Journey to Nothing

[LastThursday]

Take my hand, in white, take flight, we'll go together, flowing to the four corners, breathing forever.

I'll be your moonlit path, through the dark, until the morning sparks, then we'll shine bright, forever.

Take my hand, in white, come fly with me.

[LastThursday]

I do wonder about my night dreams sometimes. I was generally under the assumption that some amount of processing was going on in dreams - the consequence being that dreams are a kind of reflection of waking life. But just sometimes dreams are so off-the-wall that I wonder if instead I'm actually a voyeur peering into a different world. To the dream:

There's a big white-walled room. I intuitively know it's the meeting space of some hotel. As the voyeur I'm looking down disembodied from the ceiling like a three-quarter view, and a woman (possibly blonde) is dressed in a sparkly cocktail dress and open toed flat shoes with fluffy bits. There's a sensation of coldness and ice. In fact in place of a carpet the whole floor is strewn with crushed ice cubes. She starts to crunch tentatively across the ice. As she gains her confidence I can see that she's actually quite drunk and is swaying as she walks across the room. The ice begins to slowly melt and turn to slush and she wades through it.

Somehow, I know that she needs to drive home from whatever partying she's been up to. And, it turns out she's a truck driver! I desperately want to tell her that it's a very bad idea, but I have no way of getting her attention.

WTF? I can't relate this to anything in my life. Maybe I've had the privilege of peering into another reality? Nice.

Edited April 19, 2022 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

I'm trying not be sucked in the vortex. What vortex you ask? This one right here, the journal. I have my reasons - which I may journal about...

So. Yes. Anyway. Cold showers.

I have taken to taking cold showers every morning in the dark. I've found that taking a cold shower - despite how initially nasty it is - gives me a slight high. Straight after I wake up I often feel slightly euphoric, and having a cold shower seems to intensity that sensation. Why dark? Well because bright light seems to wake me up too much and kills that euphoria. I'm sure Wim Hof could explain why to me.

The only drawback is that I don't shave. A long time ago I started shaving in the shower without a mirror, just in case I ever go blind, and it also saves time and faff. Standing in a cold shower and shaving is nearly impossible, plus a warm face is preferable for shaving.

It's a phase.

[LastThursday]

More @LastThursday poetry (don't roll your eyes):

Come as you are, I don't expect no heirs or graces, just contorted faces, not complacency, some insatiable screams and shouts. Come as you are, I expect close up faces, lips in embraces, nothing fancy, a flat table with ice cream and dinner places. Came as you were, I didn't expect nothing racy, but woman were we crazy, like ecstasies, not embarrassing, just sated dreams and mouths.

[LastThursday]

I went for another one of my famous (in my circles) urban hikes yesterday. I do this mostly as an escape, but also to get to know a place better. Also, I like the warm satisfaction of having completed a mission. This time it was about eight miles from Uxbridge to Heathrow, those places probably won't mean much to you except maybe for you international flyers. London is big and there's lots to explore. 

I usually like some reason to walk from point A to point B, maybe it's just to continue from where I left off last time (Uxbridge), or maybe have points of interest (Heathrow and planes coming and going) along the way. But the main reason is exploratory, to "feel out" different areas and how they segue into each other. There's also a sense of just being with your own senses which eventually brings you into a meditative state. 

The route itself was mostly uninteresting unfortunately, busy main roads and mile upon mile of suburban housing - but it didn't matter so much. Each area does have its own character, and it's possible to imagine how a place was countryside not so long ago, with bits of greenery, woods, commons, golf courses and parks hinting at how things used to be. 

The highlight of the hike was spotting two buzzards slowly drifting low overhead, whilst I was traversing a high street. This was an impossible sight. Buzzards are rare even in deep countryside and are mostly seen flying high over farmer's fields - and never over a city. But they must have strayed from outside of London. The route I walked mostly skirted near the west side of the greater London boundary and beyond would have been fields and reservoirs. The synchrony with the huge and noisy metal birds at the end of the route wasn't lost on me - they also coming and going from outside of London.

I felt I could have walked further, I normally like to do ten miles or so and the day was blazing sunshine. But I'd reached my intended destination and I could feel my body wanting to rest a while and I was hungry, so I gave it up when I reached the tube station on the perimeter of the airport. Pushing further would have spoiled the experience in some way.

