WEEKLY WTF
01-15-24 Edition
I’m So Wet
See you in Hell
Reality is a Book Written Just For You
Reality is a book written just for you. Wherever your eyes land you will find the photonic scripture of physics which reads as a momentarily frozen tale of perpetual change. When reading the book of reality, regardless of what chapter, we’re ultimately reading about ourselves. Objects detected with our sense organs undergo a sort of categorization process: Is it a threat? If so then shall I kick its ass or run the fuck away? Is it a resource? If so shall I covet it and own it? Will I share it or be a greedy asshole? Do I like it enough to attempt to obtain it? Do I hate it enough to avoid? Do I not give a shit about it such that it can be ignored?
That’s pretty much how we roll day to day but this sort of default perception is like when you’re reading an actual book whilst thinking about other shit, nothing penetrates, no story is being woven within the mind. What’s the fucking point?
To really get into a book you have to get lost in it. You have to almost forget you’re reading. To read the book of reality requires forgetting the past and forsaking the future in exchange for directly perceiving what is in the here and now. What’s needed is an all encompassing allowance. What I mean by allowance is that we have to allow reality to be whatever the fuck it is as opposed to what we think it is, or want it to be. Otherwise things get categorized and filed away into one mental bin or another. Don’t take my word for it, go and see for yourself. Find some damn trees, what do you see? Do you actually see a tree or do you see a word that is spelled T-R-E-E? Or is it a label denoting the type of tree, Spruce or maple or redwood or Pine or fruit? Is it deciduous or evergreen, coniferous or whatever the fuck? See what I mean about labels? Is it a thing you are attracted to or repelled by or do you not give a shit about trees? Does your attention penetrate past attractions and aversions, labels and definitions to see the damn tree or is it busy filing it away so as to look for the next thing to obsessively categorize then the next thing, and the next, and the next ad nauseam until you fucking die?
Sometimes I just stare at shit. A tree, a landscape, a leaf, a rock, a person (but only if the person doesn’t notice me looking at them because it’s fucking creepy otherwise). I stare at shit to, first of all, find out what pre-conceived notions and subsequent judgements I have of the shit being stared at. If I can become aware of all that then I can dissolve it and look past what I think a tree, for example, is or what it can do for me or what danger it poses or what other people have said about it or whatever daisy chain of thought or memory happens to be getting activated.
Then maybe as I look at a thing, a tree in this case, with a sort of semi naked awareness, my wrinkly pink meat computer still thinks it’s supposed to be working and processing shit and so maybe I start to think about relationships. How the Redwood tree, for example, has a very small root base and evolved to grow in close proximity to each other which allows their roots to lock together as a network and thus they don’t fall the fuck down in high winds. There’s a lesson in that, do you know what it is? It’s not for me to tell you, reality is a book written just for you, figure it the fuck out. Could be about community or family. Maybe it’s about collaboration or connection. Strength in numbers, I don’t know what it might be telling you. Ideally it’s about whatever you need it to be about at any given moment based on questions you have or challenges you currently face. The book of reality is fluid and quite cool like that. Perhaps it doesn’t resonate with anything at the forefront of the mind but do you feel that satisfying click there in the back? We can have a sort of understanding happen that we don’t quite understand. The next time you see a single lonely Redwood that someone planted next to a house for shade or curb appeal you might look upon that tree worrying about its inadequate root structure, mentally measure its length and potential falling trajectory and assume with relative certainty that at some point that fucker is going to blow over and either turn it’s adjacent house to splinters or, hopefully, fall somewhere other than where motherfuckers are sleeping, or walking, or driving or… you get the idea. The more we know about a thing the more we see variables of what we know, as opposed to seeing the thing itself as it actually is.
We might think about the symbiosis of algae or cyanobacteria wrapped up in a fungal package that we call lichen, ( the green shit growing on the trunk of these trees) or ponder more about roots and the symbiotic relationship between mycelium and trees and how the mycelium actually convey chemical messages from one tree to another, a kind of mushroom internet, but that’s just more mind flex.
