Title: Multidimensional Adventurer

Gender: Male

Age: 61

Sun Sign: Virgo

Location: Sonoma, CA

                            Like a Splinter in the Mind

     Let me tell you why you are here.  You are here because
     you know something.  What you know you can't explain,
     but you feel it.  You've felt it your entire life, felt that 
     something was wrong with the world.  You don't know what, 
     but it's there.  Like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.
                                 Morpheus, in The Matrix

   It was 1968 and I was a teenager working as a shipping clerk at Sears in San Jose, California.  While working there I got to know Francisco, a chemistry major at San Jose State.  One Monday I asked him about his weekend and he told me about taking LSD while hanging out at the beach.  He said he was lying on the beach looking up at some birds flying overhead when suddenly he was gliding through the sky, looking down at what  had been his body looking up at the birds.  I had never taken LSD and asked him if the horror stories ever worried him.  “Psychedelics are the only thing that get me out of bed in the morning,” was his reply.  
   The next weekend I began my experimentation with psychoactive substances.  A few years later, while roaming a rural hillside in the nearby town of Los Gatos, I experienced a perfect, cosmic love and joy.  At that moment it seemed perfectly obvious that what we called existence was better described by the term coined by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick–VALIS; vast, active, living, intellignce system.  Before that moment life seemed lifeless, non-experiencing energy, i.e., I was a materialist.  But on that day this young materialist was baptised in the living waters of life.  Since then every moment in what the world calls reality has seemed an hallucination; which raises the question, “What is the difference between what we call reality and what we call hallucination?”   As the effects of the drug wore off and I descended back down into mass consciousness, I felt that splinter in the mind, and came back with the conviction that we, as a species had, somewhere,
taken a wrong turn.  

     Morning has broken, like the first morning,
     Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird,
     Praise for the singing, praise for the morning,
     Praise for them springing fresh from the word.
                          Cat Stevens

   Now imagine the magnitude of the problem if a whole species goes round the bend.  And while it sounds counterintuitive to refer to the normative patterns of a species as aberrant, if those normative patterns are so destructive as to threaten the survival of the species while said species remains in total denial as to the seriousness of the threat, I feel that qualifies as aberrant.
Speaking of aberrant, I was born in 1948, a few years after the largest conflict in human history, which caused the deaths of about 72 million people.  When Joseph Stalin died in 1953, he had personally overseen the deaths of about 20 million of his own countrymen in political purges.  Not to be outdone, Mao Zedong, in power from 1949 to1976, had somewhere between 40 to 80 million of his own people executed in an effort to teach what  it means to be a good communist.
   Within is a blog titled, City of Mind; it is a memoir of my coming-of-age in an age gone mad.  Which is not to imply there  was a time when we made more sense.  The main difference between our self-destrutive tendencies then and now is the vast superiority of our implements of destruction. 
   If I were to give a word to this splinter in the mind, it would be bifurcation; any mode of perception or philosophy that divides the unbroken whole of reality into some form of duality.  All materialist or naturalist philiosophies bifurcate, in that they have an inherent subject/object duality, as well as a living/non-living duality–“the denial that the most pervasive processes of nature involve any such psychical function as sensing, feeling, remembering, desiring or thinking.” (Charles Hartshorne).  But extreme forms of idealist philosophies also bifurcate by separating body or material existence from spirit, or by
suggesting some sort of spiritual hierarchy or rank.  So this splinter in the mind can be traced back to a split in the mind.  
   My hope is that this text brings us a step closer to the realization that there is no inherent duality in reality, that any such split exists only in the mind, and that If we are to access the real this split must be healed and, conversely, if we are to heal, we must have access to the real.  For me this text is both idea and prayer; a prayer that we might bring and end to all this violence and greed once we all feel deep in our soul that all is part of one living whole, a prayer that we might move one step closer to realizing we don't exist as isolated egos, but as extensions of a living intelligence called love.
 
    Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning,
    Born of the one light, Eden saw play,
    So praise with elation, praise every morning,
    God's recreation of the new day.         
                  Cat Stevens         

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