JonGnosThings

[jongnosthings]

I let my ego stand in the way of what promised to be one of the richest friendships life has offered me. I often regret that I wasn’t capable of expressing what I felt. All I needed was to be heard but my ego stood between us, wanting ownership over that which can not be owned. So much of my happiness has been stored away in memory; I want it back. I need to be liberated from my memory, from my currently constructed self. I never should have given it away, granted it to others instead of myself. I must reclaim that which was always mine from the constructs of my ego: joy.

[jongnosthings]

Dream

I once had the strangest dream. It was very simple in content, but extremely powerful regardless. I was sitting in a circle on the floor of a living room with a number of people, staring across and to my right into your eyes. It reminds me vaguely of watching “I Shouldn’t Be Alive”; of you taking cover under a boat’s windshield; of seeing a Del Taco employee dispense soft serve directly into their hand. The dream felt frozen in time, just as those memories do. There was no movement or noise, just a moment of awareness between two people and the initially subtle but distinct sensation of the environment burning away from that which captured my gaze. I remember it clearer than anything else from that long ago.

[jongnosthings]

If someone is fine without you, you must be fine without them.

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I’m grateful for you.

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poe

[jongnosthings]

I think the key to fitness is not making yourself do exercise that you don’t want to do, but finding exercise that you enjoy doing. Skating laps at Liberty Park keeps me enjoying movement.

[jongnosthings]

Mental Health “Why don’t you just be happy?”

From my perspective the primary issue with the "change the way you think" suggestions for the treatment of mental health issues isn’t necessarily that they are bad suggestions; they just fail to realize how deep the illness often runs. A mentally healthy person does not struggle with the creeping unknowable dread of chronic anxiety to anywhere near the same degree or frequency as one who has fallen into the pattern of such; it can become a somewhat continuous burden. A generally happy person doesn't realize how deep the depression of a long-afflicted person can run. Those who haven't been locked in a pattern of depression or anxiety can usually deal with their creeping darkness quite speedily, as it doesn't penetrate very deep. It's easily dispelled.

This is not the case for those who have spent entire weeks, months, or years in a place of emotional dysfunction. As the mental and emotional patterns play out, their place in one's mind grows. As time goes on the parts of your mind feeding the illness multiply, and the parts of your mind protecting you from it diminish.

In a very real way those with depression and anxiety find themselves as both subject and perpetrator of cruel and unfair internal judgement. The creeping voices that question their self worth and security are in fact their voices. The patterns have penetrated their minds so thoroughly that their mind works to perpetuate the negativity out of habit.

This, from my perspective, is the difference between chronic depression and passing sadness or self-doubt. Once a brain has been wired (though always mutable, repeated neural patterns solidify over time) in such a way that the patterns of sadness and depressive thoughts become self-perpetuating, it is a very different battle than that of someone with the Monday blues.

Thus we are left with a case of people without mental illness suggesting what works for them, because they are maintaining a stronghold against mental illness, and people with mental illness taking their failure to implement such suggestions to mean that they are inadequate or incurable. Neither are the case. The battle is one that must be fought much longer, and much harder for the mentally ill than the comparatively healthy; and both parties need to realize this for real communication and understanding to occur.

[jongnosthings]

You are functionally immortal: you can die but instantly come back to life. Over the many, many years you've become jaded and bored, and now dying is the only thing that gives you any sort of rush anymore. You're about to attempt your most elaborate and thrilling death yet.

I have lived a thousand times, or perhaps more accurately I have died a thousand times and simply awoken in a new place with a life only differentiated from the old only by the distinct memories of the hundreds or thousands of deaths preceding it (I've lost count) and a new face.

I used to think I was perhaps just a bit mad, or that I dreamt my death so often that I had come to believe it was really happening. This was dispelled by a number of attempts I successfully made to legitimize the deaths, personally at the least. Once I die my appearance usually changes enough that any attempt to prove it to others is met with accusations of madness or stalking.

