Its truthful to say that at no point in ones life do they stop undergoing the process of discovery. Of the universe, or of the self.

My question is,… does it REALLY have to take that long? =(

Interestingly enough,… I am not typing this from my established place of lingering within the house.

I am sitting out in my deck, enjoying the calm, dark tranquility of the night.
A light breeze is filtering through the trees, relieving me of the reckless warmth I was feeling earlier.

… The way I see it, my consciousness has been much too dormant with the coming of college finals and all of the academic craziness.
Now that college is out of the summer, there are going to be some changes with my habits, and I feel I need a little more inspiration to actively and creatively develop my consciousness. I felt sitting out amongst the tranquil night would provide a different experience that would help conjure up some interesting thoughts or states of mind,… since… of course… psychic awareness can be strengthened with little things that inspire and stimulate the conscious mind, and keep the brain focused on the ongoing mysteries of extra-planar existence.

…

For that matter, I find it interesting that the supernatural has so many different terms attached to it, all having small differences but all indicating the same thing:
Para-psychology, supernatural, paranormal, inter-dimensional, extra-planar, occult, … I’m sure I am missing a whole batch of them, but you get the point.

…

Why am I rambling?
Because I can; … and people do what they do simply because they can.

…

Onward to the point of my posting:
I went job-hunting today around the Fridley area, hoping to find some sort of employment around the area that would give me an excuse to move in with my friend Kenny (he was the one I posted about a while ago about his throat ailment. Its all healed up now.) … I decided to visit places that I hadn’t visited yet, and I figured with my trusty stapler, and my folder full of pre-printed resumes, I could finish a multitude of applications,… simply filling out special sections to them, and then stapling the resume as not to spend 15-20 minutes writing general information and experience.
I stopped at a Half-Price Bookstore, and I decided to apply. I looked for a chair to sit so I could fill out the thing, and lo and behold… I managed to unintentionally sit myself right in the Metaphysics section. I found myself glancing up to survey some of the books, when I came across one that I was intrigued by: The Element Encyclopedia of the Psychic World. … Being a person who was not much into hard-core reading, I was more attracted with books which were compilations of facts and findings, rather than ongoing personal or lecturing babel. I finished up the application, and decided to pick up this… large, 850 page, hard-cover book. Luckily, the price was somewhere around $8. … Half-Price Bookstore,… remember? ^_^

So, I managed to make a good impression with the clerk, do my business, and leave.

I started reading the book a few minutes ago, and I can say, from the beginning summary,… this book suits my interests! It even managed, amongst a short list of important psychics in human history, speak briefly about Edgar Cayce, who is someone I had heard and read plenty about and had highly respected.

Just thought I’d rant about it.

…

The moon seemed to have disappeared behind clouds as I was typing this.
*shrug* … That seems to take away some of the tranquility. Perhaps I could move back inside.

School is now out for the summer!
… and a whole month before all of the other colleges!

Good time to get a head start on a job!

Also, freedom means more personal endeavors. … so my posting here may just increase!

=)

Just thought I’d update shortly

You are probably wondering right now… “Hey! His post says ‘please read’. I wonder what Matt has cooked up on his blog today!”

Once in a while, there is a particular song that a musician puts out which hits me in a very deep spot, and almost resonates with the soul itself. It so happens that one of my good acquaintances,… a valued friend, who happens to be a local musician/rapper, has recently put out such a song,.. that even he says was perhaps the “realest” song he has ever put together. The song is called “White Wash“. He named it after the instrumental that he used for the song, which so happens to be a song by Buckethead.

Whether or not any of you like hip-hop, bear with me.

www.myspace.com/fatc

I can’t believe what I am reading right now. =/

… First of all, I would like to clearly set the record that I have had nothing against the Twilight books, or the Twilight movie. There are those who have a deep appreciation to these movies, and I’m fine with that. If anyone is anyone, you all know how much obsession there is over the Twilight books, and how so many adolescent teens have their head buried into the Twilight universe. Once again, to each their own. … but… what I am reading right now is a massive collection of various reports and personal eyewitness about Twilight fans engaging in acts of violence over simple disagreements over the books. … I’m not talking about just pretentious fans being stubborn.

… I’m talking about acts of violence pertaining to the level of massive felony charges! Drowning. Assault. Attempted murder. …

Do you want to know the creepiest part of it? None of these fangirls were over the age of 16.
What the hell kind of society do we live in where 13, 14, and 15 year old girls,… the overall demographic for things like Hannah Montana, Jonas Brothers, and High School Music,… attempt to murder someone over a differing opinion about a piece of wood filled with paper!!?

