Word Is Born

As the lids of my eyes fell beneath the cumbersome pull of sleep, it resembled any usual night concluding another ordinary day. Shielded from the outer world and its soul-perplexing light, my journey inward began its motions. First, the insipid darkness, the intermittently insular action until intrusion by a prompting portal of light. Witness spectral projections sharpen themes with divine origami, the folding and unfolding of the creator’s cloth. Rediscover the elusive realm of dreams. Take me to a place that encapsulates this swath of scenes.

Flush with the rising sun, I awoke in a fluid transgression from the dream’s natural ending to the start of another day. So many times before had I recognised my catapulting release from a dreamy spell. The open gates to ‘reality’ evoking an instantaneous, elbow-jerking ascension of the torso. A rude awakening to a forgotten world.

This arousal was different to others. No ‘normal’ dream with its inconspicuous inverse, the familiarity with life was all too candid. A carbon copy par a few crystallising enigmas. Neither was the emulation a lonesome novelty. Dreams, typified as ether, aren’t known for their longevity; if anything, the setting of sleep pours past the dreamscapes trickling time. Two hours strapped to the subconscious event horizon returning fractional experiences. That relationship was rewritten in this dream session. It’s what brought about the convulsion. The immediate sitting up as the sight senses alerted my mind to its relocation. Questions lingered, not on where I had been. Or what had happened. But how long was I there? Roused away from what felt like many years of sleep, only to be back where I’d slept a quarter day prior.

What beyond Earth was that? Dreams always had the potential to be peculiar. I’d experienced lucidity, premonitions, shared dreams with family members; this night, however, set a new boundary, a galactic mirror. Yet the enquiries did not chase their crescendo. Choosing to dissipate into the long-term memory as the life of an average 16-year-old reclaimed centre stage.

The following two years were epitomised by the towering collapse of my self-esteem, consumed in a cannabis-blazing inferno. Choking on the fumes of decadence, callow eyes scoured for their undoing. The fires, fuelled by the roaring winds of behavioural addiction to marijuana, ravaged my identity. Left were the remnants of a broken human being, withering scornfully in the debris of his own tarnished ashes. Succumb to the perishing fires of self-doubt, a self-imploded ego of forlorn clout. A whim whisper of smoke protruding from a fleck spark. The concluding relic, embers of a razed soul.

Easy to presume such devastation as the ruin of my life. Focus had fled, leaving my mental faculty in disrepair. Thinking felt like the balancing act of walking a ship’s deck in stormy seas. Tipped towards objects on a waves will. Thoughts affixed to the grasping moment until the sea of the subconscious rocked me elsewhere. Confidence weathered down to rubble by interminable torrents of self-criticism. My conscientiousness held hostage by a voice stricken with the loss of love for his life. Pedastooling my cognition on a high agenda was a grave mistake, realising what I had invited in. I lamented every part of myself for the naivety, travelling down this tumultuous road with such abandon. Captured by my own interpretation of the quote, “when everything is beautiful, nothing is beautiful.” For all of me was grey, except the blue hue of boohoos.

Suffering in despair, overcome by competitive concoctions of dread. The noise of life drowned out by sorrowing soliloquies of regret. Submersed in panic, at the mercy of life’s relentless waters, the inner court summoned self-destructive behaviour. Protesting, with a fresh lack of care for my well-being, the dilemma that stole my spark. Markedly rugged gulps of an inebriate, the medicinal numbing towards apathy. A closet of solitude, where one could pretend capitulating with the static enmity was, in actuality, surpassing it. All I could conjure to counter the unease of interaction. What appeared to be complex social dynamics was my failure to digest the presence of others. Choosing to conceal this jaggedly stalling charisma behind a drunken disguise. Deeming its embarrassment juvenile to the patchy drivel of a sober man and his sterile confidence. Who’ll again detest himself, too mortified to be maudlin.

Not to label me a lost cause, it wasn’t all degenerative coping mechanisms; in the other hand, lay sincere action towards revival. I espoused the reclamation of mental performance, addressing it with cogent prudence. Smoking may have brought me down the road to ruin, but it was not all calamity. Dry sullen ashes triggered a crying thirst for knowledge. Creative sparks in their dim ignition called upon further expansion of my repertoire. Enthusiastic remittal propelled me to craft what could be. The slate was being wiped clean, erasing the majority of my desires, but this yearning for revival wove itself around my skeletal interior. Its exclusion from the purge, the elected key to a conscientious amendment of my past. The rose that grew through derelict concrete. It seemed self-evident. Garnering an astute frame of mind was the most sensible rectification. A compliment to my emotional inflexion. Losing so much to the haze, yet the questions knew not to ask where was it all? Rather, what was worth retrieving?

Surprising yourself is one of life’s precious rarities. When the discovery of a new paradigm of being comes around, change routinely follows. The descent wasn’t long-lived. Not even six months had passed since internal conflict slapped the enjoyment out of my life; now, it was offering me an uplifting hand. Did I need the beat down to take notice? I assume without punishment, my delinquent attitude would have nullified any viability to proceed along my life’s path. Trapped in an eddy of circular ignorance, treading the currents of repetitive life lessons, unaware to destiny’s raft floating downstream.

The sympathetic hand lightened my mentality, and a relinquished-strain permitting illustration ensued. Abilities I’d neither raised nor relished came to be. In its elastic desperation, chasing back to claim wasted years brought forth a dour summoning of cognitive abilities. And no matter how grey my mind, this rejuvenating revelation guzzled at the unfettering drive towards salvation. But for what reward?

To begin with, no more than knowledge to supplement intriguing conversation. The satisfaction of healing, fixing up the abandoned, repairing that which malfunctions. Not until, in light of the issue, seedlings sprouted. Stems of self-belief and self-respect broke through desolated soils.

I’d discovered a talent, an ethereal dexterity when forming and understanding concepts, soaring way above my assumed average capabilities. Topics floated within my mind space like specs of dust glistening in the resurrecting light. My mind’s eye fixed with confident intent to endearing interpretations.

This complex world wasn’t so complicated after all. And now, I’d uncovered tools to translate its meaning—gifted sapience partnered with infrangible passion. Gone was the swirling focus, faint as the wind’s source, reinflated with infatuation, engrossed by the blueprints of worldly life. Realising the power of knowledge allowed me to immerse myself in its deciphering unabated. The key ingredient to my rehabilitative recipe, an area I could put the work in with no interference from social angst.

The universe began to open up like a book, each step clarified by critical thinking. Logic and rationale shone with their fluent persuasiveness. My history and its collated data drenched in relevancy, the spongy memory acting as an index card upon stimuli’s calling. I was attentive to my mode of thought, how it was matching like for like with industry wisdom I’d uncover when examining subjects. Even if the introduction was moments ago, I was repetitively, after prefatory analysis, discovering the same conclusions as those who wrote on the topics. All via independent thinking, chiefly insight structured with logical analysis. Sometimes I didn’t even need an introduction. Examining reality, I’d have a burst of inspiration highlighting what appeared as convincing truths. On occasion, those truths would later cross my path as if the inspiring message was a flirtatious synaesthesia. Confirming its taste before my tongue ever touched its existence.

Every subject had an organic DNA of laws and proclivities wrapped into their reality. To me, unlocking this interpretation technique was as if I’d resolved the backbone to analytics. You didn’t have to see to believe if the deportments were self-evident – archetypal answers abound. Dormant sagacity had what could only be called a miraculous awakening. And the world became a playground, as for the first time in my life, I began to believe I had the requisite tool-set to start living the adult lifestyle with finesse.

The flowing of ideas compounded into a realisation of how grossly I had overestimated the adult world’s judiciousness. I’d examine the variables at play, understand their strengths and weaknesses, and then form a corrective action theory. A high morality game emerged, enshrined in wisdom and packed with heartfelt significance. I was starting to farm avid enjoyment from my intellect like the toys of my childhood, painting scenarios where they could be put to good use. ‘I can make a difference’, the solitary light to guide me through the internal and external darkness. Precious enchantment, rousing the wisdom and compassion necessary to begin my new journey.

Somewhere, not long before the towering collapse of my self-esteem, I lost control of my thought stream. A voice within dominated with its conviction, a voice I identified as myself. I wasn’t happy. The person I’d become, unrecognisable to my past. My mind, in protest, scoured every moment for regrets to detest. The judgment of myself became my own worst enemy; scolding condemnation poured upon my every decision. A pressure exerted within the mental sphere so heavy I lost my true self-expression. Interfering everywhere I went, a plague of perpetual punishment. Across the fall from grace all the way to dusks rising of the phoenix, it watched over my actions. Exploring copious formulations to berate the mistakes that brought me unwanted predicaments.

Overwhelmed by the new paradigm, my mind looped through thought patterns undeterred. Incentivised to release this recognition in the form of frustration, adamant that I taught myself a lesson. This sickening deluge, an obsessive effusion. And no matter how much I desired, escape was hopeless. Shackled to streams of thought that accentuated my self-hate. The tale of a mindsets projection, borne across my brow in permanent marker.

My first sincere introduction to flow fell at a surprising end of the polarity. I, in my angst, developed a knack for continuous anxious thought. None of these thoughts were created with praiseful intent. Conversely, they had a determined drive that left me trailing consecutive avenues for lengthy periods. My mind had been in a state of overthinking since I discovered the joyous accelerant marijuana was to offer. The continual whisking of thoughtful contents, the gradual transformation from a free-flowing liquid of expression to a viscous muck, and the inexorable clogging of my cognitive mechanics.

As the muck receded, my head pressure relieved, brightening my life force. To my surprise, my development hadn’t subsided during the gritting. The strain I placed upon myself, the challenges I had to overcome, as those tribulations diminished, I wasn’t left frail and weak. At times life felt more fruitful than it ever had as if the whole process wasn’t as feared, pulling me down into an inescapable doom. There it occurred to me this wasn’t going to be a permanent debilitation. This was fatigue from what a sanguine mind would interpret as strength and conditioning training. The sacrificial tender for newfound limits.

The steady pattern of intensity, a witness to transformed tales, from anxious analysis to eager interpretation. Although my mind didn’t flick a switch, disposing of those angst-ridden thought patterns. They still came around, typically in social situations, but the dominance fell claim to reignited passions. Unravelling that mess in search of the perimeter of my potential, I came to meet flow’s positive aspect.

The streams of thought were beholden to themselves. An auxiliary plugged into my interior dialect. The narration, on my part, was fortuitously complimentary. This wasn’t me expressing the power of craft; no, it could only be presentation. Flow was autonomous. I may not have been able to recognise it at the time, but the insights garnered through these swift tacts are too much for the mind to conjure. Too direct, too instantaneous, too inescapable to be contemplated into creation. It wasn’t an attempt to build what manifested, but rather acts of inspiration, an ambition to merge with the essence of knowledge. No step by step activation; only soul expectancy under the auspices of emotion. I had the mind to interpret and endure, but I wasn’t flow’s endogenic origins. The only creative role I played was that of housekeeper. Shaping my internal environment to attract these bodacious guests.

My understanding of life was levelling up, bringing about realisations of how lacking the world was in so many sectors. The culture of my surroundings seemed insistent on blaming the issues that plagued this world on people’s ‘natural’ character. I diverged from this point of view, recognising people are creatures of habit who adopt most practices via imitation. This may be a simplified view of the formation of culture; however, knowing how people are moulded by their environment, it seems evident that many are destined to become the dictation of their surrounding experiences.

I visualised this explanation with the analogy of a global disco ball. Its incalculable mirrors, each capturing an individual reflection, representative of each and every person’s uniqueness. Still, a grouping is individuals, each portraying a different aspect of the same location. Specific, yet all similar reflections of their environment. Not to say people are destined to become a mirror image of their surroundings, especially in the information age, where one can explore different environments using their fingers and thumbs. Nurturing environments can still produce sociopaths, scarce generous, violent peaceful, peaceful violent, but these are those who go against the grain, an oddity, intentional or not. At the end of the day, most of us go along to get along, the social status crowning of crowd mentality, the silent acquiescence of conformity, the magnetising influence of the majority. All portrayed through our zesty skin.

This is a standardised representation of the class & cultural divisions encountered across many societies. We expect abundant morality in those whose environment is sparse of necessities and support. That is like expecting a group of disco ball mirrors not to reflect that which is in their immediate vicinity. Yes, some may not. They may be of the small percentage who overcome but expecting all is expecting the impossible. Life is a game of numbers. We should all be able to appreciate the relationship between odds and fate. Calculation of odds is a key component of analysis. So what was stopping society from curating good odds? From eager involvement to spectatorship, are we considerate in the search for variables that endow harmony?

