Foreword

This... blog as it were- is not the first of my hands. I had previously held to keeping a journal or blogging as a sort of therapy of organizing the infinite mile-a-minute thoughts that whizz around my mind on various topics, at various stages throughout my life. I tell you this as a confession and a warning, that my writing style is, at times, hard to follow because I tend to take on a “stream of consciousness” narrative as I type.


Although this narrative mode is regarded in literary criticism, I tend to believe that it captures my thoughts in their purest, most passionate form- thus unaltered by the dulling/weathering effects of constant review and editing. After that, it is what it is, left to your interpretation, your validation, your opinion. Suffice to say- I have no agenda beyond personal growth and understanding. I have no motive other than to (read: attempt to) perceive whatever Truth I can discover about the world around us as I journey through this existence.


In past, my writings were quizzically optimistic, often times finding interesting new technologies or white papers and expounding on the concepts to theorize on their future importance or how they could be expanded upon to do something really cool. It is undoubtedly a passion of mine to take ideas and expand them, just as it is a passion of mine to take seemingly disparate concepts and find their commonalities and relate them.


It is this engine of curiosity and philosophy that fuels 80% of my daily mental activity.


If my writings of past didn’t focus on topics of science, history, or technology, they dealt with personal psychological growth- interrelationships with people in my life, mostly within the realms of love and friendships, and usually only when those relationships came under stress. Through those years I learned a lot about myself and others, and became an avid student of human nature.


So what is this then?


This is part of an overarching exercise - an effort- to grow beyond the narrow limitations of how everything relates to me, and widen my gaze to areas of the universe that exist outside my id/ego. It is though this progression in existentialism that I hope to gain knowledge and understanding of my relationship, our relationships, to all things. “Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia” – Ortega y Gasset


There is, however, a great hurdle that exists, and thus what sets the tone for my dark and ominous blog design. You see, it’s not just the challenge of knowing yourself, overcoming personal prejudices, overcoming experiences or circumstances within our own realm of thinking. It’s not just the challenge of absorbing new information, the process of discovery and working through the equations of our lives to achieve harmony... there are external forces that are in direct opposition of these processes.


There are, at all levels (religious, government, social, etc) individuals… organizations… movements… that have existed since the dawn of history that have artificially (and purposely) altered those realities as they are presented to each of us. In some cases it is analogous to “rose colored glasses”, designed to make things appear more pleasant than they actually are. In others they are not unlike 3d glasses, intended to create a complete fabrication of reality that our uninformed senses take as reality.


In fact, the more I learn, the more I realize just how thick the veil is that surrounds the things we perceive to be “true”. More so, there are individuals who seemingly need these veils because they use them to quantify their lives, rather than taking a step back to first qualify these doctrines.


As Leary put it:

“Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities — the political, the religious, the educational authorities — who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing — forming in our minds — their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself.”

This, coupled with my “mental engine” I described earlier, has created a sort of inspiring, horrific, embarrassing angst that I have made it so far past the first quarter of my life without caring more to investigate. It is this mental image that created the theme for this site – a theme I’ll discuss more in a future entry.


I’m harder on myself for this because I have to accept responsibility for inaction. I cannot say that I didn’t have opportunities to think and explore on these concepts earlier than now– I was never overtly “oppressed” in youth from questioning things, or coerced under duress to think any certain way.


But while, of course, “civilized” societies of today tend to condition and engineer a false sense of thought-freedom, I cannot claim total ignorance to these veils over the past many years either. As early as freshman year in college I was already given material to start with, such as a philosophy course which introduced me to works like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. It was all there, around me. I understood the concepts. I was, interestingly enough, not shocked to find the truths about many of these things. What I lacked, and regret, is the capacity and motivation to care.


I think, for a time, that I must have felt somewhere between insignificant and selfish. Selfish in the sense that I had my own life to deal with – my own personal growth to work through – to worry about the world at large. I felt insignificant in the defeated sense that even if I was given the keys to the grand library of all truths and secrets, that my knowledge of such things would mean absolutely nothing without any kind of power to change the outcome or change the history books or even change current popular beliefs about those events.


And thus, those thoughts were merely thoughts- dancing around in the back of my mind without direction or purpose. Or, perhaps, I’m merely justifying my inexcusable ignorance. 


But I digress – in the spirit of “never too late”, this is where my intent rests. I have found a sense of responsibility that has grown over the past few years. I feel that I have come far enough in my own personal growth and understanding of the interdependencies of human life to hold a genuine care for our world and our species, and a desire to qualify and help progress to a state of clarity and transparency that I believe is necessary to transcend the dated and corrosive version of reality most of us live in.


Finally, I feel that it is as important for you, the reader, to take what I say with a grain of salt, as I always have and will when I read or listen to others. Do not simply allow me to inform you with my discovered views of reality. For one, I am no scholar. I do not have access to ancient tomes. Most of my research is limited to what I can find out there on that vast internet: videos, interviews, manuscripts of works, etc.


In the end I imagine there will certainly be things that I did not think of or facts that I was not aware of, and that is primarily why my work is on such a public domain as an internet blog. It is my desire to have my work scrutinized and corrected where necessary. It is my philosophy that I do not fear the investigation of ideals, no matter how terrifying they may seem on the surface.


See you on the other side.