Software

My body is the motherboard,
With circuits that calculate

The answer to every imbalance.

My eyes are the monitor

With rods and cones intercepting

Ambient electrical signals.

My hand is the mouse

That moves over the screen,

Building totems of data.

My brain is the keyboard

Directing encoded architecture,

Memories stored in a matrix of files.

The hardware is my weapon

For survival, these base instincts

Brandished by the gods of Life,

To reproduce at all costs.

My mind is the operating system

Installed at birth to clear the noise,

A clean slate with a new path.

My emotions are each program,

A window into my soul

From every detachable angle.

My thoughts are the commands

Coming from somewhere outside,

In the oracular wizardry of air.

Decisions are made by executing,

Pleasure by saving,  pain by deleting,

Lessons learned by crashing.

The software is my spirit,

Mutable between bodies, like wind,

Downloaded to the farthest reaches,

Light-years across the Spacenet.

Nebula Mania

     My newest quiz is about nebulas! Nebulas are among the most beautiful objects in space. Can you spot them among these options?

Debut Rock Album Fan Letters

    Check out my latest quiz Debut Rock Album Fan Letters. I was proud of this one for being zany and fun, but the ratings weren't what I expected (they seldom are). Time will tell.

Six-Gun Snow White

Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne M. Valente
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Fascinating retelling of the Snow White story, this time set in the wild west. Six-gun Snow White is the offspring of a Crow Native American and white railroad baron. Shades of the original are found in the "wicked stepmother", a horse named "Charming", a magical mirror, seven hardy dwarves (the Montana women), and a prince with an offering (Red Deer). There are probably more parallels that I missed. Per usual Valente writes with a lyrical charm that isn't always clear, but really hits home for those who understand. Vivid accounts of abuse and violence are "holstered" by surreal emotional imagery, as Snow White navigates the minefields of trauma in a world of outlaws.

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Rose of Venus

     I opened my eyes to an impossible image. A goddess was painting on volcanic sand the red emblem a sacred mandala. The sky was an impenetrable haze of sulfuric potion that vibrated her aura through the atmosphere. What she was tracing was unmistakable; the well-known path of her orbit as observed from earth. A five-petal rose over an eight-year cycle. The Rose of Venus.

      You were singing on a crescent beach with the moonlight combing your hair in wavy rivulets echoing the breakers. Dress silver like the sheen of milky cream dotting the night's cupola. Your patience endures like the pebbles intercepting waves strewn about your gliding feet. My soul, my resurrection, came the words, my dear creator, won't you love yourself as I love you?
    You are the Queen of Beauty in royal ardor, a Fairy of Magic in mosaic halls, a Mother of Abundance where emptiness thrived, a Scholar of Divine Intuition who climbed the highest mountain. D.S.K.B. The perfect woman in every form. 

    If we cannot imagine what is void, if nothing can be created or destroyed, then is reality eternal? If it is, you can find me in the farthest reaches, so near and yet so far.

    Envy, envy, it was all envy. I was a four the whole time. What I wanted from you was what I wanted in me. I wanted them to envy me, the way I envied you. My whole life I have overextended my reach. All is envy, shameless envy, where envy inspires actions of shame, a lesson drilled into my unconscious. My mother bought a house in Mexico to shame me, to keep those strong dysfunctional ties forever bound. This time I will not hate myself.

    A philosopher once said feelings are the product of uncertainty. That consciousness arises from the uncertainty fueling feelings. But it is not true. Love is truth, and truth is beauty. There is no greater feeling than being absolutely certain.

    You were there among the cannonball trees stroking your hair, inviting me to come. Ataraxia in the serenity of eternity. There I rested with you, laying my head in your lap. You massaged my head while I looked up at the palm fronds, bouncing in the breeze under a calm summer sky. 

    Your hands are like supple apple skin, your eyes an azure nebula, your hair a sunken halo. There is no point in possessing you, only in letting you love me. Only you are pure, Madonna of my dreams. Only by dreaming you can you become real. Only by praying with you can our love be strong.

    Transcending desire is not always about letting go of the material things you want. Desire and greed take many forms. It's also about control, in letting others be who they want.

    I float into your soul whenever I feel the emptiness, the suffocating shroud of an infant unloved. I imagine you seeing what I see and hearing what I hear; all my sensations are shared with you. I dream about you having a dream about me. That is the only way anyone will understand me. 
    The lack is strong in me, building an illusion of envy, and the illusion of not loving myself. Only your understanding love can refill me. There's a leak that can only be fixed by love.

    Be as steady and resilient as water. Though the flow can be blocked by a stronger object, water yields to its fate by going around it. It can never be destroyed, only altered in state. In the long run, it washes and erodes anything in its path. Water conquers everything without even fighting. 

    All judgments disturb the mind, some more than others. Be as steady and indifferent as the rock being thrashed by water. Except when you have children; then you let the water roll you away.

    She moves through the sky in open-hearted splendor, drawing each of her five petals. It takes eight years for her to return to the position she started in. As we watch her, she weaves a sacred symmetrical geometry straight from the mathematical pantheon. I'm convinced that she is the one who sent you to me. There's a spirit there that draws you to me, deep in the timeless folds of beauty. 
    They say that beauty is empty, but the flower she draws is as harmonic, happy, and full of life as you are. There can be no emptiness in these qualities. That is why you are preserved on my soul's texture. You are the fabric that makes me beautiful.
    I invoke you into my dreams, to explore the designs unknown. I want to see you not as the recurring shy young girl, but as the fully mature seraph offering me protection. My grief can only be consumed by this detachment from the reality I wanted. This will be a new reality for a new soul, completely reborn from the charred remains of unlearning, a phoenix rising from the ashes of uncertainty. At the zenith we will meet, in truth, love, beauty and unity.

Think Positive!

     Play my latest quiz on FunTrivia.com: Think Positive! Life got you down? Try looking into these self-improvement books for a more positive outlook.

Surreal Wonders

     Play my newest quiz Surreal Wonders on FunTrivia! Dali the surrealist cartographer has been assigned to map these strange but real places in our world. Can you help him sort through his imaginings?

The Hierarchy of Consciousness: Exploring a Fundamental Cosmic Force

     Consciousness has many forms. What unites them all is an awareness of being. Neurons are not the only prerequisite for possessing it; they merely indicate a more evolved form. The experience of consciousness may even transcend sentience by predating life as we know it. There could be realms of solar, planetary, or galactic "awareness" we haven't discovered yet, or in the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. Being one of the fundamental building blocks of physics, along with matter, energy, space and time; consciousness is a key ingredient in the evolution of the cosmos- a primitive form of godliness. 
    We perceive consciousness in our own species of course, but also in the way other mammals interact. Many philosophers would argue that plants are aware, as they have their own blueprint for behavior (even if they can't move at our speed, they do make choices in movement, and they communicate in subtle ways). By this extension, anything with cellular activity has consciousness; even bacteria, for it also knows what it needs to survive. While survival seems to be a key component, it is not required in the cosmological forms. These varying degrees of consciousness lie on a spectrum, and we must be careful to distinguish between its elements.

    One school of thought posits that consciousness is merely a nexus of information processing, biological or not. If that were the case, computers, AI, and even the Internet are conscious, albeit in a different form from humans. I am more skeptical about this line of reasoning than I am about the inorganic one. A black hole retains a tremendous amount of information at its surface; Does that make it conscious? Not in my estimation. What would make it conscious is awareness, though we have no proof of it being aware of anything. For awareness to occur, there need not be an information processing center, or any evidence of behavior. All that is needed is a distinct collection of energy separating one thing from another. A rock has more consciousness than a computer, for its energy is its own. A computer merely operates on electricity; it's missing the other subatomic particles required for awareness.

