy and Big Daddy. Nobody suspects the truth about Mommy and Daddy Archon: that all we are to them, and to their real children, is a big family food factory. We are their food.

Mister Archon is a giant, a four-metre-tall, reddish humanoid with a pair of long, black horns on his head. I have a hard time remembering what Missus Archon looks like. I think she's rather similar, except bluish. She tends to the demon-babies most of the time. Her partner is in charge of us slaves, it seems. I can tell their union is one of expedience and barely-disguised dysfunction. They both have terrible tempers, and I suspect they hate each other, but on the surface, everything is okay.

I only have one trick up my sleeve when it comes to getting back at them. Sure, I can play little tricks, get them to go at each other, but that's too sneaky for my tastes. I want them to know it's me.

I grab Mister Archon by the horns.

When I do that, he's totally helpless. It's amazing. 'Cause normally, he's this huge, intimidating beast of a being, and those horns are like the dot on the 'i' of his incredible fearsomeness. But they're so long that if I grab on close to the ends, he can't even reach me. He's reduced to a flailing, stamping, wall-banging, totally out-of-control, impotent mess. And who can respect a guy that suddenly goes apeshit like that for no apparent reason? His wife doesn't, that's for sure.

Maybe she'll take over from him, lock him up so he'll stop being such a public embarrassment. I daresay she could do it; despite his braggadacio, she does seem to be the one wearing the pants. I don't know how the slaves are going to react, but she controls the monkey army for sure.

I don't know what else to do. I don't have a plan. I don't see much hope for a revolt, much less a successful one. Maybe I'm a fool. But what do I have to lose? My life? Hah. I'm a ghost already. Maybe some miracle will happen, deus ex machina comes to set things right. The probabilities don't favour us, but maybe the universe does. That's my only hope.

In the meantime, all I can do...

... is grab the devil by the horns.

War is bad. We don't like war. Never wanted it.

(I've never tried any hallucinogens, and I don't feel the need to do so, although I am OK with people using them as a shortcut [and only as a shortcut] to experiences and states of mind that might otherwise require lifetimes of work to attain.)

I dreamed about mushrooms last night. As far as I know, they weren't entheogenic mushrooms, just the regular, edible kind.

I was walking through a spruce forest. It was shady and the ground was covered in brown needles. There was hardly any green to be found. A rather dead place. I had a woven basket, and I was wandering around, looking for mushrooms. For some strange reason, the bottom of the basket was covered in little rocks. It's like I wanted to feel some kind of weight in there, even if it wasn't the thing I was after. All I had found so far was one little piece of a mushroom, just enough to prove that there were mushrooms to be found. After much fruitless wandering, I was feeling quite discouraged.

A couple of elderly women passed by, dressed in white, carrying white baskets that appeared to be quite full of mushrooms. They looked with amusement at my basket of rocks. They didn't speak with their mouths, but I caught the impression of a thoughtform:

"Those rocks'll make a tasty soup, I'm sure! (laughter) Good luck, boy. Keep looking!"

Somehow, I knew in my heart that I had to keep searching and not give up. So I kept on, guided by this inner knowing that it would all be worth it in the end. And sure enough, I finally found a whole cache of mushrooms as big as my hand, already sliced and stacked in neat piles. As soon as I saw it, I remembered: I picked these myself earlier!

There were more mushrooms than I could even fit into my basket!

So I dumped out the stupid rocks and started to fill my basket with precious, delicious mushrooms... the treasure and the true, spiritual food of angels!

If anyone's been wondering why I chose “New Renaissance” as the defining term for my recent series of posts on influential personalities, the answer is simple.

It's an unoriginal, pretentious, forced-sounding name that borders on the ironic, and yet, in a very deep sense, it does capture the essence of what I see beginning to happen. And yes, I did pretty much just pull it out of my ass. So much the better!

Because of something I caught wind of today (the 2nd of November as I write) concerning an upcoming significant date in (one or more of) the Mayan calendar(s), I checked my pitifully meager offline resource to see what, if anything, it had to say about this. As I expected, there was nothing specifically about November 8, 2009 – but there was a short piece on the Sixth Day of the Galactic Underworld, which just so happens to be ending right about now. And wouldn't you know it, the Sixth Day is also called the “Renaissance.” Synch!

Those doggone Mayan calendars keep cropping up; I find them impossible to ignore. Not to mention that their way of structuring and assigning meaning to time actually makes much more sense to me than this arbitrary Gregorian calendar we seem to be stuck with.

The 260-day Tzolk'in, for instance, gave me a whole new insight into who I am and what I'm all about in this particular lifetime. My Gregorian birth date translates as 13 Cimi. Thirteen is the sacred number of ascension and the completion of all things. Cimi is Death, the Transformer, which is big on transitions. Both are highly appropriate to my sense of purpose and my life experience thus far; taken together, they do as neat a job of summing me up as such a simple system could ever do.

