Michón Neal's Blog, page 40

Playing the Levels

There is a bad habit humans have of taking things at face value, of letting the surface be as far as we look. This is a huge problem in America, the land of the veneer. For example, white teeth are more acceptable than healthy teeth, the promise of sex is everywhere but it’s not ok to actually talk about it, horrible violence is allowed on TV yet cussing is often edited out. There is a serious backwards paradigm at play here. It hurts more than it helps, if indeed it helps at all.

The veneer demands that what is true be hidden in order to display that which looks good. This isn’t about making something better; it’s about pretending it’s better for the sake of reputation, advantage, or power. A woman is not supposed to appear as if she is powerful or sexual, the veneer requires her to be displayed, to be available, to be willing. This particular veneer then turns the real woman into a bitch if she won’t “put out” or a tease if she refuses a man. It means that, oddly enough, rape survivors bear the burden for the crime committed against them. Another example of the veneer is the fact that British people tend to have healthier teeth than Americans, yet many of us tease them for not having identical perfectly white blocks in their mouth. The veneer actually starts to become hypocritical in instances, as when a rape survivor is silenced for the sake of “community” or “family” cohesion.

Everyone knows about the MPAA but no one knows who they actually are. The MPAA rate movies and television shows so that parents can know what’s appropriate for their kids to watch and others know what movies to avoid. While this has been a fairly useful system to have the MPAA is made up of people we know nothing about and whose decisions oftentimes result in arbitrary ratings. Movies with sexual content are often rated higher than those with ridiculously graphic violence or language. The FCC does a bang-up job of editing our TV experience by castrating wonderful cinema. Sometimes the message of the movie or a scene becomes nearly unintelligible. Other times you have to wonder what the point is when the language is dumbed down but the terrible violence remains. Then there are the arbitrary commercial rules, where all of the good programs are played in the middle of the night yet commercials about sex toys, pumps, and pills abound throughout the day time.

Is it any wonder people are confused? We have contradictory messages being sent at us all hours of the day. In many ways, we are told that the substance of a person, object, or idea do not matter if the packaging is appealing. Is it any wonder that people end up making bad decisions when they have never been taught how to critically view anything? Even people who claim that surface issues don’t matter still have some other idea or people they can’t get past because of the “ick”  or “duh” factor. We all know politicians are “full of it” but it doesn’t seem to matter because the same types of people keep getting elected.

We all know people who claim “all men/women are” (various terrible things) but at the same time can’t get enough of them. Or the person who keeps finding the same terrible people to date because they’re hot or because of some other arbitrary factor. I find it ironic that people think polyamory is weird or unnatural when so many monogamists cheat or date serially. The message comes across as the sanction of a veneer over the truth: it’s okay or more acceptable to be dishonest, jealous, or to sum it up to being “just the way men/women are” but not okay to be completely honest, own your emotions, and work through it. Many people claim to dislike fake people yet turn around and tolerate a culture of veneer. It’s gotten so bad that we make fun of it and still don’t really change it.

People end up with shallow ideas, shallow emotions, shallow philosophy, and a shallow life. Shallow ideas, or a veneer, is true in the most limited sense possible. The problem comes in when the veneer is mistaken for the deeper reality of the object or subject. Some people dig a little deeper and move down a few levels. Some manage to find deeper truths (as when many white people realized that black people were actually people). The deepest truths we have come from philosophy and science. In other words, they cover more levels of reality than the surface. The truth covers everything, which is why the search must go on so long.

 

What veneers hang over your life? What veneers are harder to see but still do damage? Why do you think people put up with veneers? What are ways you can get to the deeper, meatier levels?

 

NASA to Unveil Mars Rover Curiosity Findings Monday | Space.com

Don’t get too excited. I am very interested in finding out what they’ve found. I love learning about the universe we live in. http://www.space.com/18721-mars-rover...

The Loudest Voice

Ever had a dark thought? A random thought? Ever just think of such horrible things? Do you sometimes wonder if your mind is actually under your control? If this happens more regularly than not, please seek help. Mental illness is no fun. I know, I have one.

