In the Zone

Mapping out the territory

Many people have told me things like this in one-way-shape-or-form all my life.

"You're always going through every second in your head. Come back down and just be here. This moment is the only place life is actually happening, and all that thinking is just a way of stepping around it instead of living it."

Basically that overthinking and overanalyzing is all in your head, all conceptual, and not the direct experience of itself.

The map, but not the territory.
I get that.

So I want to distill the whole view down into something clear. Because it is true that I am spending a great deal of time on the map now. But there is a reason for that.

Ten Years Ago

Ten years ago I was heavily experiencing reality directly.

Being.

Doing intense meditation to be present in the moment and absorb the universe.

Breathe in.
Breathe out.

In synchrony with the ebb and flow of the tides of reality.

And then, for equally long stretches if not longer, thinking about what I realized in those experiences.

Going back and forth between raw direct experience, and then, while it was fresh in my soul and my vibe and my experience, conceptualizing and drawing and mapping out the pieces in my head. Hands on keyboard, typing out thoughts and ideas. Occasionally getting lost in the endless joy of trying to code the models and get things precisely defined enough for engineer-level, practical, level of detail. Something you could actually physically, literally work with in software code, with no ambiguity.

Then I would go until I could not go any longer.

Sleep.
Dream.
Wake up.
Work.
Explore.
Meditate.
Be in the present.
Observe.
Map.
Break down.
Organize.
Distill.
Try and explain and figure out.

In an endless loop or interwoven spiral.

With the occasional great joy of spending short periods with a close new friend who I had met here and/or there along the way, who for one reason or another found similar levels of curiosity in exploring the depths, and bouncing ideas around with open minds, seeking / exploring the space of candidate possibilities / potentials for what could perhaps, maybe be going on behind the scenes, below the obvious.

Periods of not being steeped deeply into modeling or coding or problem solving. Taking in the patterns with my brain and my soul and my experience, not mentally, but through direct experience. But followed and preceded all-the-while with breaking-things-down, trying to figure things out, and going back to the whiteboard, laptop, or pen and paper. Weaving back and forth through intricate and immersive / deep presence, and the math, science, code, notes, conversations, and the sketchbook.

The Sliver

Then every now and then, repeating.

Going back into some sliver of an aspect of the global problem I was trying to figure out, to map out, of how the universe works.

The very origin of the universe, how the first beat or step would have had to have worked. How to model intelligent, knowledgeable, problem-solving agents to simulate reality. Connecting the sage-like insights from the Tao Te Ching and the Torah and the Bhagavad Gita and other ancient texts, which I would listen to on a regular basis, every few months, six months, a year, whatever.

Being so deep into the raw experience for several hours each day, the pendulum-swinging back from that to conceptualization and thinking, then to full-on problem solving and trying to map it out into an unambiguously clear model and documents that the public would understand.

Getting closer and closer it felt like.
Feeling things increasingly coming together and making some sense more and more.
Yet still stumbling around, trial-and-erroring my way stumbling through in the dark.

Crossing the Barrier

And then, boom.

Barrier, crossed.
Door unlocked.

At the last moment, boulders of experience rumbled into their final positions.

Gate opened.
Tone/code/stone activated.

I entered a new realm in experiential reality, in one day, and all of a sudden I was in an entirely unfamiliar place. At first, good. Great. Amazing. Cheers deep down resonating in my soul everywhere. Mind and spirit unexpectedly clicked, like whoa.

But soon. Quickly. Terror started setting in.

Like I had just woken up from a deep sleep in the middle of the jungle or the desert, being hunted like prey by the coyotes or the bears, making me panicked. Kind of like the movie The Grey, with Liam Neeson. Never knowing where they were going to come to you next, haunting you, trapping you. All the while you are endlessly terrified that they are going to get you, and the slow and agonizing, painful, long, drawn out, slow, torturous death that they were going to slowly merge onto you was going to be everything you are imagining, and then, oh wow, even more imaginings of how much worse it can get from that. And any moment, you were next.