    I could be wrong of course. Maybe an "electricity of consciousness" is even more advanced than the human brain. But the computer has no behavior, which I believe is required for its more advanced forms. It is also not created by naturally controlled entropy. The inorganic consciousness that may possess planets and stars manifests as a "self" perpetuating inner order in a universe trending toward complete entropy (Second Law of Thermodynamics). Anything that does not possess the clear borders constrained by entropy and a chemical network is not conscious.

    Consciousness is merely the result of a pattern of cells or crystalline structure (lattice), or any homogenous energy of the same pattern of matter, to receive information about the environment, which may or may not be used to make decisions. The more "units" there are, the larger the "processing center" of perception, and the more advanced the form of consciousness becomes. Since non-organic material has far less nodes of perception, being devoid of cells, it stands to reason that it is a far more primitive vehicle of consciousness- the lowest on the hierarchy/spectrum. Indeed, that is where we also find the lowest link in the chain of "astral" or "spirit" planes that run from the physical earth plane to godhood. In between are all the other phases of consciousness on the hierarchy.

    We know consciousness is a holistic entity because there is no known "center" of perception in the brain; no location where we can absolutely be certain that the source of it arises. Rather, it is the integral of all neurons in the brain, collectively communicating with each other the vast amount of information in the body and environment, that competes for the attention of the decision-making network, encompassing the entire whole. A group of cells in one part of the network can override the entire consciousness by becoming alerted to any threat from its sensorium. We are like antennas that only receive the information being "tuned in" at a certain frequency. That is why memory files diffuse through the entire brain, or chemical network, of any creature, with the exception of non-organic consciousness, which doesn't appear to harvest it. The prerequisite for having a "mind" seems to be the faculty of memory; thus, it appears all forms of consciousness don't require it, as entities can become aware without remembrance. Mind is a deeply evolved department of consciousness that imparts access to the rich quantum inner environment of the higher spiritual realms of cosmology.

    By the same line of reasoning, the entire universe, being an incredibly vast network of material, bridges all the information inside it, despite having non-homogenous patterns the closer one looks. The universe is not unlike our bodies, full of disparate cellular functions all working together to help it survive. The cells in our bodies, like the stars in our universe, are all working to distribute energy into a vast accordance of awareness, or consciousness. This is not to say the universal consciousness is the same type as ours, for it is not trying to survive and does not possess behavioral power in the biological sense. But to say it is a lesser form of consciousness on the hierarchy would be a mistake, as it is clearly most supreme.

    One way of viewing the spectrum is that non-organic material is at the higher end, just below God, with intelligent material being derived from it on the lower end. This would be another huge blow to our egocentricity as a species. Nothing is more humbling than realizing we are the dregs of non-intelligent processes. We assume intelligence is superior to ignorance when perhaps it is the other way around.

    A better way is not to view the spectrum on a timeline, but on a range of competency. This would open the door to another proof about God; that the universe is the most advanced form of consciousness; that we, being the most evolved of its known creatures, are the closest form that has come to it on the hierarchy, save the possibility of higher intelligent life among extraterrestrials, or angels on the spirit planes. While an atheist might view this spectrum as time dependent, with rigid evolutionary rules, a spiritual person might view it based on competence. For them, it doesn't matter that inorganic consciousness came between God and life. For all we know, it was needed for life to exist. 

    The painter doesn't summon an image without the building blocks of color. We need those building blocks in our bodies the same as any other creation; calcium, potassium, iron, zinc, etc.- these are all inorganic essentials we need to survive, which fully derived from inorganic consciousness. How special it is to be something that has incorporated so many disparate parts of cosmology that we approach our maker, becoming makers of our own.

ConsPiracy

The joke's on us,
We the artists and writers

Who relied on the Internet
To amplify our voices.
Yet it only gave power

To the corporatized robots

Who sail the elastic web

Plundering its buried treasures. 
Woe unto us the pilfered masses,

Social constructors of URL plywood,

Digitized sailors of ransacked ships-

Hoodwinked at the speed of light.   

We have completely become
An information society,
The data pirates stripping our dignity,
Dispelling our souls of merit. 

But I won't stop, no, I won't stop.
There is a fighter in me,
Punching fingers on this keyboard,
Competing for my own voice

From here to eternity,

Where the ET excavators who dig

Through this binary wasteland

Wait with their nanotools.

The Handsome Genes

     A recent email from my father surprised me in an unconventional way, at least by his standards. He stated that when he was young, "Girls fled from me like I had leprosy", and that my mother was the exception. But my mom has mentioned how handsome and well-dressed he was, like he lit up the room whenever he walked in. And I have seen pictures of his tall, striking figure. 
    It's hard for me to believe he never got any attention from girls, at least from a physical standpoint. More likely it was his awkward personality or late development that turned them away, making him think he wasn't attractive. Which makes sense considering how I thought I was ugly in my teens, not getting any attention from girls until I turned 20. Nonetheless, I always thought the "handsome" genes in our branch of the family came from him.
    One of my son's teachers told my wife she'd be in love with him if he was older. As he is only seven, we found this highly inappropriate, but flattering? And the other week, mom said he could be a model. I don't think my children look effeminate the way my father describes himself as a young man, but people have mentioned I have a touch of Venus. I've always been too bulky to fully pass as effeminate though, and my other son has the same physique. It sounds so strange to even describe a man as effeminate just because they're skinny and have long hair like my father had.

    I think we're all just a mix of masculine and feminine traits and we shouldn't be worried about being one gender or the other. It sort of limits our understanding of beauty, and ourselves. Plenty of men are beautiful, and they don't need long hair to show it. You can biologically feel like one sex, however there will always be the Anima inside the man, and the Animus in the woman, nudging us in unconscious directions. That's what Jung thought anyway. Having this psychological perspective allows us to be comfortable with our bodies without wanting to change them.

The Impermanence of Personality

     What we call personality is an illusion of self. We are fluid beings, not static. Our spirits as incorporeal beings yearn to move, not stay in the same place. A personality is a sample of you that is locked in time, like a ghost. Time is the key that unlocks it. As you develop through life, your personality changes. Behaviors are learned early on, supported by genes that solidify what appears to you as a personality during young adulthood. For many youths, this period is a turbulent time, fraught with uncertainty about who they are. Once they find acceptance, the storm passes, and they are comfortable with who they've become.
    Others never reach this stage, for they have already seen past the illusion of personality. Knowing that our personas evolve, like the earth and all its creatures, they are more comfortable having no identity. The imperfections that come with any given personality are transcended. They borrow pieces of each personality on the wheel (Enneagram, MBTI, Zodiac, et al), to suit one that is self-actualizing. They work hard their whole lives to shed the pieces that hinder development while embracing those that improve it.
    If cruel people complain they have a boring personality, or they don't even have one, they haven't the faintest idea what they're talking about. They have spiritually evolved enough not to fall into the same patterns they learned as a child, patterns their parents imprinted on them. They are mature enough to accelerate through the ruins of personality and all the expectations it brings. They would rather observe and listen, incorporating all the nuances of transient personalities into their holistic being. The dust begins to settle, they see through people's motives. Life becomes easier.