When I looked at the matter of reality, everything looked backwards, like the world is one big hypocrisy. Agendas, individual and collective, came before what was most suitable. What was sold as suitable was usually an order of business dressed up in emotional string-pulling propaganda. A corroborative tactic, with a driving force of those who fall for the appeal to emotions, powered by their emotively charged insistence on the enaction of said agenda. We are all at risk of becoming narrow-minded, especially when compelled by such deterministic emotions as sorrow, anger and fear.

For instance, our treatment of criminals reinforces the behaviours we wish to deter. We use punishment to inflict lessons in the hope that administering an aversive stimulus will bring about behavioural change. A quick fix that, in the long term, is vulnerable to regression. Environments defunct of love, catered to the animal, hidden away to be forgotten about, the delaying of inevitable remission. Punishment, whose desires for retribution are backed by strong emotions. Are we fixing the problem with these responses? Leaving it in the hands of a state and the growing private prison industry?

We don’t get to the root cause of criminal behaviour hence why re-incarceration and recidivism rates are so high. Are we nurturing people? Do we try to understand why people act the way they do? Something that shouldn’t be reserved for academic individuals who go out of their way to understand the human psyche. If society endeavoured to have a mass understanding of empathy and the struggles of the individual, we would be better prepared in decision-making for rehabilitation of those whose psyche needs healing and restructuring environments to protect the prospectively culpable. Believe it or not, many criminals fall into this bracket. Damaged psyches, so caught up in their struggles, empathy and morals murk in the unsettled soot of someone trying to keep themselves afloat. Unaddressed trauma, the ticking time bomb.

As a rule of thumb, it looked like the less material wealth you had, the greater your vulnerability to trauma. To add fuel to the fire, general society doesn’t value answers on how to heal trauma, leaving those struggling and those who fall victim to its trans-generational transmission to fend amongst themselves. Instead of rendering the environment to relieve the pressure of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we punish those, sometimes imprisoning them in an even more deficient environment. Marginalising others’ happiness, claiming ‘they should know better’, will never get to the root cause. We must begin searching for therapies that cure suffering and remove sources of trauma. I believe that love, founded and flourishing from the heart centre, will play a crucial part in overcoming this challenge.

People will state governments offer services for those on the bread line or troubled by other circumstances. As with many government services, wasteful failures wrapped with a bow of advertised corruption, it’s only an unending receipt for symptoms to a true cause of trim care. Worse still, more people seem to be dropping down the hierarchy, we forced to deliver more to a state bloated with the flatulence of selfish agendas. Quarrelling between fictitious ideologies and fairytale ‘utopias’ wished to manifest by ballot and uphold by baton. And if you win? Feast upon the scant rewards. The transference of people-pleasing vernacular into an implanted institutional-power initiated letdown. Shaped in the eyes of the withholder for profit and power of a selfish minority.

What do we expect? This isn’t the servant of the collective. This is a tool of class enslavement, coercing the collective tax cattle at the behest of control freaks. Inequality shoots to the moon, while at the same time, they preach for less resource creation in order to save the planet. So, where is the wealth being transferred from? Who’s keeping this Ponzi scheme alive? And who foots the bill when the debt game grinds to a halt? For millennia, unsustainable debt levels have led to a reset of economies, with the wealthy incurring the greatest losses. Call it economic balancing via wealth equality harmonisation. This time, everything is interconnected through globalisation, the fast-tracked producer-to-consumer supply chain, our over-dependency on a fine-tuned, delicate system, and our reliance on faraway lands following the steady disintegration of community self-sufficiency. I fear the cycle will not continue as it has. Technocracy looms over us all.

It was obvious the vast percentage of the planet’s population needed relief in one form or another. Still, for the most part, global society was lacking in destitution, waiting for any sort of paternalistic response. In fact, many of modern-day society’s engineered fundamentals were undermining relief efforts’ impact. Look at the world bank or the international monetary fund, institutions representative of the world’s financial nobility and portrayed in western media as the pinnacle angelical eleemosynary. World shapers by the power of coercive loans large enough to sink national economies, preserved with propagandised portrayals of charity. Do you personally know of the scrutiny these institutions have faced by those intrigued to investigate or those who have felt the force of their monetary might? Famines killing millions have been the symptoms of their predatory lending practices! Structural adjustment programs, strong-arming control of market policy decisions, fiscal budgets, and fire sale privatisations. Restructuring entire national economies in return for the world’s wealthiest to profit with interest off of the world’s poorest.

And this new money injected with the hands of corporate powers has much of the administrative costs lining their pockets, increasing their access to the nation’s economy. Yes, money was spent, and things got upgraded, but not necessarily on quality of life essentials, schools, hospitals, social services for the poorest and so on, but rather infrastructure for those who could afford the capital to use it. It was never about social relief or even the market influence of the invisible hand. More so, cementing economic cultures, thus building cash flow back up the nodes of the financial elite.

Keeping nations in perpetual debt until bankruptcy reckons is a form of contemporary slavery. Held under bondage until they were forced to sacrifice sovereign policy decisions, infrastructure and resources to foreign powers, leaving them definitively worse off than before, all thanks to a handful of misrepresentatives. Disempowerment, all to the blame of poor economic policy advice, better described as quid pro quo exploitation disguised as monetary relief. Economic warfare, using diplomatic and financial arms as enforcement weapons.

We are the creators. We are the dreamers of the dreams. Our forefathers got us here, and our children depend on us as we did them. What’s the point if the planet is a ghetto of squalor? We are the potential. We are the future. Where is our real opportunity? Our opportunity to plant the shaded trees. Opportunity to give back, not to those who have but those who need. It’s a damn shame this planet is filled with need, so most of us give to those who have. Beggars can’t be choosers, so give us this day our daily bread. And whence it comes, have us need for something else. Climbing social ladders, one need at a time, with no genuine care for those left to ascend the standard of living. You may be rising, but the whole fucking thing is dropping into an abyss. Puppet masters encircling the rim.

Seven billion minds with potentials unimaginable, half of them don’t know where tomorrow’s meal is. How many have seen the cold, deathly-calculative ways of warfare? How many have never felt the vibrant energy of an educational institution’s corridor? How many work their whole lives with nothing but their offspring to show for it? Cumulatively, billions. That’s fucked, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It may be true that this has happened because of how the world turned out. We ended up here due to man’s animalistic origins, but I’ll tell you now, there are people at the top who use wicked intellectualism to keep us here. And suppose we carry on living like this, disconnected, disbelief dominating our optimism, sentences charged by the perilous belief that the masses can’t change for the better. In that case, we will only continue to be used and abused as our acceptance of dismay gifts the greedy.

When one took his time to study the cascading failures, the findings started to substantiate a conviction. Was it possible the hypocrisy that devalued our global web of interaction was, in actuality, an agenda designed to devour it? It left me wondering whether it was by pure coincidence the age-old tactic for ruling over subjects, divide and conquer, had manifested in modern-day society. We losing our economic power, our freedoms, our sanity. Like a softening up for the kill. As my dad always says, prior preparation prevents piss poor performance. If there were plans to build a new world order, I’d expect to see some prep. Then again, it doesn’t have to be a conspiracy. This could be explained as the natural progression of the human psyche and unimaginable wealth accumulation. A semi-subconscious belief that their vast wealth or intelligence marks them as a superior subsect of humanity. We’ve already seen it across races with racism and self-acclaimed ‘superior’ races. We’ve seen it in the self-prophesied divine right of kings and queens with their royal blood. What is to stop those so powerful they can send ripples through the world from housing a similar belief? From seeking ‘divine’ or ‘scientific’ excuses to bend the world to their will?

We, the inhabitants of this planet, particularly the West, where many of these beastly institutions derive, have to integrate the possibility of this reality and take formative action. If it is true and we get blindsided by this, it’s bye-bye liberty. Forever. We are on the verge of allowing a technological nightmare. Would be class rulers will understand not only the psychology of collective groups but the individuals that make them. Data analytics allows tailor-made propaganda, and with the internet of things growing by the day, that data set is only becoming more conclusive. I’m not talking about simple likes, and dislikes, behavioural analysis deep into the crevices of your personality will reveal more about yourself than you will ever know.

Facial recognition flavoured mass surveillance leaves nowhere to hide. The social credit score herds the masses by the threat of excluding consequences. CBDCs or other digital currencies on a closed ledger blockchain give control over spending, travel, access to goods, business income, as when the trend towards cashless completes, and alternatives are few and far between. Your removal from the economy will be the workings of a button.

Remember, universal basic income is on its way, not because theirs extra cash to give away. No, the robots and AI will be working most of the jobs, and their added value must be extracted by the financially influential and filtered through the government down to the plebs. Remember, you will own nothing, and you will be happy, or else (see above).

Mass civil unrest? Half of you will have fallen victim to data analytics and been psychologically manipulated into believing this is the ONLY answer. Another quarter wants to stick with the majority and avoid trouble. An eighth can’t afford to not feed the family. A sixteenth has too much to lose socially. A thirty-second does not want to go outside and break the rules of the new public health emergency. A sixty-fourth spent so much time fighting in the run up they had nothing left to give. One-hundred and twenty-eighth tried rebellion but got put down by an army of drones and robot dogs. Two-hundred and fifty-sixth gave up. And the rest were deemed domestic terrorists and either fled as stateless individuals or got gulagged.

The End

A grim prospect that hopefully does not come to fruition. However, par the army of robots and gulags, all other factors are either deep into planning or on the production line. Yes, they add to administrative efficiency, but the risk of malice utilisation is an enticing prospect for controlling sociopaths. Let’s be honest, the job positions occupying those roles attract people with possessive tendencies like flies to shit. For however long these tools are available, we will risk perilous exploitation.

Once that snowball starts (newsbreak – it has), the power needed to halt it grows exponentially. This is why it’s time to take a good hard look at life, for our children’s sake. Technology is a sticky issue that demands maturity. Right now, we have psychotic commanders of nations armed to the teeth vying to gain or hold global supremacy. War isn’t the answer if you want to make the world a better place. Trauma and cultural tensions will scar the populace of this planet, so some wanna-be big shots can write the rules in their benefit. If we want to make it to the other side, we must put aside our differences and unite in the search for harmony.

Early in my ascent, one of the first things that stood out to me was the importance of truth and its vital role in configuring harmony. For if you wish to be aligned with the art of being, one has to conscientiously drive osmosis across the barrier between reality and persona. The closer you’re assimilated to the absolute truth, retrieving it with non-judgmental endearment, the easier it becomes to walk in a righteous direction. Equivalent to the Fibonacci sequence and its narrowing journey toward Phi, each step in the right direction should bring one closer. A pattern coded into an identifiable performance by reality’s physical nature, a philosophical transfer from its invisible nature, the rudimentary coding to life, to expansion. A fundamental bespoke to the entire universe, one which, when dawned upon my mind, cast an emblematic shadow beyond my ignorance. That startling reaction brought forth an inspired response. One I hoped to last a lifetime.

How the house shook when I began my journey down the rabbit hole. As a child growing up, I had assumed the world and humanity were inherently good, and the hierarchies in society were a measurable reflection of that. Lucky enough to live a protected life, the people I interacted with enforced that belief. So, I was gobsmacked to discover the TV and media I’d consumed presented a fictitious representation of saintly western cultures and powers. Programming me to believe this was an accurate illustration, an apt description of political society. I wasn’t taught to be aware of any visible qualms or mistrust with the talking heads of media except to be wary of falsity and hyperbole in misleading advertisements. Naive of me, but how was I to know any different? The trials of life were presented as to be a manner of justice. Schooling taught me I had to be a good human being; otherwise, general society wouldn’t accept me. People were smart; we had troves of knowledge stored, tangible and intangible. Society was supposed to be more advanced than at any time before in humanity’s history. They lauded how they had a solid grip on ensuring the world wasn’t going to shit through the sanctity of democratic institutions. Yet it was, and with closer examination, the culture I called my own was guilty to a greater extent than the rest. Sustaining this sorrowing state that is our current affairs.

I was bewildered at how this was allowed to happen. It became apparent I’d woefully overvalued aspects of societal maturity. Failing to realise the pivotal role emotional intelligence played in the politics of citizenry, the psychology of groupthink, herd mentality, tribalism. Selfish tendencies, inability to coordinate, opinioncy bias, the disintegration of community, ignorance accepted with indulgence. But nothing hit home harder when I realised how willing people are to go along with influencers’ narratives. Complex issues were greeted with ears but not independent minds. Society had a trust issue, a big one. We trusted authority too much and ourselves too little. Played for fools, divided by the whispers of traitors. Schooled into subservience. Gaslit out of achieving anything close to our potential.