And streams of experiences.
Faster than memory.
Faster than video.
Faster than dreams.
And definitely faster than words can be put together.

Pulsing through you, moment by moment, every time the clock ticked the next minute, and your eyes would twist right to the clock hands or the clock numbers the moment before they would change to the next minute. And the snap to the next triggered inside your mind, soul, and experience, a new awakening. Each step.

And every moment was a test.
Do you make the right decision, or the wrong one?
And every time, you make the wrong one.

Boom.

And overwhelming guilt and shame and despair and torment wraps and weaves through your whole body and vibe and mind and heart and gut and every thought and every dream, crippling you for hours and days and weeks and months on end.

An unceasing raw stream of the tree of life, interwoven and perfectly blended together with the tree of knowledge. They were one.

Yet somehow you managed to continue on the outside pretending like life was normal, smile at your neighbor, order something to eat and be kind to strangers, and still trying to find a way to navigate through the infinite maze to some sort of impossible-to-find temporary zone of semi-calm for a second, so you could still get some work done and focus on various projects and make an impact on business.

Crammed With Knowledge

And you were not just seeing knowledge. You were being crammed knowledge down your throat/mouth faster than you could take a breath. And it was not conceptual knowledge, but real experience, direct experience. More richer experience than you had ever experienced in any dream or waking moment of your entire life before.

Impossible to imagine, I had never imagined this level of experience before.
Not once.
Never even close to crossing my mind before then.

Just laying in bed, or walking down the road, or climbing up a trail, or sitting on the train, moment to moment, the layers of reality being peeled back. You seeing and feeling and dreaming and dreading the next one, because it could not be any worse than the last, but, oh wait, it was way worse. It’s always gonna be WAY worse.

Way worse than before, every moment.

And it wasn’t me, thinking. These were streaming in in some clever way that I have yet to map out and figure out, how it was even possible or who or what was basically doing that to me. It felt like I was being hunted, and I saw endless signs of the potential, yet nothing became of it in definite reality. No amount of logic or mental stamina or rational thinking or training is going to get rid of the fact that the wolves are right over there, smelling my soul as I try and hide quietly, as they’re surrounding me no matter my clever attempts to find a way out. When you are staring the mountain lion in the face, or the bear coming at you b/c you’re too close to its cubs, are you going to be able to shift gears to calm, focus, as you face your last moments?

But it’s worse than that. Your mind and experiential reality has been breached. Someone is within the walls, streaming into your mind and body and spirit new realities and experiences, like they have tapped your soul and the IV is going right to the source of everything you know, your awareness, the vibe you feel in your gut and intuition and memory and understanding and experience of every moment of reality.

Can you control the pain you feel while being whipped.
Can you calm down while they poured gas all over you and threw the match.
While your teeth are being slowly chipped at with a screwdriver.
And pulled out with the wrench.
As you watch your loved ones suffer even more excruciating severities and torments.
Because of what you had unknowingly done.

This is a new type of “awareness”, or “knowledge”, I had not anticipated becoming intimately experientially familiar with. Alongside seeing the unlimited reasons why things are the way they are, and why everything is in careful balance, and why what appears bad or even absolutely terrible and wretched is often the best possible outcome given the karma of give and take dynamics, yet no normal human could ever intuitively understand and absorb through some sort of back-n-forth explanation, discussion, or heated argument where the only goal anyone has is to never listen.

And yet, this is just the tip of the iceberg of the years of data-dumps that went like this, in infinite directions emerging every moment, tied to every signal in day to day life. To reconvey in words or tell in stories every last detail would take many lifetimes.

And realizing human reality is basically like an ant compared to a giant mountain, or the entire planet, or the entire universe. A speck of dust in the air. A tiny piece of moisture on the tip of a foam bubble on a wave in the ocean. Sand grain in the desert.

Humans, you are realizing every second now of every day, are not aware of a goddam thing, in comparison to the crazy complexity of knowledge and data and intelligence coordinating the unfolding of the universe behind your eyes. The experiential universe, not forcing you to see or do, but hinting at you, deep down inside of you, a subtle memory of something you are for some reason intimately intrigued by and endlessly curious of figuring out what’s over there, and it causes you to go left instead of right, over and over again, in so many unforeseen and forgotten ways.