We could discern a lesson from this particular Redwood fairy ring, which we also call suckers in our neck of the woods, pun intended. Here once stood an ancient Sequoia Sempervirens (aka Coastal Redwood) which was logged in the 1800s by sweaty dudes with big ass saws and mustaches almost as glorious as my own. The way a Redwood deals with its own demise is that it sends up a bunch of “suckers” (aka baby trees duh) around the stump and a couple hundred years later viola, you have a Redwood fairy ring within which you can picnic, dance nekkid or trip balls. What do you read in this particular chapter of the book of reality regarding adaptation to extreme tree trauma? There is a message there but it’s yours to discern. Reality is a book written just for you.
As interesting as all this shit is and all the layers of this tree we could potentially peel it’s still just mental masturbation. Do we see the fucking tree yet or do we still just see what we think about the tree? If I stare at it long enough for my knowledge about the tree to exhaust itself, then I start to wonder all the shit I don’t know about it. Sometimes you have to let yourself hit your limit of knowledge and drive straight into the wall of the unknown to total your perceptual vehicle. If I know that I don’t know, then I can transition from definitions and opinions to a sense of wonder. If I keep at it and make it past wonderment, then this other thing happens.
A tree that is being viewed just as it is, is actually a weird and wonderful fucking thing! Bizarre even! Imagine you are an alien from a strictly desert planet devoid of trees or flora of any kind. Or you’re from a water world and you have gills or some shit. Or perhaps you evolved on a gas giant and you’re some kind of helium breathing skin blimp floating alien, whatever the fuck. To see a tree for the first time through eyes that have never beheld one would be fascinating as fuck. You’d gaze upon these odd textured tubes that stick out of the planet with fluffy shit towards the ends of the tubes that close up are actually thin and veined sheathes, or sharp poky bendy bits, and you observe more textured tubes that extend at different angles from the main tube with more fluffy shit that may or may not appear green depending on the photoreceptor rods and cones in your alien eyes, or maybe you’re a blind aquatic thing that uses echolocation, idk, but anyway you’d be like “What the actual fuck is this thing? Does this planet have Neurons or some shit? Why is it? What’s it made of? What’s inside it? Is it sentient? How the fuck do these happen?” And of course you’re an alien so those questions may sound more like “blerpudhgut shmerdanglewonk turngchang, changawangda?” The point is that if we push past information and wonder, maybe we can see a thing anew ever so briefly and marinate in its strange and bizarre beauty until thoughts once again flood into that void we created in order to actually see. It’s just how the mind do.
Are you picking up what I’m putting down? It’s too late for us, we’ve all seen trees and have already been told “those are trees” and we have over time created an extensive mental file on them and have replaced actual trees with a labeling system that allows us to file them quickly away and move on perceptually or pay attention to them depending on how they’ve been categorized. If you’re a naturalist or a logger or some such you have a much bigger file on species and characteristics and relative value but for most folks a tree is just a blah thing, a whatever the fuck thing, a who cares thing. Sometimes they look cool when the sun shines through and we take a picture and post it with hashtags about #trees or #ilovetrees as though we actually give a shit about trees. We like hiding under them when it’s hot and sunny, we chop them up to stay warm but mostly we just see a label which is in the “whatever” file so we perceptually move on without actually seeing them just as they are. “Wait does that one have fruit? No? Oh… never mind then”
This one time, many years ago, I drank some cucumber soup that wasn’t cucumber soup. It was a certain liquified cactus. I drank a LOT of it. I MEAN LIKE A LOT-LOT. I subsequently found myself in a forest lying in the dirt, blood in my beard, having mini seizures whilst gazing at a nearby tree. I could not disentangle myself from that tree whatsoever. I was me but also the damn tree. I could not tell where I ended and the tree began. I was the seer of the tree, the tree that was being seen and also the process of seeing. Except I didn’t perceive the 3 things separately, the sense of “I-ness” was an emulsification of all 3. Explanations of this are only going to ever come out fuzzy but the experience was lucid and clear, more real than reality tends to be. I saw reality as it is as per the temporary expansion of that self induced state. I saw that fucking tree and it turns out, the tree was also me, WTF.