For the final time, I am not trying to insult Twilight. I’m insulting the prospect that anyone would be so hopelessly lacking of any consciousness or intelligence outside of the fictional universe of a novel writer, that they would… well… …  … =/. Allow me to post some of the things I have read pertaining to this subject.

---

Attempted Drowning:

---

Threat with a Knife:

---

Strangling:

---

Beating with a Bat:

---

Shot with a high-powered flare gun:

---

…
If this post makes you the least bit angry, it really should.

Before anybody gets defensive and accuses me of making unjust claims, I am very much aware not every Twilight fan is a sadistic zealot. …
I’m almost 99% certain that none of you fellow Xangans have any traits of the above. … at the same time…
… if at any point that any Twilight zealot is committing felonies over the book, like those described above,… I would have no incentive to have any better of an impression of them or those like them, because they are merely ruining the reputation of Twilight fans for everyone, because they have absolutely no control over their emotions or actions. AND,… if at any point anyone here is willing to debate with me that the people participating in the above are… in some sick way… somehow justified,… and dislike the way this post is going…. may you politely get a head start and take two running jumps straight to hell!! … You have an entire universe to make choices and to discover intrigue! There are things in existence much more fascinating and important than a first-class case of delerium invoked by a book.

…

With that said…

… if you want my opinion, I figured an ‘immortal’ like Edward would have better things to do than attend high-school chemistry year after year?

“Be free. … Your freedom is priceless. … Be free, free to be, whoever you damn well please!”
- lyrics from the group Siamese Papadapolis.

Today was quite the day of emotional problems, and their resolution to clarity.
I left college to travel back to my hometown for the weekend, and apparently there was some Battle-of-the-Bands going on at the high school. I didn’t feel like going, since I didn’t expect a high-school run Battle-of-the-Bands to be all that good, compared to say… a college-level BotB. Still, I went, because I knew that through time, I would be forced to come back to this town for the summer with absolutely no escape after college. … What had emerged was a deep, repressed set of emotions.

The day I graduated from high-school three years ago,… I wasn’t ready to leave high school. I didn’t feel as if I had lived well enough,… have established enough friends and have planted enough seeds. The only thing I felt I left was a few points of regret. One of them manage to appear before me during the intermission. I refuse to say her name outright, but she is someone who I had felt for, but when the time came, I pushed her away,… mostly because she was trying to cheat on her boyfriend for me, and my damn conscious got in the way.

My brother and I left BotB, and he went off to do whatever. I was locked in his deep brewing pit of turmoil. … I hate my home town so much, it is unbearable. Its just simple fact, really. It is so far away from everywhere else I want to be. I knew that college was ending in two weeks, and I would be thrown back here again. To top it off, I felt a lack of purpose really. I was no longer the producer to my friend’s hip-hop group; they found somebody else to do their recording. It was all fine with me, but at the same time, if I couldn’t record them, then technically, I wasn’t their producer anymore, and if I’m not their producer anymore, then I can’t really represent them anymore. I can’t wear them as a badge anymore; a mark of things that I helped create,… and if I still acted outright like I was the ‘big guy’ behind the music, I would only be making myself into a tool! … To this… I say,… fuck-that! … I love em,… but it doesn’t matter if I’ve been their friend since the beginning. I’m not a tool. I’m a human-fucking-being, and I have some fuckin requirements. That’s that.

This is something I coped with a while ago, and that is said and done with no remourse,… but at the point of which I am speaking, I gazed into the future, and saw nothing good. No point of glory ahead. I didn’t know what to do with myself. … I fiercely fought tears knowing that I wasn’t OK with where I was at. I ended up barging for a walk to clear my head, keeping my mind focused on more metaphysical things; perhaps it is not right to think that things will just happen accordingly to justify things. Perhaps you need to ignore the ‘if you build it, they will come’ concept,… and just go out and build something! Don’t think about it! The universe works only when actions are already put into play. Otherwise, how can it align?

The negativity was worked out of my system, and I emerged with a better sense of self. … For a long time, I’ve focused on others. I’ve spent my energy on watching others grow. Those others have either disappeared or moved on. … This time, I can’t just think about others anymore. The time of helping others has ended! I have to put my foot down. I got to pull the strings myself. … even if I end up stepping on others, unfortunately. The beast is growling. … Time for me to be someone! … Time for me to be the one to make others follow, or have them keel over in jealousy. Not just a man. … but the man!

There is a time when its just necessary.

Have you ever had one of those weeks, or long periods of time where you feel simply drained and depressed,… not out of any ‘really’ long term depression, but it simply feels as if your energy and your consciousness has depleted to the point of delusion? Suddenly, you are forgetting what makes you significant, and your purpose on the planet,… and even who you are.

