#676

Two days I took a shower and I was shaving my face. Weird I know, but that’s how I do it. Shave most off in the shower, glance in mirror afterwards and touch up as needed. So, there I was, lights all out and only the faintest light of the setting sun underneath the door. I was shaving and thinking nothing, but I was in a mood. I was focusing on what I was doing, on the feel of the razor against my skin, whether it was gliding smoothly or not and by that judging if I needed to go over it again. Then a thought out of the blue; this is for control. We chop off our hair for control. I thought of my chest, of woman who shave their legs and pussy. It’s for control. I’ve heard someone once say that the reason some women shave completely is a sort of retreat back to a child-like look and that men like that look for the same reason. The idea seemed ludicrous to me then though I couldn’t put my finger really onto why at the time. I just knew it was wrong because I can see a shaved woman and like it a ton without even the remotest thought about screwing a younger girl, let alone a pre-pubescent one. Seeing it now in this light, I think I know why. It’s control. When we think of people who take care of their appearance, we say they are taking care of themselves, that they have style, that sort of thing. Is that what style is? Is that what taking care of yourself is? 

I don’t think so. 

And even if it was, that’s not going deep enough. Why do we do it to ourselves? It’s simple…we do it to control ourselves, to define ourselves to our ideals. If you think of the majority of what humankind does, perhaps all of what humankind does, ultimately it’s a grasp for control whether obvious of subversive. I think especially of learning….why do we learn? What is the process of learning? We name each and every new thing, we define it, and thusly, we eliminate all the other possible things it could be. We control it. 

Or we think we do. I don’t think we control much, especially not ourselves. Have you ever done Ketamine? DXM? Any other dissociative hallucinogenic? If you haven’t I don’t this idea if explainable to you. I know I never understood it until experimentation with them. You see, when you’re on this sort of drug, your normal base of where you are changes and you experience the world in a way you never have before. If you have the presence of mind and are a touch lucky, you can remember how it feels, how you work, how everything is. Then you realize who you are with a clarity that is not possible without having yourself broken away from the things that make you you.  We’re the products of our experiences and physical makeup in a huge degree and at this point I think it’s impossible to truly realize that without having it shut off. 

It’s like this. Do you remember the thought-cycles bit I was rambling about previously? Where the way we remember and define the world around us, even basic words and ideas have connotations which shape and deeply colour our pov. Sec, let me grab the main idea out of it….

"Consider three things:

1. When you define something you make it more difficult, and perhaps even impossible, to see that thing in other ways. For example, when you see a cut of meat and see it as something you cook for food and you reinforce that definition every time you see a cut of meat, it becomes more difficult to see a cut of meat as a tool. For example, a make-shift cold compress or a binding material. Or if you’re a racist, if you hate latinos it becomes more difficult if not impossible to see a latino as a trustworthy individual you could be best friends with, or married to. This goes for any kind of thought, positive or negative, every thought limits your ability to think other thoughts that aren’t tacitly implied by the original.

2. When you recall your feelings on something, the strongest memory/emotion is recalled first and not the other things you might have thought/felt about said object. For example, if you went out on a date and it went terribly and the guy was a total slob, if you were to recall that memory you’d remember that first and not remember that the food was nice, the restaurant had good wait staff and the guy in the taxi on the way home switched the station for you etc.

3. Humans learn and think in chains. We define things in a very basic way first, then to a basic way, then to a deeper way until, by the time we hit adulthood, we have incredibly complex definitions for almost everything around us. Even something as ‘simple’ as what the word "water" means to a person is incredibly complex, but it goes by so fast we don’t notice it and think of it as simple.

My chain of thought on water currently goes like this:

Water. It’s something you drink which breaks down to a feeling in my mouth which breaks down to a sort of taste " " the feeling in my throat " " pleasurable feeling " " only drinking so much " " sensation of thirst " " what is thirst? " " thirst is a physical desire " " am I thirsty? " " yes I am " " how much? " " only a little.

And then it goes down another path: Water " " something you cook with " " measuring water " " pouring water into a pan for stew " " everything else about the stew (not breaking this down) " " can use for marinades too (not breaking this down either.

Another path: Water " " Swimming " " Movement through water " " sensation of water on skin " " how you move when in this environment " " depth of water " " sand/mud at bottom " " depth of water " " deep water " " fish in water " " other things in water " " not being able to move as effectively as other things in water " " feeling inadequate in water " " not trusting myself to be safe in water " " not liking deep water " " how much do I not like it? " " a good bit of dislike " " I don’t want to swim in deep water " " How much do I not like shallow water? " " I don’t dislike it " " I kind of want to swim in shallow water. " " What bodies of water are shallow? " " rivers and lakes which goes on and on to rivers vs. lakes and which I prefer etc etc etc.