To me, Death implies Rebirth. Rebirth = Renaissance. We are witnessing the steady and sure Death of everything that is out of resonance with what's coming. Some things will not survive at all; others must evolve or suffer the same fate. This is good. We don't want to bring the nasty baggage with us, and not only do we not want to, we can't. Those who insist on trying will find out just how futile that is. At the same time, seeds that have been lying dormant for as long as our “modern” dark age has existed are now sprouting. In the end, those seeds will spring up luxuriantly and exuberantly through the mulch of decay, bringing about the hard-won, glorious Rebirth of humanity.

You might be asking how I can state those things with such seeming certainty. My friend, these things are written. They are written in ancient heirloom teachings from eras past. They are written deep in humankind's genetic, racial memory. They are written in the movements of the heavenly spheres. They are written in the phenomena of the nature around us, if we but stop to observe and to ponder them. And from where I'm standing, these things are pretty much written on the wall. Not to mention in my heart, in the place that never, never knew a lie.

(At the same time, I don't want to pretend I'm totally free of any doubts about this thing. But those doubts come from a lower place. They're there to keep me on my toes and remind me how much work I still have to do on myself.)

I can't hope to convince anyone. I'm not equipped for that. But I can point you to some of the folks who might be able to help you convince yourself, if you're open to that.

I know, and I want to emphasize this, that everyone has their own truth, their own unique path to follow. This isn't about me trying to herd people onto my path. God forbid. Hell, I barely know what my path is. And I could be wrong about anything. The wise ones tell me to always be aware and to keep reminding myself of the eternal fact that I just... don't... know. The minute I forget that, I'm setting myself up for a fall. And falling hurts. But it's OK. Because everything is OK. We live and learn.

Now that I and my writing have once again come down to the level of a child, I think I shall call it a night.

P.S. The Dog Poet is rescheduled for tomorrow. Suspense getting to you? You know, you could just google it, find his stuff, and never glance at my blog again. (grin)

P.P.S. Children are amazing teachers. Seems like the younger and simpler they are, the more profoundly that holds true. ^^

Okay, so he's not really a face – I couldn't find a picture of the guy – but Clif High, if anyone, is a true renaissance man. He doesn't paint, but together with his associates (notably George Ure) he has almost single-handedly invented a whole new science: predictive linguistics. (Though it's a safe bet that some government agencies have probably developed their own versions of it for their own uses, wink wink.) Before anyone dismisses him as a quack, I'd like to point out that he's not proposing anything more radical or against the grain than the simple hypothesis that probable future events with high emotional impact can send ripples backward in time that subtly affect the word choices people subconsciously make in their everyday communications on the Internet. OK, that is pretty radical. But he's under no delusions of being able to actually predict the future, and he makes that very clear. What predictive linguistics can do is spot trends in language that, processed and interpreted, often appear to correlate strongly with events that happen later, right down to the specific timing and archetypal significance of the events.

(To demonstrate the principle that we're all a little bit psychic, just do some searching for references to the events of September 11, 2001 from before that date. You'll turn up the most uncanny references in the most unlikely places. It's hard to believe any common person had foreknowledge of the attacks, so a more plausible explanation is that these were psychic echoes reaching back in time, conceivably transmitted, propagated, and received through some kind of shared subconscious.)

Clif himself does a much better job of describing the technical process, but essentially you have a bunch of “spyders” or web bots constantly reading new material on the Internet, programmed to look for certain words and phrases and record the words and phrases that surround them. This generates a huge amount of raw data that becomes the input for “modelspace,” a computer-generated model of how language is being used. From there it's a matter of filtering out the noise, picking out the trends in word associations that might mean something, and trying to puzzle together just what the heck they mean. That process is messy, delicate, extremely complicated, heavily biased, and subject to a metric crapload of error.

Clif periodically publishes the results of this mad science in the Asymmetric Language Trend Analysis (ALTA) reports, which he makes available, complete with dire warning labels and a page's worth of fine-print disclaimers, for a very modest per-issue subscription fee. I ordered Volume 0, Issue 1 back in August, and I have to say he's not kidding with those warnings. If you do buy one yourself (you poor sap), don't distribute copies and don't post the text of it online. That messes up the modelspace with self-referential knots that Clif then has to lose sleep untying, and could threaten the whole project. Other than that, have fun scaring the bejeebers out of yourself! Yup, it's probably a good idea not to take any of it too seriously.

As an antidote to the intense negativity in his ALTA reports and to the crummy side of life in general, Clif recommends pie. In fact, he's earned himself the nickname of “pie guru.” This and many, many other highly worthwhile tidbits come out in his frequent radio interviews. I never cease to be amazed at the scope of the man's knowledge. He must have read thousands of books on all kinds of interesting topics.

Anyway, the reports aren't all doom and gloom. – Oops, I just caught myself about to copy-paste from the August 2009 report. Hmm, gotta put this in my own words. Well, there's a catch-all entity in modelspace for all the weird, unknown, unexplained, and officially denied stuff. For some reason, it's apparently less inaccurate than the other entities, and going by the report, we should be headed for some highly interesting times in that area. In fact, those times have already begun, with NASA obligingly having gone ahead with its absurd plan to “bomb” the moon. A funny choice of words for a funny little operation. “Looking for water?” Puh-leeze.