Imagine, you go to sleep one night, in a hot room, tossing and turning because although you feel tired, your mind has overloaded with fragments of bizarre, negative thoughts and images. The best way you can describe it is with words like… ‘blitzed’ … and ‘static’ … and ‘raging incoherance’.

… and then you wake up one morning, and everything feels absolutely new. Your thoughts are wiped clean, but your memory is intact. You no longer look at the world as a boring constant entity. Somehow, that rush of mental anguish the night before, where it felt as if your negative thoughts were lighting up like white-hot flames, and burning themselves out of existence, completely wiped you clean of the weight your negative thoughts carry on you. Its sobering, and it makes you feel as bright as the sun.

…

Its going to be a good month!

Identity crisis (psychology)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article’s tone or style may not be appropriate for Wikipedia. Specific concerns may be found on the talk page. See Wikipedia’s guide to writing better articles for suggestions. (April 2008)

This article is about the psychological term. For a related concept, see midlife crisis. For other uses, see Identity crisis and personality crisis.

An identity crisis is when an individual loses a sense of personal sameness and historical continuity. The term was coined by the psychologist Erik Erikson.

Contents [hide] 1 Description 1.1 Seven areas 2 See also 3 References

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[edit] Description

The identity
is “a subjective sense as well as an observable quality of personal
sameness and continuity, paired with some belief in the sameness and
continuity of some shared world image. As a quality of unself-conscious
living, this can be gloriously obvious in a young person who has found
himself as he has found his communality. In him we see emerge a unique
unification of what is irreversibly given–that is, body type and
temperament, giftedness and vulnerability, infantile models and
acquired ideals–with the open choices provided in available roles,
occupational possibilities, values offered, mentors met, friendships
made, and first sexual encounters.” (Erikson, 1970.)

According to Erikson’s stages, the onset of the identity crisis is in the teenage
years, and only individuals who succeed in resolving the crisis will be
ready to face future challenges in life. But the identity crisis may
well be recurring, as the changing world demands us to constantly
redefine ourselves. Erikson suggested that people experience an
identity crisis when they lose “a sense of personal sameness and
historical continuity”. Given today’s rapid development in technology,
global economy, dynamics in local and world politics, one might expect
identity crises to recur more commonly now than even thirty years ago,
when Erikson formed his theory^{[citation needed]}.

[edit] Seven areas

This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources (ideally, using inline citations). Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2007)

If you find yourself (again) in an identity crisis, you can look at
seven areas of difficulty in which to work towards a resolution.

Time Perspective

Can you distinguish immediate gratification from long-term goals?
Have you learned to balance between jumping at opportunities as soon as
they are presented to you and working steadily and patiently towards
your long-term goal?

Self-Certainty

Do you feel consistent in your self-image and the image you present to others?

Role Experimentation

Have you tried different roles in search of the one that feels right to you?

Anticipation of Achievement

Do you believe that you will be successful in what you choose to do — whether your role is at the work front or home front?

Gender Identity

Do you feel comfortable being a male or a female, and dealing with others as such?

Leadership polarization

Are you able to become both a leader and a follower, whichever is called for in a given situation?

Ideological

Have you found a set of basic social, philosophical, or religious values that your outlook on life can be based upon?

[edit] See also

• Existential crisis

…..

Existential crisis

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may contain original research or unverified claims. Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (September 2007)

Existential crisis, derived from Existentialism,
is a perceived sense of harsh confrontation experienced when a human
confronts questions of existence and a change in one’s subjective
perception their relation to their world.

Contents [hide] 1 Description 1.1 Handling existential crises 2 See also 3 References 3.1 Further reading 4 External articles

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[edit] Description

An existential crisis can result from:

• The sense of being alone and isolated in the world;
• A new found grasp or appreciation of one’s mortality;
• Believing that one’s life has no purpose or external meaning; or
• Awareness of one’s freedom and the consequences of accepting or rejecting that freedom.

Existential crisis resembles anomie (a sociological concept), the mid-life crisis is an example. Usually, an existential crisis stems from the person’s perception of existence.

