Thought Moments

Watching faces up close and intimately.  This is a pretty amazing video.

Thought Moments

Hypnosis and neurology article.

Interesting article on some contemporary research on hypnosis.  As with any article on hypnosis take a lot of the conclusions stated as suspect as it's hard to find corollary studies.  The part about "10% of the population" leads me to wonder exactly how large a research group they used for said study.  

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2010/sep/30/hypnosis-neuroscience-psychology

It amazes me how spending only twenty-four hours at Valley View leaves me with a sensation of dislocation when I come home.  Denver looks a little brighter, but a little less like home.  I feel like I had a week long vacation and yet I was only gone from Sunday morning to Monday afternoon.  Ashley and I decided to go at the very last minute, at eleven o'clock on Saturday night.  We packed up and headed out on Sunday, and called the office to reserve the room (that opened up miraculously) about five minutes after the office opened.  We drove through two snowstorms on the way there, and once there the wind was cold and the weather somewhat uninviting.

It was amazing.  There is no place else that I have been anywhere that leaves me feeling like this.  The feel of clothing is currently foreign.  It's not unpleasant, just foreign.  I will have to remind myself for the next few days that I can't go stand on my porch in the buff.

Trees and rocks, birds of every kind (especially noisy jays, jaunty magpies and a one lone bald eagle flying off to the north as we drove down the dirt road into the hotsprings) a tiny, white ermine and most of all the water.  It's not the hottest water ever, but that means I can stay in it for hours.  Getting out of the water can be excruciating for a second until I can get my wool cloak wrapped around me.  It's even more excruciating when I back into a snow covered tree. 

But really... I just feel different after spending time there.  I've never been for more than two days.  I can only imagine that after a week I might not ever come back.

'Tis the season.  Worked my first fire show in quite a long time.  The show went well, despite some rather serious moments in the middle.  Having Ashley on hand and ready to grab a wet towel when not asked was a fantastic thing.  I've never done Boo at the Zoo with Doug before.

I did get a small burn, myself, but I didn't realize it until we were headed out.

Took Ashley to Pete's Kitchen which apparently reminds her of The Phoenix which is a coney island in Michigan that she's fond of.  All in all it had the elements of a good night.

I'm not feeling much like being social of late, something I need to push through I suspect.  I have no real ideas for costuming or anything and part of me would rather work at Terry's tomorrow morning and spend the afternoon and evening working on my large pile of financial shit so that it will smell less come January or so.  I do plan to go out, likely to the gathering I was invited to through the session at the Snug.

People scare me though, they really do, and when I'm not feeling particularly strong in the head I get twitchy around them.  I don't like passive aggressive behaviour and I like it even less when it's directed at me.  People want to believe they're rational but if there really are stable, calm, thoughtful, rational people out there, I've yet to meet 'em.  I know plenty of people who think they're on the ball and quite honestly the saner someone claims to be, the further away from them I want to be.  It's not that I mind my friends being crazy, I just mind when the crazy runs their lives.

I feel like there's an angry hum underneath almost all social interactions of late.  It's where the crazy people trying to run me off the road come from.  It's why we have the Tea Party and why packages are being shipped from Yemen to blow up synagogues in the US.  It's a feeling that I can't shake, even on the good days and it seems to affect a lot of people other than just me.  Some get depressed, some get belligerent some just go catatonic.


Me, I just want to run off again.  I won't, at least not like that, but I want to.  It was so much easier when I didn't stay anywhere for very long.

It's quiet tonight but not in my head.  I should be worried about all kinds of things, how the recent money troubles can be dealt with, how to get the company website up and running, what new product designs we can invent or discover... further afield I could be wondering whether I will ever be truly independent or whether I really am stuck following in everyone else's wake as they create stunning new ideas and almost as often drop them again.

I'm not a terribly creative person, and my most creative and inspired talent is speaking, outloud, extemporaneously and to a very small audience.  My ideas appear and vanish over a cup of coffee and a slice of cake late at night in a badly decorated coffee shop that only remembers the past glory of the Denver scene.