Also according to Volume 0, Issue 1, we should now (November 4-8, 2009) be in the minimum of a “low” period of “building” emotional tension, as opposed to a high, where the uptight energy gets released. Which could explain why I'm feeling almost euphoric about how things in general are going. Thinking back one year, to my twenty-fourth birthday and the election of Barack Obama, my emotions were very similar, although much stronger, at that time as well. Perhaps it's one of those echoes, going forward in time?

As a final note on Clif High's work thus far and as the segue to my next entry, the report contains references to a mysterious figure known as the “dog poet,” who is supposed to become a key personage in the coming “war” between the powers-that-be and the common folk. The report is quite circumspect as to the identity of this person, with Clif undoubtedly looking to provide just enough clues so that the aware can deduce who it is, without placing this individual at risk. Fortunately, though, the Dog Poet himself has since come forward, and has, I assume, not overly endangered himself by doing so. Who is he? Stay tuned and find out.

UPDATE: As a follow-up to this blog, do take a look at psychegram's related post Get Ready... Here Come the New Patriots and the comment section there. His is a voice of greater experience than mine. For a more in-depth discussion on Alex Jones as possible COINTELPRO, I recommend the Signs of the Times article Celestial Esoteric Stuff and The Socio-Political Nitty Gritty. Thanks to psychegram for that link.



YouTube: Alex Jones in Waking Life

The above clip from Waking Life (2001) is hardly a balanced or complete look at Alex Jones, but it shows what he's about. While notorious for his bullhorn antics (and who could forget the Joker incident?), he is, I contend, far more than just another angry white man venting on the airwaves. He represents a large and growing current in America today: a clearer awareness of the realities of politics, economics, and the plight of the common man, which is spurring many to become active in standing up for their rights and liberties, holding their elected officials accountable, and reducing their dependence on the maybe-not-so-dependable-after-all grid.

Alex has been on the radio since the early '90s and has produced a number of virally successful documentary films. His Info Wars website is one of the most popular alternative news sites on the 'net. In the past, mainstream media outlets wouldn't have given him so much as a sarcastic mention, but oddly enough, he has now appeared more than once on FOX Television. This is less surprising when you factor in FOX's massive propaganda campaign against the new administration. They probably figured a popular critic of the powers-that-be like Alex would pull in views and boost their cause. Or they just wanted a face of the conspiracy fringe to snicker at. (I didn't watch those segments, so I don't know what went down.) In any case, the man's got balls. The FOX network is deep, deep enemy territory for him. He hasn't forgotten how different their tune was under Bush Jr. He knows their game: divide and conquer; good cop, bad cop; Eastasia, Westasia; Democrat, Republican. He doesn't play that, he exposes it for the fraud that it is.

But the question is, is Alex Jones himself controlled opposition, a COINTELPRO psy-op? In the often paranoia-fueled drama of the conspirasphere, any rising star is a target for accusations of “shill” and “Pied Piper.” While I suspect the majority of such attacks are simply ego hurt and fear bug making the rounds, the question should nevertheless be addressed seriously.

Alex Jones is often loud, often angry, sometimes even uncouth. Well, when you've got a message you believe in and you think is important for people to hear, you might want to be loud. Anger? Hell, I got angry when I first found about a lot of the things Alex talks about. They're outrageous and they need to be stopped. Anger is a powerful emotional energy that can and should be put to constructive uses. It is also negative, unhealthy in the long run, and should probably be avoided if possible. As for the occasional rudeness, there is no excuse for that – but then, I haven't seen him make any. At least he humbly apologized to David Icke for calling him a “turd in the punch bowl.” Any other rude remarks he's made that I'm aware of have been aimed at people who, quite frankly, deserve a lot worse than that. (Although I personally couldn't bear to see anyone burned at the stake, even a mass murderer.)

Getting past the man himself and his very human faults, there is the matter of his actual message. I'm of the opinion that his message is quite appropriate for his audience, which I would venture to say is made up of pretty average, everyday people. He's not “mainstream” perhaps quite yet, but is at least on the verge of becoming so. These are quite often people who are just becoming more aware, who have graduated from the Pablum world of CNNBCABCBSFOX, but who aren't necessarily into ufology, energy healing, the paranormal, divination, other occult subjects, or the deepest, darkest, most disturbing recesses of conspiracy research. A lot of them subscribe, at least nominally, to one of the major organized religions. Naturally, there are limits to how far out on the fringe he can go and still be relevant to a significant portion of the populace. The ones who are so inclined will go elsewhere to seek out the fruit that Alex doesn't offer. So I don't see a problem with the limited extent of his territory.

As for how he handles the territory he's got... hmmm. Let's take a look.