It’s extremely rapid, all of this happening sometimes in under a second and it’s also maddeningly complex. I’m oversimplifying and skipping ideas like whoa up there and even doing that it grew to something rather large."

….So. When you take a decent dose of DXM or some other dissociative, they do a few things to you, one of the main things in my experience is weaken these connections, like a big damper, and at higher doses, completely break them. You no  longer feel any of the emotional connotations for anything nor the intellectual connotations either. They’re just gone and you just exist like an animal. At even higher doses, it’ll break even that and you won’t exist at all. It’s an impossibly hard thing to describe….I don’t have good words for it but…it’s like you’re aware, but you’re no longer aware of yourself. You don’t exist as a person, your awareness is all that exists. Your body is gone and your emotions and thoughts are gone too, all you are is an awareness taking everything in for the first time. It’s a very, very powerful experience. Not an altogether pleasant one for many though. I think now that the reason for this is because it breaks all semblance of control. Dissociatives are not for ‘getting high’ nor for play. They don’t bring you up like that. They break you off from yourself and that terrifies people who are overly reliant on their own ideas of self-control. It’s an incredibly alien experience and it blew to pieces my previous ideas of being away from myself which I’ve gotten a lot. Many of you who read me often know I’ve brushed up with dissociative disorders in my past, that I can break from reality for a bit and do all sorts of fun things like hallucinate or get super paranoid or just feel nothing, absolutely nothing. The feeling when I’m in those states is somewhat similar to being on a very low dose of a dissociative drug, where it’s starting to dampen on my sense of self and on what’s going on, but it’s a different thing. The psychological dissociative is nothing like the drug kind, it’s not as powerful and it expresses itself differently, like your mind is being wrapped up in warm, mildly scratchy wool blanket whereas being on DXM is like….just nothing. Complete killing of the self. 

Where I’m going with this….having been broken off from myself completely from myself and realizing myself in that way, realizing parts of my attitudes and stances that I’ve never even noticed before, I’ve seen that I am defined in a very certain way. Even being more aware of them now, they’re not under my control. They’re bigger than me and they influence me and everything I do in huge ways. In other words, they control me, I don’t control me. I am the logical outcome of my wiring and my experiences. 

And so is everyone else too. It’s easier for me to see others and watch them and see their makeup than it is for me to see mine. I have too much self-bias to be accurate on myself. But….if you look and get to know someone deeply, understand why they’ve done the things they’ve done….why they don’t talk to their family, why they date such and such, why they like certain things and don’t like others. With a little thought and experience with them, they make sense. You can guess the sort of things they’ll probably like, the things they’ll most likely hate, how to charm them and pressure them, how to anger them, all that. Most of us can (and do) do this on a daily basis, most obviously when choosing a gift or activity for them, but also when we choose how to talk, act around them too. We can count on them to be a certain way because that is what they are, we have an approximate pinpoint on both where their head is at and also what their physiological makeup says.

Take that and trace them back, think of the things they’ve done, the people they’ve chosen to be around, the things they do, the things that matter most to them, the things they’ve done. It’s almost predetermined; we’re an intricate web of acting based upon our past + our makeup as everyone else does the same, like a million spiders on a single spiderweb tingling and vibrating the entire thing, each affecting the others, sometimes in strange ways.

So how much in control are we of ourselves? I don’t think we are. The things we do, the shaving ourselves, our working, all our actions are us striving for control over a world we have no control of, over a self we have no control over and over ideas we have no control over, too. 

The bit about ideas struck a chord with me especially. We like to think we control our ideas, that we’ve shaped them and formed them, that they don’t control us. But they do. Consider math. We go to school to learn math, to learn this idea and to understand it, to shape it and to be able to use this idea to better ourselves and for our own ends. Does a kindergarteners lack of understanding mean math doesn’t exist? Does your adult understanding mean math exists? Course not, it’s still there whether or not either exists. So, too, with all other ideas. They exist and we form to them, not the other way around. It doesn’t matter how much we understand…..or if we don’t understand at all. All of our symbols work this way, everything from math to justice. They all shape and control us and not the other way around. 

I thought about all this in my shower. Thought about our seemingly complete lack of control and our seeming intuitive awareness of it. Why be aware at all if we have no control? That doesn’t make much sense to me. There’s no need for awareness if we’re just going to be an animal-structure that acts on wiring and instincts. So I started thinking about the meaning of life. 

Why? Why does the world exist in this manner? Starting with the idea that the world has a purpose, it’s not far-fetched in my mind to consider that a creator of some sort could have made this world the way it is as an insanely complex computer. This computer would be taking information and processing it and that we, the things in the environment, are the chips. If you consider how logic-gates and boolean algebra, it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to see it. So it would make perfect sense that we as people would be bound to a certain core of physiological restraints and that we act within those bounds and ONLY those bounds. Then when you take into account the fact that we are aware you can explain that away as the way we pick up new information to process. Then we refine this information as we age and pass it on to surviving generation and over time we get closer and closer to the answer. 