I do hike with other people sometimes, but I find the experience completely different. The silences have to be filled and there's a more urgent intent and tempo to the walk, as if the destination is the prize and glory is simply completing the hike. Certainly sharing the walk with someone is more like an adventure and if you've done the route before you can be a sort of tour guide pointing things out along the way. Also, the time seems to go quicker. Neither mode is good or bad. If I'm feeling meditative or contemplative, then I go alone, for energy and adventure I go with someone else.

[LastThursday]

She makes me laugh so much:

And sort of related. Maybe I'll try this myself some day?:

 

[LastThursday]

Futuresight

Our mission is to build a sustainable future for our planet, by using systems approaches to tackle some of the most intractable problems we now face. We see ourselves as catalysts for change by taking many ideas and viewpoints into consideration.
 

Open positions:

Director of Sustainability and People (Sus)

Responsibilites for exploring long term sustainable options in all areas of people, technology, agriculture, energy, environment and finite resource use.

Director of Polymathy and Creativity (Poly)

Responsible for pulling from many different resources, facts, ideas, meta views, big picture, systems thinking, and synthesising new ways to solve difficult problems.

Director of Arts and Technology (Artech)

Responsible for putting all aspects of technology to use in solving problems. Visioning and advertising, problem modelling, promotional material.

Directory of Chronology and Storytelling (Chron)

Responsible for visioning, mission statements, advertising, social media, media, lobbying, bringing groups together and finding new ways to work together. Responsible for planning and executing on those plans.
 

How we work:

We have a flat organisational structure, where each department works very closely with each other to bootstrap a future we all want to live in.

This is a typical work flow:

Sus will take a problem such as how to create sustainable transport. It gathers statistics and does impact modelling both now and going into the future. It will identify problem areas and end goals. Poly will then take these results and pull in information from related areas of the "system" in which the problem lies, for example the impact to people, culture, wildlife and use of resources and come up with many scenarios and solutions. It will work closely with Artech to vision the feasibility of those solutions technically and with Sus to ensure long term sustainability.  Once best working solutions are in place, Chron will build a vision and narrative and get agreement at all levels, then create a plan to execute on. This process iterates throughout the lifetime of the project.

 

The first problem is bootstrapping the organisation from nothing.

 

[LastThursday]

I often wake up with tunes going around in my head. This morning it was this:

I didn't question it. But I did put it on the laptop and had a little dance. This is unusual since I'm no dancer and I'm not a morning person. Oh, and my brain's stuck in the 80's...

Edited April 27, 2022 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

When you're doing self development, it's important to have some sort of sign or signal that you're actually developing; otherwise you're just spinning your wheels. This happens a lot. There's a fair amount of experimentation whether that's self imposed or from external sources. It's often dressed up as something other than experimentation though: formal therapy, heroic life goals, serious serious stuff. That's not to denigrate it, experimentation is just fine with me - and mostly you need those external sources to inspire different ways to experiment. Experimentation requires being truthful to yourself, playfulness and a fair dose of courage.

Signals. For me one of the primary signals of change is lightness. All the times I've had major shifts or breakthroughs I've felt like a weight has suddenly been lifted off me. This is telling, because it's my body that is feeling the release. Most change happens in the body and with how you feel moment to moment. How does the body know how to feel release? I find that super interesting, because it implies the ability feel "released" was there all along, it's not something the body dreamt up in the moment. I mean it could be, but the release is positive and feels good, the body already knows how to do those things. I would argue that feeling "released" is the baseline or tabula rasa for the body. 

The body also learns to feel tense and knotted up, as life throws bad experiences at you. It does this as a form of self-preservation, it's fight or flight. With enough stimulus the body encodes the fight or flight directly into its neurology, and you're permanently in tension. Despite that, the body still knows what it is like to not be in tension, it just choses not to express this. The acquired tension, then manifests in any number of ways, with aches and pains, recurring illness, and bad mental health. 

