"Altered States"

Writing in the dark? that's how it begins...

Fears crowd me in,
Into a corner -
Where I lash out,
Like a cat..?

Nine lives, I say!
Or a million....
Or billions...

Spread across time and space -

Such strange nonsense,
Such surreal sensations...

As each day, I awake,
Anew!
Past days are drifting into a fog -
Hazy recollections of happy, sad -
All these sensations!

That the mind demands to understand,
And theories are tossed out,
While others are cuddled close, and kept warm
From the deadly winter
Of cold, empty space.

"Theorize this!,"
Men model -
Or is that women,
In our strangely skewed societies?

I KNOW THAT
this is nonsense...

----- or an intro...? -----

Imagine, if you will - just imagine, that we awake in new manifestations, that may or may not be the same body which we were in last night. If you are aware, while you sleep, do you get locked in to one vessel? Will your hairs grow grey, and your wrinkles grow deep?

If you dream, are you in this world, or another? Yet, I can hear the naysayers, scoffing, claiming "Astral Projection Bullshit!"

I doubt that shifting consciousness is a novel idea. I imagine some philosopher, some where, has entertained it in the past. We even see allusions about it, in such movies like "The Matrix" and "The 13th Floor"; and it is often dismissed as mere delusions...

Yet..! What evidence against? What evidence for? ...and who's to say that the scientific models can even capture the full reality of our lives. Hell - electrons don't like to settle down to one position, so why would our consciousness - such a grand gathering of electrons - feel constrained to stay in our heads?

Oh, but another "bizarre Bean theory" - who's to say that our consciousness only exists in one point in time and space? I might well be meeting myself, multiple times per day - refracted as I was, through the lens of the universe. But, of course, that's all musing speculation, trying to make sense of "Deja Vu" (Black cats?) and common reference frames and complexities that I can only see a micro-sliver of, in this brief life laid before my feet.

---- and a change -----

I've heard it said, that God speaks through other people. I've also heard it said that God is deep down, inside each and every one of us.

...and 30 years ago, I tried to cast God as a great diamond, possibly fractured, where each of us was one of the myriad facets - we were all God, and part of God. And, I would claim, today, that God is not omniscient; but rather, trying to make sense of how It came to be; wherein we are It's tools and sensors. (Perhaps the imagery is flawed, that's the weakness of models)

Us humans are strongly shaped by societal forces. We have been telling stories around the campfire, for time immemorial. We want this frightening universe to make sense, desperately. So, we create mythos, and we create archetypes, and we create dreams - trying to bring order into the chaos of lights and sounds that we find ourselves embedded in. A little bit at a time, we develop a huge set of scripts to act out our lives by, hoping that behaving in this or that manner will bring solace and relief - or at least prevent our neighbor from whacking us over the head with a stick.

-- another aside ---

There's a big, old iceberg in our culture; revolving around sex, essentially. I want to drill into that ice, to cast out some taboos, to challenge the notions... or at least, acknowledge the dialogue we're telling ourselves. ...and yet, I feel it strays wildly, like my mind is apt to do. "Sex has normally been the path for propagating humanity." Yet... as aware beings, is that what all of us want?

---- brain's puckered out, for the moment. might come back to this, one day. for now, it is a first draft sketch... ----