If you feel invisible,

1. These feelings are normal and more common than they may appear when you are in the grip of them. Social isolation is one of the oldest and deepest fears, and it triggers a prolonged “fight or flight” response that diminishes physical and mental health.

2. Above all, the human being is capable of transforming experience via small choices that develop into big ones. Do something good for yourself, something simple. Then when you can, do something good and simple for someone else. You may be surprised what comes of this.

3. “Invisibility” can be fun, once you learn to modulate it. And you can, and you will. It’s mostly mental. The most powerful 3 words are:

I

AM

_______.

..and then whatever you fill the blank with.

So be careful what you wish for. 

It ain’t rocket science, but it might help you escape gravity.

Life is crazy. This is A Strange Moment. A vital time of change as one world falls away under its own putrefaction and another rises (in potential) to replace it. Want to be part of the sequel instead of hating the endless remake? Work on you, and ripple out. Get your mind right so you aren’t flying blind or whistling past the graveyard.

Meditation doesn’t have to be a martial art or a a holy ordeal. Those are the tricks that keep us locked into obsession with the thoughts. It’s how ego keeps you on house arrest.

They aren’t evil, you aren’t crazy, you aren’t failing at being good. They’re just thoughts, mostly automatic. Ants after sugar, nothing more. You can spend your life at war with them or brush them away and keep 

You aren’t your tummy rumbles, your itches, your half asleep stumbling pisses or your sleep-farts. Likewise, you aren’t your thoughts.

It’s the reaction that counts, everywhere and always. Your relationship with life comes down to your choice of reaction. 

Carve out a slice of timespace for yourself. Sit down. Hush. And “watch the weather change.” Keep going until it doesn’t piss you off. It’ll take eventually. You’re never done. But you’ll get more ready, and you’ll start to duck before the bullets.

May you find peace, even if it’s just half a second today. It’s a start. The rest is just loving yourself enough to practice. I trust you to do that. For you, and the better world to come. 

Opposites Distract

You are on a path, moving toward truth. You see it peaking over the mountain, and begin to move swiftly toward it.

~BUT WAIT!~

A peal of thunder deafens you, as a blinding strike of lightning hits ground not 20 feet from your face. You open your eyes, stunned. As attention retunes and vision returns, you now face a wall too high to see beyond, and as wide as the horizon. Your path stops here, flanked by two identical doors.

You hear the rattling of doorknobs and the creaking of hinges. Each door cracks open, and while the interiors are obscured you note what you can see.

The floor of each is tiled in checkerboard, and in each room, the silhouette of a figure tilts toward you. You hear two throats clearing, and then..

“This way! I’ll show you the way to a perfect future, all these corruptions undone. We welcome everyone, and soon everyone will be part of our unified system where all are the sa—I mean, equal! Just a bit of flexibility on your part, a few rights sacrificed, for the cause.”

“No, no, ignore that utopian fool and come this way! The old ways are best, and I can take you back to a time before all this corrosive progress. We can make this land great again. The way it was, before that one’s kind spoiled it for us. God’s on our side, kid. Right this way.”

You have to choose, and yet you hesitate. Something seems amiss. Can you remember what it was? What do you do? Are you bound to choose between the only two apparent options, or is there more beyond the facade?

Human minds are addicted to the assignment of all things to polarity. Order and chaos are no exception. People want security above all, and so they box the world up to try and own and run it, or shrug their shoulders and give up on personal responsibility in favor of moral relativism. Is it all chaos, or is it an intricate web of conspiracies and bureaucracy?

It seems to be both. Order is imposed on the perceived chaos of nature by man, who deems it wrong because it is uncomfortable. Nature perfected order before man, but it's too subtle for most of us to notice. So it goes also with autonomous societies existing in parallel with the Death Grid. Manmade order tends toward the pathological, and begets the hellscapes occasionally discussed here. The option (the Web or Life, in this case) waits, for aeons if necessary, for us to come around. And we will, in good time.