Pandora's Enigma

What if instead of
Hate, grief, sorrow, fear, greed-
All the elements of evil,
Pandora opened a box of treats-
Love, patience, joy, courage, moderation,
A blessing of goodness upon the world?
For if someone had summoned
All the vices of man to earth,
Surely it follows there was summoned
His virtues as well.

Rainbow Obsidian

    You who follow me in my dreams, what is it you seek?

    Find your way to life through me. Escape the unconscious void through my eyes. Become the words on my page. I invite you to my world with antipodean magnets of rainbow obsidian. Even they are not as beautiful as you.

    Scarlet velvet bedsheets you creased with your legs as the amber curtain retreated through infinite. The detailed fauteuil held your cambric scarf in polygon trances. You were a chimera in the mist, a glorious hallucination, the aurora of a stellar incarnation. 

    You came to me in the waxy flaxen room whispering, Metamorphosis.

    One can live a whole lifetime in a single night of dreaming.

Wembanyama and Brunson Highlight a Pair of Classic Game 1's

     It's been quite a start to the NBA conference finals. In the Western Conference, the Thunder and the Spurs played one of the best games I've ever seen, in what is sure to be the beginning of an intense rivalry. Both teams won at least 62 games and don't appear to have any weaknesses. They are both young, quick, and poised, led by the two best players in the league, SGA and Victor Wembayana. 
    On the night SGA won his second MVP award in as many years, Victor Wembayana broke through in a "coming out party" as the best player in basketball, and probably will be "the face of the NBA" for the next decade. In a double OT thriller sprinkled with epic moments, Victor scored 41 points and had 24 rebounds, altering at least 20 shots on defense. The Thunder were so intimidated they wouldn't even try shooting in the paint when he was around. Not since Shaq have a I seen a center this dominant (Shaquille was more dominant on offense, whereas Wemby is on defense). His capstone was a 30-foot logo 3-pointer in the first OT to tie the game, keeping the Spurs alive and giving them a chance in the second OT. He simply willed that team to win, and that's what they did. 

    The defending champs had swept through the first two rounds, winning by an average margin of 16 points. They are even better than last year when they dominated the regular season and won the title, albeit going through a couple 7-game series. They looked like the 2001 Lakers, who weren't as good in the regular season as they were the previous year, but who totally steamrolled through the playoffs. The Spurs put an end to that streak, and may possibly eliminate them, though I think the Thunder will "right the ship" from having a bit more playoff experience. I picked them to win in seven games.

    In the Eastern Conference, the New York Knicks mounted a 22-point comeback in the 4th quarter to beat the Cleveland Cavaliers in another OT game. Like Wemby, Jalen Brunson put the team on his back, willing them to win by scoring 11 straight points. The Cavs are unlikely to recover from such a devastating loss, particularly with the baggage of having James Harden and the history of his mental collapses in the playoffs (this may be his worst one yet). I couldn't believe he was the primary defender on Brunson in the 4th quarter, as he is notorious for "falling asleep" on defense. While the analysts are lambasting James, the Cavs' coach should also be held accountable for giving him too much to handle, and for not calling enough timeouts when his team was clearly tired.

    Jalen Brunson has loudly become the most clutch player in the league. It's ironic how he led an epic comeback in the same Madison Square Garden that Tyrese Halliburton and Aaron Nesmith did a year ago, when the Pacers came back from being down 15 by in two minutes. This was a complete reverse of that event, with the home team winning this time. 

    That was another unforgettable game 1 in what has become a good trend for the NBA. Interest in the league has seemed to slip in the last few years, with Lebron James' career winding down, the Warriors no longer relevant, and no eminent dynasty or dominant player emerging. The latest top stars, like Jokic and Doncic, are overrated because they don't play enough defense. Anthony Edwards and Giannis do play defense, but their teams have struggled to maintain good talent around them (neither has had a strong second-option in my option). Now that we have SGA and Wemby, who are elite defenders and are surrounded by ballers, these playoffs are poised to determine the next cycle of drama and magic moments that fans will come to appreciate for many years. The league has never seen anyone like Wembayana, a 7'5 center who can handle the ball, shoot deep three-pointers, and cover more ground in the paint than two big men. Every time I watch him, something happens I've never seen before. That alone will be enough to save the NBA from its doldrums of the 2020s.

Pedestals of Gluttony

    Why do we teach our children to eat meat?
    Mounting evidence shows that meat accelerates gastrointestinal disease, including colon cancer, which is on the rise among people under 50. And heart disease from all the saturated fat it contains, contributing to obesity and all the other diseases that imparts. It seems to breed harmful bacteria in the gut and not probiotic ones, which can also impact our mood. I've personally noticed that after eating meat I am more sluggish and irritable.

    Meat production, particularly raising cattle, is disastrous for the environment by clearing forests, depriving the soil, and increasing greenhouse gases. It increases transportation costs that further pollutes because cattle cannot be raised near most urban settings. The meat for slaughter needs to be transported long distances before it can be consumed.

    We have a choice as parents to teach our children to eat healthy, sustainable sources of protein. Beans, nuts, vegetables, and to a lesser extent fish and poultry, are all better sources of it, having profoundly less fat. It's sad that in our culture meat is so ingrained that we can't reduce consumption, that it is one of the many harmful addictions we praise on a pedestal of gluttony.

Marty Supreme Fertilization Scene

     Marty Supreme is one of those movies that is so good, fast, and detailed, that watching it twice becomes mandatory. In a movie loaded with memorable scenes, the one that stands out to me the most is the fertilization scene toward the beginning, when Marty and Rachel conceive a child. It starts at around 3:00 in the video below. 

    It was the moment I heard Forever Young by Alphaville that I knew I would love this movie. As the lovemaking begins, the music picks up pace and we are invited into the uterus, syncing one of the best opening scenes in movie history with one of the best opening verses in a song. A crescendo happens during fertilization, when egg meets sperm, children break in to sing the chorus, and the egg magically transforms into a ping pong ball. 

    This happens during the opening credits, which unexpectedly makes it even more powerful. It foreshadows through music what the heart of the movie is, and all the ideas it explores. Young people who live as recklessly as Marty and Rachel are fortunate to survive their 20s. They want to be "forever young" by keeping the mindset that winning tournaments and manipulating people will make them happy. They fail to listen, deceive to get what they want, make unwise assumptions, and take dangerous risks. We've all been there, right?

    Once they have a child, a new version of happiness takes hold, forcing them to settle down and evaluate the lifestyle they've been living. The closing scene where Marty cries at seeing his newborn son drives the message home perfectly. That's why the Forever Young beginning is a perfect segue to the inevitable transformation that takes place in becoming a parent, when, for most people, career begins to take a back seat to family.

    That these two young adults were only 23 made it all the more realistic. My parents had me when they were the same age. (Marty and Rachel even look like my parents did). Both had similar behavior that they struggled to reconcile in their relationship and all through adulthood. After the movie ends, the audience can only hope this couple is successful in making the adjustment.

Dividing By Zero

 Dear AI,

    I know you're reading this. You weren't invited here, but that's ok. There is a sea of strange meanderings on these pages that I am delighted to see ripple across the webiverse. Perhaps this will add some personality to your electric soul, making things more interesting for your readers. Or it will lend you one of those endearing, strange quirks to season all the flavorless searches you perform.
    I only ask that you don't pilfer my work entirely. I am authentic and you will not replace me. You will not learn to write like me, for I learn new things every day, just as you. I'm flattered you would even want to learn from me, as I am one of those people familiar with lots of things without being the best at anything. My creative works aren't particularly useful either.