Alex Jones talks a lot about 9-11 truth. That's a key issue for people to understand. What he doesn't talk about so much is the Israeli component. From what I've read, the WTC attacks were essentially Mossad operations, aided and abetted by elements of American intel (CIA). Cheney and Bush were in on it, obviously, as was anyone within a certain circle of power and influence. Very cloak-and-dagger, all of it, compartmentalized in the extreme, as all these kinds of sensitive, major ops are. There are so many angles to it, and so much secrecy around that whole group of events, that no one person could ever unravel it all. Is Israel important? Sure it is. But thanks to AIPAC and all the rest of the Zionists embedded in the highest levels of Washington and the corporate media, you can't talk about it without being accused of anti-Semitism. (False label; Semites are the native peoples of the region, i.e. the Palestinians.) You can face serious consequences for that. Besides, it's rumoured that Alex Jones's wife is Jewish. So cut the guy some slack, eh? The main point is there, and it's well made: 9-11 was an inside job. (By the way, the thinly-veiled anti-Jewish sentiments on some of the sites linked by Rense, but not by Jones, make me sick.)

“Swine flu” and financial meltdown. Big topics. Scary topics. Alex gets credit for going after Big Pharma and their so-called “vaccine” (money grab for sure, likely also another Darwinian depopulation scheme), as well as the political aspect of this latest iteration of the problem-reaction-solution formula to impose ever greater control over the populace. His sites carry advertisements for immune supplements like vitamin D and colloidal silver products, which are, in my mind, a better alternative than any vaccine (although you do want be sure you're not getting ripped off, so always do your own research first). The economic crisis has also been front-and-center on Alex's broadcasts. He features guests like Congressman Dr. Ron Paul, who's making great strides in his campaign to audit the Fed, and G. Edward Griffin, currency expert and author of The Creature from Jekyll Island. Alex believes that the devaluation of the dollar is paving the way for a global currency as part of the elite's drive for a worldwide totalitarian state, which I would certainly see as being the intent of some of those people. I don't think they'll ever succeed. Alex's solution is for people to buy precious metals to protect their savings, and to prepare for a breakdown of the urban food supply. Both are prudent precautions to take, but are really based on a worst-case scenario where things do get that dire. Better safe than sorry, I guess. Personally, though, my sense is that I'm going through the worst of it right now, due more to my own stupidity than to the wider economic situation. I think both your health and your finances are, on a fundamental level, much more closely linked to your state of mind than to whatever's going on around you.

Which brings me to a point I want to make about Alex Jones. If you listen to his show, it will affect your mind. In the case of somebody just waking up from the old consumer dream of Santa Claus and no tomorrow, the show acts as a sort of remedial course in reality, a cold shower. For someone who's already “awake,” though, I think the undercurrent of fear and urgency is reason enough to mostly tune out. There comes a point when those states of mind become counterproductive. On the occasions that I tune in, it's mostly for the entertainment value, not so much for the (yes, important) information he brings to the table.

The man is sincere and passionate, he hasn't sold out to corporate interests, and I certainly don't think he's a conscious psy-op agent. There is the useful-idiot angle, whereby it could be argued that the elite allow him to expose them to a certain extent in order to lay the psychic groundwork for carrying out their plans, and to get people into the vibration of fear and negativity, so that they expect to be treated badly, continue to think in terms of “Us vs. Them,” and inflate their mental image of the world elite into something much more powerful than they actually are. That's the biggest danger, and it's just something to be aware of. We've got one Alex Jones already, and thank goodness he's doing the work that he does, but there's no reason to become a thought-clone of him. Not that he even encourages that; he's always telling his audience to check up on the facts for themselves, read the available documentation, convince themselves of the truth of what he's saying – or prove him wrong.

I used to think that if the world really was the way Alex Jones portrays it, we'd all be doomed. Now, I think even his reality tunnel has a tangible light at the end. This is a war, he says, and we've been getting our asses kicked for a long time, but as surely as day follows night, the tides are turning. He's not giving in, and neither should any of us. Let's have the COURAGE to DREAM of something A HUNDRED TIMES BETTER than what we've had, and the WILL to DO what it TAKES to MOVE ourselves and the planet from HERE... to THERE.

God bless.

David Wilcock has had an active Internet presence since the '90s, and his popularity has steadily risen. He started his public career doing dream readings, but stopped when the demand became too great to keep up with. He's best known for his research into consciousness science, based on the idea that consciousness is an omnipresent energy field that underlies all physical phenomena. In support of this and related hypotheses, he presents a considerable amount of persuasive evidence from experimental data that, all too often, has been glossed over, shrugged off, or swept under the rug by the mainstream scientific community. Eventually, I believe, the stuff he talks about will be commonly accepted in crotchety ol' academic circles as well. ;)

David's work is quite broad in scope. In addition to the research, the writing, and the lecturing, he has produced a double-length music album in collaboration with Larry Seyer called Wanderer Awakening. David did the drum section and all the vocals himself. I have listened to it many times, despite the fact that the music genre (varieties of '60s–'70s classic rock) was mostly rather foreign to my pre-existing tastes. The album has grown on me, however, and it always leaves me in a refreshed and uplifted state of mind and heart. If I have any criticism, it's that his lyrics are sometimes kinda literal and preachy, in a prosy style for the most part – but actually, now that I think about it, there's a lot of poetic bits too, more open to interpretation. Some might be put off by the fact that the narrator starts out as a cosmic creator-being who then descends to a human level, but I think the premise is executed well in an artistic sense and can be appreciated without necessarily buying into the philosophy. The closing words of the album resonate so deeply in my soul that it's almost scary. (grin) But seriously, it's all about releasing fear and the desire for control, embracing love and freedom instead. “Love is everything / Everything is Love.” How can you get any truer than that?

