Brains

"The brain is the most complex organ in the human body. It produces our every thought, action, memory, feeling and experience of the world. This jelly-like mass of tissue, weighing in at around 1.4 kilograms, contains a staggering one hundred billion nerve cells, or neurons.

The complexity of the connectivity between these cells is mind-boggling. Each neuron can make contact with thousands or even tens of thousands of others, via tiny structures called synapses. Our brains form a million new connections for every second of our lives. The pattern and strength of the connections is constantly changing and no two brains are alike.

It is in these changing connections that memories are stored, habits learned and personalities shaped, by reinforcing certain patterns of brain activity, and losing others."

Holy shit the brain is some ultrasupercomplex shit. I'm fascinated with everything that attempts to explain how the fuck all that jelly makes us who we are and especially how consciousness is achieved. Read all about that in this special New Scientist article and check out other cool things they got there.

Get ready to read some crazy shit

There seems to be moments when a person finds something in their mind that he/she wasn't aware of. Like something goes "click" inside their heads and suddenly "Holy shit!" everything seems to fall in place. Well, you can call it epiphany, or enlightenment, realization, etc, but you got to acknowledge the phenomenon.

I've read of people going through this states. The infamous story of Archimedes jumping out of the bath, screaming eureka to an astonished wife, I presume, and running around naked through Syracuse because he found out how to guess the amount of gold in some king's crown, THAT'S the crazy shit I'm talking about. I've had my interesting thoughts in the bath myself. Probably the fact that you're not thinking too much about what you're doing, you know, you bathe EVERY day, your brain probably gets into auto pilot and starts the "Taking a Shower Subroutine" or something.

But sometimes it's more critical. Like in my case. I had a "brain click" thingy going on but it's more complex than that. It wasn't suddenly. More like a process. But I guess I can trace it back to a single event. Pay attention.

I was at a friend's house. She was pretty sad because she had broken up with the love of her life, apparently, and, you know, I felt like I was in a soap opera or something --tears, drama, everything-is-going-to-be ok-like commentaries (from my sister who was there also, not from me). Me? I was silent. I didn't know what to say. Actually I wanted to say those hollow words too, I wanted to calm her because she made me feel sad also... or did I? I now realize I was trapped in an internal monologue, a thing I used to do. I still do it but not when I have people around, not friends or people I want to talk to anyway.

The thing is, I wanted to say something but was trapped in this limbo of words, cause I thought whatever I could have said would have been wrong or inappropriate or silly. But I FUCKING WANTED to say something. Anything. Just some comforting words... And then it "clicked". Now, I don't know exactly how or why but I had a realization. I COULD NOT SAY something. Anything. I actually did not have control over myself, I couldn't bring myself up to say at least SOMETHING to my sad friend! THAT'S when everything got weird.

I always had thought I had the power; I certainly in many occasions wanted to say something but didn't because of thinking it was stupid. Well what if it was stupid? It IS what I have to say and, well, you just can't go through life not saying things because someone might not like what you have to say, FUCK IT. It is my/your opinion and if I/you were wrong hopefully there'll be someone to call your bullshit.

I realize all this now. Back then I was just starting to sacrifice the sacred plant to the fire gods and well, my brain was starting to operate in different frequencies, different sates of consciousness I had never dreamed of. I actually FELT something going "click" in my head. Why was I such a pussy? I couldn't say something as easy as hey come on, calm down or something you know, it's not the end of the world!

...

Later that day I made some confessions. I was in a low point in my life and felt depressed... If I didn't had control over what the fuck I had to say, well, maybe, you know, I didn't had control over lots of other things! It was a really rare and bizarre experience. I didn't feel like myself. I was a stranger seeing myself doing this crazy shit just like an spectator. An innocent bystander.

I did some pretty fucked up things that day. I wasn't thinking clearly and started doing whatever occurred to me, whatever came to mind. It was liberating. I felt like I had been playing a Ned Fladers repressive moron censuring myself 24/7. FUCK THAT! I was constraining myself without reasons!

I thought about all this while still in crazy naked Archimedes mode. I wasn't feeling normal also; not quite sick, but not in everyday normal state of consciousness. Until the headache.

I actually felt inebriated, and with a sudden risky behaviour attitude. I started to walk with no particular destiny, I thought of were to go as I wandered. I ended going to the house of a friend somewhat near my house -didn't want to go there. I asked him for the phone and generally acted weird for about 15 minutes. Then I left and eventually got home. To top it of I even started calling friends like a drunk guy. I felt a little drunk alright, I felt dizzy. But it felt good to hear some familiar voices that actually care about me. The feeling of someone giving shit about you is very important and under appreciated. After a while I got a REALLY FUCKING TERRIBLE HEADACHE. It came and went for a while. The fascinating thing is that I believe it was psychosomatic. My brain was in distress, confused, like in a system crash. After the emo crash I came to a conclusion.

Either I was fucking insane an needed therapy, or something was happening to me, an alteration. At the time I really thought I was crazy.

Now I KNOW I AM crazy.

:D

I see the world in a different way, different of EVERY people I know. But who does see everything exactly as others? Isn't people subjective individuals going through subjective experiences? Damn right they are. Everybody is fucking crazy. In your daily life you've probably come across a lot of lunatics who made you think "ok, what fuck it's going through their brains." But everyone operates in their own particular ways. High or low and all the in-betweens and out-betweens. And well, that's the beauty of it, isn't it? If everyone looked at the same things and made the same conclusions, well, what a boring and stupid world. That's how I came to sense, realizing everyone is just as crazy as the next one, every mind sees things in ways I couldn't even begin to imagine, and that's cool. What are we but our peculiarities? :)

Certainly, seeing though your own bullshit is no small feat. I'm sure there are people who live their entire life without ever questioning their own bullshit. They are probably egocentric assholes.

