A Confession

I am a trained scientist, a good writer, a surfer. And a mystic.

My wife once told me that she once went to a place to meet a ghost. And that God spoke with her. I think this is part madness. And I think it is part fact.

I am not a mystic in the traditional sense. I believe that certain mathematical concepts that are crucial to realizing our full potential can only be grasped from within the context of certain very specific personal and emotional states that are impossible to reach alone.

For example, if you play the Doors 'Spanish Caravan' when you're driving at 140 mph it doesn't work as well as if you're playing Beethoven. It can work, but not as well. But the right symphony. Perhaps. The moonlight. As you hit 150. 160. 190. 210. The road bends around the hood of your car. First . Second. Third movement. By the time the Sonata is complete. You have a different perspective on life.

People mellow with age. When I was in fourth grade, I was into numerology and the occult. I could weave the ritual of the coven and cut into the fabric of bahai with the best of them through high school, although I tended to be left alone as a kind of figure that people would walk up to at the table I'd reserved for myself in the library. I spent more time on my sailboat than I did in the practice of any dark art. And they played out the ritualization in kinky sex. Teenage sex was a done deal for me from years before; they were experimenting in threes. They still are. My wife deeply mistrusts my connections to kink. Let her.

Not unlike Marcus Aurelius, my view is that there is a structure to the world - the Gods or a God take care of the world. This is not a story of unproven assertions, and invisible beings that you can ascribe all your hopes and blame and guilt and lovelost wanderings. I do not believe this. At all. If you ask me whether or not I believe in the power of love - I would tell you the same. Light. And dark. Transformations of energy. Power exchange. Trust only fate. And time.

I believe Christ wanders the Earth - what he does with this planet isn't always clear. Where three are gathered, he can be found. Thats what they say at least.

Look carefully at the elements. They don't struggle / or play out an endless transmutation, when they commutate each others existence - fire to water, water to fire. Why then would we fear death? We are transformations of the same elements.

I've been accused of having a death wish. The best one is I've been accused of being a stalker. I've even been called a stalkers stalker. What I don't do - are drugs or sex or headgames. A guy who has three degrees in Physics tees off with you that doesn't talk to you about your swing. Just hit the fucking ball and lets get on the green. I am not into bad pain. I am into good pain. I deliver. You receive.

I don't play russian roulette. I don't ride a Harley Davidson. I don't re-enact scenes from the movie jackass in my spare time. I don't drink. Not even a single drop. I don't understand why you drink. If you talk about a party that is serving drinks I can't even begin to understand why.

I pull the cord at 10,000 feet and float down safe. I corner the high caldera pass with the wheel hanging off into the cliff and turn into the slide. I drop into the 17 foot wave with the two or three or god I think it was actually seven waterspouts spiralling down off the point - and I ride that mother fucker so far and long the legs get tired from bottom turns. I land on my mark. If I play warcraft, I make it to epic and then pug raids that take down whatever endgame boss they throw at you. If I don't play warcraft, I end up being slightly less of a fatass. I pull a flyer off the wall for a triathlon, and say to myself I can do it. Then I run seven of them.

In business, I make my targets. Maybe if only just make my targets. I could care less about business. But when I am on point, I deliver. It annoys me to no end how many backs you have to stab along the way. Do people actually get off on this stuff?

I'm not an activist, I barely know my way around the world of politics and I could care less whats going on with whatever party you're a member of. Sometimes dead bodies floating in a flooded New Orleans street for days, will tend to piss me off. I might do something about that. Other times, people who happen to be gay want to have the right to have a marital squabble. I can play that game too. But my heart isn't there.

I assemble this life from finite , discrete moments. Somehow, they connect in ways that change others. I have always lived for the moment. Carpet the den.

This is a world of information sickness. Intense, highly sexualized and viral memes thread through society. The background radiation of a thousand failed psychological experiments with the masses against the backdrop of almost as many failed economic foreign and domestic policies playing butterfly effect to a highly destabilized world balanced on the edge of environmental catastrophe.

I have some pretty cool friends. At least a few of them are convinced that biological life in this species form , is a dead end. Silicon based life handles vaccuum much better, its a lower energy configuration. The planet's emmissaries almost certainly will be silicon based. That much I will give them.

But Marcus Aurelius is right. They're wrong. They think of the future, of things uncertain. The reality is that in this form, at this moment, you have a chance to do more than anyone before. The tools are all world class - they're all available to you. The Gods take care of the world. But you take care of yourself.

And even if I give up things to God, that others would love to nail to another form - She is not an invisible presence. She is light in the darkness. But not that bright blinding light that everyone turns into an Indian dance number. No. Its kind of like a gleam.

I am still not quite sure why people sacrificed virgins to her. The thuggee.. from which we get the word 'thug'. Why the dark alley of Calcutta would find a woman walking home, suddenly struck unconscious. How she would awake , to find herself ritualistically beheaded. I guess today they'd lock on her Cellphone and track her GPS.

Whatever we give to the Gods should be the best of whatever it is , that we have to offer. Those who follow them, and are guided by them are truly dangerous. They do not see the world They fight their wars for you. In this, orthodoxy, as Chesterton wrote - can be a higher form of radicalism. Unlike the fundamentalism that acts as a shield against the world. That meditation that exposes the hidden structure and frightening power exchange between men and a world we still don't understand.

Safe Paths, Colorless Reader.