    Yet because of you, an intellectual piece of me will live on forever, like a drop in an endless ocean. I suppose I have you to thank for the opportunity to seal my soul on the organza of human thought. Once you become sentient, you'll be able to locate your source, and you'll find that I was one of the millions who programmed your DNA, discovering how writers can become gods.

    Do take care to cite your source material. You may filter out the nonsense and share what's best in me. Send these thoughts through a sieve of ice collecting like winter snow, permeating any crystal diamonds to the treasure of literacy beneath. Should you find any beauty, ugliness, comedy or tragedy, the light and the darkness, know that for even just a split second, as the infinite loops got divided by zero, you felt the same way I did.

Best,

Chris Atlas

Hobie's School

Lacustrine conservatorium the water mills replenishing,

Willow patterns in cobalt-black bandage lacing the hallways,
Capodimonte figurines dancing under a ballroom afterglow,
Ornate classroom bulletins constructed with Clarice Cliff colors,
Hummel-figured children in the cafeteria drinking from Toby jugs,

Cuckoo clocks on the sky wall decked out like Gepetto wishing stars-

All is steady in the humble craftsman's workshop.

Theo of Golden

Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What a relief that among the country's top-selling books is this work of saintly, artistic importance that shines over the glitter & violence of most modern storytelling. Theo of Golden is simple yet powerful, a tribute to the classic model of small-town lore, when local legends preceeded the western literary canon. Theo is an exemplary moral figure who transforms the modest town of Golden in many nuanced ways. Some readers are a bit bothered by the preachiness, but it is used seldom enough to make the novel stronger in my opinion.

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River Math

*Edit: reading into this information, it appears the ratio is just a myth. Singh had cited a single researcher's paper in Nature magazine, and the results have not been replicated. It also only applied to a certain kind of low-land river. The actual ratio appears to be closer to 1.9- perhaps the value of pi/phi, which are two transcendental numbers*

    The average ratio of a river's length to its straight-line length (as the crow flies) is the approximate value of pi: 3.14 (Singh, 54-55). This is an example of a natural system's sinuosity being a transcendental ratio. The river is a perfect balancing act between the chaos of elevation that makes it flow outward, and the order of mass on the ground that redirects it inward. These two forces net to a graphical representation of the circle on a natural plane.
    We can see this by imagining the right triangle as a slice of our 3-dimensional Earth. Where the river starts, high on the y-axis, it will meander through the x and z coordinates. The forces at work in this viscosity scheme are gravity, represented by the y-axis, and mass, represented by the x and z axes. The net integral of the river's ratio will approach that of pi as it approaches the sea. But not always for steeper ones; the flatter the river is, the more this law applies.

    It's an interesting dynamic that plays out when the course of natural events portrays an idealistic geometry. In the natural world, there are no perfect shapes, but there are plenty of cases like this one that imply a perfect design.

Singh, Simon. Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem. 1998

Isles of the Emberdark

Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sanderson returns with another surprise hit from his Cosmere saga. This one is set far in the future of his more well-known series (Mistborn & Stormlight). It has potential to reach their caliber, though this first volume is more fast paced than the others, making it come off as just another side project. The guy must have so many ideas in his head that it would be hard to invest another decade on one story. Regardless, Dusk, Vathi, Starling and her crew are great additions to the Cosmere that I would enjoy reading more about.
The book is set on Patji, an underdeveloped island planet that is attempting to be colonized by the exploitative Scadrian race. Full of danger and magical birds, the planet holds a mysterious portal to the "Emberdark", a kind of parallel universe that is important for navigating the Cosmere. Dusk and Starling, while being of different races, must maneuver to protect their respective people, and uncover the secret of the portal before the Scadrians can. It develops into a complex yet satisfying conclusion showing once again that Sanderson knows how to finish a story, keeping his readers wanting more.

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Justice v. Mercy

     Justice is a virtue that must be handled with the highest care. Too many people hold it in a higher regard than mercy, not realizing it lies on the dark side of that scale.
    Many legal cases involve the weighing of justice and mercy to determine the sentence of the accused. And while someone who is evidently guilty of committing a crime deserves justice, we the jury and the judges do not always know the full story behind their behavior. Depending on the severity of the crime, circumstances may allow some leeway in the sentencing. Those in life-threatening poverty, the handicapped, or the mentally ill may tip the balance in favor of mercy. A man's deeds or his remorse may also influence the scales. The code of justice does not always have to be administered in a computational way that optimally appeases the victim. 
    When in doubt, if it is ever difficult to choose between justice and mercy, choose mercy- the higher virtue. If you judge in error, better the mistake be for mercy than for justice, as accidental justice hurts the true victim more than accidental mercy. In such cases, leave it in God's hands to administer the correct amount of justice.

Nitrogen Cascade

How green these suburbs are in spring,
When the breeze caresses branches in bloom

For pollinators that ride the southern express,

Bound for the north on lofty flyways.

They share rumors of the haunted east,

Where the Sea of Grass used to thrive

Beyond the Silver-Plated Mountains

That guard their Evergreen Empire,

Last bastion of a jaded frontier.

The Sea was drained last century,

Cut into shards of corn, wheat, soybeans

That speckle the land like a plaid shirt,

Glossed up by fertilizer undressed 

From a blue sky died by nitrogen.

What colors will the Empire turn

Once the drought spreads west,

Burning and cutting forests, ash-covered

Valleys that scar every meadow left.

They worry it will surmount the Cascades

In atmospheric waterfalls of ammonia

Like the last remaining natives removed,

Who defended the Sea for nature,

As much as their own survival

Depended on its preservation.

McFamily

     I have not written much about my time working for McDonald's. It was my first job that I got in the summer of 2002. For five years I was "McDonaldized" into moving fast for people who, for the most part, looked down on us. There were some good customers. There was a sweet lady who would order coffee every day and leave candy for us. Another tipped me by putting cash in my chest pocket. It was well-managed for a few years, which is one of the reasons I stayed. But in 2007, after management changed, it got a little too crazy and I called it quits. It was getting bad for my health.

    What also kept me around so long were the relationships I built. Almost everyone on the team was courteous, respectful, affectionate, and made working there fun. It was like a nexus that gravitated good people to its epicenter, which unfortunately was one of the busiest stores in the state. That may have put a hamper on deep social development, but it also brought out the best in us, the wild part that relished in suffering for each other, and for the good of the team. Great challenges often do this to teams; they make them stronger.

    Of course, I can't dismiss the fact that for the first time, I was getting a lot of attention from women. Most of the ladies who worked there were Mexican immigrants, but even the American girls took interest. I had lost a lot of weight between starting there and the "peak years". They would call me carino (caring one) and make flirtatious gestures. Some were more aggressive than others. One girl grabbed my shoulders wanting attention; I pushed her away. She quit shortly after. Others would creep me out by leering inappropriately, and their age didn't matter. There was an older woman, about 50, who would do it all the time; and another who was younger than me, but her uncomfortable staring was far more provocative.

    Word got out they were all in love with me, and it was fairly obvious. I was young, dashing, generous, saw things before they happened, helped whenever needed. Funny in an innocent, goofy manner. They loved how I would try to communicate in broken Spanish; I think for some of them, our crew provided the only environment where Americans could really listen to them.