My heart pumped with ferocity. I felt restless, like the lover who discovers their partner has been going behind their back. Unsure on how exactly to act, but full of consequentially charged emotions and their firing an arsenal of inspiring ideas. Creative avenues emerged, carved out of the dense dogma. An open can of worms, drilling into the bedrock of my naive belief of how society structured itself. My mind inspired me to pick it apart until it resembled more a piece of coral than molten rock fused in the mountains of Mordor.

It was happening again. Still not over the shattering of my internal perception, the external followed suit. Losing confidence in my own life views and decisions was one thing, but having the same happen to society at large. This was one wild, unexpected ride. My inner and outer conceptions had upended in less than six months since turning 18.

Historical events of my childhood years I’d watched change the world without becoming intellectually involved myself, now stunk with a septic stench of scepticism. What is going on? Society ate up these narratives, chewed on their fats, swallowing the contents without squirm or gag. Absorbing its synthetic law into the mind before regurgitating amongst the dinner table via polite conversation. Witnessing my own nation commit war crimes, leading to the deaths of millions, we, as average individuals, showed nothing more than mere disgruntlement. Here I was reading up on verifiable information, bombshell material; still, few could acknowledge what I was talking about. Did people not want to get to the bottom of things? Or did they assume the conflicted television and news media was doing that for them?

Most didn’t seem to care, and those that work in industries tasked with reporting this kind of information fell fowl to soft power censorship and manipulation. Although quenched by an information bottleneck, society had no exterior incentive to journey beyond the box dressing their reality. As with Pavlov’s dog, the reality of situations had come to be accepted, sometimes even cheered. All I could see was a machine designed to harvest economic and spiritual power from those tapered to its tassels. An attritional spewing of milky cream, the splurging of spent energy, our lives a venial sin, chasing to win material salvation on the road to the eventual slaughterhouse.

A rigged game. The rules set by psychological manipulation. Those of importance decided upon by a minute selection. One only had to look at how consolidated the media market was by the affluent to interpret its functioning. It dominated talking points. Fixed odds in their favour. Built Storylines with Hegelian tactics. Setting the stage for the striker to bag a goal.

Nation states, a closer resemblance to inviolable gangs than representatives. Monopolistic enforcers working at the behest of a significant other’s agendas. Not, as was sold to the public, the people’s best interest. Vehicles of dictation by the threat of destitute law and order. The first and last line of defence against rebellion. The protective administrators of their owners’ ambition.

It appeared pertinent as I removed myself from the zeitgeist in search of meaning, many issues began to make themselves apparent. Current societal issues alone did not headline my pontification. I spent much time deliberating on what we potentially faced as a collective, what we were failing to pay sufficient attention to. How many proposed and enacted solutions to societal problems didn’t make much sense in the long term. When states declared war on a hot political topic, trends suggested this was doublespeak enacting war upon the citizenry and their liberties.

Take the war on drugs, the policy of an attack against a dependent user. Someone who abuses his body using substances, often as a means of escaping the harsh reality of their life. What better way to make them stop than the punishment of induction into an environment furthering their collection of traumatic experiences. Not like addiction is a disease, and society should be searching for ways to relieve the patient by invigorating the mind. Look at the adversity towards psychedelic treatments and their superior research results for healing unresponsive addicts. Finally, coming onto the scene 60 years after initial research began. The holistic approach of empowering the individual isn’t a fan favourite of central authorities. Preferred points of action premised around docile dependency.

Then there’s fighting terrorism, with terrorism? Suppose one party conducts an act of terror that, in turn, invokes another party to do the same in retaliation. Are you not only forming a terror factory via the widening entrapment of victims turned revenge seekers? All having their turn in spreading misery and bloodshed. The dire reality of many Middle Eastern nations following illegal occupations is a testament to that. Yet people swallowed it up hook, line and sinker. ‘We shall defeat terrorism, scourge it from the planet… Using our own terror tactics!’ Where was the leading by noble example? To me, it looked like another great excuse to use the public’s money to line the pockets of the military-industrial complex. A modern-day casus belli, granting access to another nation’s resources. Recede their development, seizing economic and political power from their innocent citizenry. The lustful loot of war, domination, control, extraction and further fulfilment of the god complex. Not to forget the militarisation of the home state in the face of its populace. The excuse to snoop, a paranoid state.

It seemed as if society was happy to accept destruction as a means to an end, not far from how they’d treat gangrene before the invention of antibiotics. Seamless integration into the mindset, a proposal by our leaders that our world didn’t need healing, culling was the only means to an end. I refused to accept this. If we couldn’t heal the wounds inflicted in part by our social environment, are we not then playing an ill game of survival of the fittest on a sick planet? In my eyes, if we don’t begin to acknowledge and make amends for this broken philosophy soon enough, the musical chairs will start running out for the majority of us.

I wanted to believe this was an accident. This was some of the worst parts of human nature, selfishness combined with ignorance, pulling everyone down. I wanted this to be a natural fault in the collective, which had to be repaired. Sadly, it seemed the fault wasn’t by happenstance. People in this world actively try to keep the collective subdued in this state of mind, malleable to their agenda-driven dictates. I began to question what politics always explained away as incompetence for their never-ending accounts of failing the people. I started to believe this wasn’t about repairing; issues needed combatting. It was time for humanity to face the music.

Learning about the irregularities of WTC 7, on top of the undeniably large basket of additional, unexplainable phenomena and the peculiarly vacant public investigation into these discrepancies of 9/11, was the encore to my life as someone here to enjoy the ride. No, not a chance now. This information released a myriad of what-ifs and if-so’s. How could so many unexplained questions go by without any real investigation? And how on Earth had suspicions of this not been raised into the mass consciousness? Yes, there is such a thing as coincidences, but they are rare. Consecutive storylines filled with enough coincidences to create miracle odds are suspected as fibs. And if one actively hides these coincidences, averting or undermining investigations into them, either they have something to hide, or someone is doing their thinking for them. Now, have this repeat through life-changing, world-shaping events. It gave the impression, power pockets of sickening evil operated within the halls of western powers. The world didn’t have geopolitical villains; it has universal shadows of infectious power inhabited by our ugliest capabilities.

Beliefs held in unquestioning faith for so long had come to their end. Now the stencils of the zeitgeist would be treated as dubious, vexed for subtle malevolence and mendaciousness. Where would we be if it wasn’t for this? And where were we headed? What was driving us in this direction? Were we the victims of a select few and their psychotic apprehension of wealth? Or were there even darker motives at play? The answers I garnered seemed to suggest the two were interrelated.

Cascading foresight inspired risk analysis of our situation. Overnight, motive, method, hypothesis, logic, risk analysis and assimilation became my map and compass when traversing the information highway. The established consensus classed as unreliable until proven otherwise—question everything. A lone wolf, banished at first for my wrongs, now hoping to return to the fray, a stronger man with something honourable to offer society. A hero by archetype. A boy by name.

I understood the essence of being reborn, a grateful phoenix. Although premised around the discovery of a world imprisoned by darkness, like the deadly electricity of a defibrillator, it would shock life back into me. The heart reignited, feelings surfacing from uncharted depths. Emotions moulded in the wake of moving material with precious craftsmanship. Life’s vibrancy was reinstated, the decree to do so powered by magnanimous authenticity.

As a happy child, I was lackadaisical, brazenly cushy in my privileged comforts. The majority of my urges came from self-rewarding sense-driven desires. A fixation merry-go-round. The escape from my dreary entrapment flipped the interpretation of the word lifestyle. An assuring replacement of one for another more appropriate. Atonement. Being so averse to myself had inadvertently fostered a selfless state, rectifying its dominance. My passions had noble backing; the meaning I yearned for had arrived, packed to the brim with righteousness. Making a difference, being a positive light, a shining beacon in a directionless mire of darkness. I found meaning, one beyond the whim. One that, in the spirit of things, mattered.

Throughout my childhood, daydreaming was a pastime I couldn’t get enough of. An obsession that combined with music became nothing less than a thawing experience of swirling emotions. When marijuana introduced itself, vivid internal imagery dramatised quixotic scripts, achieving unbridled fruition. The imagination of the mind’s eye manufacturing droplets of serenity encased in the creative inspiration of vibrational harmonics. Always had it been the case, lyrics an otiose contributor to my musical mining for emotional experiences.

Daydreams showered my mentation up until the crumbling of my mental charisma. After becoming afraid of my own mind, overwhelmed by its relentless dread, the desire to daydream away my problems became too fanatical. This escapism from reality’s responsibilities was what got me into trouble. Post-trauma was about healing, rebuilding, adjusting to find a new, eligible mentality. Accepting and coming to terms with the world beyond this internal blanketing comfort.

It didn’t take long before more blessings twinkled in the dark abyss. The change of mentality further introduced me to aspects of life I’d thought little of. One Saturday morning in the car, aged around sixteen, my father asked me, ‘who’s your hero?’ The question left me uninspired; I didn’t have an honest answer for him. Back then, my passions for life were whimsical, socialising with friends and computer games being the most of it. Having a hero for these shallow passions felt supererogatory; my life didn’t possess any sort of plan, let alone sincere direction. So I dispiritingly answered, ‘I don’t have one.’ Making it clear I didn’t care too much about having one and hoped the conversation would find its end before my dad aroused the inspiration to lecture me on the importance of having a hero. As with any enthusiastic parent, the deterrent was marked void.

Once I’d been through the first crash, my heart yearned for support, advice and healing. Yet, I was too ashamed of the details to open up to anyone in my life. Due to abject embarrassment, I kept it well buttoned-up I was suffering inside. I didn’t want people to think I was mentally fragile. How stupid this was. As I began to understand the cause and effect of what I went through, an open dialogue ensued, my vocality confident, unwilling to hold back details in hope to maximise the listener’s comprehension. Although, this was only when I could speak about it in the past tense, once the suffering had set. Till then, I had to survive on my own. I couldn’t reach out to others; however, I could listen in.

He came to me with faultless timing, my first hero, the saviour of my self-confidence. A life raft constructed upon enthralling encouragement. Realising the mindset I was striving for, the views and opinions I had gained, the way I applied wisdom and logic, the suffering I had been through, all this seemingly shared in similarity by someone else. I had never felt so relatable to another person. I’m not saying we lived identical lives. Far from it. But how he handled himself, described his experiences, and explained his understanding of the world blew me away. The words felt exactly like what I’d conjure up myself. The emotion and energy put into them resonated with the introverted child within me. The acknowledgement of our solidarity filled me with pride, reinforcing the chosen direction. Identifying myself in his reflection as a wholesome human being.

Gloriously satisfied after holding so much self-doubt for all those mistakes I’d made. The worry of whether I would ever bounce back? Was I rebounding in the right direction? It felt so, and now I had exterior validation to match. One of Hip Hops most infamous contributors, a raw, original talent. Hidden away from me by my own lack of lyrical comprehension, like a time set will, waiting until the appropriate chapter. For here, the connection was at its most relative. Now I had walked the relatable path, becoming accustomed to our similarities. The universe allowed him to enter my life.

Tupac Shakur will forever be the most critical piece in a million-piece puzzle of the spiritual prowess manifested within me. From the start of my development as a lost young man to personally supporting me as I ventured through the giant leap. And onwards to whatever the future has on hold for us. It all started with a song that didn’t catch me lyrically straight away, not until I learned of our affinity. Of course, if Pac was the one to introduce me to the lyrical beauty of hip hop, he had to entrap me first in a vibing beat. The RNG shuffle gods had decided this day would come not long into 2014. With its catchy xylophone ring, Unborn Child encapsulated the lifeline role upbeat music played for me at the time. Interlaced symphonic fibres dropped from the harmonious heavens into my pit of sorrow. A momentary vista of felicity gifted by auxiliary melodies.

Strolling home after the cusp of midnight, I listened repeatedly. Busting disorderly dance moves under the lampposts aligning the ghostly streets, not a care in the world. Songs can catch me, leaving my finger hooked over the replay button, their arrival delivering a momentary state of bliss. This song was different; I wasn’t just being introduced to a novel splendour; this was an alchemic renovation. The birth of an unborn relationship. I was a downhill skier, fresh out the gates. Soon to be weaving through many of his masterpieces.

After years and years of identifying as a beat-man, Pac had changed all that. Characterisation in the quest for knowledge, followed by the discovery of music that articulated an affiliation with said journey, the pie of my attention gave up a growing slice to lyrical comprehension.