Since then I have died in countless ways, some quite amusing. Much like a married couple desperately experimenting in bed in an attempt to keep their sex lives interesting, I have divulged in every imaginable method. Even the "fun" ones like some of the more euphoric overdoses dulled with time.

Lately I have descended to lows I never would have imagined possible. In my pursuit of feeling in what had become a desperately dull existence (can you imagine a depression severe enough to invoke suicide but without the release of the act?) I have turn to corrupting my fellow man. Playing with them by committing suicide over menial things was fun for a time, but what is fun for me now is provoking others into killing me. I enjoy watching their souls become dark and corrupted in my final moments. Consumed by an uncontrollable hatred; a hatred I so proudly invoked within them.

If there ever were a chance for my soul these recent provocations certainly nullify it. I have now done the worst thing I could imagine in all of my lifetimes. I didn't realize the implications of my actions. I always knew that some of my more dramatic antics would traumatize the unsuspecting witnesses of my games, but I never thought about what would happen if I turned people into killers. It's remarkable how much work it takes to get someone to take their first life, and more remarkable still how readily many of them will kill again.

I've stopped allowing myself to indulge in such a sick pleasure but my existence has become a stain of death and pain upon my kind. I am forced to live with it as the cycles of hatred I inadvertantly began perpetuate themselves. I don't know how to fix what I've broken, but I would give all of my lives to do so.

[jongnosthings]

The further you are from the center, the bigger your impact on the distribution’s shape.

If I were to disappear would I be missed? I can only assume my death would be used as a tool to fortify and amplify self-pity and sadness; but would my character be missed? Would people miss the things that make me unique? That define me as separate from them? My quirks seem largely inconvenient and tiresome to those I know, even those that proclaim love for me can take only a limited amount of my endless, tiresome approaches to life’s problems. My prying observation and investigative gaze, looking for useful information anywhere it may be found, including behind others’ walls of privacy. The bottomless pit of unresolved concepts and ideas waiting for additional information, which I obsessively seek. It’s a lonely existence holding yourself back. It’s a lonely existence making yourself “likeable”. It’s a lonely existence caring what others think. It’s a lonely existence carrying a heavy mind. Why do I search so vigorously for things that interest none that I know? Why do I love information that others see as white noise?

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Preservation of Cultural Sin

That which is both habit-forming and available within our society reinforces the society’s form through addiction’s tendency to self preserve.

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Triumph of Evil

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” - Edmund Burke

I have heard this quote used frequently as a call to arms for good people to respond to the manifestation of evil, I think this is a slight misinterpretation, or perhaps an incomplete interpretation.

For evil to prevail, it needs room to do so; people have to perform “bad” actions, and others (typically many more) have to stand by while said actions play out unchecked.

Fear is a great de-motivator, those who choose inaction when prompted to intervene commonly do so out of fear. Fear teaches us to look out for ourselves directly, fear teaches us that the big picture is out of our hands. Fear teaches us that all we can do is react.

This is the grand illusion beset upon us by our fears. This is the illusion that masks the hand of evil from the sight of good. Evil operates in the shadows, evil pollutes all it touches and it does so largely in secret. Evil is the spread of fear and malice; the degradation of trust between passer’s by. As long as people can’t trust each other, evil will prevail. Evil grows fastest where it can’t be seen, and it is easily obscured by a detached demeanor, by a happy face covering up an upset soul that’s well past the ability to cry for help.

How have we come to be this way? To believe that everyone’s problems are their own and that each of us should live in isolation of the troubles of others. If our troubles cannot be shared, what happens when someone is overwhelmed? If we don’t aid each other in the fight against our own darkness what happens to those that lose their battles? Do they become missionaries of darkness? Perhaps even unwittingly spreading mistrust and malice by being the quiet skeptical influence on humanity’s trustworthiness? Perpetuated by way of their developed inability to see the good in people. The truth of the matter is that they are projecting the suffering they have endured onto others, becoming a member of the very population that caused their suffering to begin with. As this process continues, trust across the population degrades, and the stress of being unable to trust converts ever-larger swaths of the population to apathy, detachment, and the suffering of isolation.