Once you have a breakthrough, that lightness feeds into everything else. You find yourself behaving and thinking differently from before, and sometimes you even think "why the hell was I like that before?" - even better you don't care about how you were before, you just enjoy being your new self. Thing is, you can keep releasing indefinitely, and each time it feels better, and that's because you're slowly returning back to your authentic baseline. That is what "authentic" actually means: nothing is impeding your natural expression.

For me, I have a lot of hang ups about how I should be expressing myself. It's all very controlled, and all very much in the name of self-preservation. I'm embarrassed at myself when I do express myself openly, and I find myself always having to pretend I'm not embarrassed. I feel that expressing myself is always way OTT. And I have to constantly soothe myself by saying: "look you really didn't have to worry about it, you were just fine". This kind of toing and froing is exhausting. The answer is to release it all, and embrace a new and joyful normal.

Edited April 28, 2022 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

How do you go about not letting the past define who you are as a person? And, why would you even want to jettison the past like that?

It seems that the younger you are the more disproportionately you are affected by your environment - that is especially true for the people you grew up around. This strong imprinting in your younger years carries through to you right now. We are defined by a collage of different experiences both good and bad. A lot of this imprinting is subconsciously (despite me not liking the word) expressed in the body: our mannerisms, the way we use our bodies, our fears, our emotions, joy, sadness and so on; the rest is expressed as episodic memory and thinking. 

When you're told to "let things go" we attempt to simply stop thinking about some past event, or to try and think about it differently. Often this fails because we in fact don't know how to "let go" fully, or even we're too attached to our past and we don't really want to let go of it. This gets to the heart of the problem of changing ourselves and stopping suffering. Most of the change we experience as adults is just window dressing. I asked a friend of mine recently out of curiosity: "Do you think I've changed?" - he's known me for about 25 years - "No you're exactly the same". I found that kind of depressing because I know for a certain fact that I've done a lot of work on myself; I think he meant it as a compliment. But it confirms to me that most of the change I thought I had experienced is not noticeable to others - I feel like a different person to the one 25 years ago, but on some level I'm not.

As a thought experiment if you were sat in a lab and a mad scientist with his fancy gadget offered you the chance to selectively wipe your memories (and associated behaviours), would you do it? I suspect that most people would be terrified and say no. We are our memories, we are our behaviours. We cherish those as our identities, even the ugly bits.

It is completely possible to wipe your memories however. More precisely it's possible to change the way our bodies expresses trauma. Memories in themselves have no emotional content, it's our bodies that supply the emotion and feeling of constantly "reliving" our past. The past is gone of course, which makes this process perplexing: what is the point of all this reliving and suffering? Wouldn't evolution have been such that we just live our lives from moment to moment without a care for what already happened? Yes, we need to learn from our past mistakes and our past achievements, but once learned why do we often continue to have all that attached emotional baggage?

Personally I'm sick of my own behaviours, not because they're bad or evil per se, but because they just don't gel with who I want to be, they're counterproductive. And most of those less-than-ideal behaviours are rooted in my past and younger years. But because they're imprinted into my body and emotions, I can't just think my way out of them. I've mostly done the work of thinking and recontextualising most of what already happened to me as a kid - in that sense I've already let go and forgiven - what needs to change is how my body expresses itself right now. When my coach says to me: "go set up a meeting with X" and I get the tightening feeling in my chest, that is what needs to change - no amount of thinking will change that reaction.

The irony about all of this, is that I already know exactly how to change these bodily reactions. This is what NLP taught me. In the story The Electric Ant by Philip K Dick, an android realises that he's an android and starts playing with his own programming tape, and experiences a change in his reality. This is the feat I'm trying to achieve. Having someone external (a coach e.g.) can help a great deal, but ultimately the sensations are in your body not theirs, and only you can really understand them and change them. 

Every time a traumatic or negative reaction arises in your body, it gets reimprinted with your current context. So even the simple act of continuously engaging with trauma can change your body's reaction to it (this is how exposure to phobias can help cure them e.g.). So the trick to speedy change is to reimprint your reactions in the right way and strongly. NLP does this by triggering a strong positive reaction simultaneously along with the negative one - and this is nearly guaranteed to change the original negative reaction. This is how to play with your own programming tape. The only difficulty is doing this on yourself, because you're trying to do two things at once, and having someone else (an expert) help you do this is far more effective.