Still disorientated by the challenges I’d put myself through, the first 2Pac song I hit it off for its lyrical content was Krazy. The lyrics still inebriate me with chills to this day. ‘Time goes by puffing on lye (marijuana), hoping that it gets me high, Got a n****a going krayzaayyyy… Krayzaayyyy’… This was exceptional for me, an incisive collision with the bulls eye of significance. The most brutal battle I’d ever fought, the head narrative of my past two years. My first convincing introduction to musical therapy by its relativity to the listener’s reality. Chasing this high, hoping it would be like that of the glorious days beginning, but only getting the same old muddled meandering. As time passed, I dug a trench for myself, which was taking me deeper into a Krazy mindset. ‘Last year was a hard one, but life goes on, bumping my head against the wall learning right from wrong’. This was timed to perfection. I discovered this song a year after I’d had to recalibrate my life after the walls of self-obsession came crashing down. Bumping my head in frustration for my mistakes. The self-inflicted punishment fortuitously allowed me to admire the ability to discern right from wrong.

The came Shed So Many Tears, an invitation for retrospection. To share in Pac’s suffering. That cold, hard base harmonises with the endemic harshness within. The hissing-sob of the cymbal, a mellow accompaniment to the beat’s sentencing. The weeps and whines of a diverse instrumental array, assiduous throughout, added depths to the displeasure and the occasional subtle hint of somatic pleasure. Prior to my stale state of suffering, I never epitomised the sorrowing music of a soul in pain. Empathetic responses were there, I felt their pain, but I never lived with it. Shed So Many Tears was likely the first elegy to offer the experience. When Pac spoke of possessive demons, a reminder of the glut of negativity congesting my synapses. Finding a place for his mind to rest with the symbolic Thug Life tattoo shared commonality with my dedication to atonement. Praying to the lord to see happiness again, blinded by the darkness. How I never would have believed such a possibility to become, whereas when it came, relief was scant, beggary for ulterior forces guidance my only turn to. Devised in fear of permanence.

Only God Can Judge Me, in light of flow analysis, a synthesis of our rebellious mindsets. The divisionist and diversionary tactics of the media, the plight of minorities. Limb hairs going static every time I’d hear ‘Mr Police, please try to see, there’s a million mother fuckers stressin’ just like me!’ Potent lyrics. Exact in point with the wisdom I was receiving, this holistic world view recognising our battles with individuals are symptoms of cultural imbalances. Pac portrays his people’s plight to put the listeners in their shoes. Interpreted as ‘fuck the medias portrayal of us, here’s a true account from on the ground, extrospect this.’ Influential prowess for his listener base. A shame that besides the demographic of his origins, the majority were only youth of the 90s. The media did nothing to help to portray his authentic appearance, a threat to their narrative. He was marginalised as a ‘gangster rapper’, hence why the song’s title affirms who shall judge Pac.

Here I was, beginning to work my way out of the struggle. I’d developed and simultaneously implemented a philosophy of how to live. Raising my vibration, in turn attracting a hero of matching frequency. He substantiated the correct choices, feeding me self-belief. I thought the world of this man; for all intents and purposes, he entered as a saviour. Not only did I have an idea, a plan of action. Developing was a complimentary intense passion, so fierce it would distil all dubiety, purifying every cell in my body. Energising chemical reactions emboldened me to become a plaintiff to reality. Entertained by concepts like the meaning of my being here, powering me forwards.

I was awakening to my most desirable duty. And the cleanest part of it all? Deeming it most desirable for it was most desirable for the universe. My intentions aligned with the wisdom I was encapsulating myself within. And in return, the universe handed me more. I found my head and my calling. Only stability held me back.

2Pac ft. Bad Azz – Krazy

[2Pac:] Throw me a cigarette, dawg! [*inhales*] They got me feelin’ crazier than a motherfucker
I got Bad Azz in this motherfucker
Makaveli the Don, representin’ the Outlawz
Bad Azz representin’ the LBC Crew
So what’cha wanna do? Y’know how we do it

[2Pac:] Puffin’ on lye, hopin’ that it gets me high
Got a n***a goin’ crazy
Oh yeah, I feel crazy

[2Pac:] Time goes by, puffin’ on lye
Hopin’ that it gets me high
Got a n***a goin’ crazy
Oh yeah, I feel crazy

(Tell ’em about it!)

[2Pac:] Last year was a hard one, but life goes on
Hold my head against the wall, learnin’ right from wrong
They say my ghetto instrumental, detrimental to kids
As if they can’t see the misery in which they live
Blame me for the outcome, ban my records – check it
Don’t have to bump this, but please respect it
I took a minus and now the hard times are behind us
Turned into a plus, now they stuck livin’ blinded
Hennessy got me feelin’ bad, time to stop drinkin’
Rollin’ in my drop-top Jag, what’s that cops thinkin’?
Sittin’ in my car, watch the stars and smoke
I came a long way, but still I got so far to go
Dear mama, don’t worry; I’ma watch for snakes
Tell Setchu that I love her, but it’s hard today
I got the letter that she sent me, and I cried for weeks
This what came out when I tried to speak – all I heard was…

[2Pac:] Time goes by, puffin’ on lye
Hopin’ that it gets me high
Got a n***a going’ crazy
I feel crazy
Time goes by, puffin’ on lye
Hopin’ that it gets me high
Got a n***a goin’ crazy
I feel crazy

(One, two, three, four)

[2Pac:] I see bloods and crips runnin’ up the hill
Lookin’ for a better way
My brothers and sisters, it’s time to bail
‘Cause even thug n***as pray
Hopin’ God hear me, I entered the game
Look how much I changed
I’m no longer innocent – casualties of fame
Made a lot of money, seen a lot of places
And I swear I seen a peaceful smile on my mama’s face
When I gave her the keys to her own house, this your land
Your only son done became a man
Watchin’ time fly, I love my people, do or die
But I wonder why we scared to let each other fly
June 1-6, ‘7-1, the day
Mama pushed me out her womb, told me, “N***a, get paid!”
No one can understand me – the black sheep
Outcasted from my family, now packin’ heat
I run the streets, a young runaway, live for today
When he died, I could hear him say… (Thug Life, baby!)

[2Pac:] Time goes by, puffin’ on lye
Hopin’ that it gets me high
Got a n***a goin’ crazy
I feel crazy
Time goes by, puffin’ on lye
Hopin’ that it gets me high
Got a n***a goin’ crazy
Crazy
Crazy
Crazy
I feel crazy (crazy)

[Bad Azz:] God, help me out here, ’cause I’m possessed
I need the root of all evil for my stress
‘Cause money’s like a strong prescription drug
It’s got me addicted to the pleasure and the pain it inflicted
Somethin’ about the paper with the pictures of the president’s head, damn, it’s like a motherfuckin’ plague that spread
It’s epidemic; forgotten, forgotten it got worse
I keep my head on straight, makin’ money ’cause it’s cursed
Makin’ money makes a difference day by day
So I gotta stay paid, no doubt, day in and day out
This life is like a vicious cycle called fightin’ to live
No matter how hard you try, it’s in death, you gotta die
A lot of my peers didn’t make it to the years to come
Did life doin’ right or did life livin’ dumb
Who has the answers? I wonder; I turn to my elders
They aged and experienced, but they can’t even tell ya
Or tell me, that there’ll be light at the end of the road
(Why?) ‘Cause they don’t even know
A million things run through my mind (through my mind)
You ain’t gotta be in jail to be doin’ time
(You ain’t gotta be in jail to be doin’ time)

[2Pac:] Time goes by, puffin’ on lye
Hopin’ that it gets me high
Got a n***a goin’ crazy
I feel crazy
Time goes by, puffin’ on lye
Hopin’ that it gets me high
Got a n***a goin’ crazy

[2Pac:] I feel fucked up in this bitch
I smoked half a ounce to the head. Chocolate Thai, indo, Hawaiian, lambsbread, Buddha – all that shit!
I’m fucked up in this motherfucker
And Hennessy don’t help
And Hennessy don’t help
Thug Passion in this muh’fucker
Makaveli the Don puttin’ it down to the fullest
Maximum overload
3 Day Theory – Killuminati to your body
With the impact of a 12 gauge shotty
Double-I slugs, no love, straight thugs

The early spring chill of an overcast Amsterdam wasn’t going to dampen this day of discovery. The grey tones, only overshadowed by the dark glimmer of the canal’s surface, failed to influence the spectrum of colour radiating from the mind. Even the smoke-stained, monotonous box room at our hotel had a mystical glow to it. The month April, the year 2014 – magic season, and I was about to partake in my first-ever psychedelic experience.

The day started like any other for the usual tourist. An early morning flight and impatient train journey, followed by a shoulder-straining inner-city orienteer to the hotel. Releasing our bags at the checkpoint, we set off on an expedition to smoke our first-ever legal joint.

Sat amongst the first coffee shop table we could find, an unprecedented item hit the agenda. The time had come for something new, a reward for finding my way out of mental entrapment, a gift for using correct sober action to garner liberation. As this plan settled at an agreement with my soul, the active unease evaporated away. My feelings were tingling, centred around the stomach, anticipating some fabulous adventure. Alleviating the mechanical stiffness, I was eager with a rarefied excitement. We stepped out onto the medieval-aged merchant streets in search of a new-age experience. As if the universe tuned into our needs, walking around the first corner, there stood an ironically bland-looking smart shop.

We brought ourselves a box of magic truffles each back to the hotel room. I remember sitting on the bed edge, the excitement energising my entire body, my bones vibrating with anticipation. I hadn’t felt like this for at least a year, not since I’d developed my weed hypoxia. My first psychedelic experience was moments away, and it all seemed timed to perfection as if the stars had aligned for this. Since the age of sixteen, I’d heard my peers talk about their psychedelic experiences. It fascinated me at the time. However, not until I’d evolved to a higher cognitive understanding had I yearned for it. Staying content with the daunting fascination marijuana had to offer. After those gruelling twelve months of rebuilding my cognition, this was a well-earned reward. Anticipated as the next stepping stone in my characterial growth. The information I’d come across in my research detailed the powerful medicinal effects of psychedelics. So sitting on that edge, optimism in the belly, a packet of crisps in hand, and a box of truffles on my lap, I began my journey one mixed handful at a time.

The experience began with a fit of giggles. The energy of the room, a feathering ticklishness, and our individual contributions to the group laughter fluidly complimentary. The type of laughter that is overwhelming, stomachs busting uncontrollably. I couldn’t decipher if the mushrooms had taken effect or if our delightful anticipation had lightened spirits. The perpetual harrowing had an intensity to it I had sincerely missed since the frigid putsch of my inner kingdom. A warming reminder of what it was to have a light heart. The bodies’ trembling chuckles loosened the shackles of self-restraint, allowing a level of happiness gracious enough to taste complete emancipation from the gloom of my shadow.

As the spectacle of hysterics began to settle down, a wordless acknowledgement emerged across my brethren. The journey had begun. A warm introductory act over; now time for the main show. My mind was transforming, diverging towards a perception of total novelty. I chose to lie back on my bed, curtaining off most stimuli to isolate the internal sensations. With my distanced eyes aimed towards the ceiling, I couldn’t help but re-notice its smoke-stained centrepiece. A complex network of bogey yellows amplified amongst the monotone, off-white backdrop. Different from when I first laid eyes upon it, a lot less grotesque. Markings of human-made composition were random and chaotic in nature. Recognising the production of smoke was from man’s activity, but the laws of physics destined the direction and impact. An imprint of helter-skelter attributes.

My analysis of its composition in terms of methodology wasn’t the only identification. Gazing at the chaos, I couldn’t help but notice the whole consisted of segmented patterns and look-a-like images, epitomised by an eye-catching, two-foot centrepiece. A pronounced composition, not needing even a spec of justification across its entirety, exactly how I’d picture a cartoon triceratops head to devise itself. In all likelihood, my imagination was influenced by the Triceratons of my childhood, the nemesis species that plagued the fictitious teenage mutant ninja turtles. Scouring over its features in satisfaction, I wondered how many other guests had noticed this dinosaur head scribed onto the ceiling.

In followed a realisation, this random creation was the product of an infinite amount of artistic interpretations. The chaos was natural, but with its inadvertent expressions came an endless amount of connections to build or realise ready-made concepts and images within it. I extrapolated this out to humanity and judged that if society had the incentive to be a random, complex action of opportunity, with few barriers to freedom of expression, more works of creativity would sprout themselves into existence. The greater the chaos, the more roads travelled, in turn further diversifying the patterns of life, widening the expanse of the cultural palette, bringing about a broader collective manifestation to examine and build from. Ask more questions – receive more answers. I liken it to the branches diverting from the trunk of a tree. Striving for their own space so their leafy offspring can capture the light that consciousness has to offer. For leaves stacked under one another are getting no more solace than the leaf above has to offer. If humanity is to optimise its potential, people must have the encouragement to step off of the beaten track. Stimulated by the discovery of their own light.