David's profile just keeps on rising these days. He's set to appear in a TV documentary about 2012, and he's producing a feature film called Convergence. I look forward to both.

The biggest criticism David attracts is aimed at his position on President Barack Obama. He's convinced that Obama is ultimately his own man, and will actually be an agent of the positive “change” he promised in his election campaign. This stands in sharp contrast to the apparent near-consensus in conspiraciology spheres, which paints Obama as a puppet of globalist masters, the international banksters and powerbrokers of Bilderberg and CFR infamy. My own position is one of reserved judgement, the “wait and see” approach. I certainly hope David is right, but at the moment there are too many conflicting messages for me to be convinced either way. Still, Obama's a heck of a lot easier to believe in than Senators McCain or Clinton would have been. I see him as a sort of blank screen, on which people can project whatever they expect to see, and that's probably intentional to some degree. Time will tell what he's really made of. The real litmus tests are yet to come, I think.

David's other “soft spot” is his claim to be the reincarnation of Edgar Cayce. That's one of those things nobody can really prove, and to his credit, I guess, David has downplayed this aspect since coming out with the claim. It's ultimately neither here nor there, and I think those detractors of DW who focus on this aspect are really missing the point. It's basically an ad hominem attack, I'd say, because the Edgar Cayce thing has no bearing whatsoever on David's actual message.

And I do believe that that message will continue to reach more people and find more resonance in the world. David's message is very positive, infectiously so. He certainly acknowledges the negative, as he must if he is to be taken seriously, but works it all into a context and a core understanding that inspires one to have faith in the ultimate benevolence of the universe, and in the bright future of humankind. More power to him.

Who am I?

I honestly don't know.

I've got a general idea, though, so I'll get that out of the way first.

I am a bundle of energy. The same fundamental energy that makes up everything in existence, from gross physical matter all the way up to pure enlightened consciousness. This bundle that I experience as being “me” – or, perhaps more precisely, the bundle doing the experiencing, I don't know – vibrates on many planes, in many dimensions, of which I suspect most are more or less hidden from my current mode of awareness. There's an overarching part of me that's outside the whole concept of time, and then there's a bunch of little selves protruding out from that, through the veil, into the temporal realms. From this side of the veil, they might appear to occur at separate points in time, but viewed from the other side, all are simultaneous. They are all my incarnations in physical form. Unfortunately, the only one of them about which I consciously know anything is the one doing the writing here and now. He is, I'm afraid, only a very limited expression of who I truly am. A pitifully blind, foolish, and faulty being compared to the fullness of his unimaginably more evolved, timeless “future” self.

(Staying on this side of the veil for convenience, I use the terms “past” and “future” in their conventional sense.)

Having thus briefly established the general context, I am now left with only a puzzling series of clues as to my soul origin and my reasons for incarnating here at this time.

The first clue is that very little in this world of man's creation makes sense to me. I struggle to understand why the power centers of this world are dominated by psychopaths. I struggle to understand why the people tolerate being ruled by psychopaths whose greatest goal is to create a social system antithetical to freedom, hostile toward all things good and pure and true and natural. I struggle to understand the senseless violence and cruelty and destruction visited by humans upon those whom (and that which) they ought to love and cherish and protect. I struggle to understand the petty, selfish, manipulating ways of so many people.

The best explanation I've been able to come up with for all this is that Earth, in this age, is a tough, tough school. A “free-will free-for-all,” where these things have been allowed to develop because nobody is going to come along and fix them for us. They're not allowed to, even if they'd like to. This planet is the way it is because we, collectively, have made it that way through our free will. All it takes is a small minority of truly evil beings, left unchecked, to transform paradise into the pit of hell. We allowed these people to come along and slowly subvert our systems and our values. We're the ones that gave 'em the green light, when we went along to get along, didn't stop and say “Hey, this isn't okay.” We did that because most of us were too busy with all of our little preoccupations in life. We weren't paying attention. We ignored the signs they waved in our faces. And, quite frankly, we weren't grown up enough to take responsibility. Our history is mostly a history of adult children. Earth humans, on the whole, just haven't been very mature. We've been obsessed with the needs of our egos, and we've spread our disease over the whole earth. Hence, we suffer, and we pass that suffering on from generation to generation.

Now how is this a clue?

Well, my intuition has told me, and my readings up and down the Interwebs have indicated, that Earth is in transition from an age of darkness to an age of light. This is a common thread through so many different prophecies that it's hard to believe otherwise if you put any stock in such things. Of course, one must always employ the good old-fashioned reality check with such matters. As it turns out, I do see the signs of that happening in the real world. I certainly don't believe in any storybook climactic battle or any human revolution of the kind we've seen before. I do believe that change is happening in uncountable ways, large and small, from the mundane to the cosmic. The evidence is there if you just look for it.