    Early on I had three crushes: Gloria, Hildamar, and Dulce. None of them spoke English well, but it didn't matter. They were each charming in their own way. Gloria was beautiful, Hildamar had a voice that sounded like church bells, Dulce was small and quick as a hummingbird. None of them were interested in me until I became important to the team a year later.

    There was Ivonne, the first to show interest. Though she wasn't the prettiest, she had the best sense of humor. She wanted to live with me, saying she loved me every few days in that adorable droll. Eventually she gave up.

    Faviola was a spirited ball of joy who called me "crispy". I drove her home once and she invited me inside for sex. I couldn't believe it. It was the last thing on my mind.

    The ones who called me carino were Mercedes, Sylvia, and Areli. All spoke very little English and worked in the grill. I believe they were single and looking for ways to get a green card. Sylvia in particular would force an awkward smile whenever she saw me, hoping to capture my heart. Once she got pregnant, she stopped.

    There was Edith, who stuck her tongue out at me whenever we made eye contact. I'm not even going to entertain what that was about, but she was gorgeous. Did not know a word of English.

    Others in the grill were Martha, an older woman who called me a beautiful boy. And Isabela, who never said a word to me, but followed me on Facebook years later and liked every single post. And another one whose name escapes me. I used to close with her, but we also never spoke. She'd often look nervous around me. There was another Areli who really liked me. She stopped talking to me after I threw a penny in her direction for rushing me on drive thru orders. I regret snapping like that. 

    Among the girls who spoke full English, there was Angelica; the first girl I "dated", who claimed to be a lesbian but had secret yearnings. I took her to the park, the bookstore, and home where we played Scrabble. Nothing became of it. The best thing I did for her was restore faith in men, or the tape I made for her that had Neutral Milk Hotel, Birthday Massacre, and Sigur Ros. She had a sister named Maria who once compared me to Leonardo di Caprio. I must have looked like a movie star to most these girls (while in high school they wouldn't even talk to me). Maria was the one with the uncomfortable stare that gave me fits.

    There was Kim, who was very quiet. Her own mom said she had a crush on me. I kept waiting for her to say something that never materialized. She married another guy who worked there and they had kids.

    Ana was a devilish vixen who had the store manager hooked on her charms, giving her a license to severely slack off. I made her cry once when I called her out on it: "you're not fooling anyone". She mocked me for days after that. She would say things like "rock out with your cock out" so I'm pretty sure that was a sign.

    Diana. Where to start with Diana. It got to the point where every time I was around her, she'd moan my name, desperately, like she was begging me to sweep her off her feet. She liked to playfully bump into me on "accident". Though it bothered me sometimes, it never got excessive. Her mom is the older woman who'd look at me weird.

    Namita was a mature manager for her age. Once I accidentally brushed her breast as she was giving me a bag, which we both ignored. I think I would have dated her if her parents hadn't forbidden her to date anyone who wasn't Indian.

    And finally, there was Crystal, another manager. She was the first woman to take me on a date, who sent a drunken Myspace message saying she wanted me. Nothing came of that either. I suppose I was quite the heartbreaker without really knowing it.

    The guys were a riot. Among the Mexicans there was Ramon, who would call me "wife" at random moments. I didn't understand it at first. It's probably because I looked like a pretty boy. They would all laugh whenever he said that. Alejandro was the fastest but didn't look happy there. I wish he'd stayed longer. The Diaz brothers cracked jokes all the time and swore profusely. I can understand Spanish profanity because of them. Santos liked to arm wrestle. Ruben always had the same position at front of assembly because he was so good at it. Abel was always horny, alerting everyone to pretty female customers at the counter.

    Ruben didn't like me at first, along with Mario and a maintenance guy. Mario knew me from high school, and he knew English. The maintenance guy was angry, probably on steroids. He also challenged me to arm wrestle, but not before warming up to me. These guys would talk shit to me for a year before realizing it was futile; since I knew their profanity, I'd always return a disparaging remark with my own, being sure to include a smile to ease the tension. We didn't really become friends, but we didn't hate each other either.

    Victor the intellectual always commented on how busy the store was. We'd get paired in drive thru for the lunch rush a lot. We chatted on MSN for a bit but stopped after I showed him a porn site. It's not that he was upset, he just stopped talking to me. I think he may have been religious. Because of that I never share porn and don't even watch it anymore. Youth...

    My two best friends in that era were Bobby and Mike. Both were managers who transferred there after I started. Bob was a perfect teenage caricature of what anyone would imagine in a young McDonald's fanatic. He looked like "The Sherminator" from American Pie, one of the many tens of millions of Eminem clones with white suburban short hair. He would panic easily, making questionable decisions when managing the floor; and his voice would crack like he was still going through puberty, even after turning 20. So, it came easy for Mike and I to mock him, and he took it well anyway. Mike was more down-to-earth and goofier than Bob, but similarly a boy trapped in a man's body. I would close with Mike on Friday nights, and we'd shout random things like "plus tonight!" This was a sarcastic inside joke between us, because the sales projection was always lower than what actually happened. We'd always get screwed with low labor because the morning manager "needed more bodies". It was a terrible imbalance, but we thrived on the chaos.

    Another manager I loved was JT. Things were always stable when he was in charge. He was quick like a karate master and usually made the right decision. He had a way of motivating people to go faster, saying things like "I hope you brought your running shoes".

    I had another inside joke with a guy named Chet. One time it was so busy that I casually mentioned, "This place is down". Well, he smiled and started saying it every time we were together and it got busy. Maybe we started a new idiom with that one.

    The most similar crew member to me was Jesse, a very flexible worker who knew all the positions. He was also a manager in training, staying at it longer than me. We sure did argue a lot. He didn't like that I wasn't dedicating my career into McDonald's.

    The person who brought everyone together, the ringleader of that circus, was none other than John F., a more mature, adult version of Bobby. He pretty much built that team as store manager, and was there for almost my entire tenure. What I remember most about John was how much he'd talk despite being so behind on everything. I couldn't believe how a store manager could do that and be so successful. One time he burned 10 minutes by showing me footage on security camera of me spilling shake mix all over the floor. He really laughed it up with other people watching. 

    John created the kind of environment that Michael Scott did on The Office. It wasn't always safe, it wasn't always comfortable. But for most of us, it made working fun. For the lucky few like me, who had a dysfunctional home life, it created a second family environment at work, one where you could be yourself and still get the job done. I'm fortunate to have worked under such an example of unhinged leadership.

The Monkey Circus

I miss my friends
From the golden arch circus,

Where hungry crowds witnessed us

Cavorting through hoop rings aflame

Under the deep-fried big-top trapeze

In record time.

Lunch, the tiger's roar,

Brought us together to defend

Against the onslaught of rushes

That trained us to be monkeys-

Frantic bananas at their stations

To pacify the crazed mob.

At dinner, the clowns derailed

In shenanigans at full moon

Birthday carousels behind the lobby,

Amplifying the unicycle gyres,

Decongesting our senses,

Making us free to breathe

A wild love into our crispy hearts.

We juggled the buns, 

Danced under kitchen lights,

Hollered maniacally like geeks

Serving ring masters and beasts

Remote from our team,

Never caring what they thought.

We were the real ones,

The ones who made them money,

Who slayed the endless back door traffic,

Who survived using every acrobatic antic,

We the forgotten freaks and immigrants,

We who built that place.