Non-existential belief systems,
such as religion, astrology, and witchcraft, provide compact and
logically irrefutable (i.e. tautological) explanations for human
existence often invoking a man-made construct of one or more iterations
of a supernatural being.
A transition to the realization of the absence of fulfillment via
religious faith is one avenue to trigger suffering associated with an
existential crisis. This sudden appreciation that there is no afterlife
and, moreover, the meaning and purpose of one’s life is determined from
within, not through a irrational narrative defined by others,
inevitably leads to substantial personal growth, with the transition
through this critical confrontation with the ‘existential’ world a
necessary step of maturation

Cognitive dissonance occurs when the man or woman faces
the paradox of believing his or her life important, whilst perceiving
that human existence is meaningless and without purpose. The person’s
resolving said paradox results in the existential crisis. For many, a
resolution to this crisis is the abandonment of religious beliefs in
favor of a rational, non-superstitious relationship to the objective
world just confronted. Analogously, existentialism posits that a person
can and does define the meaning and purpose of his or her life, hence must choose
to resolve the crisis of existence. The terminal synthesis of the
crisis most often results in the appreciation of the only true treasure
in the world: the inherent self. Thus the resolution produces an
insight to the core moral and ethical values intrinsic to our species,
made far stronger by shaping in the external world, and now with the
strength, judgment and confidence of character to resist the imposition
of codes of others. The rejection of religion as the product of
existential crises is clearly consistent with such fundamental
questioning.

Existential crisis is often provoked by a significant event in the
person’s life — marriage, separation, major loss, the death of a loved
one; a life-threatening experience; psycho-active drug use; adult
children leaving home; reaching a personally-significant age (turning
30, turning 40, etc.), et cetera. Usually, it provokes the sufferer’s introspection about personal mortality, thus revealing the psychological repression of said awareness.

[edit] Handling existential crises

There is no one given therapeutic method in modern psychology known to coerce a person out of existential despair^{[citation needed]} (the issue is seldom, if at all, addressed from a medical standpoint). Peter Wessel Zapffe, a Norwegian philosopher provided in his work The Last Messiah,
a four-fold route that he believed all self-concious beings use in
order to cope with the inherent indifference and absurdity of
existence, made up of Isolation, Anchoring, Distraction, and Sublimation:

• 1. Isolation is “a fully arbitrary dismissal from consciousness of all disturbing and destructive thought and feeling”.

• 2. Anchoring is the “fixation of points within, or
  construction of walls around, the liquid fray of consciousness”. The
  anchoring mechanism provides individuals a value or an ideal that
  allows them to focus their attentions in a consistent manner. Zapffe
  also applied the anchoring principle to society, and stated “God, the
  Church, the State, morality, fate, the laws of life, the people, the
  future” are all examples of collective primary anchoring firmaments.

• 3. Distraction is when “one limits attention to the
  critical bounds by constantly enthralling it with impressions”.
  Distraction focuses all of one’s energy on a task or idea to prevent
  the mind from turning in on itself.

• 4. Sublimation is the refocusing of energy away from
  negative outlets, toward positive ones. The individual distances him /
  herself and looks at their existence from an aesthetic point of view.
  (e.g. writers, poets, painters.) Zapffe himself pointed out that his
  produced works were the product of sublimation.

[edit] See also

• Nihilism
• Existentialism
• Meaning of life
• Dark Night of the Soul
• Desiderata
• Mystical psychosis

A few days ago, I had a dream.

The content of the dream was not significant. However, I was roaming the streets of a town at night, upon a hill near a mountain range, when my awareness kicked in. I remember instances of lucid dreaming, where I could control minor variables and what I was doing. I’ve done experimenting in my dreams. Lately tho, my awareness in my dreams has been few and far between. … but this night felt like a revelation of sorts. I stool upon a railway, gazing around, as my awareness grew, and before I knew it, I felt… wind. My senses began tuning with the dream. I could feel the ground under my feet, the wind lightly passing, the temperature of the air. I breathed in the cool air, and gazed about. I even knelt down and placed my hand on the train tracks: the metal was rough, hard, and cold…. Usually when it came to sensitivity in dreams, sensations only came in thoughts which literally said ‘This should be cold.’, or ‘This should be a rough surface.’ … This dream, instead of my sensations being mere impressions of what should be, I actually felt it. …

I had an epiphany that I truly did want to practice and learn lucid dreaming, having a glimpse of the rewards. There is an entire other realm of being that I have not been exposed to yet, and my mind is now motivated to engage in this.

Back from a long trip.
… comprised of riding on a bus, singing, and the occasional Jag-bomb.
and I managed to see Blue Man Group while I was in Chicago. While everyone else was either broke or too iffy about going out on the streets of Chicago at night (for some paranoid reason), I just went. Hilton Garden Inn to Grand-Red rail station,… to Belmont,… and walk to Briar Street Theatre. Some of the best $32 of my life. … I love it when people are paranoid of going out at night. They miss out on a lot of shit.

Right now?
I’m debating sleep, but in a strange way of thinking,…  wondering what the point is.
Sleep, dream, wake up, feel refreshed…
… I can never remember my dreams anymore.

Not depressed about it. Dreams come and go.

…

Okay. I lie. I am a bit depressed about it.
… but I’m going to spare you the rant, because I may as well just fall asleep anyways.
College is making me into a stress-freak. Academics are a bitch.