Stars at Elbow and Foot

 Brooding and plotting a bit tonight. Vaccuuming always gets me in this kind of mood.

I meet and deal with people who do not have an original thought in their heads. Everyday I’m confronted with the same words and phrases that come out of their mouths. It takes everything within me to not outwardly cringe.  Am I actually talking to living people?  It's like talking to some artificially constructed  simulacrum  of a person. Am I walking amongst beings that are not fully formed? Abominations.  I might as well be talking to a doll, it’s just that the eyes aren’t quite as dead as a doll’s.  I am surrounded by the living dead, And there are very few exits.

These ramblings are my attempt to understand some things that may not be understandable, but can only be taken a position on, even if that position is that I do not understand them. Are we puppets that have been created through the accident of consciousness as Thomas Ligotti believes ? This is a belief, albeit a bleak and pessimistic one, like any other belief man creates to make sense of the meaning of his life.  Atheism is a belief just like Christianity, and all of the beliefs are at odds with other beliefs because they declare truth where there is no truth to be verified except by belief or faith or dogma to be recited like some robot that has been programmed for this purpose. I'm begging you not to be a robot, which reveals that I do not side with Ligotti on his belief in a world cursed by conscious puppets.  The problem with belief is that it is created by people, and people are not perfect, nor perfectly good, or very smart. Their biases creep into whatever belief they think

There is a hungry ghost within me, haunting online stores and desiring things that I/he does not need and may not truly want. Once the ghost obtains these things, it will enjoy them. There is the joy that the novelty of the new provides, a dopamine rush once the package arrives and he gets his grasping hands on the newly procured item. The ghost is excited. He opens it and admires the new thing, starts to use it. What he finds is that the new thing is what he expected it to be, maybe even more, or so the ghost thinks. The senses are keenly focused on the new thing and its use. The ghost smiles. The hunger has been satiated. It thinks that it is becoming more defined. The ghost thinks that it has become more than the spectral thing it was before obtaining the object of its desire. It feels complete. Now its life can be more fulfilling like the people who have reviewed the thing he wanted. Like the ads showing people using the shiny, always new things, forever smiling and using the th

 It doesn't matter what you believe becaue the universe will give you what's true every time. You could believe that the Earth is flat, but trying communicating from one end of the world to another and you'll see the limitations of that theory. Try believing that vaccines don't work, something that was proven with Polio, and you'll end up in an ICU, or worse, in a casket.  The universe doesn't care what you believe or how hard you believe in it. If it isn't true, then it's false. Facts are binary, even if you think that they aren't. This is not Schrödinger's cat. There are not 2 states happening simultaneously. There is the truth, and that other thing that is not truth. So believe what you want. In the end, the truth will still be the truth and the world will go on even as you don't.

I started meditating again. The last time I had seriously meditated was before the kids were born, and that was not a Zazen meditation, but something new and not that productive. Let's stop with the vaguries. It was imaginative, but nothing real nor good came from it. So I'm back up to 15 minute sessions of sitting in Zazen or mantra medtitation. For a while I made it a game, but that was diluting the process. I've taken a more gentle and traditional aproach to medtitating. I set my iPhone's timer to 15 minutes and sit, concentrating on my breathing or a mantra. I have this afterglow from meditating.  After meditating I am the happiest and most calm and clear that I am all day, but this lasts for a few hours and fades. The pitfalls of life and work stream back in and slowly chip away at my ability to remain calm and accepting. So there's improvement, and there's more improvements to be made.  I need to sit and do the work, probably longer and at least twice a da

      Hi, Old Friend. It's been a long time since we talked. Too long. I've been trying to make something out of myself, but it seems that what I've made is not what I'd intended. There was supposed to be creativity and prose involved, not business emails and revenue watching. How did this happen? Slowly at first, and then all at once.       There are actual living beings dependent on me for survival, so I do what I do and my family survives- even flourishes! I don't feel like I'm flourishing. I feel like I'm jumping through other people's hoops for prizes and acceptance. I'm more comfortable financially now, probably the most comfortable I've ever been, but something had to be sacrificed for that to happen. There was a price that had to be payed. The death of a dream, maybe.       You get older and you watch things fade. Eyesight. Speed. Dreams. I'm not the dreamer anymore. Now my kids are the dreamers, and I help facilitate those dreams. Bu