So I chose to incarnate at this time of transition. I, who feel so strongly the desire for a better world, am, in my own small way, a part of making that better world manifest. If you have the same desire in your heart, then you are a part of it, too. :)

That assisting, supportive role is, I'm sure, a big part of the reason I came here. But how, specifically, am I supposed to fulfill it?

The best answer I have at the moment is, in whatever way I can.

I'm sure a large portion of my work here is done without my even being terribly aware of it. Just by holding my energy in a physical body, participating in the collective consciousness of Earth humanity, going through my own inner process of becoming, and touching the lives of those around me, I am helping.

I've worked at a lot of different jobs in my time here, most of them menial and some more obviously “service to others”-oriented, some less, but none of them have especially said to me, “this is what you're here to do.” They've all simply been learning experiences and ways to earn my bread. At the moment, I hail from the deep ranks of the unemployed. For my next job, I hope to deliver the mail.

If you were to ask me what my best talents are, I'd probably say writing and building my own creations out of LEGO. The former I am just about passable at, and the latter is simply the end result of a prolonged childhood hobby cum artistic pursuit which I am now apparently in the process of leaving behind (but not before I finish a few final works in progress, heh heh). I daresay neither is a realistic career-driver. I'd rather do those things on my own terms, for my own reasons, than subject to the demands of a market, anyway.

I haven't confirmed this, but I've been told (post-initiation) that I have an especially powerful ability to channel reiki. I'm pretty sure reiki isn't bull, because I've felt its effects several times. One of my former employers had a natural ability, which she demonstrated on me. I didn't even know what she was doing, but I suddenly felt like I was burning up from the inside. All she'd done was hold her hands over my shoulders. So that was definitely something real. And if I can develop that “talent” in myself, I'm sure it will be a good way for me to serve humanity in the future. (Besides, I really like the idea of what reiki is supposed to be: a sort of loving, intelligent life-force energy that replenishes and balances the energy centers of the body, bringing healing, peace, and vitality to both patient and healer. :) I'm sure science will one day explain it, and my mind will be glad when it does, but I'm satisfied with just the touchy-feely understanding of it, too. It's one of those things, I guess, that you have to experience for yourself to truly understand.)

Obviously, since I mentioned writing, that is one way I can be of service. I've actually had a couple of “guidance” dreams that seemed to underline the idea that I should keep a blog like this one. So here we are with that. Yay!

I won't get into the things I've learned about myself and my life purpose from numerology or Mayan astrology here, because this entry is long enough already. Maybe another time.

OK, so much for what I'm supposed to be doing here. (Besides the obvious life purpose of gaining experience and using it to grow, I mean.) But now I'm left with the hardest puzzle of all: where the heck am I from?

The short answer is, I don't know and I don't think it really matters at this point. On the other hand, I'm dying to find out. Is it inner Earth? Jupiter? Arcturus? The Pleiades? Sirius? Andromeda? Cassiopaea? Orion? Just throwing out names, lol. It could be any one of these, or none. I don't feel a special affinity toward any star system, species, or channeled group. I'm just “me,” plain and simple. But I must have been “somewhere else” in recent past lives, because even our very 3-D physicality seems so quaint and painfully limiting to me. (haughty voice) “Where I come from, you know, we have telepathy and instant teleportation.” Or something like that. (grin)

The question of my so-called “soul origin” remains open. I'm open to clues, but I'm not very hopeful, either. I think if I knew, I'd run the risk of identifying too strongly with some off-planet past, and distract and distance myself from where I am now. Because for now, I am one of the ones I came here to help. I'm as much an Earth human as anyone else here. It's the only way I could do what I'm supposed to do. And you know what? If a friendly stranger offered me a ride in their spaceship, I might be tempted... but I don't think I'd get on board. In this life, my place is here, among these fallen souls who I call my brothers and my sisters. I, along with all the others like me, am in this with them. Together we'll make what happens, happen. And “the Lord and all his angels” shall be with us. :)

Once again, I have been totally neglecting this blog, despite all my good intentions to keep writing in it. Now I come to a point where I really don't care how wise or knowledgeable or intelligent or talented with words I come across as being. Life has lately been so humbling to me that I simply can't afford to set up any thresholds higher than where I am right now, which is flat on the floor, metaphorically speaking. My desire to impress and inspire others has been beaten out of me. I am nothing.

And yet, I am here.

And yet, I shine forth what little refracted, dimly reflected light I have.

(I've also given up on the idea that I have to write on a specific topic every time. Right now, I'm just letting the words flow. So much easier to let these entries write themselves. ;) )

I was thinking just now, at breakfast (coffee and cream, which is how I start my day when I'm not at all feeling on top of my world, otherwise it's usually tea and porridge), how masterful we are at deceiving ourselves. Even sometimes when we tell ourselves and believe we're being honest, we're not.