Chaos is not to be confused with destruction by disorder; that is a miss skewed understanding. An example of this is our interpretation of the word anarchy. Even though order within chaos is the function of the universe, the zeitgeist recognises this description as destructive in essence. It is chaos that brought us the building blocks of life. We, after all, are solar combustion engines crafting new meaning with our will. Still, we somewhat fear the freedom of the individual. Whether that is a natural condition of the human psyche or cultural programming, society is trending toward liberty reductionism. It is true, people with more freedom have more significant opportunities to bring harm to society. A tree branch can pull the whole tree down if its roots are not strong enough. Does that mean we need authoritative institutions at our trunk to keep society from collapsing? Institutions to dictate our roots and direct our branches? Is this our only option? Can we bring the requisite compassion, morality and intangible unity to dispel growing centralisation?

The issue is when one hands society’s fate over to institutions, one elects a lot of power onto individuals. Mutating one’s propensity to cause harm by orders of magnitude. We are all the victims of mismanagement. Over the entire history of civilisation, we have suffered via incompetence and malevolence by those in positions of power. All because we aren’t active and coordinated in the participation of anchoring our communities and society’s roots. Handing the power of autonomy only to a select few, generally those with political and monetary control, is by no means a safe bet, especially when their grouped power tips them above the judiciary’s reach. You only have to look at the finance industry. People of immense financial power and influence given the freedom to biasedly design and play a system that cyclically, under their own suspiciously neglectful incompetence, collapses. Left for us, the general members of society, to pick up the pieces while they scurry away with their profits.

Security is a desire programmed into us all, as to is faith. When those of power convince us to place faith in them to uphold our security, it is on us to keep them in check. If those in power live hundreds of miles away, upholding that responsibility becomes more distant. Standing upon the balcony of an ivory tower, the people below begin to resemble ants, their identities as significant as the number attached to them. Governance strives for machine efficiency, leaving many aspects of being human derelict.

Decentralised networks of action were what this smoke-stained dinosaur image spoke to me. Concluding the thought sequence with the realisation if we are to restructure in a more decentralised fashion, the collective consciousness would need to tower above where it currently sits. Something closer to the conscientiousness I was achieving from the magic truffles.

Love has to rule. No more abscission of moral duty. No more duplicitous self-presentation. No more mendacious attempts to convince. No more emotional neglect. No more callous rapport. No more impulsive self-centredness. No more maltreatment. No more gaslighting. No more evading inculcation. No more resentment of the innocent. No more avarice egocentricity. No more purposeful manipulation. No more single-minded vindictiveness.

The channels of power incite an offering in light of our ignorance. As one debases their morality, opportunities arise, ladders to success inaccessible to those who try to retain themselves in a righteous standing. In our competitive world, this unchecked flaw subsumes society’s web, leaving us victim to calamitous circumstances. I wouldn’t be surprised to find sickening beasts crowding the attic space of our social hierarchy.

The doom and gloom analysis wasn’t from a place of fear. I was searching for an explanation. An explanation as to why humanity’s development in the quality of life’s appurtenance wasn’t a rising in consciousness. The two are definite components of a self-developing cycle, complementing one another. Life has this vast potential, infinite at its essence, with so many permutations, potentialities, possibilities. This goes both ways, positive and negative, but given we are born with an innate free will, humanity always has the controlling share of influence. So, where are we going wrong?

If we take it to the micro and expound it onto the macro, developing creativity, happiness, and drive in the individual brings greater innovation. Releasing the constraints stopping one from chasing their ‘dreams’ offers opportunity. Inspiring morality and unity stabilises a positive direction. Insert these modifiers into society and reap the benefits as a collective. I’m not suggesting this can be done at the click of a finger. It takes time, effort and freedom of opportunity. Neither should the methodology be static, innovating as we unlock more unto ourselves.

Life is a game of odds. Most people are trying to constitute better odds towards what they deem as success. The global trend, which arguably has always been, is success in accumulating material wealth. Today we live in a hyper-modified version, the 21st-century update. Things are hyper-accessible, the wealthy have squeezed out a hyper-wealthy, and the demotic modifiers in society revolve around sending value up the hierarchical pyramid in return for a trickle down of leftovers, again hyperised. Because people who get to the top earn the right of decisiveness, having proved their worth in material ascension. What could go wrong…

Mental health is the lynchpin to a riant life. One can suffer physically, financially, and emotionally but it’s the sturdy mind that keeps an authentic smile. A strong mentality exhibits gyroscopic tendencies as it rolls through the punches. Maintaining or promptly readjusting to a state of balance in all manners of turbulence. Not to say I am fantasising about the idea of omnipresent mental invincibility. Every mind has its breaking point. Comparable is the tree’s contention with wind. Those with robust roots, unstilted by the concrete jungle, assertive by their own making, hear the howls, feel the waver; nevertheless, cyclical verdure is all they know.

When I measured my self, I didn’t note mastery or perfection, I didn’t hear self-assurance or control, I didn’t see serenity or splendour, but I felt. Not these ideals, a drive towards them, at times so fixated, so bewitched, an automated exertion sharp enough to pierce past any barrier to effort. It cut down mountains until they resembled stepping stones. Tracked paths without map or compass. Studying the synopsis incited an ardent attitude and dispelled lethargic moods. All I had to explain for this was my environment. There was no training, no long-seated ambition. Curious happenstance and credited care. I had my struggles. I clambered the quagmire; still, I bathed in fruitful fields. I wasn’t spoilt nor deprived, rather lucky and respectful. I had it all, blessings and challenges. Formulated in a way that come the 9th April, I was sat in a morbid room, exuberated with dedication and the belief to make something spectacular out of my life.

I was a template, not of exactness. Let us not all eat the same food and grow with the same plants. Monoculture is an ugly business. However, that rain and sunshine, my access, location, location, location. My mindset had the correct calibration for me, the person I wanted to be. Now, could we set modifiers in place to give more people that very same feeling. Everyone deserves just that. Society deserves just that. No more one size fits all national development of our youth. Invest not in their future to bring wealth to existing functions but to bring new functions, new developments, new levels to existence. Humanity is losing its spark. The gift of creativity lays dormant in divine creations. It is our job to awaken it. We have the free will to, for now, anyway.

Venturing to neo-sensual domains, I was introduced to artistry unimaginable to my sobriety. Everything became heightened in the senses and cognition. Imaginative expansion magnified the surrealism of all the differing interactions with reality, even thought itself. Sensations within the confide of this boxy room introduced themselves with profound intimacy. Stroking my finger against the only piece of artwork in the room, not including the smoke graphic, its canvas repurposed itself. Rings of tension emerged out of the cheap print, halos sharpened by their glisten. A symmetry that partnered with clarity had a poignancy far outshining the art. An acting testament to the theme of this adventure, natural compositions secreted an uncanny beauty. My eyes fixated as I danced my finger across the canvas. Calling my fellow space travellers to set their eyes upon it.

Submersed in the sight sense, we forgot all about the auditory until someone had the ingenuity to turn the speaker on and play some classics. Magnetised, like a shift in wind direction, my complete awareness melded into the auditory sense, locking onto the symphony of vibrations emanating from the speaker through the perceptible medium. The sound was a substantial deviation from regular, sober noise. I heard the music but also felt its touch, tracing its waves across the room. Each note struck as if my spinal cord was a harp. The vibrations reverberated from vertebrates patterning themselves in symmetry with the musical scale. My body was symphonic; I was one with the music, feeling as sensational as it sounded. The absolute bliss of ambrosia honeydews dispersing sparkles of delight with the pull of each string.

Having moved to a different bed, we had subconsciously enclosed ourselves closer together in the unity of the experience. Much of the trip was spent in silence. Although, communication had a mystical underlying. My headspace felt contiguous with my brethren, bounded by consciousness, connected in a way I interpreted as supernatural. We reached the same conclusions without muttering a word. We asked and pondered questions in silence, yet, the eyes spelt unanimous understanding.

At moments I would feel my awareness drift out of the situation and the setting. My consciousness would take me somewhere, to a place where I’d forget who I was—my identity, my location, my life, forsaken. It was hard to tell where I’d go, like waking from a dream; upon returning, the immediate stimuli would heat my memory into a foggy soup. And with a shocking reminder from reality, I’d realise I had let myself go, drifting unaware, almost too far. I recognised the risk of venturing like that. All it took was the slip of a leash. What if I was to come back but forget what I was doing, where I was, who I was? The visions were so dreamlike, and the experience as a whole so extraordinary, obliviousness to reality was only a moment’s slip away. Thankfully I was aware of this risk and kept hold of command, but, as a precaution, I made an effort to keep one-half of me anchored to the true setting at all times. Prudent understanding as to why they had sober sitters watching over people tripping, something we didn’t have.

In an attempt to tie myself to the room, I concentrated on my immediate surroundings and senses, noticing there was something aberrant about my perception. Not what I was perceiving, I’d come used to the evocative, unnatural commencement of physical objects’ liquescentce. This was to do with the actual angle I perceived reality. Something that requires an adroit imagination for those who haven’t had the experience. As if hovering above yourself, perception lies between running parallel with the ground and a bird’s eye view. My field of vision seemed to encapsulate them both, which rationally sounds impossible. The eyes, although of use, weren’t utilised as the focal points. An eerie experience stamped into the memory bank under the transcendental category.

Observing this state of awareness, fixed still, ultra-sensitive to the energy coursing through me. Ultra-aware of my body’s magnetic flux. As it had been since the giggles, the headspace felt optimal. Have you ever heard the statement something along the lines of ‘we only use 10% of the human brain’s power potential? Imagine where humanity would be if we could use 100%.’ A popular meme across the internet some years back. You may know it was followed up with the correcting statement; this wasn’t as simple as turning up the brain’s power. The mind wasn’t achieving its potential because it would require the entire brain to work in unison, something modern culture and medicine didn’t value. I couldn’t help but think of this as I sat placid, observing. The regions of my headspace felt coherent with each to them all, as if my neural network had achieved harmony. A valid explanation for the heightened cognitive awareness.

“Brain imaging studies suggest that when psychedelics are absorbed they decrease activity in the default mode network. As a result the sense of self appears to temporarily shut down, and thus ruminations may decrease. The brain states observed show similarities to deep meditative states, in which increased activity occurs in pathways that do not normally communicate. This process has been compared to defragmenting a computer. Following this, it appears that the default mode network becomes more cohesive. We think this could be one of the reasons levels of anxiety and depression appear to reduce.”

Dr. Simon Ruffell, Psychiatrist and Senior Research Associate at King’s College London

This experience wasn’t novel to me. Heightened states of mental activity when high, positive and negative, also had a similar feeling in terms of mental capacity. However, unleashing the constraints on reality was a truffle shuttle original. In subscribing to this surpassed state of consciousness, the avenues of my belief in the self and humanity broke free like a released ant colony. Glass ceilings and walls were no more. Neurons bailing in unified diversity left a labyrinth of new thought patterns. What became visible was no longer treated as illusory; psychedelia had given me my first real taste of cognizant opportunity.

How I had perceived consciousness beforehand as the by-product of my existence, the result of internal chemical reactions within the brain, in one mesmerising instance, became outdated. Deep into the psychedelic experience, I felt above myself. My life force was consciousness, streaming down into my body, the vessel. The avenues this opened up were endless; if my mind is a signal receiver, reality must be a construction of signals processed into actuality. Therefore I can tune my receiver to receive differing signals. Is it then possible to transfer from signal to signal? Is this not what dreaming is? So, lucid dreaming could be explained as the conscious realisation of manipulability? What if I could tap into this power while not dreaming? What if I could merge my dreaming with life? Or even dream up a brand new life? If consciousness is a signal, could it be possible within the state of sleep to download and experience a signal that seemed so real, so alike to waking reality, it rationally was, perhaps a mere juxtaposition of the original?

Off I journeyed as the realm of possibility expanded before my eyes. Life would never be the same again, in a marvellous way too. Eyes opened by a slap from the nature of reality, its coded language, the basic building blocks being numerical in essence. Under the laws of mathematics, the underpinnings of fact, everything is coded with a numerical value. So the closer our readings to absolute values, the more accurate our understanding of reality. What does this mean? If you want to progress in your knowledge of all that surrounds you externally, you have to progress in being real with yourself internally. Being real internally and, therefore, externally is critical. The more real one becomes the greater one’s propensity in coming to terms with reality. For example, suppose you deny a law of reality because it conflicts with your predefined beliefs. In that case, you will enact further resistance against developing an understanding of anything directly or even remotely related to that law. As reality works on unity, connections between all that exists, you will hinder yourself not only in the specifics but potentially all the interrelated. Even phenomena appearing as disconnected as distant galaxies. So by allowing yourself to be as authentic as possible with first and foremost yourself, you are far more likely to progress at a faster rate when understanding the life you live and that of the universe. Come further in tune with the infinite.