But even if you know how to change your own bodily programming, would you want to? I find that even identifying my body's reactions to situations is hard to pin down, let alone change. And my body is very attached to all that trauma... damn it.

[LastThursday]

I'm going to moan about words and how much of philosophising seems to be hot air around definitions. 

What I've noticed is that there is a lot of this:  take a word (e.g. love) and put forward your opinions and thoughts about it. The method is to hope that something new pops out of the woodwork and you end up having a different slant on the word than everybody else has - or at least your aim is to be deep and insightful. Whist this process can be good to garner greater understanding about seemingly everyday words, to me, it seems like a limited exercise. It's rather being like a talking dictionary, informative but somehow unsatisfying. Some of the watchwords that go through the mill (on the forum) are: love, spirituality, god, sexuality, being, infinity.

I guess I'm being a little disingenuous, all these watchwords are really concepts, but my sentiment is the same. There is a reality out there that doesn't neatly fit into the confines of concepts. This is why philosophy is so convoluted, because in reality there are no boundaries to the concepts that are being expounded upon: love bleeds into spirituality. If you're a novice in the process of philosophy it's very easy to get tangled up and lose your way.

What is a concept? (I'm doing philosophy now bear with me.)

A concept is like a machine with interlocking parts that together perform a function. Words then get attached to the concept so that we can talk about them or at least refer to them. Words have a very definite feel to them as if they're made of solid stone, and that is their function: to make communication easier by reducing complicated concepts into short verbal utterances. Words are a shorthand for concepts. But concepts are also a shorthand, they carve out a space from the infinite permutations of reality to make it more manageable. So there's a two step process of reduction here from reality to concepts to words. For "reduction" read "distortion". Words and concepts are really a distortion of reality; love and sexuality don't actually exist at all. This is why I feel philosophy can unsatisfying. But if you tell someone "love doesn't exist" they will probably argue strongly with you that it does, or think you're suffering from insanity, or that you're having a hard time and need more "love" yourself.

All this explains why it is impossible to definitively answer questions like "what is god?" or "what is gender?" or "what is the meaning of life?", because all those words and concepts are imaginary and ill defined. If you want a pretence at definiteness try mathematics. Never trust anyone who says they have the definitive answer.

[LastThursday]

I've taken to dancing in the morning. I put on my fancy headphones that block out the world, put on something danceable and move around like a loon. It certainly loosens everything up and pumps out those endorphins, it's also very cathartic, but I also love music for its own sake. I've always felt that I'm a crap dancer, I just feel so stiff and uncoordinated. I even took Latin dancing lessons a few years ago, and boy was I bad, but I did manage to burn through my self consciousness! 

What I've realised is that I can move and flow it just takes practice. In the end I think it will teach me to reconnect with my physicality, improve my walking gait and posture, and hopefully help me move better at Badminton. I never thought of myself as a graceful mover ha! I've always known I'm a loon though.

[LastThursday]

This kept coming up my recommendations, so in the end I clicked on it. I'm always intrigued at the story behind and told by paintings, the little plaques on the wall in galleries never give you much backstory:

 

[LastThursday]

I'm continuing to work on myself along with my coach. When can I stop working on myself? I dunno, maybe I won't. Stagnation is the work of the Devil. Whatever circumstance we find ourselves in, it is or becomes normal for us - even if it's miserable or ecstatic or something in-between. We always want more or something different though, that's our nature; just like cats like to stalk birds and dogs like fetching sticks. It's our nature to constantly expand and explore our potentials because we know it's latent within us. Anything which suppresses our latent nature depresses us and constricts us.

Although. 

We are limited: in time, place, abilities, physicality, circumstance, thought. Part of the joy of limitation is in working with it, around it, or pushing through it. It's also human nature to tell good stories of how we overcame our struggles and succeeded: it's the hero/ine's journey. Like great art we work within the media at our disposal and use the limitations as something to push forward against. The struggle against limitation can be hell, but we always expand our boundaries as a result - and so we get to express our true natures.

Also.

Our potentiality needs to be directed. Having a sense of direction gives us impetus and shows us where to expend our energies, we need hope and purpose. We humans work so much better with certainty however ill-defined it is, even if the certainty is just a working hypothesis. So we push against limitation and pull towards purpose. And when it's all over we get to tell the story, the joy is in the story and the journey. What more can a man like me need? 