Surely it is difficult but who will carry the light to ward off darkness? Who will see that malevolent behavior is merely a manifestation of the weaknesses that we all carry as humans? A just world is a dark world in the absence of compassion. Regardless of our suffering we must do all we can to keep from propagating pain. Let others know our pain, because if we don’t it will twist us until it leaks through the cracks and affects others in a way that perpetuates the cycle.

The only way to combat human suffering is by treating each other excellently whenever possible. If we don’t go out of our way to build trust then the  unavoidable degradation of trust caused by the misfortunes of life will eventually undermine our support structures and pave the road for those twisted souls who’ve fallen so far as to wish only to spread their pain to others forcefully.

[jongnosthings]

I miss the knowledge that I was walking forwards. I knew in the core of my being, perhaps for the first time in the presence of my adult mind, that no step was wasted. I know not the legitimacy of the feeling, but I know that I miss it dearly. Now every path I choose is from a host of options, every conviction clouded by countless potential alternatives. Is it possible to regain the naive, innocent devotion of youth?

[jongnosthings]

"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones." - Marcaus Aurelius (allegedly)

[jongnosthings]

Imagine, if you will, a life lacking positive emotional experience to the degree that by comparison you are your own pinnacle of happiness when complacent and comfortable. You don’t know any better, you don’t know what love feels like, you barely know what excitement feels like. Your problems are your own and you learn to deal with them silently. This is the life of the lonely.

Brief experiences of outward love can overshadow years and years of lesser experience. It feels as if your entire self melts away, the things you thought were important are revealed as little more than distractions. A life, a being, shattered in a moment. This is the fate of those who learn love but fail to obtain it: as their initial patterns of being return they make futile attempts to slip back into their ignorant comfort. Try as they may to fool themselves, they’ve learned the truth; they are incomplete.

[jongnosthings]

I remember in grade school when I first started meeting my mental guards. Prior to their arrival all of my interactions peers had been genuine, usually in the pursuit of curiosity and fun. Inevitably, my peers began catering their behavior in the ways of our elders around them. Appearances maintained, social expectations adhered to, manipulations executed. I never understood it; the only way I knew to live was to follow my most genuine emotional drives. I didn’t understand this subversion of the heart in the name of the mind, in the name of adherence to expectation. Eventually, my refusal to participate led to my isolation and from within it my own mental demons were manifest. In the years since, I’m sure I have pushed others to a similar fate. Perhaps this is a natural part of development: to lose one’s inner child and to eventually find it again, on the other side of vast oceans of learning and experience.

[jongnosthings]

Some people seem as islands of familiarity in a sea of foreign experience. They remind us of comfort, of how to feel at home even when far from it. These people serve as sanctuaries in an otherwise unsure world. They cannot be claimed. You cannot plant your flag in the solace of another’s presence because you can’t own their existence; you can only appreciate it for the time they grant you.

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SoC 1

I have been reading about different states of consciousness, and how to move between them.

As the most natural and regular changes in conscious state come while sleeping, I’ve started there.

I read that the first step is learning to be aware of what happens naturally as you approach sleep.

As I lay still in bed, trying to observe the transition between waking and sleeping consciousness I slipped into a dream. I was aware enough to notice it happening; I was suddenly enveloped in an experience visually and emotionally and I would think “Oh, this is a dream that is different than the void of thought I previously occupied” this awareness allowed(forced?) me to slip out of the dream and back into the empty transitional state from which I had entered it. From here I found myself slipping in and out of various dreams until I lost recollection and awoke the following morning.

In my attempts to learn dream lucidity I consider this perhaps my most significant accomplishment yet. I plan to work to extend my time in that state of transition, and beyond that to begin to manipulate my dreams from a place of awareness.