I don’t recommend an ego dissolving dose of “cucumber soup” but the point is that reality is much stranger than our governed down perceptions and evolutionary constructs will allow us to grasp. Don’t feel like you have to break your damn mind with a cactus or anything else in order to see. My epiphanies are not born from a single experience. I don’t necessarily hang my hat upon altered states of consciousness, they are just bread crumbs to add to the salad of experience. All you need is the aspiration to know wtf is behind the curtain and start reading the book of reality. I’m not for or against altered states, learn from my dumbassery if you want so that you don’t have to. I’m all about using a canoe to cross a river but I’m not interested in dragging the fucking thing through the forest after I’ve crossed. Maybe it’s best to learn how to swim.
When you see a tree what do you see? Do you see trees or a forest? Are you a micro or macro motherfucker? There are no right or wrong answers, the important thing is to ask the questions. Thats how we learn things about ourselves and that will eventually lead back to actually knowing thyfuckingself and then the most extraordinary thing of all, knowing the knower. This isn’t about trees obviously, it’s about reading the book of reality. In part It’s about looking deeply into a thing to discern what message it has for you personally. Go the fuck outside and read the pages of growth and decay, of expansion and entropy once in a while. Most importantly though, this is about perceptual processing and awareness. Read actual books, read all the fucking books you want, books are great, information is very useful. But additionally can you learn to transcend knowledge and experience reality just as it is as the knower of things that are known? The cognizance behind thought? The empty but wakeful field of mind? I’m just talking about you Boo. Can you stare at a plain ole boring ass weed and see the incredible and strange beauty? Can you stare at dogshit and not be repelled or disgusted? Can you look at another person and see yourself? Can you read the book of reality and discern the story it’s telling you? Can you see anything at all beyond just what you think of a thing?
I don’t mean to put pressure on you or imply that you should be out there in the world falling in love with a dog turd or having transcendental experiences with dandelions or some shit. It’s enough to just make the effort and examine not only the thing examined but that which does the examining. That is a symbiosis as well. A collaboration of matter and consciousness. A singularity functioning through an egoic aperture. A mental scaffolding of sorts meant to convince itself that it exists as a thing separate from other things. A portal so the cosmos can pretend to interact with itself in the form of you as if there was something other than itself.
Consider that the entire universe that we perceive is comprised of individual photonic letters bouncing off of shit into our eyeballs or waves of sound that vibrate our eardrums and we arrange the letters of light and pulsating phonetics of sound into words in our mind that we then string into neural sentences then divide into paragraphs of personal opinion and we write those chapters into one of three books; the “I Like It” book, the “I Hate It” book or the “I Don’t Give a Shit About it” book. The entire universe, as far as you are concerned, is just a book written within your mind by you and is being constantly referenced and applied to the observable universe in an attempt to prove that you exist and are separate from the persistent illusion of reality you perceive, do you see that? If you don’t that’s fine, it’s our default mode. You’re simply seeing the universe as adopted definitions held in your mind-book and you kinda wrote that shit in ink because you want to have some say and control as to what reality is. We attempt to write a story onto the surface of water, a tale of characteristics that we become identified with so that our bit of wetness feels a bit wetter than the rest of the Sea of reality, do you see that?
Reality is a book written by you, just for you. An endless rabbit hole of stories, a self published dictionary of attraction and aversion and indifference. A fictional essay of qualities entitled “Me”. A non-existent reference E-book of memories stored as electricity. An audiobook of experience and opinion. A bible of belief. A textbook of data points. A quantum fucking epic of information that when read between the lines will eventually lead you, back to you. Reality is a book written just for you. Toodaloo.
Whatcha Thinkin’ About?
Meditation isn’t, getting used to is.
Alrighty, well… have the week you want not the week you’re given. It’s up to you. You’re the one livin’.
Toodaloo