[LastThursday]

I really need a holiday from myself.

Most folks use surrogates such as social media or binge Netflix or play videogames to get away from themselves. There are other ways to be absent, such as meditating or getting lost in creativity. I find all this sort of thing work to a degree, and you may have your own escapes. I want whole days where I can be not me.

The absence of myself implies the presence of someone else. I can't ever get too far away from being a human, this physical body doesn't let me. I could take drugs I suspect and that would even take me away from this body, and I can probably spend whole days doing it. But without drugs, the only option is to become someone else.

The current me is an intricate system of memories, manerisms and context. To become someone else implies changing all of those things. Saying that I do feel like there is this disembodied ineffable pinpoint at the centre of it all that I can identify as me. I've had moments in my experimentation where that pinpoint has shifted and I've felt like someone else entirely. What's a better name for that pinpoint? Let's call it my anchor. My anchor is the thing that responds to the name "Guillermo"; it being that recognition of myself as myself.

One way to pull that anchor away is what I call forcing. Techniques include wearing different clothing, talking differently, moving differently, hypnosis. With sustained effort I have longish periods where that anchor is not my anchor, but someone else's. It's a kind of possession, or walk in. In fact I will often invite that new person in and expel the current one (temporarily).

This is fundamentally play acting, the things kids do in the playground, where they are temporarily possessed by the characters in their imaginations. I could argue that there is a real "Guillermo" living inside this body, but in actuality I'm play acting even him - it's just that he's taken hold and become anchored firmly in the seabed.

This is all very powerful stuff. Having the flexibility to genuinely switch characters and take a holiday from yourself is both relieving and crucial to growing yourself. It allows for the expression of completely different traits.  And for me it's all a step further to mastering my own psyche.

Edited May 15, 2022 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

I spent Sunday editing midi in Cubase of one of my piano compositions. I'll do this sporadically when inspiration seizes me. Boy is it time consuming. Mostly, I'm trying to iron out the deficiencies in my playing and reach some sort of polish and perfection. Like photography, it's better that you take a good picture in the first place rather than try to "fix it" later. I find it amusing that I can't play my own compositions, what's in my head is always far in advance of my technical ability. With a lot of fingering practice I can get closer, but that's also time consuming - Cubase allows me to be more precise to achieve the effect I want. I still need a much better workflow, one that doesn't get in the way of my creativity. A more permanent setup would help for a start.

The thought does keep crossing my mind that I should spend even more time and just write my own midi editing software, so my workflow is exactly how I want it. My idea is a kind of pianola roll (so vertical) and big fat blocks (easy to grab and move around) representing notes with time going downwards - scrolling sideways with a mouse-wheel never feels natural. But I know writing software is always a deep-time-sucking-vortex-of-a-rabbit-hole activity. Cubase really does suck for midi editing with a mouse though. But yo! I'm living in the 21st century not the 20th, there's probably a shit-ton of software that will give me exactly what I want. Only time is my enemy, and I fu...... hate searching for and trying things out, it's so time wasting and boring.

The other side of the coin is getting my stuff out there. What's the point in just creating and hoarding stuff just for myself? This is a less onerous activity. I have already dabbled with Soundcloud and directly on Youtube, I have basic video editing skills so there's that. The issue here is capturing high quality output from my Yamaha keyboard, heck I just need to buy the cables and a high enough table for the laptop to sit on (just do it man!). It'll be going to mp3 anyway most likely, so instant quality drop. Maybe even buy a dedicated laptop.

And the third side of the coin is actually coming up with long enough compositions. I always get good ideas, but then trip over myself because of the workflow, lack of finger skill, and getting bogged down in details too quickly. I also need to greatly improve my "big picture" view of compositions, where are they going, what's the journey? That will help me produce longer pieces and improve creativity.

The main question is how serious am I? Or is it just an occasional fancy? Dunno. But it gives me joy and that's probably enough.

[LastThursday]

Dictionary Salad

Reflect, perfect (n.)?, defect (n.), perfect (v.), inspect, retrospect, circumspect, deflect, disconnect, neglect, imperfect, reject (v.), reject (n.), infect?, detect, inject, disinfect, suspect (n./v.): insect?, intellect?, sect?; interject!, subject: resurrect: respect.