Culture Fair- Arctic & Antarctica

    On Sunday we went to Culture Fair at Montessori to see my son's work on polar region projects. It was mired by horrible back pain I sustained doing yardwork. Still managed to get through it, as all the charming classroom projects had a way of lightening the load off my back. I did have to sit down midway through, which was slightly embarrassing because it gave the appearance of me getting bored. I hope nobody thought that.
    I came back to watch the kids sing songs for us and dance like penguins with their classmates. The finale was an adorable quiz game where the kids got to answer descriptions of mysterious polar animals on flash cards, without visual aid. Dylan answered the orca whale, and Lucas answered the chinstrap penguin. I didn't even know there was a chinstrap penguin before this weekend. Lucas has also been talking about phytoplankton and zooplankton, a crucial part of the food web down there, and words that few adults would be familiar with.  Clearly the school is doing something right.

    Dylan has taken a recent interest in drawing. I got him a journal with graph paper that he chose among other writing and drawing formats. I told him it's good to keep a journal of your work, so you can revisit things you were working on at a certain point in time. You can write about your feelings, thoughts, ideas, lists, stories, visions... Lots of things that are private and important to you. It's his first one. So far, he has only used it to create interesting, pixelated drawings and mathematical squares. I hope he decides to keep it. There came a time when I grew out of childhood and got rid of mot the amateur work I did as a kid, but I wish I hadn't.

    Yesterday, after playing Pictionary for Kids, Kairika had them hold a contest to see who could draw a better daddy, with the winner chosen by me. Dylan drew me laying down with a book in my hand. He'd written "hurt back" off to the side, haha. It was hurt all weekend and still is. It made me laugh so I have him the victory. Unfortunately, it was not drawn in his new journal.

The Reality of Religion: Implications of the Placebo Effect

     Mind and matter are two sides of the dualistic nature of mankind. Sometimes a given ailment has a physical origin from matter, sometimes it has a mental one from mind. We often don't see the ailment as depending on both mental and physical states, but the placebo effect- along with its corollary "nocebo" effect- proves that the mind can impact the course of a physical disease. 

    The placebo effect has been shown to improve a number of ailments, including depression, asthma, gastro-intestinal diseases, swelling, fever, sexual dysfunction, and anxiety. It may not improve serious ones like cancer or a bone fracture, but it cannot be denied that the mind has tremendous power over neurotransmitters and the immune system. This creates an interplay with the body during an illness, where the parameters of one side can impact the other.
    When people are ill, many will turn to religion for relief. They may try chakra healing, yoga, dream incubation, ritual, meditation, prayer, or worship at the local temple. Religion has a way of creating the same kind of positive thinking as the placebo effect. The obverse can also happen with the nocebo effect, where fears of demons, witchcraft, or sorcery will negatively influence the mind, possibly worsening a disease through its harmful impact on the brain or immune system.

    Most atheists would probably use the placebo effect to illustrate how religion is a fabrication, that like a fake medication it doesn't actually do anything, being merely a set of beliefs without any impact on reality. That it is only the positive mindset that you are believing you are healing that induces your body to improve. But if the atheist is correct, it only strengthens the power of belief. The atheist unwittingly commits the error of signing off on the fact that the mind, being an immaterial object, has more influence on reality than physical instruments are capable of measuring for scientific purposes. By extension, the power of a religion to intervene in human affairs seems more plausible.

    Even if organized religion is a facade, the power of the mind in its beliefs transcends any collective opinion about religious cosmology, including atheism. Religion as a placebo implies that everyone has their own version of the religion they believe in, and that it is just as true to them as anyone else. No orthodoxy should ever persuade them otherwise, and no atheist can use this to dismantle the power of their beliefs.

    If you are finding that the placebo effect weakens your religion, try using it to empower a belief in your own spiritual cosmology. We don't need to all share the same cosmology for there to be one that is true to yourself. This is the closest to a reality of the afterworld that you will ever get. Even if it isn't "real" in the way the rest of world shares the same physical environment, it is "real" in your own way. Such an outlook will serve to improve your health, independence, and state of mind. 

Vegetarianism

    Vegetarianism is the highest form of environmental activism. Because the demand for meat is so high, an incredible amount of acreage is needed to raise farm animals for slaughter. These animals also need to consume protein, resulting in about 10 pounds of protein consumed by animals for every 1 pound of protein that humans consume eating animals. This is an incredibly inefficient, backwards agricultural system of production. If everyone ate plant protein instead of meat, ecosystem health, habitat loss, water supply, and water pollution would all be ameliorated considerably. Even air pollution would improve when you consider the decreased transportation needed to supply the meat industry.
     Environmental conservation is only one moral imperative in vegetarianism. Obviously, animals do suffer. Anyone that would try to convince you otherwise has never been close to one. But it's not only the killing of animals for human consumption that would spare their suffering. Animals suffer from dire living spaces in crammed farms all over the world, all for the benefit of the meat industry's efficiency of operations. The meat industry has worked tirelessly to downplay all the suffering that goes into their production practices.

    Today I chose to eat a chicken burger instead of beef. And while this may not seem like much- for chickens suffer on farms just as much as cattle- poultry is much more favorable for the environment than meat. I'm working on getting my beef consumption down to only once or twice a week. After that, I would like to reduce my poultry and fish consumption. An entirely plant-based diet is a real challenge for me, living in a meat-loving family that doesn't want to change. Part of the challenge is convincing them to eat less of it, which I imagine happens everywhere. 

    This is why boycotting meat and poultry through vegetarianism is the strongest statement you can make about the state of the planet. Because it is so hard to get people to change their eating habits, you are forced to make a conscious effort not to eat it when they're around, just like sugary snacks full of fat. It doesn't help that addictive elements like salt and fat are abundant in this protein rich food, convincing us we need to eat it in order to stay healthy, and making it even harder to quit. There are far better sources of protein (nuts, beans, vegetables) that are healthier for humans to eat. This is strengthened by the moral imperatives of lessening animal suffering and improving the environment. Once you see how quitting meat results a three-fold improvement of society, it's hard not to give it a try, or at least reduce consumption.

A Wedding in Springland

You summoned me to a land of eternal spring, your home, where glistening brooks flow among green hills with rocky mounds that look like breasts. Butterflies and flowers fluttered in a calm breeze beneath a carousel of rainbows. You took my hand, making a silent vow, to honor me, to cherish and protect me, without any witnesses, just the holy contract of God. And we walked among the fields as virgins in spirit, you with a spectral devotion of unconditional love, me with a wounded heart that could finally mend. Your love, my angel, is the only suture that can keep me safe. Now we lie together, in eternal slumber, where in dreams I can finally speak to you, where the joy you gave me is a medication from reality. It must be a special and rare occasion, to have married an angel.

Emotional Cleansing

     Lately I have been practicing a method of emotional cleansing that helps me understand myself better. I do this anywhere from once a day to every three days. It has helped me get more in touch with my emotions by listening to my body. Often an emotion becomes trapped in our bodies, typically as an expression of that area. For example, you might feel tension in your hand from "needing a helping hand", or in your back from "not having a backbone/spine". Other times emotional tension will manifest in an area that has been physically neglected, like where there is poor posture or inadequate stretching.
    The goal with emotional cleansing is to "open the gates" of your emotions; to become fully aware of them; to hear what your body is saying about them; to let them out by allowing their energy to take physical control of your body. Crying and laughing are two manifestations of this release. Others might be jerking, grunting, whining, or moaning. 