However, I’m not here to discuss that. I’m here to talk about sane (or mostly-sane) people finding themselves thinking the wrong thoughts. Or not so much the wrong ones as foreign ones. Every time you of what someone else will think, every time you berate yourself, every time your feel anything less than overwhelming love for yourself, your are taking on foreign thoughts.

I often felt that I had great reason to let the other voices in my head win. In so many ways, I was (and still am) a freak. To this very day I am not sure why I am doing as well as I am. The odds, the statistics, all of the information out there about people like me says that I should be an absolute mess. Admittedly I did struggle some, but not nearly as badly as I could have. Somehow, I managed to tune out those horrid voices telling me I wasn’t good enough, that I was a perversion, that I was too dark, that I was such a minority that I could never be successful, and many other awful thoughts and listen to my own. I let my own echoes build inside my head until only I remained. All the comments on how ugly I was, all the relived memories of my parents’ horrible fights, the pain of feeling lonely because there was literally no one else completely like me; it became background. It lessened to a manageable level. Nowadays, I wonder why I ever let anyone else’s words mean more to me than my own.

Due in part to my social experiment and due in part to Single Dad Laughing’s inspirational and brave post, I am going to open up. I am going to list here for the first time out in the open as many of the things that make me weird as I can. I’m going to list these attributes that the world labelled evil and wrong at different points in time (some of them are even still considered so). This is the scariest thing I have ever done. This is for my own health and my own account. I am responsible for my own life and it is high time I own up to who I am. I have held the more unnoticeable aspects of myself tightly for many, many years. I kept everything to myself because I never felt safe enough to let it go. I’m writing this here, so that one day someone can see it and say to themselves that it is not the end of the world. Because maybe somewhere out there is someone just as weird as I am who just needs to give themselves permission to let it out. It is the same time of person I keep in mind while I write my stories.

Deep breath. This is me owning me. For each of these following attributes I somehow find myself in the middle. For each of these I have known someone to think me wrong because of it. I am the feared other. None of the characteristics listed below are necessarily related to any other. Each one stands alone, with only me in common. They may contribute to my experience of another aspect of myself, but they do not cause each other. Most importantly, these parts do not sum up to the whole of me. I hope you see that.

I am considered black (African, Native, European blood but I’m dark enough to fit the “Black American” category). I am light-skinned (not quite dark enough to even be accepted by “real” black people). I liked rock music and wore a mohawk and chains before it was cool for black people in general to do it. I grew up very poor yet have a “proper” attitude. I am both highly intelligent and highly sexual. I often scare people because I rarely smile and tend to walk like a serial killer and yet I have a raunchy, dry, eccentric wit. I have been on government assistance yet I believe firmly in working for your own. I am athletic (I love to dance especially) and yet I have many physical illnesses that rack my body with pain, sometimes for weeks or months at a time. I am rational and logical and yet my imagination runs away with me. I am very spiritual yet not religious. I have tried to kill myself yet I absolutely love life and my life. I am left-handed, rendering nearly every psychological study useless because my brain literally works differently. I have bipolar disorder with some OCD tossed in there. I am pansexual (I consider the person first, the body is secondary), sapiosexual (turned on by the use of intelligence), polyamorous (loving more than one person at a time openly and honestly), and genderqueer (not male or female, but something in between or neither). The last thing I will tell you is that I am a rape and abuse survivor.

Those last sentences are especially painful for me to let out into the world. They are most likely the most contentious. The general Western attitude toward sexual matters is to hint at it while never actually learning about or discussing it. But there it is. I said it. It’s out there now and I can’t take it back. Nor do I want to. I don’t need to take it back because my voice is my own. It’s not my job to make life more comfortable for those who judge or hate me (especially when it’s based on the misunderstood, poorly understood, or unacknowledged). I’m setting an example for the people that I love. I am putting my money where my mouth is. One of my core values is integrity and that requires honesty. I share this list because everything on it is something that someone told me I should be ashamed of.