The frantic ones who say it's all planned down to the atom shrink life to the size of a panopticon prison cell, and in their fear offer no candle against the shadows. Trouble abounds, to be sure, but speak of solutions or get off the stage. The smug nihilist hipster tadpoles preaching no future and no agency of individual control leave the gate open for malevolence to operate with elbow room, and tend to help it along unconsciously or otherwise. Surprise, y’all. Complaint without contribution means you’re working for The Man.

The options as advertised are dead ends, and we do ourselves little favor when we take the shapes of someone else’s jars. If you haven’t figured it out yet, that Death Grid that chokes the earth is powered by the savage fight-or-flight emotions at the bottom of the brain (Hell) rather than the top shelf imagination and problem solving of the higher levels (Heaven). So be contrary to yourself now and then. Make a third way when there seems to be one. Ever wonder why so many religions, philosophies, artists, musicians, and architects are hung up on triples? Take a hint, and travel well.

Rope for Quicksand

Think of intersecting circles in empty space. Imagine one ablaze with light and complexity, and the other impossibly dark and bereft of detail. In the center, the overlap, the vesica piscis, is where the experience of life happens for you and me and everyone who is.

Now, activate that almond by zooming in mentally on the overlapped space. Bring it near, and rotate it until you can see the waveforms forming its surface. Uncountable layers are interwoven, yet each has a signature, a fingerprint.

Find yours. Let the others blur for now. Do you see it? Do you see a familiar loop of oscillations? Zoom out and you see childhood spike into adolescence and flatten into adulthood. Zoom in and you'll see this year, this month, this week. You'll notice the crests and troughs as your line meanders toward All and toward  Nothing.

Maybe the moments of proximity to All seem few and far between, and downright miraculous. Never let them lose the luster, even after you've seen them become the new standard. The closer you are, the more luminous the colors, the sweeter the sounds, the more gorgeous the patterns, the better the luck. "It's magic. You know. Never believe it's not so." You can go a little too far here in the gravity of astonishment, so keep a silver cord anchored back at center.

But there are those other moments, when you float into the Dark. The colors fade to grey, the music's out of tune, every face is the grimace of a ghost and every day is like Sunday. What grew is wilting, the senses assault you, and your legs and bedsheets weigh a thousand pounds. Your hell has frozen over and you're hollow, hopeless, mute.

Don't worry, you can modulate this.

Zoom in until you can see the ripples from individual actions and their echoes. That's the dataset you need, Programmer. Now call up the controls. Put all your strength into turning that first dial: contrast. Now you can really see those lines of force. Follow them through the fog of doubt into the light of possibility, wherein you may engineer solutions.

People may tell you to turn Brightness instead. It can wait. Do your work and the lights will come on just fine without you forcing them. There, see that? Each step reveals the next with clarity. But hang on. Maybe you couldn't find the Control Panel. Maybe it's covered in dust and dog hair and spent burrito paper. The system has provided a workaround. Look around for that blinking yellow light and listen for that overly polite squeaking siren.

Summon your strength and punch that button. Hit it like it gives you oxygen, because it will. Don't be alarmed when the emergency lights come on. It's all to help. You have taken the first step and you will not walk alone.

Please hold while we connect you with Technical Support. We're so glad you called.

Just a little reminder.

Yeah ok, it’s the Fourth Reich and that’s clearly awful and by all means do whatever you can to gum that horror show right up, but also remember: 

These people tried to make a mind control truth serum and created the psychedelic revolution by accident. These people created a spy network and we used it to replace the media and bring out the forbidden texts. These people replaced the food supply with poison and we’re remembering how to feed ourselves again. It’s a long, exhausting game, but we win.

But only if we fight. The key is: don’t fight the way they want you to. Most people are a little shift away from working for real change. We all have to stop falling for the division traps and get over our grudges and truly unite against The Adversary. It treats our stress and outrage and fear like some kind of monstrous happy hour at an endless carrion buffet. It’s allergic to love. It wilts in the presence of forgiveness and understanding. 