I really ought to write them down, but then they come out sounding like this, stilted and overblown, stuffy... which isn't to say that's not how they sound when I'm rambling on about mind and spirit and flow and pointing out how badly the art is hung, but at least I don't have to hear it.

I had a new thought tonight, new to me, about the human dichotomy, or trichotomy in some cases... we still have so many issues dividing this from that, mind from body, soul from heart and then we break it down smaller and smaller, to the cellular, the atomic and down to buzzing strings of energy but we really don't want to put it all together and just look at the thing that is, right in front of us and inside us.  The only division in perception that I can make sense of is between the state of precision and the state of the eternal.

Precision is the snap shot, the tiny little piece, and every piece when held up to the whole, is tiny.  A rock, a stream, a sneeze, a planet possibly slowly cooking itself to death, it's all tiny compared to a moment of completeness, even one held for just a second.  Every piece matters and it's not a bad thing to want to see the pieces but you can never see all the pieces, hold every one of them at once.  The mind isn't designed for it and I suspect there are no minds that are.

And the eternal... I have no belief about God in any sense.  I have no idea whether there is or isn't deity or afterlife or reincarnation but a person is a flow, a stream a continuance.  Life is, existence on any level is, continuous and continuously changing.  We can know a person by slices and snapshots or we can step back and just watch and engage with that person and know them as that continuity, not in a way that defines or limits or does anything but be one eternal presence connecting with another.  That eternity always ends, we lose it, start thinking about something else and it's gone, but we can always find it again as long as we engage with ourselves.

It's all very mystical, I suppose.  One creates two, two creates three and three creates all the ten thousand things.

I prefer a balance between a defined world and a world experienced in immediacy.  I can explain all day about a person and miss everything worthwhile, but then sometimes without the words and the explanation, I might forget to look at all.


Babble babble.  On other notes I've discovered that using hypnosis and massage together works pretty well.  I miss being able to get acupuncture treatments that don't require me to explain everything each and every time.  I want to spend a lot more time at Irish sessions and I wish I had the money to buy a bodhran.  Politics is likely to melt my brain as I watch the ineffectual battle with the morbidly obtuse.


Free from desire, one perceives the mystery/caught up in desire, one perceives only the manifestations./Mystery and manifestations arise from the same source./This is called darkness./ Darkness within darkness, the gateway to all understanding.  -paraphrased from memory from some translation or other of the Tao te Ching.

Cutting

Self Injury Leads to a Brief Lessening of Pain

Because of how I was exposed to this issue, I will always be fascinated by the ramifications of it.  This is not news to me, but for those who might have encountered it and truly not understood, it might help.  More knowledge might have helped me.

Logic and disbelief

I keep running in to the agrument that disbelieving in something is not a belief in itself.  I have trouble with this logic, most especially when it's presented by people I otherwise like and respect.  The argument that not believing in the Loch Ness Monster makes sense and holds water is perfectly reasonable, but to make the same case for the statement, "The Loch Ness Monster does not exist," is completely different.  It's semantics, but important semantics.  In the first case you are hazily dealing with probabilities such that the odds seem to be against the Loch Ness Monster existing, so I generally don't bother believing it.  If you state unequivocally that it Does Not Exist is a statement that requires proof, not hazy generalities.  Just like proving that something Does exist requires proof and rigorous testing, proving that something does not exist would require some kind of logical or scientific argument that allows for every possible effort of having searched for and not found the Monster.  It is easy and logical to say that such a beast probably doesn't exist as it has been looked for by amateurs and professionals and crackpots for so long that at this point it would seem that someone should have found something.  The trouble is, not finding something doesn't actually prove it doesn't exist unless you can show with a reasonable amount of scientific effort that you have looked everywhere it Could be. 

There is a subtle but powerful difference between saying that something is unlikely in the extreme and that something is impossible and/or truly Does Not Exist.  You can apply this argument to any form of Statement of Universal Truth and I often do.  I'll leave it to those reading to decide whether they can agree with me even if the Loch Ness Monster is replaced with other semi-mythical realities.

Don't get me wrong, those of you who insist on a black and white world, the opposite of belief is in fact disbelief but the opposite of a believer is not an atheist.