And no one is aware of this.
But you.
But me.
But others have had to have seen this before, right?

This is insane, why is no one talking about this, is it a big game, and I am the idiot. The fool. Wanting to talk about what is going on inside for me, when no one else is saying a goddam word, never even heard of any of this before, all this crazy intensity of waking dreams endlessly tormenting me, while showing me the inner architecture of something it will take many years to unpack.

Just Be, Present?

So, no.
Sorry.
I am pretty f-ing terrified to just “be” in the “present” :).

Goddam-near had my skin peeled off with razor blades and barbed wire in real life, followed by endless imaginations of experientially real streams of my eyes singed out with that blow torch sitting in the garage, whipped up my brain with the drill bit on that handheld drill I never use for woodworking and craftsmanship. It would fit so perfectly right in my right or left nostril if I just tilted my head back and went straight in to jumble up the pineal gland, but that would never be enough. First then take the bull-whip and whip me to my knees into a waist-deep pit, and stone me until my bones are all broken, drag my carcass into the oven and leave it there at 450 degrees for a few hours, pull out my melted blob of a body while my mind is still semi-fresh, absorbing every goddam moment one by one, as I dream of my way out of the infinite concrete mirror prison where the only way out is to win favor of a terrible man who only values blind loyalty and nothing else, yet does nothing worthy of respect.

I mean, I can go on and on.

That could have been five seconds, or four minutes, of my soul twisting and whirling toward unfathomable pain and torment.

Why

Why?
Because I experience too much?
While conceptually trying to figure out what I was going through.

Trying to map things out.
Down to the math.
To the code.
To the letters and numbers and sounds and symbols.

From experience, and back and forth like that, for too long, until I cracked the code, mapped the stone, and crossed to the other side. For a brief moment in my overall life, though many years like that is not that pleasant, so to speak, you can try to imagine.

Maybe My Flaw

So maybe my flaw was asking too many questions.
Breaking things down too much.
While never losing my soul in empty distraction and meaningless chitchat for more than a few moments, as required to be a somewhat normal person in this life.

Maybe I should have just gone with the flow, but never really, you know, thought about what I was going through. Just dull my brain, and dull my mind, and just live.

Maybe I should have done that.
But nope.
I don’t think that was the right approach, for me at least.

The Knot in the Rope

I am like a knot in the rope, keeping the two sides, or the multiple sides, locked together, in balance, as they pull and try to rip the whole thing apart into their perspective, their side, their direction.

I have been, as I see it now, tuning to the oneness, since day one. Using logic to distill what is accurate in terms of a working model of reality, while being fully open to new ideas, perspectives, and the raw experience of the present moment.

And all the mainstream perspective, it turns out, it seems to be just one more way to distract us from who we really are. To never take a look in the mirror. To never reflect and remember who we really are, deep down.

So there are pros and cons to “just being” :).

Where I Am Now

And for the moment, I am a little bit terrified to dive in the deep end of raw experience again. Maybe it makes sense to you perhaps, maybe not.

Given now I know and have found tons and tons more about the organization and structure of the universe than I ever did back then, I am afraid of the potential torment that might await if I merge back into the swimming pool again, absorb the signals more directly again, feel more intensely again.

Not that I don’t feel.
I am in a good balance now, for me, it seems.
I live a nice, simple, calm life.
I am fully in tune with my vibe and my experience and my path, following the good, and in union with the one way that I have been formed perfectly for.
And I feel like I am fulfilling my mission.
And that, I think, is a good life.

Enjoyable at least :]. And perhaps, to some degree, productive or useful.

At least a nice thing to expect one day of your life. To follow the calling until the solution becomes apparent, and making it manifest, to bring about a better world, contributing according to your soul’s weaving into the web of existence and experience of us all, in this crazy ass universe.

(What if 😉)