Yet if my own voice means nothing, if each of us cannot trust our own voice, then how can we trust any other? If the mind is so fickle and impressionable then how can anyone have any authority or accountability? These two thoughts led me to strengthen my inner voice. I searched, researched, learned, grew. I unlocked that box in my head where I had hidden myself, folded into the layers of the attributes I had also hidden. Over the past few years it has all been pouring out. I finally feel ready to let people know who I actually am. I’ve never been so scared but I’ve never been so free. My own way of letting go, of erasing the power of each of these labels over me, is to speak it, write it, type it.

I have been a writer since I was 12. My first series was my personal journey set in a fantastic world. It was my mind, divided into different people and set onto paper. It was the only place I could open up about myself. It was my first and greatest exercise in exploring my own mind and healing myself. I’m going to be publishing that series next year, making it available for people to read for themselves. I’m doing it for that lost little weirdo out there who cannot find a reflection of themselves in the media or their environment. I am doing this to show that there is yet a beauty to be found. It just starts with the voice in your head. It is your constant home, why not make it comfortable?

I hope this doesn’t sound self-absorbed. That’s not my intention. Exploring the self is something that’s always been important to me and at times my only refuge. I suppose everything is spilling out of me now like word vomit because until recently I kept my mouth shut. Silence is the enemy; it’s just space for other voices to creep in and start shouting over you. Your voice is your tool; it can save you, hurt you, or free you. If this can help even one person, I will be fulfilled. I hope this opens your eyes, I hope this helps you look at the people you know in a new light, I hope that it encourages you to make your voice the loudest inside your head and that it is the voice of love. That’s all.

A recent picture of me

Anything Other than Straight

This is such an inspiration for my own personal journey. I’m too busy crying right now, but I will talk about this more soon. http://www.danoah.com/2012/11/anythin...

Telling the Truth

I recently started a project; a social experiment, if you will. I had been reading such wonderfully inspirational things lately and had an idea. I have this tendency to be really honest. I like people to know exactly where they stand with me. I reblogged a post about this very issue this month. The truth can result in people running away, going silent, or being grateful. It is a very odd thing. It is a symptom of a larger problem: this culture abhors the truth oftentimes.

Think about it, every day the media glorifies lying, deceit, and subterfuge. Many popular shows revolve around showing the worst traits humanity has. When it comes to emotions, many people have the awareness of a child. Somehow, though we move forward in many other categories, we have not gotten much better at telling the truth or expressing our deeper emotions. It is not taught in schools and many people end up having to go through therapy to learn how to healthily deal with their emotions.

I don’t like this and partially for this reason and partially because of a wonderful meme I saw (shown below) I decided to try something. Why wait until someone is dying, gravely ill, moving away, dealing with an addiction, or suffering a tragedy to tell them what they mean and what we wish for them? This year, I have seen so many people pass away and I often never got to tell them. I never want it to be too late again, so I developed a template and started going through my friends list alphabetically.

One by one, I am letting the people in my life know how they are seen through my eyes, letting them know how much they mean to me or inspired me, letting them know my deepest wishes for them. I was nervous about starting it but I knew I had to do it for my own sake. I stated my intention in a post on facebook and let them know that I wasn’t expecting any replies unless they wanted to do that. I set up my template and began sending out messages. The first day I sent out five messages. I got a response from two people and experienced such overwhelming pure emotion I had to take a break.

I didn’t expect something so simple could have such a powerful impact. But so many of us are hurting, so many of us go around every day wondering what people think of us, and I wanted to change that, at least in my life. So many people have emotional issues and feel unloved and alone. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, sometimes you just need a reminder that someone actually cares about you. Our emotions affect our health, our intelligence, and our relationships. I wanted to just do one thing to make it slightly better and attend to my own health.

I uncovered healing and a whole new realm of emotions that I’d have never known otherwise. I used to have a really bad habit of bottling up my emotions. This isn’t just curbing an emotion to avoid damaging myself or someone else; I wouldn’t even let out positive emotions because I never felt safe enough to. I never trusted that I would still be accepted or that I loved myself enough to put that out into the world. I am uncorking the bottle and discovering that spiritual thrum that precedes new terrain. By doing this, I am being honest with myself, honest with my loved ones, and making it apparent. It is an exercise that I want to repeat regularly, for my emotional and mental health. If nothing else, it just might make somebody’s day. Some will run away, some won’t say anything, but a few will respond just as strongly, opening up new paths on which to connect.

