I am still a boy. I am a wolf in sheep's clothing. I have the outward appearance of a man which hides the many shades of existence. I am a boy and a grizzled old veteran. I am the light and the dark. I contain the many shades of grey that confuse and confound. I desire good and evil. I desire. I surrender. I am both sides of the coin, trying to exist on one side. I am the yin and the yang, I am good and evil. I am neither of these things. Inside this being there lies a dormant light being waiting to be allowed to express itself. The chains and weights of the past of life prevent it. These contradictions exist in ways that cannot be understated. One cannot give oneself to anything entirely. Everything will have a little left in reserve for survival, for the continuance of what happens next. Everything exists in the past and the future, never in the now. To live in the now is to escape oneself completely. This is an impossible task. One exists in the barriers of the mind and body, the highest perception of this being is one of body and mind. There is a very limited experience happening within this individual at this time. It is limited and it is complicated. There is a fear to expand. There is a fear to remain locked as well. This tension will either resove itself and there will be a winner or they will perpetually remain in a state of flux, never pushing anything strongly in one way or the other. This is stagnation and this is death. There is no life where this is now, there is no dynamism or movement. There is no more becoming. I am a still life form. I am a statue of a man playing out a part that is so predictable. The joke is that I can not predict it. But I have been down that road. I know where it leads, I know where it ends, I know where the final curtain call makes its unwelcome appearance.

There is a grand fear in the pursuit of life. It is the breaking out of the shell that one must come to grips with. Everything in your life up until this point have been dress rehearsals. This is the realest deal you have so far encountered and it must be faced like a man. It must be dealt with. You must break free of these chains and liberate yourself to move in the world freely. It is not your fault, it is not anyone's fault. It is all your fault, it is all everyone else's fault too. It doesn't matter. What matters is action from now on. You have to take that leap off the edge and start to make things happen. There can be no other way, this is your first life and death battle. Choose life and begin the real journey of being a man.

How To Be A Living Thing!

Journey into yourself, look beyod the most superficial parts. Try to separate yourself from your thoughts. Emotions are very powerful desires trying to wrench you back into the cycle of desire and ego. The tricks it can use to fool you are unbreakable. You can't outsmart it. It can not outsmart itself, you are it. You are ego, you are thoughts, you are emotions. These things are temporary. There must be something else behind the machinery that makes it run with a strange manner, unlike any other machine. What is the difference between a dead body and an alive one? There is no spark. Something happens when we die that removes all the fight from us, all the struggle has ceased and it becomes something like a willingness to co-operate, a willingnes to acept what has happened, what is happening.

There is no way I can experience such a thing. By its very nature I must be absent. There is no possibility of me garnering any particular benefit, apart from another sense of perspective - another version of the truth. Or perhaps not. There is really no way for me to know.

There are so many tricks I use to maintain my sense of self. This sense of reality is flawed, I know it because I can't remember everything perfectly. I act despite myself. I am delusional. I don't understand who and what I am (are they really two separate things?) Any effort to distill the mind seems to make me less tolerant of myself, sometimes to the point that I can't stand to be like this. I need to escape somewhere, anywhere. The list of aces left to escape to are dwindling - drugs, alcohol and tobacco are losing their appeal, I no longer feel such a need to go out and indulge in pleasures of the flesh as much. My coveting of women continues, but on a much more subtle level. I still succumb to it sometimes, I let myself be tempted by big ideas and possibilities that by their very nature can not be fulfilled, ever. And if they are, the reality is so diferent to the idea of it that the desire remains unfulfilled, and manifests itself in another way, waiting to sneak up on me at another opportune time, just after I've forgotten the lesson I've just learned.

The cycle of self is such that I don't really know what's going on. I think I'm making some progress, but progress toward what exactly?Why am I doing these things? To find out what I am. Plato said that all we see is just a shadow of the outside world we see on a cave wall, and the true unseen, unseeable reality is outsid the cave. I don't know why I'm referencing a 2000 year old philosopher, probably because there were much less distractions back then that people would actually be courageous enough to leave their utter boredom behind to pursue truth. Perhaps they were stronger men, whatever that means, or perhaps the conditions of living at the time were such that it was conducive to this sort of thinking and practise. Perhaps those individuals were nothing like me, perhaps they are exactly like everyone who has every lived. It's not important, it doesn't help me.