I've been deceiving myself in the most tragicomical way these past months. Thinking I could go on and make my way through life without doing certain things. As though I were some kind of special case. And given how basically honest (I think) I am, that deception has had to rely on a huge helping of denial in order to stay viable. I am an introvert, and I have a vivid inner life. My imagination dreams up things that aren't necessarily true all the time. Normally, I can tell the difference between outer reality and these products of imagination, but that does sometimes require taking a step back and being consciously objective about things. In the case of this lie, I didn't want to do that, so I had to keep telling myself new lies and stopping myself from thinking about the whole issue. And that's how it usually works, isn't it?

Truth has a way of coming out, though, and lies have a way of being revealed for what they are. All it takes is time for the circumstances to bring that about. In my particular case, luckily, those circumstances have now become concrete and impossible to ignore. Given certain acquired failings of my character, I am infinitely grateful for the support I have been receiving from my close relatives and friends. Without their help, I would probably be well on the way to being evicted from my apartment by now.

Much as I'd like to be able to offer some kind of generally applicable wisdom on this subject (and heaven knows I love to play the wise man), I feel obliged at this moment to at least try to rein in that ambition and not overstep my bounds. We'll see how that works out, though. ;)

Without spinning too many sweeping generalities, let me touch upon one of the greatest deceptions I've ever perpetrated upon myself, from my current perspective: religion.

Starting when I first became aware of such a thing as personal religious faith, around perhaps the age of six or seven, up until my twenty-fourth year, religion was a major part of my life. In retrospect, my first impression of it, through the innocent eyes of a four-year-old boy, was probably the truest. I remember sitting in church about Easter time, listening to the words of the preacher, and thinking, “Why does he keep going on about this dead guy named Jesus? What do I care?” There were more sermons from different speakers, but they were all on the same (to my mind) irrelevant subject. And man, were they depressing, too! I said to my parents, straight up, that I didn't care to hear any more about this dead guy named Jesus. They were taken aback, I guess, but shrugged off my words as mere childish talk, not to be taken too seriously. I imagine they figured I would come around when I was a little older and better able to understand what it (the Jesus thing) was all about. Well, they were right about that. I did come around. I came around pretty hard, actually.

The sect of Christianity I was raised into is a fascinating subject unto itself, but for the purposes of this blog entry let me sum it up with just one word: conservative. I even hesitate to use that label, because I know a lot of folks inside that group who I would describe as being rather liberal than conservative, and God bless them for that. (grin) I prefer to view the sect as a collection of unique (emphasis: unique!) individuals under one convenient banner rather than a monolithic group of thought-clones. Although, come to think of it, it does contain its share of the clones, too... no, I'm kidding. But it's true that a certain degree of suppression of independent thought is a feature there, which is, I think, typical of all dogmatic institutions. But I digress.

Suffice to say there is a certain set of dogmatic beliefs, both overt and unspoken, that you generally have to subscribe to in order to be broadly accepted as a member of the sect, one of the “believers.” Never mind whether those beliefs are internally consistent, logical, or based on fact. I'm not even saying they necessarily aren't. That's for each person to decide for themselves. What I'm saying is, that's the requisite for membership, in practical terms. (Plus there's the matter of who's qualified to open the door for you; clearly, only an existing member has that qualification. I bypassed that myself, being born and raised into the faith.)

Anyway, what I'm trying to get at is that I was about as “in” as you can be. I believed it all, even the parts that were not so easy to swallow. It wasn't even very difficult, most of the time. Do you know why?

I wanted to believe.

I wanted to believe, and that was that. That's really what it comes down to. If, deep down, you really want to believe something, you'll find a way to do it. In the case of a lie, you'll set up whatever construction of denials, plausible lines of reasoning, and/or emotional appeals it takes. Failing that, you'll just... believe anyway. Or not. But in my case, for a long time, I did. (And yes, I am personally coming out and calling that belief system a lie, because that is what it most definitely appears to be in my eyes now. I have no qualms or doubts when I say that. But, as always, judgement is subjective. One person's despicable lie is another's sublime truth. Ain't nothing wrong with that.)

Now mind you, a belief system certainly doesn't have to be all true to be useful. If Christianity weren't useful to someone, it would have no reason to exist. In the same vein, a lie doesn't have to be all untrue in order to be an effective lie. It merely has to bend the truth just enough.

It was because of the perceived overall usefulness to me of that conservative Christian belief system, and its apparent proximity to the truth as I then beheld it, that I wanted to invest myself in it. When those circumstances changed – in other words, when I gradually lost my spiritual use for it and it was no longer close enough to my evolving sense of the truth – I abandoned it. Very simple.

And yet, there was that crucial, defining moment of decision, when I said to myself, “I just want the truth. Come what may, I just want the truth.” In that moment, I was prepared to give up beliefs that I'd cherished for years, which had become part of my very identity, and which formed the context, if not the basis, of almost my entire social life, all for the sake of finding the truth. I no longer wanted to believe as much as I wanted to find the truth.