As we are attached to our identity and biased toward our beliefs, this makes a challenging objective for us all. You must detach and be empathetic to the existence of what it is you are attentive to. Shield this from your ego and use the mathematical logic of the universe as a calculative reference. Try to understand first what it is and second why it is so. Become competent at both, and not only will the universe grant you extended understanding but so to feeling. With improvement, you shall come closer to the knowledge underpinning the unity of the universe. Unravelling your interconnectedness to all that is.

Science is the most practical way of discerning what reality is made up of, corroborating the dynamics behind its mechanical workings. Still, recognisable science is difficult to disseminate without strong validation from internal authorities. A mechanism designed to discern right from wrong in the evidence supporting a hypothesis. Correct to a degree. Acceptance demands proof. Achieved acceptance gifts benefit of the doubt.

Secular thinking may wind up down the wrong alleyways, misinterpreting fundamentals. However, dogmatic thinking can leave those living out their days on the wrong side of history, incorrectly insuring phenomena as fundamentals. Going down the wrong alleyway may bring an onset of embarrassment, a quick, red-in-the-face parley with a map holder. Having the house of your beliefs turned upside down by a rebel faction, threatening decades of undoing, the stigmatisation of your life’s work, trenches will be dug, battles will be waged.

Truth is both solid and fluid. At its past sits particles arranged in an irrefutable form. Ahead, its future store’s waves of infinite potential compositions. The path from past to future is reasoned in the present, for always a trail of explanation is laid. Some are well known, some only experts know, and some no one knows. Understanding is a dimensional outgrowth. The method of account is guaranteed from beginning to the end of time. People may have a strong indication for what is as of, but, what is to come, beyond cyclical patterns, experts lay with men. Predication comes from the gut, from intuition, from interconnectedness, from insight. Finding the future is the only universal job in this universe. So why fight each and every other over it?

History repeats itself in an archetypal sense, hence why religious texts hold a permanent degree of relativity. It virtues one to embody its lessons, to format its workings internally, as long as the threat of close-mindedness is refrained from. Undermining collaboration efforts in the search for the future because one disagrees with the other’s beliefs confines perspective and propels division.

This dilemma is why we need drastic unity in the search for truth, giving all an equal voice and offering just ears. Beware not to congregate under a Truth Czar(s), as that is a surefire way to (technocratic) dictatorship. We must remove our adversity towards differences, coming together using the power of open source. With a yearning for the truth, not The Truth, we can begin to build a more accurate representation of reality and its history, away from the propaganda, biases and dogma, towards an environment symbolising the superfluidity of truth’s potential and its constitution as the thread of reality.

Night had fallen by the time we decided to head outside. The blending of homogenous street lighting and blemished iridescent neon shone onto the dark canvas, delivering a creditable cinematic aspect. The canal shielding streets of Amsterdam was alive with people. The prospect of being in the vicinity of vast crowds would evoke a nagging self-conscious state; however, this time, I was in what they call afterglow. Many mind-altering substances are infamous for their ‘comedowns’, the lows of serotonin depletion. What goes up must come down. Afterglow isn’t so erratic; think more of a feather floating down with no aversion, par bathing in the gentle resistance of pure satisfaction for having had the experience. Psilocybin isn’t some compound with superficial boosting of uplifting chemicals. Psilocybin is a substance that invites introspection and offers insights that can be used to garner permanent evolution of one’s psyche. Which is why it is such a potent tool in supervised therapeutic settings. The afterglow isn’t a synthetic scenario. From my own experience, it is the soul’s festive glow. What builds higher foundations enjoys more expansive vistas. You are enjoying the reward of self-realised progress.

There I was, on the streets of Amsterdam, not even twenty-four hours into my arrival, and I’d found a level of peace I’d never before reached. Everything was okay, life was a blessing, and I’d come to realise many of my worries had no real excuse for existing. The amount of progress I’d made in 6 hours, I couldn’t believe it. My body felt light; there was no dread pulling me down. The bounce from my knees and the sway of my hips oozed a loose comfort and natural self-confidence. I wasn’t ruminating on what had taken place rather enjoying the moment. Present and happy. It felt like all I would ever need. A new man walking into an old world.

My soul was overrun with optimism. Opening new neural pathways, the uplifting psychedelic experience corrected broken reflections and inserted explosive fuel into the inner engine powering my drive. This resonation with reality had my body charged with a magnetised lightness. I felt ready, optimal, pumped with enthusiasm, eager to eat up the road that leads to life’s meaning. The magic of existence, inherent in all interactions, inspired a rhythmic beat beneath my chest, the pump of promiscuous possibilities. I had a spring in my step, a reposeful duo of eyes and lips resting above a hitched chin and a chest invigorated with a conviction the mess I observed in myself and the world can and will be rectified. Rectified to (re)align, to liege, to meld with universal harmony and wisdom.

My already impressive ability to analyse the world’s phenomena, coming to terms with relevant logic and reasoning, developed a sharper advancement. What was once a pleasant discovery of underestimation became a miraculous shock. The magic within me was beginning to bloom, what I was sustaining, its mysticism unimaginable, an actual pinch myself mentality. Flow became a regular occurrence, as did smoking weed again, playing the role of an access key.

Amsterdam had not only thrown away a lot of the junk that resided in my mind but furthermore constructed a higher plateau for me to venture from. The rebirthed sensitivity to my surroundings internalised world phenomena, illustrating its intrinsic patterns. Gone was the small, self-centred farm, home to a couple of domesticated miniature pigs. An officious obstacle keeping me occupied during my ascent to adulthood. So too had fled the ultra-sensitive field of anxiety, home to that which suffers in irresolute silence. After a year of dedication to expanding my knowledge, incorporating it into my existence, I now roamed with freedom upon expansive plains. Plains hospitable to all of life’s wonders.

Not that this entailed liberation from all struggles. On the contrary, the problems I became aware of with this expanded awareness were magnitudes larger than my self-centred sulking. However, the scope of these calamities didn’t endorse discouragement. Not a hint of hopelessness held me back from developing into the extraordinary human being I needed to be. In fact, recognising the dilemmas did the exact opposite, driving me towards my noble goal. Highlighting its importance like a forest fire lighting up the surrounding untouched shrubbery. A self-fulfilling feedback loop, the further my awareness expanded upon the forest’s entirety, the stronger my adrenalin pumped. Desiring the watery wisdom to extinguish evil and save the sacred lands. Empowered by the fact a man’s greatness is not all down to his responding victories but also how he rises to his challenges.

How relieving to have meaning, made by believing with sincerity and seeing with clarity the love and wisdom intertwined with my current life choices. My gut was on overload, reasserting this was where I needed to be. I had a plan, a picture, a style, and a faith this would take me towards the boundaries of exceptional.

When in flow, I was captured, held witness to its revelations. If I attempted to venture off, it would overpower my distraction and deliver another thread of universal wisdom. Many times this wisdom would be within the context of my distraction. I wasn’t only revisiting past knowledge, regurgitating already known facts with frictionless recall. Whatever the direction of my senses, whichever objects they analysed, however novel they were, my awareness would spark a dedicated, enlightening stream of thought. This conscious river carried the flawless ability to deconstruct phenomena into its most basic blocks. Its meaning translated through to me by the universal laws that supported and expressed the object’s existence.

Flow would carve out a nexus. Chains of phenomena linked to each other’s existence, engraved with lessons, the sparks alighting the nexus highway. Allegories and metaphors delivered this knowledge in troves. The revelations, with their enlightening exposure, left me in awe. Subdued at how it felt all so easy to understand. I expected explanations for the mysterious workings of life to be dumbfounding and complex, like the equations upon the blackboards of geniuses, untranslatable to the unequipped mind. That wasn’t the case. Patterns of interconnectedness self-arose from the details. It wasn’t so much that people didn’t have the faculty to comprehend this knowledge; we just couldn’t see it. Distracted by the dementedness of our own life bubbles. Overindulged in our identities, over-occupied by our survival needs. Flow was like examining the Wordsearch of universal wisdom. Except, instead of scouring the letters looking for words we knew, nonchalant observation of the whole would illuminate letters, highlighting wisdom wrapped within oblivion.

Evaluating what was taking place, this sudden great leap forward in cognition made me realise how unpredictable life was. There were many discrepancies with the West’s material outlook; enigmas society preferred to show little recognition. Now I was personally discovering many of these mysteries, my mentality was shifting. Going through the emotions, a gradual ticking, like that of an outward spiralling clock arriving upon a new destination at the end of each passing day. I adopted an anything is possible mentality. My realisation consciousness was closer to the source of life than matter allowed me to believe the consciousness at the core of my being permitted access to infinite possibilities. At this moment, I held the impression I was capable of anything.

These realisations harnessed immense satisfaction, yet they left a part of myself unfulfilled. I couldn’t withdraw the real value of my appraisals until I could share them with people. That would necessitate bottling their essence and reproducing it in a presentable construct. Easier dreamt than said. Still, this desire ran me on all fronts. From ego to soul, my entirety cocooned in this wishful destiny. You see, these realisations were powerful; it didn’t take much effort for them to alter the course of my life. Thus, I did and still do, believe if people were to see them, it would change how they viewed life for the better. In the best interest of humanity, I had to expose them to these epiphanies and allegories. Gifting the opportunity to actualise this pattern of data and experience the emotions surge as I did.

There was an issue. Flow’s velocity leads to a lack of control, facilitating recall in a place above my reach. When struck by supreme segments, I remember times I’d stop, focusing on what went by, desperate to relive its wisdom. Even though it happened seconds ago, my memory would freeze, unable to move past my decision to try and recall the details. I’d push, silencing the mind as unnecessary statements intruded, only to get frustrated by blankness. On one occasion, I calibrated my recollection with vein-bursting determination and within the mind’s eye appeared an empty dark void littered with nothing except distant stars. A visual representation of my attempted retrieval using the ill-equipped working memory. Limited power, unable to facilitate traversing the vast expanse. Left alone to observe the specs of giants, evidence to the theory these insights were not formulated and stored in mind, I was playing the role of receiver.

Every segment would slip through the working memory like sand in a sieve, leaving only the larger bite-size subject chunks. These have stuck with me, moulding my worldview. But the finer details, the pieces the sober eye fails to observe, the intricate weaves of demonstrated wisdom, they left as fast as they came. The only part that lived on in me was the memory of my emotional reactions. And these emotions, the rawness of them, the up-seated state they had me in, I knew of their power. I theorised if segments of humanity could see this, revolutions, political and spiritual, would fire up overnight. This was my objective, my deepest desire. Identifying this noble cause with determined intent and enough devotion to fill a church hall. It came to be all my heart could yearn for. The world was crying out for conscious emancipation, and I witnessed resolutions to help achieve it every time I got high. I needed to do something.

There appeared to be two ways of achieving this. The first was gaining the ability to recall these visions and translate them into a concise message. This had to be completed to the degree that the words carry the same weight or near enough that of the visions. Something to the ordinary rational thinker would seem the best and only choice. Next time I would get high, I would sit with a pen and pad by my side, ready to recall whatever remnants I could. Albeit, for me having the experience, I couldn’t chase that route. I was in love with the flow of it all, how I could take off, shooting from point to point, painting a multifaceted dot-to-dot picture. At the time, it felt more important to carry on venturing from revelation to revelation. Sacrificing the time to record the odd one or two in a worded fashion that failed to deliver literary justice couldn’t suffice. Who was I to disregard the rest of the harvest for a couple of misshaped veggies? I was high most evenings, with the two working in unison, so my ability to focus on a particular point without distraction was ruptured. Being only able to access flow through smoking left me in a sweet predicament.

This isn’t to say I was willing to throw it away, to remain in awe and not play. I had faith from my visions a second option was on the table. Instead of having to translate these revelations into a worded format, I was envisioning another means of transmission. An induced inkling that these visions could be shared via telepathic communication. With the magic of consciousness showing part of its light to me, what was to stop the trend from continuing. Although my gut held much greater belief than my mind and its logic. Thankfully flow had me well in-tuned and trusting of the former.

At that time, I was receiving teachings I’d never seen across my short-lived venture into global cultures. The experiences were so fatidic, so beyond normality. Every day was a transgression against the beliefs I fostered throughout my childhood. Reality had a depth to it which could be nothing less than infinite. Meaning at some point in the construction of the universe, there must have been a participant who housed dimensions of infinity. How can we begin to picture such a feat in this linear existence? So why tie all that is down to linearity? There has to be something that connects us to this magnificence, exactly as there is a lineage linking us back to the beginning of the human species. What that is, no one can prove. However, in my epiphanies, consciousness demonstrated itself as the strongest candidate. And there we had our telepathic hypothesis.