There's always a finish line. There's a point, somewhere in the future, where everything will be OK, I will have realised what I wanted to realise, I will conduct in the most optimum way possible for this individual and I will know death and fear will be a thing of the past, a sideshow, a distant memory of what it was like to be so aware of something that wasn't at all important. This point is always in the future. One day I will have to accept that the future is always today, that the past is always truly dead and gone, nothing will ever bring it back. There is only one way, now, the future is just an idea in my head. It's an estimate based on things that have happened before in the past, the dead past. I carry the past with me lie a Bible. It holds the key to my behaviour, my treatment of myself and of others. There is no impulse to let it all go now, for some reason. I think that if I let go of the past, truly let go and assign no importance to it, then I will give up my identity. I have my own self-image that I want to believe and realise is not who I am, but there must be something deeper that says "you can't let me go for no good reason". Up until this becomes unbearable, all of this, I don't think it will be possible to drop it. There I go making up ideas about the future again.

Enough for tonight.

Who writes stories?

Every word written, ever, has been stolen. Not one was an original thought. Thoughts by their very nature are unoriginal. Who is writing this? Mind. Just a survival mechanism. Mind is going around in circles, writing things down to make them real in the physical world. Sometimes mind has to hear its own thoughts aloud to make them real, to make them more believable. It has to make the world a safe place. If the mind's own thoughts are written down, then they are real things, they belong to the world proper. But the difference is an illusion. Thoughts in the mind and on paper, on a screen, travelling through the air as sound are the same thoughts. They all exist in the mind in differing forms.

Perception is the mother of confusion. Perception, with mind, causes confusion. Perhaps perception with no mind is clarity. Maybe that is God, or Nirvana, or whatever. No mind. How is that possible? For mind, writing this down, it is not. Mind can't understand how no-mind can be acheived. I = mind. The more mind has tried to stop its own thinking, the more frustrated and angry mind gets, the more determined mind is to find another way to trick itself. These are all ways of tricking mind. Even this process of writing down mind's own thoughts. Perhaps, even this is the path of destruction. Mind is creating a labyrinth of systems and gateways, and false corridors that will eventually make no-mind a complete impossibility. Mind is its own worst enemy.

Mind writes sentences like that - mind is no one's enemy. Mind just is. Let mind go on its way. Just watch mind. With watching will come understanding. Let the dust in the river settle first, then mind will be able to stop. The water becomes clear. But only if you let the dust settle first.

Diary of a Maniac

I don’t want to listen to anyone who tells me what to do to fix my perceived problem. They don’t know what my problem is or what its like. They can give me their answers but they will be relating to something they have no experience of. They haven’t lived my life. They don’t know me because I don’t know me. They don’t know what this house looks like in here. I don’t want to listen to people give me their solutions beause they don’t even work for them. They are blind. At least im crazy and I realise it.

What am I doing here? Why am I asking these questions? I don’t want to try anymore. I want to give up and just let it happen. I don’t know what it is that will happen or if anything will happen at all. Im not scared of something happening. Im not scared of dying alone. Everyone dies alone. Death is an idea. I don’t know when I was born. Going to sleep is not an experience ive ever had. Ive always been unconscious for it. But I keep waking up. I don’t know what happens for a third of my lifetime. Something must happen. Or nothing. Ive never had an experience like it. I want to lose myself.

This really blows. I don’t have the same problems as everyone else. I feel like im the only cunt looking through the door at something that has always been there, while everyone else is in the back of the house trying to decorate it, knowing something is outside but choosing to ignore it. I can't take my eyes off the thing outside. I cant see it, smell it, nothing. Its impossible to understand. I have to walk outside the door to get to it. It cant be known from in here. Everyone else will think im crazy because the inside of the house is so pretty, and they have decorated it well and worked all their lives to make it pretty and bearable, but really it’s just a house with things hanging up in it.

They think it’s everything when in fact theres something outside that’s going to knock the door down one day, and they will be clinging to their stupid house and decorations. I want to open the door to the thing and shake its hand. I want to invite it into my house and have it do whatever it does with it. The house is useless and fake. Its pointless. It stops me from seeing what I know must be there. Everyone tries to convince me that I should go back and find a nice spot in the house to decorate it, but every time I try to do it I feel like shit. I eventually quit.