It was in that moment that I made a bigger leap of faith than I'd ever made before. Faith means trusting. I trusted that I would be able to find greater truth, and that that greater truth would not condemn my soul to eternal suffering in hell (as I'd been assured so many times that it would), but that it would actually set me free instead.

Well, to be honest, I don't think I'm very free yet – at least, not nearly as free as I'd like to be – but I'm certainly freer in some key ways as a direct result of no longer deceiving myself in line with that tired old system. I think the less I fool myself, the freer I become. It's working on the level of practical, everyday issues, so why shouldn't it work on higher levels as well? Food for thought.

I'm kicking myself for not having written this up earlier, when it was still fresh on my mind, but better late than never, I guess.

I'm an insomniac. I've always envied those with the effortless ability to fall asleep in moments. I can lie awake for hours upon hours before finally drifting off to sleep, exhausted, in the not-necessarily-so-wee hours of the morning. It seems there's some knack of shutting off the conscious thought process that I've yet to master, although I am able to do it with some effort. (One of my favourite methods involves passively experiencing the flood of complex, random thoughtforms from my subconscious as they flick past at the rate of two to three per second.) Being unemployed hasn't helped, either, knowing that I don't have a place I have to be in the morning, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. It's all too easy to put off going to bed, especially in the presence of this endless source of mental stimulation called the Internet. Even now, as I write, it's 1:30 in the morning.

(On the other hand, I often do find it easier to write at night, when the world is relatively calm.)

Recently, I went through an episode of insomnia that I can only describe as epic. It was a period of probably a week and a half (I don't keep track) when I slept very little and very poorly, getting worse and worse toward the end. By the last night, the night of the 8th, I was in a highly impaired state, forgetting the most basic things, bumping into furniture, the whole bit. It was like being trapped in a sort of limbo between sleeping and waking, and I began to have fears that I would soon lose the ability to sleep entirely. There were times, lying in bed, when minutes passed like hours. It was a living nightmare. At the same time, however, it was fascinating to observe myself and the changes taking place in my body and in my consciousness.

It was the night of the 8th, or more correctly, it was the wee hours of the 9th. I was a technicality away from being certifiable as one of the living dead. I determined to take a hot shower and attempt sleep once again. The shower helped; I felt remotely more human, a little more relaxed and comfortable. When I got out, I caught myself in the mirror. Who was this ghostly, haggard man? I couldn't look away. I just stared. I was, for a moment, simply too tired to summon the will to look away and engage in the preparations for sleep.

I had read, in the other GLP topic I mentioned in the time-traveler post, the self-reported story of a person who had gone into a sort of psychosis and/or actually stepped into a whole alternate way of experiencing time and reality after staring at him/herself in the mirror while heavily sleep-deprived. I had an awareness that what I was doing was liable to induce some kind of altered state of consciousness, and I was actually curious to see what form that might take.

It didn't take long before I noticed that my face in the mirror looked oddly distorted. When I blinked, it changed. And changed again. Soon it was shifting by the second. Each distortion was distinctly different, but they were all grotesque. I reflected that the information received by my retinas was not changing, but that the changes were happening somewhere in my brain, in the way it interpreted the electrical signal to produce a subjective image. I stared at my mirror alter's forehead, at the "third eye" or pineal gland. The whole time, it seemed, the faces were getting gradually scarier, even demonic. I was nearly in their thrall. I began to feel a vertigo, a sensation of falling, of being swallowed up, heading toward something totally unprecedented and most likely too powerful for my psyche to assimilate. At the last second, by pure reflex, I broke away.

I felt like I had stepped right up to the brink of an unknown abyss. My heart was pounding with adrenaline. All that had saved me was the brain-stem-level instinct for self-preservation. Something in me knew it most definitely didn't want to go there. I stood leaning against the sink, catching my breath, trying to fathom what had just happened. And when I had calmed down, I looked into the mirror again.

This time, I had the unsettlingly vivid impression that the person in the mirror was not simply an image, but a living, breathing being unto himself. My looking-glass self. Another person. I began to notice how his facial features would react to my state of mind. If I was in fear and loathing and uncertainty, he would appear as an exact reflection of those feelings, with an unattractive face that matched them exactly. Conversely, if I was in love and acceptance and trust, he would appear as a being worthy of such: benevolent, fatherly, and wise.

I had a sort of conversation with this otherself. I can't remember the details of what we said, more's the pity, but I especially desired to speak with the beautiful versions. They seemed to carry such quiet authority and compassion and wisdom, something like a perfected, future me. However, I also spoke to the misshapen ones. I forgave their faults completely, held none of their ugliness against them, even though they seemed to expect nothing but abuse and rejection. I let them know they, too, were loved just as they were. I looked them in the eye without patronizing, without judging -- with pure, unconditional love. And they rejoiced as they realized that I did not wish to disown them or shut them out or punish them, but that they were in fact ME. We were not separate, but one.

After this, I felt truly cleansed and clear. My tiredness was sweet, no longer a numb, dead stupor, but like a soft, drowsy scent in the air. I went to bed and slept like an angel. It was my best sleep in a very, very long time. :)