Social evidence was building in support of this possibility in unison. A steady trickle weathering down my material aversion. As if when the gut pumped and faith sharpened, so too would follow a social interaction, the enaction of a physical clue. People I’d come in contact with shed peculiar hints they knew more about me than they should; it felt at times like I was a Truman show. Short-handed revealing comments would leave me bewildered, asking, ‘how on earth did they know that?’

Knowing I had some magical connection with people drew me faith these visions were being shared somehow. Intuition told me there was something, whether that was from present moment telepathy or some other kind of secondary transmission. Evidence too. But also, people were keen to keep the specifics undisclosed. It seemed I was the subject of an inside joke, except the inside was everything outside myself, and it wasn’t so much of a joke, rather esoteric schematics. And out of fear of coming across as crazy, I was afraid to ask why.

I left it with hope and tried to carry on as usual. I’d come too far to travel back to whence I came. And I was moving too fast to make sense of where exactly I was heading. I had a destination, but it appeared abstract, like a beach and its copious environmental copulations. Journeying to sandy shores can entail any coastal area on this spherical sanctuary of consecration. I could be lounging beneath an active volcano perched above tropical shores, my only predicament crossing the hot white sands to the next point of shade. Or gazing upon the beaches of Normandy, the day, D-Day, about to live through a face tattoo in global history. I had no settled scale of events, no predictable timeline, just the adrenaline of the could-be. Sensory overload stamped in with the experience and egoic limbo as I stayed present in the ensuing steps of one day in front of another.

During an early morning sunrise, I captured a subtle but significant memory. We were sat amongst the dawning silence of a student accommodation courtyard, me, an old friend and his new pal. But before I explain that scene, allow me to add a backdrop to what was a sorcerer’s night. Now my mind wasn’t deprived of joy; I was beginning to experiment with drugs, the socially acceptable ones of a student lifestyle. A renewed confidence had opened the gates to purgatory grounds, an invitation to rekindle with the graces of shifted assembly points. Hesitant, deciding not to run into mind-altering experiences Kung ho again, only to make the same reckless mistake I had made with marijuana in my adolescent years. These nights were designated rare occasions, once every few months, and the substances involved approached with humbled respect.

I had a routine when these events came around. One drug for that evening, and when the next special occasion came around, I’d alternate substances. This supported two causes: first, making sure I didn’t develop any habitual relationship with a particular drug. This was unlikely. My mindset still hyper-averse to that happening since my Mary Jane turmoil. The second reason wasn’t another policy to subvert negative situations but to extend the life of positive ones. I had a firm understanding of tolerance, and my revitalised mentality was in jubilation, amalgamating with these newfangled experiences. I didn’t want that intensity to fade, so I separated out the visits as a precaution. My first year being a rotatory selection of pills, MD, and cocaine.

This night was off the cusp, my first time after Amsterdam, where I had the opportunity to let loose. A weekend away, and although it wasn’t my first time taking illegal stimulants, I hadn’t touched them since long before my crash some two years ago. The reintroduction started with Mandy, and I loved it, the freedom of expression, the serenading self-love. I felt excusably wholesome, and my personality, free to express this feeling without a doubt. A bookmark moment, a time where I could look back at the past two years, all the self-inflicted suffering I’d put myself through. That moment, coming out of the dark abyss, moving beyond its influence, reaching a distance where it felt safe to turn back and contemplate my escape. To celebrate my freedom.

Coded with symbolism, the night emphasised this achievement. Not only left to recognition of how far I’d come, there was another, more eery act of symbolism in the night’s proceedings. One realisation has stuck with me ever since, re-emerging with numerous acknowledgements, a social interaction set on an uncanny precedent. First, let me explain why this night was so unique. I didn’t only dabble in Mandy, this was a student party with many contrastive characters, and according to the diversity, everyone wasn’t on the same stuff. We had found ourselves chilling in a crammed small bedroom. People slumped wall to wall. A bag of ketamine making its way around. The atmosphere was disorientated. We, a wall away from the compounds of society, were a world away from that reality.

The unorthodoxy of the setting shone an iconoclastic light on something I’d missed since my arrival. A joint was being passed around the room, and as I went to pass it on, the guy sitting next to me politely refused. The declination struck me; something about his tone incited recognition. I had an inkling about why and felt impelled to ask. His response, a mirroring of my prediction, set off a brigade of neural fireworks. Explaining why he didn’t smoke, he mentioned how it used to be a large part of his life, but now, it would make him feel awful. In an instant, I knew it to be the same struggle I had endured. In fact, as this realisation came to be, I took note of how indistinguishable he was from the person I was months prior. Although not identical, our characters shined through filters dressed in our life experiences. He cloaked his anguish behind an extroverted persona while I hid mine behind silence until drunk enough to release the anxious constraints. Mannerisms had a similar jigged action, a hesitant control of the vessel you’d like to that of someone learning to control a vehicle. It made clear he was second-guessing himself, overthinking much of his actions. While I’d slowed to a trickle, rattled with angst, he was still trying to maintain a high speed.

A shimmering focus of my sedated eyes upon his appearance tore apart the foretold conclusion. His hairstyle, like his personality, was a lot more out there than I could muster. Still, beyond his cultural expression, the impression of his genetic manifestation began to verge into doppelganger territory. My mind started to weave significance into this fateful crossing of paths. The symbolic representation of a man with brotherly facial bones, both previous prisoners to an overactive central mode network, whose present locations were a fork tip away. I, ready to reincorporate my past with added finesse, he, ordained to leave it behind. Here I found myself incorporating a signal from the universe, a look into who I may have become had I not learned to move on.

The night, what was left of it, took a turn after this. What had been an internal celebration of my newfound self-love, the joys of letting loose, moved towards deeper contemplation. A reflection on my life and what my recent life decisions had sown, the night’s concluding emphasis. Having corrected my adversities, what now lay on my horizon? Flow and its shell-shocking soliloquies spelt a bright future. Arisen from the depths of my self-scathed psyche, the surprise of a second chance. A new, forgiven beginning, preserving a potential as vast as the scope of mathematics. So there, as the sun rose on a clear summer’s Sunday, I sat upon a courtyard bench with two friends, one old and one new. A comfortable distance away from the social scene for me to open a mouse hole to my mind.

What struck me first was the inclination this setting and the scene itself I found myself in was some sort of reoccurrence. Its novelty magnetised my memory to an abstract dream implanted within my recall. Although I knew of deja vu, having experienced it many times in my childhood, this encounter differed. Imposing itself within an ethereal soup, there was more than a moment. The memory occupied a connection heterogeneous to semblance.

The quaint atmosphere released the bridles of reserved conversation. My company invited me to discuss myself and my recent experiences. The manner of the invitation delivered an expectation as if aware of the changes I had been going through. I spoke of flow, my new beginnings, philosophical understandings, the cognizant experiences I’d begun to settle with as my updated norm. As I traversed my recent history, the two companions would turn and comment to one another in acknowledgement of what I was speaking of. Unlike what I would have expected, there weren’t any questions that elaborated on their intrigue, only quiet discussion between themselves, a nod, neck turn and naming, before invitation for me to continue onwards.

After what felt like little time mellowing in the surreal, catching glimpses of memory lane, its vast corridor of endless doors, opening and closing with unlocking spontaneity, the courtyard started to congregate with early morning risers. Conversations arose above the silence, the hum of excited voices, ready to go party at the annual festival situated on the outer edge of the city limits. This would be where I would part ways, to head back home with plenty of contemplation under my belt.

The internal restructuring appeared to be constituting an external change in the reality of my interactions. My life was in the middle of a relentless transformation. I knew what I was like before this ascent; the difference was luminous. And even though I spoke little of my mystical observations, my external reality, made up of those that crossed my path, was somehow not oblivious to this. The shift was apparent to more than me alone. The question was, how much did they know? Or how much could they see?

Looking back, I regret putting all my eggs in one basket. It would have been easier for me to recall these cannabis-laden, amnesic years with journal recordings to go off. However, who knows what this incessant desire managed to manifest? My history is littered with what-ifs. Living an epochal timeline, they would liaise close as an otoscope to the ear if I didn’t believe everything happens for a reason. When the decisions you make have monumental consequences, this life view alleviates living under constant distress. As long as my choices are understood and mistakes recognised, with sincere attempts to ascertain what I need to do to stop them from happening again, I can move on with peace of mind. It took me years to measure that response. The times these words wear, I’d only just embraced the ominous.

Much of the flow felt like the explanation of a divine plan. Not so much a message, there was no deep bellowing voice sending down orders from upon high. Rather pellucidness, grand and gracious, in the search for direction. I was being handed a calling. The mission? Elevate humanity. To advance the world into a more peaceful existence. Branched with the side objectives to expose lies, empower truth, and incentivise generosity. Rescuing the pivotal recognition we are all one with humanity. Instilling the belief this world could be splendiferous if we put aside our differences. Necessitating, we build an environment that offers everyone the opportunity to thrive from the heart. It appeared I’d found myself in a crucial position, at least in terms of potential. The situation depended much on myself, with what looked like the critical opportunity to be a game-changer. That responsibility, borne upon my shoulders by the universe, required empowerment.

I tended to concentrate on how we were being held back by the powers that shouldn’t be in conjunction with the tantalising possibilities before us if we managed to break free from their spell. This was my field, where I would transcribe the lessons sent down to me. Recognition of the reality on Earth’s potential, she was a real fixer-upper, and the subject had me enthused beyond obsession. My sudden ascension, unlikely concerning my lifestyle, mounted faith in humanities prospectives. If I could arrive at this experience without relying on externalities, what was to stop me from being the opening drip to a broken levy? Give me a bullhorn, and I’ll make a bull run.

My confidence in this shifting reality grew with each passing day. Still, I had my down days, questioning what this was, why it was happening, was it even happening? But as the magical moments cumulated, so too did my conviction. I remained silent to the world on the exactness of my ideals, just as I had my bouts when battling depression. Hiding my attainment behind secret self-discussion was abnormal. Lofty ambitions need a grounded pillar. But it was as if I had outward support inside, whispering reassertions I look no further. If I wished to confide with someone, my conscience could do the job. Was that me alone, or was this a secondary force? At the time, I put it down to an energised gut, a solar courage, a warrior spirit.

How I had suffered in despair; when this opportunity came along, I grappled at it with both hands. Up, up and away! Like Mary Poppin’s umbrella, Atreyu’s Falkoor, Carl Fredricksen’s magic gas, my trust answerable to a gift. I was in debt to the universe. I owed it my meaning, the fuel to my passions, the impenetrable faith encompassing my aura. I didn’t recognise myself as being tapped. I realised myself to be of abilities so astute the universe entrusted me. I, unsure of who I could turn to, recycled that trust and used it upon myself.

Half a year on since Amsterdam, there was no relenting. At this point, flow was a guarantee as the nervous system heightened its sensitivity with every kiss of the joint. The sea of memory, the visible surface reflecting clouds of euphoria, floating mountains eminent in the fluffy, mellowed-blue skyline. Those of grandeur, large enough to mistake a plane for a bird, close enough to hide half the sun’s chapters, tall enough to be crafted by stratospheric winds, brought a brouhaha to the water’s surface. Almost every significant night of flow featured some state of panic, whether that was social anxiety, suspicion, lack of thought control or sheer paranoia. I have spent much time deliberating over why these two appear as partners. I would argue this can’t be contemplated without recognising that the partnership is 2/3rds of a triangulation. The final piece, sitting at the apex, an altered state of consciousness. For each to happen at the ardent levels I have experienced, the apex must be present. That doesn’t mean there is always an equal balance between the two; nonetheless, it is a rarity to catch one and not the other. The theme of the night is whose dominance? The majority of the responsibility for the night’s affairs falls on my state of mind prior. The environment plays some role, but my mind predicates reaction to the stimuli.

The question then comes to why? Do they complement one another? Are the states of shock and paranoia pushing my mind into a heightened state of awareness? Granting access to flow conditions as if it is a kick starter. Or are they only a representation of my lack of control, the heightened state already there, both aspects taking turns to feed off it? The Indigenous American wisdom of the two wolves fighting for dominance within one’s head comes to mind. The victor? The one most well-fed. Whichever is the case, there is then cause to ponder is it all organic from within? Could I be the battleground of ulterior forces, universal entities of good and evil grappling for dominance in my leaky, cogent consciousness?