People accuse me of lacking motivation, of not being real, of not having an idea about the realities of life and what I should be doing. Im sure that if I should be decorating a house for my whole life then I would have been born with the intrinsic ability to do such a thing. Decorating would be just like breathing, or having my heart beat. It would take no thought and effort at all to do if this was what humans and I were meant to do. Doesn’t anyone else see that? Why am I the only person who wants to confront the reality of the situation? Why is it so scary? Why have they invested so much in everything when its clearly so fake and pointless? When the door opens for them, they wont know what to do. They will be scared because they will lose their precious fakeness. But it has always just been silly colours and rags anyway. It’s a massive effort to distract them from reality. I don’t know why. Is reality so bad? Why must it be avoided? I don’t know what im saying. If I have to leave my hat at the door before I open it, then so be it. I don’t care. It’s a fake hat anyway. Fuck you.

A Fight to the Finish

There was a black cat who liked to drink milk. All the other cats liked to drink milk, and when the store owner would empty out all the stale milk from his store every few days all the cats would race to drink the milk. This black cat, however, sat there and watched as the rest of the cats raced for the milk, pushing, fighting, scratching, arguing, to make sure they got as much of the milk as they could.

This black cat watched it all, every few days, the circus unfolded in front of him. It's not that the black cat didn't like milk, he did, but he didn't need it that badly.

One day, as the store owner was emptying the stale milk into the street for the cats to drink, one of the cats, who wasn't very good at pushing his way through the rest of them, noticed the black cat sitting there, watching it all. Usually none of them noticed him because they were obsessing over the milk, but for some reason today the white cat saw him.

This white cat walked over to the observer, and asked him, "What are you doing here? Don't you want any of the milk?"

The black cat looked at him and said, "Not really. If the milk was offered to me, I might have some, but look at the rest of the cats over there, they are doing more fighting, pushing, scratching, arguing, than they are drinking milk. They do not know what they are drinking at the moment, even though the milk passes through their lips. They are too busy worrying about their next lick, worrying about who else is going to stop them from getting their next little bit, that they are ignoring completely the tasting of the milk itself".

The white cat, after hearing this from the black cat, looked over to the scramble of cats trying to feverishly lick up as much milk as they could. He noticed their eyes darting around, looking for other cats who might push them away, always on guard, always fearful of losing their spot.

"But surely," said the white cat, "you can't have tasted this man's milk before. This milk is the best in all of the shops in the town, how can you say you don't need it when you haven't tasted it?"

The black cat answered back, "You're right, I haven't tasted this man's milk. And if I don't fight, scratch, argue, and push with all the other cats then I probably never will taste it. But neither will they."

Hearing this, the white cat sat down next to the black cat, and they watched from afar as the town cats faught, scratched, argued, and pushed each other for the rights to the milk.

Illusions

A butterfly goes to sleep. It wakes up as a man. The man goes to work, eats his lunch, sleeps with his wife, for 20 years. He goes to sleep. The butterfly wakes up.

A little beetle story.

There was once a man and his boy. The boy idolised everything the man did, and the man was very proud of his boy. The man named his boy "Karl". It's not important what the man's name was, to the boy he was "Father". The boy watched the man in everything he did, and was astounded by it. What a great man, he thought, that can make so much money and be so successful! What an incredible man was he.

One day the man and the boy were walking along a garden path. The boy stopped and looked on the ground, for there was something shiny that had caught his eye. He leaned down to look at it more closely, and it turned out it was a penny.

"Look, Father, a penny!" said the boy, as he looked up at the man. The man looked down upon the boy, with a gentle smile on his face, and said,
"Why don't you pick it up?"

The boy smiled a little more, as if it were possible, and turned down to pick up the penny. As he picked it up, he saw a little bug had made its home underneath the penny. It looked to the boy like a beetle of some sort. Without removing the smile from his face, he gently placed the penny back where he got it from, on top of the beetle.

The man observed this, and asked the boy,
"Why did you put the penny back down? Don't you want it?"

The boy, still smiling, looked to the man and said,
"Yes, I still want it; but that beetle needs it".