Due to the influx of tears on both sides and the opening of that spiritual door, I decided to only write three to five messages per day. This way I could pace myself and not become lost dealing with emotions I had kept under lock and key for so long. The truth is the truth, but it must be made apparent, it must be spoken and recognized. I do not want anyone taking me for granted so why would I expect them to feel as if they were? I am taking nothing for granted anymore, especially the people important to me.

P.S. If you would like to try this for yourself, copy, paste, and personalize the template below:

Hello,

I recently posted a status outlining my plan to let each person I know what they mean to me. Our time on Earth is so special and at times, so short. I want to take the time to tell people the things that really matter, because I don’t think we do it often enough. I’ve always enjoyed being honest and up-front, and this is just a natural extension of that. So I hope that you can accept this in the best light, and maybe it will even brighten your life just that little bit.

Please feel free to repeat this exercise for yourself, and if you like what I have to say, share it with whoever you wish. I don’t expect a reply if you have none to give. This is simply me taking account of all of the wonderful and influential people I have in my life at this moment.

Our Past:

Our Present:

Our Future:

Philosophy of Humor

Reblogged from Globalization & Capitalism:

This is one of the latest entries from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I am sure you will Laugh out loud and Learn with this amazing and interesting article,

Philosophy of Humor

First published Tue Nov 20, 2012

Although most people value humor, philosophers have said little about it, and what they have said is largely critical. Three traditional…

Read more… 66 more words

I love humor and I'm glad I finally have since philosophical light shed on it. Humor is very important in my story-telling and now I am more assured as to why. Thank you, Guillermo, for sharing this.

The Hidden Moment

Light takes a fraction of a second to reach your retinas and then another fraction to be processed by your brain. Sound takes a bit longer to go through the same process. Yet something in this process allows us to take the information from our senses at these differing speeds and combine it to form an all-encompassing experience. Our consciousness forms a filter thorough which we grasp events as related and occurring all at once, instead of in discrete, separated packages. Oddly enough this means that experience itself is a kind of hallucination, a dream, a story we tell ourselves in order to understand the world.

Yet there’s an even stranger phenomenon happening here. In order for the brain to process an experience and mold the world into one full picture, it must anticipate what will happen. That’s not that strange. What’s odd is how the brain can do this. Think about it, literally everything that you perceive right now has already happened! You are literally looking, feeling, hearing, smelling the past. Albeit it is only by microseconds.

One day I decided to meditate on the current moment. The self that existed now at this very moment, not the one that receiving past information. Needless to say, the experience that followed was transformative. It completely altered my perspective. My consciousness was the only current event. What this means is that no matter what is happening, I have an advantage. At any moment I can choose to start a new thought, or refresh, or take a step back. The current moment is completely free space. I can always step back into the past or plan for the future again. But those current moments are an entirely new world. It is enough time to make a choice.

Broken Glass

There is a fear of being broken. There are sayings about broken people and wanting to break people. The struggle to maintain the foundation is a great one. But what if we are meant to be broken? What if being broken is a gift, the only way we can build something greater?

I have been broken. I cannot tell you how many nervous breakdowns I’ve had. I often joke that it’s a twice annual occurrence. In fact I welcome it. How can such a seemingly awful event lead to a better, stronger me? As with anything, it is all in the way you view it. What angle do you examine everything from? Free will is the choice to find a different vantage point, one that allows you to view more of the issue than you previously thought possible.

I find it helpful to visualize the mind as being a physical place. Each set of ideas is a room or a different destination. Movement is precipitated by traveling along connected ideas and associations. In this way I can control which thought rooms I stay in. The better the thoughts, the more often I stay. In this way I can then choose to build up certain rooms. Some thoughts become mansions while others I let fall into disrepair.

Actually, it is very similar to the dream world in Inception. My goal is to replicate as much of the universe as possible in my mind, each photocell object being made up of ever-accurate ideas. This requires that I refresh, renew these ideas constantly. When a complete reset is required, this is when being broken comes into play. A nervous breakdown becomes necessary. What does that actually mean and what exactly is happening to the brain and mind of a person going through one?

