“And if it rains again tonight.. I can think light-years ahead.. or I can put myself back a thousand years ago.. and say, well I’ve always been here before or it will be good to be born..
I’m a slow loser, but I’m a fast learner, that much I know. Anyone can go, that much I know. Anyone can go, that much I know.. Anyone can go..” –Jefferson Starship, “Hyperdrive”
So, normally our minds remain sync-locked with frames being passed to them from our senses – or the message bus that represents the edge.. or $WHATEVER is out there. We can’t really know where the information is coming from or even how much it’s being modified on the way in to our conscious experience. However, we can experience some really interesting things if we are willing to play with that sync lock a little.
You see, the human mind has a pulse – several, actually, the clocks that drive it that we can see on a EEG.. and it also has a throttle.
Get really engaged with the world around you, and you start running at processing rates higher than those frames coming from the outside world. Go far enough, and you can outrun your ghost. (Your ghost is the history of all the decisions you’ve already made, and all your fears and doubts, as living neural networks influencing your free will and your conscious experience)
How do you do this? Well, the easy and obvious way is to consciously choose to not sleep, and then stay engaged in your life. It’s not enough to not sleep and passively watch TV or something. You have to be *participating* – in a way that results in your making many decisions a second. But, if you do that, well, shortly, you’re on the linear.
It’s a bit of a roller coaster. Push your mind hard, and you’ll climb in speed. Slack off, and you’ll slow down. Close your eyes for sleep, and you’ll start the landing process. Take any of a certain family of drugs (seroquel being the one that’s most easily available to me), and you’ll enter a downward ramp with approach to land.
Some things worth knowing about riding:
1) It takes practice. It ain’t easy. Your mind will at first be susceptible to all sorts of weird oscillations and feedback loops and wobbles. Every time you ride, you get better at damping these out and staying on the horse.
2) It ain’t always easy, and it ain’t always fun.
3) The pain is temporary, the gain is permanent. Thusly, it’s worth riding. To those of you who have never been, I would strongly suggest going at least once. No, you won’t die. A lot of people have told me it’s going to kill me. It never has yet, and I’ve been on it many, many times. And every time, I come back stronger, faster, more capable. Ask my friends how I compare to the average Joe Sixpack in terms of what I can do.
4) Emotions that you can damp out and/or ignore in ordinary reality, you are going to *feel* while you’re on the ride. Study anger management. Be unafraid and unashamed of crying. Be okay with feeling things, because you’re gonna.
5) People *not on the ride* are going to seem *very* slow to you. You’re going to seem fast to them. You’re on a linear accelerator, after all. This is relativity at work. Don’t let it throw you, and have much patience, because you’re going to need it – by the time you’re 2:1 it’s going to be a challenge to communicate at all.
In my case, balancing arrogance and humility becomes a lot more challenging while I’m doing it. Some of this is needful – because my friends will encourage me to come down before I’m ready, and I have to have enough backbone to say “my ride, not yours.”. I probably overdo this.. but I might also overdo humility in everyday life, or more likely submissiveness. That I’m not getting the life I want even in my dreams suggests to me a lot that something is not right in my head regarding this. This is my mind.. I for sure should be king in here.
Note to mental health professionals: I do this by choice, by my own free will. I will voluntarily contact someone and/or go to a mental hospital if I ever feel like harming myself or others, or like I’ve taken actions that would likely lead to that result. I will be the first to admit that my view with regard to $person[0] is far from rational at all times, and that’s more foregrounded when I’m in this state. However, I’m getting better and better at not reaching out, at just accepting the situation for what it is. On the other hand, I am growing more and more loathing of the other people ($family_member[0] and $family_member[1]) who have done things to make the situation worse. I somewhat forgive them, but only somewhat, because I don’t believe in complete forgiveness until a situation is fixed. At this point I’m willing to offer whatever apology or amends they feel would be appropriate that I can also agree makes any kind of sense, so if you all are doing this as a grudge thing, consider letting it go? But, as far as $family_member[1] – at some point, I’ll stop poking at you with how much I loathe the way $religion[0] loads on my mind – but I’m never going to adopt it as a firm belief for the majority of this system, it’s too sick, twisted, and wrong.