Depersonalization, looking at your own self, losing the ego and seeing that you're just a clueless creature wandering through existence bumping with things as they get to you its one of the best experiences you can have. It's no easy task, but thanks to some mind altering friends, we have some tools to aid in the mission. But there is an ample array of methods to achieve this mind-click. You can stop whatever you're doing right now and simply sit stubbornly until you find out what I'm talking about. Literally, without moving or eating or anything, ala Siddhārtha.

You can shut down all exterior stimuli with one of these wonders*. You can try lucid dreaming, or meditating. It works if you get one of those really crazy high fevers. Or try don't sleeping at all for a week, or don't eat. You can can be blessed/cursed with a near death experience. There are even some cases were people get beamed just because, spontaneously, out of fucking nowhere. There are many more forms. Some involve ingesting truly mystic substances; this topic by far exceeds the scope of this post. But to summarize, there are some compounds out there that when you experiment with can get up to your brain and twist and move shit about and make you think things you normally don't. Read THIS to know more about about what I'm saying. Hear THIS if you haven't already gotten a grasp of what I'm talking about. That guy knows how to express himself, say something really cool and meaningful and be funny at the same time. Or read THIS previous post.

So it's really just a matter of getting out and doing it.

I've never tried DMT or any other super potent psychedelic substance, like LSD or magic mushrooms. But I'm planning on doing it and hopefully I'll write about my experiences here.

···UPDATE {tried LSD, post in progress}···

Have you experienced an altered state of consciousness? If no, what's stopping you?

...

There are drugs that allow glimpses into this fascinating and mysterious experience; if you want to, fuck it, it's the most natural thing theres is, other earthlings get high, why shouldn't you?

Note: If you think you note different moods sometimes in some paragraphs, it might be that I added, besides the obvious one, small updates of style here and there 8 moths later ;)

*I was going to write a full post about this but Joe Rogan got ahead of me :/

Of Perception...

...to be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness - to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves. Meanwhile, however, there are gratuitous graces in the form of partial and fleeting realizations. Under a more realistic, a less exclusively verbal system of education than ours, every Angel (in Blake's sense of that word) would be permitted as a sabbatical treat, would be urged and even, if necessary, compelled to take an occasional trip through some chemical Door in the Wall into the world of transcendental experience. If it terrified him, it would be unfortunate but probably salutary. If it brought him a brief but timeless illumination, so much the better. In either case the Angel might lose a little of the confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning and the consciousness of having read all the books. Near the end of his life Aquinas experienced Infused Contemplation. Thereafter he refused to go back to work on his unfinished book. Compared with this, everything he had read and argued about and written - Aristotle and the Sentences, the Questions, the Propositions, the majestic Summas-was no better than chaff or straw, For most intellectuals such a sit-down strike would be inadvisable, even morally wrong. But the Angelic Doctor had done more systematic reasoning than any twelve ordinary Angels, and was already ripe for death. He had earned the right, in those last months of his mortality, to turn away from merely symbolic straw and chaff to the bread of actual and substantial Fact. For Angels of a lower order and with better prospects of longevity, there must be a return to the straw. But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

--Huxley

HAIL JOE ROGAN

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grcqs9cDuN8

I don't know why I ended up reading about this guy but he speaks some trippy interesting shit. This is some radio interview where Rogan discusses DMT, WOW, that sounds like some MASSIVE TRIPPY experience, definitely something to tell the kids.

Laboratory Notes (1943)

I suddenly became strangely inebriated. The external world
became changed as in a dream. Objects appeared to gain inrelief;
they assumed unusual dimensions; and colors became more glowing.
Even self-perception and the sense of time were changed. When the
eyes were closed, colored pictures flashed past in a quickly changing
kaleidoscope. After a few hours, the not unpleasant inebriation,
which had been experienced whilst I was fully conscious, disappeared. What had caused this condition?
--Albert Hofmann

"I HAVE BUT RECENTLY RETURNED FROM THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH. I'M RAPTUROUSLY BREATHING IN ALL THE ODORS AND ESSENCES OF LIFE. I'VE BEEN TO THE BRINK OF TOTAL OBLIVION. I REMEMBER AND FERMENT THE DESIRE TO REMEMBER EVERYTHING."

best band ever?

This is what I got after searching for "BEST BAND EVER" on Google. Half of the results were people fighting over who is indeed, the best band ever. Morons. I just think is really cool I got TOOL in the results. I don't know why there's some site with Linkin Park in it. What does Linkin Park means? Why it is "Linkin" and not "Linking"? What the fuck is a linking park? Did you know the vocalist, Chester Bennington, had a crazy cyber stalker? Read more about that here.

No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for

drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
--P. J. O'Rourke.

ABOUT THE SAME

The Beatles and Radiohead wrote songs about THE SAME THING. Yes indeed THEY DID. It's so obvious once you realize brouhaha's.... yes so obvious...











GIRL & CREEP




Think about it. It's about the same GIRL. The thing is we get the adulation, adoration side of said girl IN GIRL. THe other thing is CREEP. This time we focus in the guy. The creepy guy that masturbates thinking about her. You know it COULD BE YOU. YES. YOU FUFER***omg O: O: O: *******4*t*h***** **w*a*l**+l***lolololo1111111101010101010010101010101010101010010101,

/

John Lennon's best song would be about his own death.