A nervous breakdown at the scale of the brain is a massive storm. It is a global cataclysm, a hurricane occurring inside of the head. As with any disaster, there are casualties. Thoughts are washed away, whole systems of thought are utterly destroyed. The mind becomes a wasteland.

Then, suddenly, green plants start growing. People start rebuilding, creating new thoughts, new systems which will last longer and weather harsh storms. Like glass that has been broken, it is not useless. You just have more pieces to work with. If you desire, you can create something more beautiful with the shards than you’ve ever made before. Being broken is only a threat if you leave it at that, if you refuse to rebuild.

The materials that can now be used are made of stronger stuff. Just like spring cleaning, one can make room for updated ideas, ones that take into account what happened without buckling under the same pressure. Broken is not defeated. It is an opportunity to take those pieces and rearrange them into a beautiful new pattern. The rooms are yours to decorate. Be grateful for your glass. Be grateful you are breakable. The fact that you still remain means that you are greater than whatever was broken. Better yet, it means that you can design it by your standards, instead of using the blueprint you were previously given.

Day (339) - How You See

Reblogged from The Better Man Project:

I’ve never seen myself as someone who was blessed with unbelievable amounts of talent. When I played sports, I had to work really hard. When sports ended and I went into the gym…I had to work even harder. And life didn’t come easy. So what did I take away from all of this? Evan, talent only will take you so far…the thing that will make you different from everyone else…is your work ethic.

Read more… 395 more words

More beautiful words from Evan. I just enjoy it so much.

Recycling and Consciousness

Everything repeats itself. Nature is made up of many cycles: seasons, fractals, the same patterns over and over. The simplest pattern is repetition and nature’s mastered it. Everything operates from little particle that are also waves. What is a wave but the flowing in and out of the same initial point?

It is ironic that we are taught everything save consciousness is recycled, born anew, refreshed into a new form. This is due to the dearth of information surrounding the origin of consciousness coupled with the prevailing reductionist and mechanistic views of humanity. This can be better summed up as the classical view of consciousness; the assumption starts with the idea that consciousness is derivable from processes, that it is an emergent phenomena based on physiology. The problem with this is the general problem of reductionist theory and incompatible with the rest of nature, in that consciousness is an over-and-above occurrence, rendering it unnecessary for basic functioning.

To make this clearer I shall say this: consciousness is primarily about choice between certain actions. Yet the prevailing theories about it are based in a classical view of the universe. This is the free will problem. If the universe is deterministic (which quantum physics and relativity birth say is not the case) then there is no room or reason for free will or consciousness. Yet as the classical model was replaced with an updated version in other areas so too must it be in this instance.

Dr. Stuart Hameroff (Microtubules as Carriers of Consciousness) proposes that or souls, the source of our consciousness, is recyclable. Many mainstream scientists reject this idea. They are kind of required to since they view the brain from a classical standpoint. Consciousness has not found its proper place amongst the sciences. It is like the infinity, the singularity, taunting us with its elusive yet ever-present qualia-creating ability. Deepak Chopra (Consciousness-based Science) has also proposed a model that seats the qualia of consciousness right into the quanta dynamic. Both have a lot to prove if either will ever be taken seriously.

My writer’s brain latches onto these theories as they work well in my imaginary worlds. They make sense, more sense than the alienated view humans have of themselves right now. Philosophically, they also have a certain appeal. Consciousness becomes a cause instead of a random and unwelcome elephant in the room. Nature is cyclical, not necessarily repetitious, but it does use a similar template to create new variations. We don’t really have a template for consciousness in the dualistic worldview.

I’m waiting for confirmation either way. Humans have long feared or at least seemed to be bothered by the fact that we think. We haven’t figured out what it means to be an observer yet beyond the ability to choose. Even that is contentious to some. I love the mind, the soul, and I am anxiously waiting for confirmation either way. If we are nothing, or something more. That we are not over and above, nor beneath, but maybe right beside the other natural forces. Recycling our minds over and over, in an altered form each time.