Choke it. And smile from your deepest heart while you do so. See you in the Invisible Trench.

On the road

I’m gonna go ahead and say that the overwhelming majority of evil in this world is the result of human ignorance. Some is the result of sociopathic arrogance. Some is harm for harm’s sake. What inspires that level I can’t say for sure.

Some say evil and good are both masks playing the game. I don’t think I can get behind that anymore.

Ahimsa, a life of minimal harm, may be the way to happiness. It’s not an easy way, but it seems to be the right way. You never finish being in the position of making those choices that keep you from adding to evil and feeding benevolence.

Double dare ya.

Friendly reminder: being depressed in the crash isn't crazy. But do me a favor and recharge so we can all make it.

I'm gonna challenge you because it is hard to do everything when you feel like this. Over the next 3 days, I'd like you to try the following in no special order:

Buy your favorite snack and give to the first person you see with a cardboard sign. Don't worry about the reaction.

Call somebody you have had a beef with and absolve them. This is actually more for you but it helps them too.

Go to the lobby of a hospital and talk kindly to people waiting for surgeries to let out.

Walk around an outside place with plants and water if you can. No tech.

Buy your favorite snack again, and try to eat it like you've never had it before.

Let me know how it goes. Persistence is all.

Pollyanna Overdrive

A lot of people want to play a game where everything is positive and pleasant. They pretend to have popped into our world fully formed from a perfect land where "everything was beautiful and nothing hurt," to steal from a better author. But there's one little needling problem:

They're full of crap. 

Pain is real because experience is real. Crystal humpers that want to be creating reality out of whole cloth with their daydreams are half right because you always get to govern your own interpretation/perception/reaction but since they usually just pretend they're wizards or faeries or unicorn trainers, it doesn't work and they go to a new cult.

The true oneness of interdependent phenomena (with strong evidence of overarching organization and intelligence of some sort, be it deity or emergent property) is not what people are usually talking about. It's a few layers beneath the veneer of psychedelic t shirts and ripoffs of indigenous rituals. The fake oneness is idolatry because in order to inflate the ego (by pretending to dissolve it) it denies intelligence/harmony beyond the self.

The personal self is real, though much of its visible aspect is propped up by patterns and postures. The larger oneness is real. It's possible to be both at once without being crazy or obnoxious. It's just a bit harder and about a hundred percent more worth the time. What I like about it best though is that it can be done quietly.

As it is.

In "Stranger in a Strange Land," the main character (a human raised in a Martian colony and returned to Earth) describes  phenomena with a detachment uncommon to Earthlings and in contrast to our emotional reactivity. Example: "Waiting is." Rather than be impatient, he simply accepts delay as the current condition.

I would say, here, evil is. Or maybe, depravity is. Addiction is. Escalation is. Corruption is. Conspiracy to conceal is. Control through blackmail is. Malice is. Psychopathy is. Sadism is. Predation is. Bottomless horror is.

We long for some higher sense of meaning to give us context for madness and darkness. Is there any in these things? Perhaps none inherent. Our responses, however, create meaning and even a sense of purpose.  Ideally we through our works produce progress in reducing the above while magnifying the goodness and wonder which are so often drowned out in the howling, tilted narrative that aims to keep us divided and exhausted.

Discovery is. Compassion for the victims is. Outrage is. A thirst for retribution is (some might say this only feeds the dark). Under some conditions, maybe empathy for our devils is. Maybe that's even the aim of the game. It's not for me to say, and maybe not for us to know.

But for now, as we stumble upon the often invisible tragedies of this world, sadness is. A measure of complicity is. A measure of complacency is. Guilt is. Urgency is. Desperation is, in some cases. Yet we must remember that increasingly, awareness is. Contact with our cultural shadows is. In good time, redemption is, though we don't know the shape it will take. Balancing is.

A parasitic fear-feeding paradigm with a helplessness-projecting agenda is. Darkness is. And yet ever more, light is. In the meantime, opportunity for kindness is. Inner work is.