Consider how boolean algebra in our computers works, it breaks the problem down into the simplest answer you could possibly get, 1 or 0. Off or on. True or False. Yes or no. Something or nothing. Like this, you can add with 1 and 0 and nothing but. From that addition, you can subtract, it’s just the opposite. From addition with addition, you can multiply. So on and so forth to *all* math, to all forms and symbols that could be imagined and designed…to everything really. 

A primer if you aren’t familiar: http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_4/chpt_7/2.html

With this setup we can stack the math incredibly high in towers of data and still break it down extremely quickly. So why is it so hard to see that our bodies are constantly acting and reacting to our inner chemistry? Why is it hard to believe that that very base chemistry, down beneath even the quark level, is the very basic boolean math and that we, the world, the human beings, are the composite tower, tiny pieces of a program taking in information and sifting it out and just continuing to do so.

We already have programs that self-edit and improve themselves. Evolutionary programming is a very neat and mind-bending set of ideas where the program that is written not only self-references itself, but it refines it’s own source code over time to constantly make itself better and better. What is a human being but not such a creature, an object refining itself and feeding itself constantly?

Makes me wonder…

Of if there’s no creator. Then there’s only ideas, the ideas that are created because of the awareness. The awareness bit without a creator is still unfathomable to me as it’s always been no matter how many times I try to write about it. Back on task. There is no creator, but awareness happened. Perhaps it’s the nature of what the world is. Whatever, it exists. What do we do as people? We define things. We see them and analyze them and give them names, giving them definition, and in this way we create order out of chaos. Then we take that information crystallized and weave like a spider, creating our tools, our houses, our things. Perhaps we’re agents of order in this way, an idea that we chain to but don’t control (but slave to), a BIG idea, a much more fundamental idea than most others I can think of. In the name of this sense of order we continue to define, we continue to build and shape things from the raw stuff out there into logical, precise things that are measurable and understandable. This would be a very dangerous way to be, of course. If we continued to multiply and force everything into strict, rigid order we’d fall into stasis where nothing could feel and everything would be as nothing. 

But that’s not the case, we’re not purely creatures of order. We’re creatures of production too. The unpredictable newness that  the structured web of order tries to ensnare. For every object we discover, for every idea we think, those ideas lead to new ones, we create countless possible new ideas for every object and idea we force into a structured setting. We know this exists too, the world is constantly finding new ideas to work with, the creationary. 

And then there’s the breakdown of everything, entropy. Time that breaks down the the systems and creations of both order and production. Hm. 

Upon that backdrop I can see that other ideas are just functionary for the ultimate goal of ordering the universe, analzying new bits of the universe at the same time as producing more of it too. When the coffee-maker was first created, it solidified a method of making coffee into one particular way rather than any other way, thus creating order. It took materials out of randomness and structured them into a very specific way, also creating order. Then the coffee-maker could be seen and defined as ‘can make a cup of coffee in x minutes, using this much water, creating coffee in this method’ etc, creating even more order.

When we as people see this order, we can embody the second main force of the universe, the creationary. We see the capabilities of this pot, then find ways to improve it. Or to use it in a way completely new. In this way, we create new ideas and new uses and a new universe upon which to act. 

Finally….entropy breaks it all down. In a literal definition, entropy will eventually break the coffee pot, then over many years break the coffee pot down into nothing, then back to it’s component materials. In a less literal sense, the ‘idea’ of the coffee pot will entropy too, it’ll fall into uselessness and be forgotten. Perhaps it will be brought back in the future and be refreshing then. Perhaps it’ll fade away completely as many ideas already have. Entropy will break it down though, all things will be broken back down. 

Those three things would be the big realities of this idea of the meaning of life. Just those three. Everything else, good and evil, god and satan, love and hate, those would just be ideas that work within the framework of order, creation and entropy.

*shrug* I don’t know about this one. It’s just an idea that I haven’t really fleshed out yet. Haven’t thought about it enough. 

I probably shouldn’t have babbled about the meaning of everything. It’s not that interesting and def not that useful. What I really want to focus on is what I know is real, what I know is right, that control is something we don’t have and that we only feel (or not feel) we have it because of our bodies and that that is a disturbing idea. I don’t much like it at all, but I’m not really coming up with a good argument against the idea that we as human beings have absolutely no control over ourselves or the world around us. It mildly scares me. 

Bleh. I’m not satisfied w/ this entry. I’m just going to post some pictures and act like it never happened.