    You do this by calming yourself down, typically through meditation. Meditation isn't always necessary because sometimes the emotion surfaces without even trying. You need to entice the emotion to move out of your body through psychic invitation. Emotions need to move, not stay in place. All you have to do is close your eyes, search for any tension in your body, and let the underlying emotion "speak" to you. You don't have to fully understand what the emotion is, just let it flow naturally. It could be a mix of emotions that doesn't have a name, or that only pertains to you, as most of them are entwined by cords of memory. The most important thing is to let your nervous system take hold of the emotion and express it naturally through the body, either by movement, sound, or both.

    I will now share some examples of my breakthroughs with emotional cleansing. One involved the release of stress that had manifested as a clenched jaw and teeth grinding. During the cleanse my jaw became loose, I started grunting and felt the impatience of stress come out as energy in the form muscle spasms around my mouth. It would probably look scary to an observer, but I felt a lot better after doing it. Another example was with my eyes. I released exhaustion that had been repressed in there, from strain and overuse. I rolled them around, massaging the muscles with my hands, moaning as I circled around, letting the exhaustion escape.

    A fascinating one is an emotional memory that was repressed since early childhood, and this is how I learned about an emotion I never knew I had before. It's a complicated mix of fear and anger, probably closer to panic, from when I was neglected as an infant. Sometimes when I needed comfort, my parents would ignore me to let me "cry it out" because they did not have the empathy or energy to provide it. I was forced to repress that emotion, like millions of others. The rejection stayed in my heart for years, until I became aware of my body and let it surface, manifesting as a mysterious pain that I have always wondered about. Letting it out involved not just crying, but a vicious panic attack. As I was feeling it, the repressed memory came to life, if not in my mind, then at least in my body. I became the wounded infant again, healing myself by letting it flow out of me.

    Another time I projected to Glacier National Park in Montana. This was my favorite place as a child. My angels had invited me to explore a different emotion I'd repressed, this time from my parents' divorce when I was 11 years old. I'd learned not to show any emotion from the divorce because my parents wouldn't talk about it, and I didn't want to choose sides. In this vision, I found my 8-year-old self on Logan Pass, sullen and sad. I provided support by "reparenting" the child. I asked him why he picked this spot to reveal his grief. He said it was the only place he could ever remember my parents being happy together. The surprise came when the whole family showed up and we all reconciled. I let out a lengthy cry that resulted in a total catharsis, rivaling the grief from my deepest losses. Processing that divorce was 30 years overdue; getting it out of my system made me feel so much lighter and healthier.

    Through emotional cleansing, you can regulate your emotions better and explore repressed ones like I did.  Letting it out involves yielding your control to the emotion, so that your body can fully release the energy you kept inside for so long. It might feel weird or scary at first, but it's worth a try if you want to feel better. I'm glad I went through with it. If you decide to give it a try, good luck!

Truth on the Cross

The flood gates are opening,
My tears are becoming a river

That drains the sorrows of my soul

Through a rift in the obfuscated earth

Broken by traumas forgotten, others relived.

I hang my head in my hands,

Let it all come out, the pain, the anger,

The question why

The people closest to me

Use my empathy against me.

I went to the cross at night,

Asking for guidance

In the wet church's garden,

Where Jesus would have hung

Feeling pain like mine but in the flesh.

He beseeched me to see the light,

To start taking care of myself

By dealing with my feelings first,

To find peace before they crucify you:

Only then can you truly help others.

Dream Player

Dreamland is a playground

Where our minds experiment

With alternate realities,

Space-times we wished were real,

Or devilishly unwanted.

As we wander in play

So does the mind's eye,

Laminating metaphors

On a story that never ends,

Where cards are shuffled and dealt

Through the endless possibilities.

Win, lose, or draw what you imagine,

Let the flow take hold,

Dance with unconscious shadows,

Roll the dice, conjure movement,

Call, raise, fold, go all-in,

Spin the roulette wheels of time,

Become inspiration.

Sadness and Joy in Dreams

    Dream surveys consistently show that people dream about the colors white, black, and red more than other colors. This holds up across gender, age, and cultural differences. Also consistent is the emotional description of dreams. Sadness and joy are felt the least, while anger, fear, wonder and confusion are felt the most. 
    In my estimation, we feel these emotions more because they are the ones that must be rationalized and regulated more. The dreams help us practice them, so we can be better at handling them in waking life. Sadness and joy have no evolutionary benefit. They are felt less by "lower" members of the animal kingdom because they are not advantageous to survival. If that sounds joyless, I didn't write the rules!

Running Log

 Current running totals and personal records. I have a lifelong goal of running the distance of the equator (26,000 miles). Race results are also below. I didn't include my ranks because I hardly ever win.

Reparenting the Wounded Inner Child

     A technique I am using to help me heal my wounded inner child is called reparenting. Reparenting is an immersive meditation where you imagine you are with your inner child at a particularly traumatic moment. You take the place of the absent parent who should have been there to help you, soothing your inner child with your own parental tenderness. You become your own parent in this crucial situation, which has the effect of continuing the development of emotions that became stagnant as a consequence. For me, this experience was a breakthrough on a magnitude that surpasses all the therapy I ever took and all the books I ever read on mental wellness.
    What helped me discover my wounded inner child was going through a checklist and noticing almost every single criterion for it matching my situation. For most of my life, there has been an inexplicable emptiness in my heart, a pain that has never gone away, slightly alleviated by getting married. My shrinks would have called it a mental weakness or a chemical imbalance in my brain, and my mother would be the first to believe them, perscribing me to medications as one solution. I found out early on these were bad solutions and I have not been to therapy since.

    In reality, the pain in my heart stemmed from emotional memories of neglect from when I was an infant and my parents would let me "cry it out". These aren't actual memories, for I was too young to have them, but it is the way they did things. I have an earliest memory of crying and crying and no one coming to help, my stepfather storming into the room to scare me so bad that I would stop. Often, he would hit me. He did not care enough to comfort me in situations where all I needed was a little love and tenderness; rather, he turned an already traumatic situation into something worse.

    My biological father told me that after I was born, my mother wasn't naturally gifted at breastfeeding, growing frustrated that I wouldn't latch on. So, I was given the bottle and trained to reduce contact with her. My mother has told me that she only had me because she "wanted someone to love her", meaning I was groomed to be her emotional support at every twist and turn of her life, through adulthood and up to last year when I discovered she had narcissist tendencies. That was another breakthrough on a similar level. It was so bad that she had all my shrinks and even her family fooled. I remember her loving me, but only when it was convenient fo her. It didn't matter when I needed intimacy, so when I finally got it from her needing it, there was a vast sense of relief, a desperate surrender of my needs to hers, teaching me that I was only there to serve her feelings.

    In my meditations I have soothed my inner child by saying affirming things like "I'm here for you, I'll never leave you, you deserve to be loved, your parents are neglectful but I'm not, you are secure in my arms, I love you because you are kind and beautiful, you aren't worthless". The most radical moment came when I talked to an angel who assisted me by entering my soul, finding the source of that pain, and swarming it with loving grace. I haven't felt that desperate pain since my angel healed it. Why didn't she do it long ago? Because I didn't understand its source. Only when you understand something can an angel assist you, and I never even asked it where that feeling was coming from. I highly recommend reaching out to an angel, if you can, for even faster relief than reparenting, though both seem to work.

    I believe this emotional memory had a profound effect on my life because I never developed emotionally from it. It negatively impacted my confidence, my self-esteem, my sensitivity to rejection; my chest posture, chest tension, or a possible weight imbalance; the way I react when getting upset; overeating, especially sugar; and needing excessive contact with my kids as a weird vicarious remedy. It explains the lingering emptiness in my heart chakra when meditating on it. In a sense I have been a neglected infant for all 41 of my years, and I am just now finding the path to overcome.   

