Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right...

Stuck in the Middle with You.

The sky was a dramatic swatch of blue and violet pastel applied to the canvas with a massive paint knife.

A fellow writer at work commented that I am hard to pigeon-hole. He sees me reading sci-fi and fantasy, other 'odd' literature, my psychology and religion, occult and other esoteric subjects, and can't seem to reconcile this with my appreciation of the likes of Bukowski and Churchill.

This reminds me that this is almost the theme of my life.

I am the Exception to the Rule.

I just started listing examples and got bored of it, so you'll just have to take my word for it. I have a disdain for labels and stereotypes, so I work to bust them all. If you can label me, I can give you examples of my genre-busting personality.

Cosmology I : : Just Some Thoughts

I've always felt that brain development is half genetic predisposition and half based on experiences; that our experiences alter and guide the brain's development. We all basically have the same hardware, but the software we install can alter and change the way the hardware works.

For instance, LSD can produce religious/spiritual experiences, and all LSD does is mimic seratonin and reroute messages arriving at the seratonin receptors into lesser used neural pathways. Spiritual experiences activate different parts of the brain. It's a new program accessing new parts of the hardware. And you get to be the programmer. Every new experience, especially the enlightening ones, are like flexing and exercising new muscles, installing new awesome programs.

As R.A.W. says, It's ALL in your head, you just don't realize how big your head is.

We have no proof whatsoever that anything exists outside of our perceptions, so technically, even external reality is happening in our heads. So, the probability that spiritual experiences are inner-originated makes them more valid, just as valid as external reality.

I have the same view of dreams. In DreamLand, we experience our dreams as if they were reality. Regardless of the "realness" of dreams, we experience them as reality and therefore are on an equal footing with external reality for experiential validity.

I assume everything I experience is real. It's like a living in a house. Everything I do happens in the house, but some things happen in the living room, some in the kitchen, etc... And so that's reality, some of it happens in dreams and some in waking life and some in visions and day dreams. You just have to categorize your experiences.

Vocabulary Lesson

In my ongoing quest to increase my vocabulary, I hereby present some of my latest additions, brought to you by Dictionary.com's Word of the Day. Some of them are very different than what I imagined them to mean.

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