Left Brain Right Brain

I had a great time tonight hanging out with Doug and his friends. It's really cool to hang out with people who aren't the typical kind of cool. They got interests and interesting quirks. Met a psychology major who's in a holistic therapy school right here in my town.

Earlier today I was really down. I tried calling Mari, but she didn't pick up or return my call. E.B. was probably going to hang out with his gf or programmer friends again. Good people, but enough computer nerdism for me. (Computer nerds tend not to be into occult esoterica and depth psychology.) Doug also took a while to get back to me, so I felt a bit lonely. The thought of drinking alone on a Saturday night didn't appeal to me, even hooked up to the EEG ("beer research" as the bums call it). Slashdot also killed a bunch of my time and some of my stomach lining as I sat through the hunger laughing at jokes that would completely ostracize me from mainstream society if I repeated them in public. Wasted a couple of minutes on askaninja.com (damn Slashdot).

When things get a bit dreary, they always pick up again, and I learn something about myself. I can't hang with tech geeks too much. I need a dose of the poetic, the schizophrenic, the "soft" sciences. The more I think about it, the more I'm pulled away from my declared major in computer science and into something more human.

Scratching

I just did a little scratch intro for a friend (DJ Enyce) for about the price of NeuroProgrammer. Hey, anyone else need scratching/mixing work? I need to buy more brainwave stuff. :)

The Middle Way Is Not the Midpoint

Moderation usually means finding a balance between two extremes, drinking once a week instead of zero times a year or five times daily, looking at lingerie catalogs instead of renting hardcore porn or being completely celibate. However, there are two problems with this approach. First, the extremes are arbitrary. Who sets them? Society? Your whims? There's no systematic way to set the extremes, so there is no systematic way to find the middle point.

Second, attempting to find a midpoint between two extremes actually focuses your attention on the extremes. What am I losing when I move away from the left? What will I miss when I move away from the right?

There is always a second dimension to any continuum, any duality. The Middle Way is not the midpoint on a line segment. Pessimism and optimism are not transcended by finding a middle ground of apathy. It is transcended by dropping expectations and embracing surprise. Expecting the unexpected means being open to life as it comes and not contracting around a fantasy.

This was very difficult for me to comprehend, being raised in a dualistic society. At first, I saw only black and white. I learned about grays later, but that was still limited. I would ask the Dharma master, "How do you notice jealousy and neither dwell on it nor repress it?" thinking that there was a moderate response in between those extremes. The answer lies outside the continuum, not in the middle. He responded, "Acknowledge the feeling, just watch it. It will pass on its own." In other words, witness the emotion as an event passing through you rather than a tug of war pulling you in two directions.

Mouth Noises

Luis came over from Puerto Rico, and we made some noises with our mouths. Listen here:
Psycho Reddneck - Scat

Circuit Breaking

I renamed this site to "Circuit Break" to reflect my new focus on mind reprogramming, breaking obsolete circuits and creating new ones. An EEG I ordered just came in yesterday, and I'm very excited about getting into neurofeedback. Couple things I've been reading/watching lately to do with exploration and expansion of the mind:

• Conscious Media Network: Great interviews with great minds of the new millenium, e.g. Hank Wesselman, Michio Kaku, and David Icke.
• Interview with Robert A. Wilson about consciousness, drugs, yoga on mp3
  
• Lessons Out of the Body by Robert Peterson (www.robertpeterson.org)
• Jonas Ridgeway's Astral Projection Forum
• The High Performance Mind by Anna Wise (http://www.annawise.com/)
  
• A Symphony in the Brain by Jim Robbins (http://www.symphonyinthebrain.com/)

If you've got a wave editor that can loop play, try this wav file in the morning at a low volume if you want to stay in theta (for lucid dreaming or OBEs).

Lucky Charms

we're superstitious. if you don't think so, think again about one particular lucky charm that's still very popular today. we believe that green slips of properly marked paper gives good luck to its owner. if you don't have this special paper, you are very unlucky indeed. people will go out of their way to keep readily available food away from you if you don't have the paper. if you try to take the food, whole groups of people will carry you into a closed off room that's hard to escape.

but if you have an abundance of this green paper in your pockets, people treat you with the utmost respect and deference. they'll open doors for you and call you by reverential titles. what a great lucky charm! with this lucky charm, you can enjoy all the luxuries society has to offer simply by presenting it to people protecting these luxuries from those without the lucky charm.

yes, certain objects and actions are strictly withheld from those without lucky charms. there is enough good stuff and human energy to go around, no doubt, but people insist that those without lucky charms do not enjoy the good stuff and the fruits of the human energy, also known as "commodities" and "services" respectively. services and commodities are deemed good or lucky. in a fair, just, and predictable (manageable) world, those without lucky charms cannot enjoy good luck. if they did, then the world would be confusing, unmanageable, and unfair! thus, they must be forcibly administered bad luck, which is really the withholding of good luck--the services and commodities that people create.

if you think superstitions are benign fantasies, i dare you to throw all your green lucky charms into a flaming pit. those who you call foolish believers will call you stupid. your friends will leave you. you will notice a great diminution of good luck in your life. if people notice that you are getting good luck, they will forcibly remove the luck from you and go out of their way to prevent more good luck from getting into your dirty luckless hands.

when large groups of people believe in a superstition, the force of their consensus makes the superstition a reality. to fight consensus is to run up against a brick wall erected by the consensus. the funny thing is that the builders of this wall don't think they built it. they imagine it to be like a tree that nature herself seeded. because of this belief, they imagine there is no other recourse than to follow "nature" and continue in their reverence of the superstition.

the black hole we face today is greed and jealousy, which are really the fear that there isn't enough good luck in the world and that other people are only out to hoard it. since lucky charms bring good luck, people hoard the lucky charms too. one person's fearful activity proves another's fearful expectations, and we dive into a spiral of fear and greed. lucky charms are the symptoms of a made-up belief that reinforces itself until it starts to look natural. universal selfishness is as real as the luck of a lucky charm. if you believe in it, you help strengthen and maintain it.

Simply Love

If we don't think we are made of love, we must pretend that we are lovable in order to possess another person. If we know we are made of love through and through, no posturing is necessary. No manipulation, no strategizing, no tensing. The love within us is then free to act naturally.

The need to control ourselves and others comes from fear and assumptions of worthlessness. Our will is naturally loving, but if we assume otherwise, we will work very hard to cover up our will, which we have assumed to be unloving. That initial assumption is the critical point. No amount of rationalization or cover-ups can hide our original belief, whether we think we are made of love or not.

I just really learned this recently from experience and am only beginning to heal parts of my psyche that still hold on to shame and guilt.