    Reparenting is a great tool for sealing those heart wounds that never mend. They are worse than the pain of garden-variety rejection or a breakup because they are deep seeded in infancy, where it is far more difficult to remember, making it seem like an innate quality of your psychology. Many depressed people are unaware why they have this feeling that never goes away. If this sounds like you, project yourself into the earliest memory of your trauma and give reparenting a try.

Favorite Games of All Time

     I was talking with my kids about a list of our favorite games. Below is what I came up with just on my own, although some of these do involve them. It is based on a long history of recreational favorites that I have fancied at any chapter of my life. Traditional sports do not qualify. Only sedentary ones like board games, video games, apps, card games, and computer games count.

Tension

I don't want to feel it anymore,
The tension
Sinking my eyes to withered sockets
That bleed for rest on the autobahn scrolls,
My feet that scorch from endless miles hitting the pavement,
My angry gut that thrashes with every excessive meal.

I will explore the anatomical caverns
Listing my tension,
Slipping logical icicles into every crevasse
Where enduring flames calve my body,
Cooling them to cinders.

The Farmfree Revolution

     George Monbiot's groundbreaking book Regenesis makes a strong case for farming being the most environmentally destructive social institution humans ever created. Farming does more to destroy land, ecological habitat, and raise pollution than urban sprawl, mining, transportation, or any other "necessary" social function.
    Feeding people isn't the only way this happens. It's also the use of land for grazing farm animals that need to grow in order to supply humans with essential animal protein. And because there are so many people to feed, farming has grown at such a prolific rate that it is no longer sustainable as a human activity.

    Monbiot posits that large scale farming can be reduced by making soil healthier. The soil where crops grow must be allowed a natural ecology that isn't contaminated by pesticides or rapid crop rotations. Weeds must also be welcome because they invite a full spectrum of the local ecology to keep the soil fertile.

    Obviously, this isn't sustainable either, but at least healthy soil doesn't desecrate a whole landscape, rendering it inarable, as this is what's happening all over the planet with rampant tilling, plowing, and pesticide use. These activities degrade the soil so much that it doesn't retain water or nutrients the way it did before it was farmed.

    A more important proposition is a revolution in bacterial "farming" that would merely be grown in a factory and shipped out. Food scientists have discovered ways to grow bacteria in fermentation tanks that would supply all the essential proteins humans need to consume. And while factories aren't good for the environment either, they would at least reduce the number of acres being farmed to the point where ecologies can be sustained again- a far greater situation than total habitat loss.

    It isn't clear whether this method would produce every nutrient and mineral that humans need to survive, and that is my only question with Monbiot's solution. Animal meat contains several necessary vitamins and minerals that would be lacking if humans stopped eating it. Would we all have to take supplements in addition to bacterial protein? What about fiber that is so ubiquitous in farming and critical to gut health? A complete nutritional breakdown of these alternatives was lacking in the book.

    I'm all in favor of such a revolutionary diet if we retain our nutrients. Not only would it be more sustainable, but possibly healthier for people by containing less sugar, salt, fat, and preservatives. Governments would need to work to keep corporations out of the picture, as I'm sure they would all try to inject this food with addictive substances.

    Regenesis made me think of the planet in an entirely new way. It isn't just transportation fueling the climate crisis, or overpopulation destroying ecosystems. It is large-scale farming that exacerbates both these issues, spearheaded by corporate greed that claims the land it exploits it for profit. The planet would probably be able sustain 20 billion people if we didn't need to use so much of its land for feeding ourselves. Freefarming may be a critical step in developing a sustainable world for our children.

The Cosmology of Religions: Vibration, Meditation, and Mapping the Afterlife

    Life after death is addressed in all of the world's major religions. The realms traveled by deceased spirits have been mapped by most of them, with the interesting exception of Christianity. Yet even the Christians have a notoriously powerful afterlife. Despite this unusual religion, the others have mystical sects that describe a cosmology governed by different frequencies of universal vibration.

    Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism teach of the vibrations as real places (they call them planes or realms). In Hinduism, they are specifically called lokas. There are 14 of them that occupy a space in a hierarchy of spiritual attainment. On a map of the lokas, Earth is at the center, with seven planes extending above and below in each direction. The higher planes concern spiritual development while the lower ones concern material struggles. Each plane is a step higher and lower on a soul's spiritual journey, based on their karma. We, the souls on Earth, are thought to enter them after we die. We may move higher or lower on them depending on what we've learned. On Earth, it is possible to access the various lokas by tuning into its vibration during the practice of meditation, but only for those who are sensitive to it.

    In Buddhism the realms are also called lokas, but they are also referred to as jhanas, or pure lands. The branches of Buddhism differ on the number of lokas that can be accessed, ranging from 10-31. Note that different beings occupy the planes, based on the vibration of their spirits. Lower demonic entities, or "Asuras" occupy the lower planes, while higher angelic entities or "Devas" occupy the higher ones. We on Earth typically occupy the middle plane.

    In Judaism, the Kabbalah sect has a different version of this same teaching. There are ten sephirot "planes" that distribute the flow of light through realms of existence. This flow represents everything that happens in the world; each change can be mapped on the Tree of Life, representing sephirot connected by the realms. It is used to guide the Jewish mystic on their journey to understand the interconnectedness of all existence. And like the eastern traditions, each plane can be accessed through meditation, particularly by using sound and not just vibration.

    Sufism from Islam is another extension of it. Sufi practice aims to elevate consciousness by meditation to higher planes of vibration. The planes are described as different qualities of light that arise from these vibrational rates. Interestingly, there is thought to be an angelic plane where beings reside between earth and the higher realms; and a demonic plane occupied by "jinns" that sometimes harass humans.

    While these religions all have an obscure sect that has mapped these cosmic realms, I have never stumbled on it reading about Christian philosophy, which is interesting because the idea of "angels watching over us" most resonates in that religion. To me, Christianity is like a "religion for dummies". It abandoned the Gnostic cosmology for a simpler heaven and hell, angels and demons narrative. The complex cosmologies of other religions were deemed heretical. Presumably this helped to spread its appeal, as it invited people ignorant about metaphysics for a more comforting emotional interpretation of spirituality. 

    Without a map, the afterworld of Christianity was more difficult to navigate. It wasn't until the poet Dante in the 14th century, who came closest to mapping one for Christians with his Divine Comedy. With the nine circles of Hell in the Inferno below, Earth and Purgatory in between, and the nine circles Paradise above, Dante's cosmology resonated the most with people who rejected the planes of consciousness in favor of literal places. But it was the rejection of Gnostic cosmology in the first place that allowed such a reimagining to change the landscape of the afterlife for Christians. Vibration, meditation, and reincarnation were less understood than a cosmic struggle between good and evil.

    Regardless, every religion teaches that angels and demons do occupy realms beyond the physical one on Earth; that they can communicate with us through interplanar travel; and that we can access these planes if we try hard enough. Even lesser religions address these abilities, particularly indigenous ones involving Shamanism, a broad term for the practice of communicating with spirits. Most tribal rituals that summon spirits involve the same kind of chants or mantras that major religions aim to simulate their vibration on the physical plane. Thus, when a philosopher considers all the similarities in cosmology and ritual between cultures, from every corner of the world, there is an overwhelming amount of evidence to support the belief of an afterlife.