A friend asked me where I was going in life. I couldn’t come up with an answer on the spot, and that bugged me.  I'll attempt to answer that question briefly and succinctly. This will necessarily involve where I’ve been and what happened.

I was obsessed with myself and my work. I was isolated by choice. I was oblivious to others, regretful of the past and neglectful of my health. These choices eventually led me to the gates of insanity and death. I was committed on a 5150 for suicidal depression. 2 weeks later I had a major heart attack. I was down and stayed there for 3 years. Then my fear of death, which was all I could think of, was relieved by a power greater than myself.  I turned the corner spiritually, emotionally and physically. I feel I’m back on a spiritual path.

So I’m open to God’s will. Where do I feel that is leading me? I seem to attract people with addictions and mental health problems. My experience allows me to be helpful. I get huge satisfaction from this  I’m being taught to get out of my own way. I’ve been exploring my creative side, with music and visual design. What’s going on here? All those enthusiasms seem to add up to carrying a message. I think I have something to say, and I’m being given the opportunity to say it. 

What do I have to say? 

Today matters. The past and future are imaginary. Forgiveness is freedom. Spiritual growth is about spiritual experience. Words get you part way there, but words are not the experience. Meditation involves silencing the articulate mind.   Logic and analysis, separation and ego must be stilled in order to experience wholeness and connection. That consciousness lives in me. God is in me, and in everything else. 

But I struggle with faith. I get pissed off at God and slam the door of consciousness shut. When I do that I’m in grave danger. Anger at God will drive me right into a pit of despair and self-pity. If I revel in logical/philosophical objections to God, that's where I'll go. That will kill me quick. This is not a theoretical proposition. I have to find my way back as soon as possible. So I have a practical argument in favor of God consciousness. I can sometimes help people who, like me, have intellectual resistance to that sort of thing.

Semi-sometimes Journaling

Keeping a journal has never been something that I’ve ever done successfully over the long haul. I have ideas about why that is but none of them fully satisfy me. It’s true I’m lazy, and it’s true that I have trouble regulating my time. Be that as it may I’m more motivated this time around to write on a daily basis. I don’t want to the track minutiae of my daily routine or the goings-on of my friends, I have Facebook for that. Here I’d like to leave thoughts that pass through my mind and disappear. Sometimes I think some pretty interesting thoughts. (Interesting to me at any rate.) I’d like to hold onto them a little longer than just  until my short-term memory gets wiped. 

It’s not just a matter of recording my thoughts directly. I want to find a way to articulate the ideas beyond merely putting them down on paper.

I’m thinking about discipline. My perception of myself is that I don’t have any. Like many of the unexamined opinions I hold about myself, this judgement is black or white. I either have discipline or I don’t. That’s nonsense. I do have discipline in a lot of things. I’m a disciplined thinker when I want to be. I adhere to schedules that I almost entirely set for myself. In other matters I am not so rigorous. I have little discipline when it comes to my physical surroundings. I live in my head a lot, and I use this as a way to avoid unpleasant things. Using my license not to be coherent in this narrative, I’m going to shift focus over to that live in my head thing. This is, of course, very undisciplined.

I am a thinker. I spent a lot of time in my thoughts. There are various reasons for this. One reason is that I have an active and powerful mind. I believe I was born with that, and that it was nurtured by my parents. Another reason is that an unpleasant childhood prompted me to live in fantasy. Let’s try that again. I have always lived in fantasy. I’ve always had a very powerful imagination. I have often been able to think of things that are more interesting more engaging more pleasant and just happier than what is happening to me right now. These abilities are not good or bad. I can use them to create worlds that are interesting to others as well as myself. I can make models of reality when I’m trying to solve a problem.  I can also run away into my fantasies, as I did with Second Life, and World of Warcraft.

These are all, good and bad, examples of very obvious, all-inclusive forms of fantasy. My imagination works on a smaller scale as well. I look into the future to decide where my next foot will fall and how to get from appointment A to appointment B. But I also take present upsets and injuries into the future, projecting them into a model in my mind. There I direct puppet show wherein a person who has injured me, say, shows why they are such an asshole and why I was right all along.