[LastThursday]

Are you extraordinary? No? Yes? Or are you just ordinary, run-of-the-mill, nothing special? Are you broken and beyond repair? Maybe you're all of those things.

I sometimes think about how beautiful people must view themselves.  The only conclusion I can draw is that they experience perpetual cognitive dissonance: they belong, but they're different. There must be long stretches of normality interspersed with moments where they're fed specialness, which they may or may not learn to integrate within themselves.

It's not just beautiful people though. If you have/had decent parents they'd've shown you how special you are, but those moments would have just been highlights in a long history of everyday ordinariness. If you had indecent parents then you well know what being broken is and existing in a state of  "less than". 

Sometimes you yearn to break free into the burning light of specialness. I would even argue that that is our natural state - we are godly beings masquerading as mortals. But like a moth to a flame there is always an inherent danger of gripping tightly to that specialness - we become addicts, always in fear of losing it. No. How much better it is to realise that we are neither gods nor lowly mortals. 

We are like a river meandering from place to place, exploring the landscape, the highs and the lows. The joy is in the exploration and constantly rushing forward, gathering momentum, never lingering too long in one place or another. It's ok to be broken, ok to be ordinary, ok to be special.

You're ok.

[LastThursday]

I had a dream where you shone transparently, just as an animated avatar. I wasn't sure it was you, I could make nothing out, you were silent. How I wanted it to be true. The light was grey, your clothing fluttering in the breath of my dream imagination. I reached out and tried to encompass you. You turned to a silvery liquid and enveloped me in your very being. I awoke, gasping, blinking, disbelieving.

[LastThursday]

I'm a very open and liberal person, and yet I'm a pretty private person too. How do I square this circle? 

I've always felt some amount of cringe talking about and being asked about myself. There are parts of me I don't wish to expose or I feel would mark me out as different somehow, or that don't paint me in a good light. There's a public persona and my private persona. That's not to say I'm an axe murderer, just that I feel uncomfortable (publicly) with some truths about myself. To that extent my public persona has always been somewhat curated. I also don't naturally rehearse my thought processes, so having to "explain myself" to others has never felt natural. A lot of it is just plain emotions anyway, which are always hard to put into words.

That process of curation definitely goes against my innate openness. I want people to know I exist and that I have something to say. That openness also pushes me to be somewhat of an exhibitionist in all the myriad ways that manifests itself - including on here. Sometimes I feel as though I push too far and then I have to withdraw back into my privacy and re-assess myself, berate myself, curate further.

If anything the wisdom of age has taught me, it is to take the middle path in most instances. Be open, but not too open, public but not too public. It's a learned way of being rather than an authentic one. 

I recently got invited for an interview of sorts for a dating show here for national TV. My friends are super excited, I was/am definitely very apprehensive about it. I spent several hours being quizzed in front of a camera and bright lights, about my history, love life and desires. Again, I had to carefully curate what I thought would be good to say and of course, the interviewer (producer) wanted an emotional angle and soundbites. The entire process was surreal and somewhat out of my comfort zone. Naturally, when my friend had originally pushed me forward for the application a year ago, I said "yes" in my open way, not really thinking too much about the consequences. I learned a long time ago to say "yes" to most things and then to back out afterwards if it was too much or things changed - it can be disappointing for others, but it has also opened me up to many new experiences.

I've yet to film or be invited for the main part of the show. But if it goes ahead (it may not), then one of the potential consequences is that I will get recognised in the street. I'm ambivalent about that or even wanting that - anonymity is a pleasure I wish to maintain - but the exhibitionist part of me wants it. Another, is that people who do know me, will probably want to contact me and talk about my experiences, which given the above I also feel ambivalent about. The elephant in the room, is that it's a dating show and my lengthy singledom could potentially come to an end - that's actually the least of my concerns, ha! But I'm ambivalent even about that. There's no pleasing some.

I imagine on my gravestone:

"RIP

Here's lies the body of LastThursday

He was AMBIVALENT."

But I console myself in having been part of the 0.1% chosen to participate in the show, maybe I am special you know? lol.