Due to its intensity, the night of the autumn equinox will be etched into my memory for life. Still, the early stages of flow and this night, without a shadow of a doubt, were my most vehement yet. A few friends and I were attending a student party in Manchester. My anticipation flavoured with elated hope. The last one I’d been to, the MDMA escapade, compounded with the realisations of Amsterdam, sealed a curative treatment for my social anxiety. The ability to let loose and feel comfortable doing so was something I had missed over the years. When you lose the ability to do so, you can’t just take it back. As with any mental health issue, the pieces must be put back together, which can take years or even a lifetime. The mind is fastidious. Like a toddler having learned to say no, it needs a complimentary want to even begin. Constant reassurance via conviction from the self, culminating in some sort of leap of faith. I’d completed that leap without bump or bruise, and now I was ready to revel. So as this weekend approached, I felt eager to relive those extended feelings of celebration once again. However, this night wasn’t destined for relief from anxiety.

I reverted back to uncomfortable interactions with people, my contribution obsolete to the room’s energy, like a shy child in the company of older children. I didn’t take any MDMA for alleviation either. Feeling a flabby mechanicalness, underwhelmed by the barren concoction of beer and an oversized pizza. In the hope of finding an emergency kickstart to my flaccid feelings, I joined in with two others and bought a small amount of cocaine to share between us. After a few rationed lines, it became apparent this wasn’t it, so I gave up. Dissatisfied by a buzz more similar to an exhausted bee trapped in my stomach than a thriving hive. A failed night on the uplifting drug front, cascading into a collapse of the want to party, retreating to the stoner section of the house in search of the weed we’d brought with us.

I came to expect, after smoking up, my mind to shuttle off. If I felt awkward before toking on a joint, what would proceed, my vocalisation or communicative action of any kind would paint me in discomfort. So, having given up on socialising, I picked up the quart of weed we had in a sandwich bag, rolled up a joint and began the launch sequence. Two other guys were sitting in the room. Having walked into a heated discussion, I eased it with a peacekeeper’s second opinion. Successfully subduing the ferocity, the room’s energy now more fitting for take-off.

Smoking, I sat there silent. David Attenborough’s velvety voice had occupied the room. My eyes held a fixed gaze on the screen, ears tuned, listening to his cushiony vocal cords while admiring the complimentary cinematic presentation of nature’s beauty. Even though I’d escaped the depressive pummelling that overrode my thought stream when high, this didn’t necessitate the submission of my thought stream’s dominance; instead, it was only a change of tact. I still struggled to do anything else except think to myself. My mind was loud, hypersensitive, domineering. I couldn’t function in any form of extroverted fashion. When high, it was me, myself and I.

So, as I sat in the sofa chair staring at the TV, engulfed by its comfort, my internal narration began to enter turbulence. My mind was off to the races, and the first track displayed a patterned route of paranoia. Unacceptable today, the scenario of little significance now was a thorn in my side at the time. I’d left the weed unguarded all night and became highly suspicious of whether others had smoked it. Pathetic looking back now as there was still plenty there, and if one were to act like it is their problem, they are tilling the soil for negative karmic seeds. At that moment, I couldn’t take my mind off it. The paranoia and suspicion made me feel uncomfortable in the room’s presence. Until all of a sudden, as if the past fifteen minutes were announced obsolete, a rush of catharsis took hold. Continuous thought streaming through my mind, workings and analysis left me again beholden, in a state of shock. This time not delivered by some negative conception but the positive of all-seeing knowledge.

After the first round of polar energies, a comment from the room initiated the second. There I was in the back-end of ingenious revelations when a passenger remarked, “bloody hell, Fin.” Encapsulated in thought for the past fifteen minutes, I’d been nothing but external silence. When out of the blue comes a comment that, in normal circumstances, makes no sense. No words followed, no context, only the statement alone, and in a flash, my mind reached out to an idea that had long been floating in my life analysis. Could people really witness or hear the thoughts within my head? After all evidence prior, the antagonistic connotations, the comments containing unknowable context, the retreating glances. What the fuck is going on? Where is the boundary of my privacy? Does it even exist? Is this a permanent thing? How am I to think what one would not like others to hear? What if I think something I wouldn’t want to think…

As the pessimism ebbed against the bristling sands beneath my forehead, up went a retreating lick against the dawning wave of ingenious. A countering composition to the adverse reaction of living a telepathic existence. A sure break-in reverence. Reverence for the power of this flow and how its appearance as a fetching tool would deliver me the greatness to inspire change in the masses. Ideas danced within like electrons orbiting the atom, attracted to the positive possibilities ahead. A platform constructed, a gift for me to stand out from the crowd. My relevance supported by the revelations of flow, and my mission, with the power to communicate ideas in greater intrinsic detail than words could ever produce, streamlined for success. I could cast my net wide, capturing the hearts and minds of people. Pulling down the evil forces that kept humanity from achieving our Satya potential. The emancipating flow was glorifying, a ray of hope in a dark world. Until analysis brought me to the idea if I am known, then the darkness will want rid.

Enter the 5th wave, more despairing thought, this time premised on my survival. Identifying that soldiers of freedom in their acts of heroics paint targets upon themselves, it would be naive of me to conceive I was an exception. Sitting alone in my chair, having moved in search of solitary to a bedroom, fear of the consequences of my striving aspirations locked me into a panic. Submerged in an analysis of the risks that lay before me, how vulnerable I appeared to be. Scenarios raced through my mind as I sat in paralysis. The fear had mutated from the worry of successfully living within this new paradigm to living itself. At the time, unmindful of public perception, relations, and the realms of game theory, I was petrified, thinking a hit squad would burst into the house at any moment and take me out. I had estimations the knowledge resonating from me was so eminent the damage limitations of a brazen display of power were justifiable. After all, this night was the introduction to the life of an illustrious man and the halls of prominence.

Even though I was anticipating my imminent final moments, the encore flow still followed this tandem rotation. The new subject was one a lot more abstract, a lot less terrifying. Remembering the details of flow is near enough impossible, par a few scrambled lessons sticking to the pan. This, however, secludes you from the distinguishing feature, the parcel in its entirety. The web of logic paints a picture of reality in its rawest forms. So when journeying through the abstract, it becomes even more challenging to pinpoint the web’s premise. Seismic events staple themselves onto the memory, and this one is no different. Memorabilia, the colour of its contents, I can only taste.

Sitting in an office chair, my back facing the window, I could feel a presence behind me. I jerked myself around, not sure what to expect. Scanning the street illuminated by dusk’s precocious commencement, its emptiness ratified my spectral feelings. Swivelling back to reassume my original position, a peculiar sensation came: a faint, evening sky-blue light entering between my brow. The strange part about this stream of colour, my mind interpreted it as coming from behind myself. Peculiar as I know, the light shouldn’t bend, and even if there was some sort of reflection, I shouldn’t be able to sense its original source. This was my first experience of a spiritual phenomenon aggravating the sight sense, bending physics. Again I turned my head, chasing its inception, not knowing what to expect. And there it was mounted, with its accustomed shining glory, a broach to the sky. The gibbosity of the heavens. A full moon illuminating the dome, and in an account of the colour show, my mind too.

At the tip of the madness, the highs and lows, this flow finale and the other transpiring topics were complete conceptual esotericism. With no backdrop to the briefing, holding onto the piercing profundity in all its detail is an unachievable task. The memory of that precluding segment recollects an emotional intensity beyond conception. The thoughts that streamed through were not only analysing the material world and my potential. Struck by epiphanies of the esoteric formula that gifted me the ability to be who I am right now. This is my belief, one I can never be sure of. Memory fades over time; they say you hold a shifting description of what happened, which becomes further muddled as the days pass. Hence my uncertainty as I write this six years and a day after the event. If you were to ask me what I thought unfolded itself, my answer would be this, as in this moment. Who I am right now, all of it, all of what you will soon find out.

The Waterboys – The Whole of the Moon

I pictured a rainbow
You held it in your hands
I had flashes
But you saw the plan
I wandered out in the world for years
While you just stayed in your room
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon
The whole of the moon

You were there at the turnstiles
With the wind at your heels
You stretched for the stars
And you know how it feels
To reach too high
Too far
Too soon
You saw the whole of the moon

I was grounded
While you filled the skies
I was dumbfounded by truths
You cut through lies
I saw the rain-dirty valley
You saw Brigadoon
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon

I spoke about wings
You just flew
I wondered, I guessed and I tried
You just knew
I sighed
But you swooned
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon
The whole of the moon

With a torch in your pocket
And the wind at your heels
You climbed on the ladder
And you know how it feels
To get too high
Too far
Too soon
You saw the whole of the moon
The whole of the moon

Unicorns and cannonballs
Palaces and piers
Trumpets, towers, and tenements
Wide oceans full of tears
Flags, rags, ferry boats
Scimitars and scarves
Every precious dream and vision
Underneath the stars

Yes, you climbed on the ladder
With the wind in your sails
You came like a comet
Blazing your trail
Too high
Too far
Too soon
You saw the whole of the moon

Observing themselves, do angels see exclusive positive interference? My internal mirror stormed with torment. For all I’d experienced, the immense realisations, the palpable harmonics of my resonance, the reality was it looked implausible my life would ever return to normal. Both in a good way and bad. Not since I was sixteen did my mind know peace with the reality of who I was. Now, there were triggers everywhere my awareness traversed. Most evidently so in the eyes of those I encountered.

Sharing my life indefinitely, in all its intimacy, inescapable to naked judgment, trapped within a vitreous enclosure. Alterations in expectations, irresolute dishes for heroes and freaks, fraught with corresponding emotions. Acknowledging that living in a recluse of privacy looked destined to become an unattainable fantasy. It wasn’t so much the loss but the lack of belief I would be able to put the demons into an eternal sleep. See, when I identified the fingerprints of the format, the pressure brought forth revulsion. My mind desperate to dodge thoughts detrimental to the setting.

The date was 19/03/2015; I was attending a friend’s birthday party that evening at a luxury flat in Liverpool’s city centre. The night felt like any other; my daily schedule up to this point had been the usual fickle fiasco, painful failure at evading direct loathsome thoughts towards others. Still early days in this new reality, and I was struggling. Social gatherings exerted extra unease with the mounting pressure. Generally, the closer my relationship with someone, the more it hurt, especially if I assumed them to be vulnerable. I used to hide away pain behind the drink, projecting an animated facade. Although, if you examined closely, you’d see me quince as predicaments arose in my mind. Alcohol is a toxic poison that these days I see little use for, but back then, it produced some sort of mitigation. Alcohol-induced courage would reduce the significance of any quandary. Unfortunately, there were risks involved, as applying the medicine was a balancing act.

Building such a reliance meant drinking for myself became a fluid action in more ways than one. Being dependent on it in social scenarios, a drink would rarely ever leave my hand. It wasn’t that I suffered from alcohol addiction; I didn’t crave alcohol; I craved normality beset upon my internal musings; I craved comfort under my skin. Alcohol was the easiest way to achieve this. And the more I drank, the more I wanted to drink. An unsupportive self-serving feedback loop. This night of all nights especially. My coping mechanism was about to send me over the edge.

The flat was at the very top, a significant amount of high ceiling floors up. The only way to reach it was by climbing a grand staircase that snaked inside the perimeter walls. This left a gaping hole wide enough to fit a double-sized bed in its appropriate position. A daunting view for those fearful of heights. Myself undeterred, blood drenched in whiskey.

I wasn’t having an awful time. I was in good company; we were laughing, talking, messing around. I did not feel dire and had ridden many harsher mindsets. Moments prior to the unfolding madness, I’d had a lengthy conversation, the contents of which wholesome. Nevertheless, the routine fluctuations of trepidation, compounded with the alcohol, had produced the usual indifference due to dismay. Although this time, a foreign energy was acting all too influential.

Something came over me as I closed the door to the top landing. Alone, heading down for a cigarette, I had this irresistible need to inject significant adrenalin into the situation. A fire within pleaded for the fuel of intensity, a drunken request conjured within many times before. However, this one burned with carelessness leagues above my adrenalin fixes. I knew something was happening as I walked over to the bannister. Leaning over to take a look down, I didn’t feel fazed by the view. I had put myself in risky situations before; even if drunk, the body would signal hesitancy. Whereas tonight, all I could feel was a reassuring commitment.

Not sure if it was due to the alcohol, but I was definitely witnessing an irregularity. My vision didn’t require glasses, and from the top floor to the bottom, it couldn’t have been no more than 70 feet, well within the bounds of my range of vision. But, no matter how long I stared, I couldn’t make out the bottom floor. From my perspective, it looked as if there was an interference, a blanket of translucent energy distorting the viewpoint. The first thing that came to mind, funny enough, was the film Donny Darko because this distortion mirrored their depiction of a wormhole.

Everything felt peculiar, even myself, the expression exerting itself from deep within as if its light was shining through a filter. To suffice this urge for adrenalin, I played a game of life or death. Jumping bottom first onto the bannister, hoping to achieve a sliding action. The friction against my jeans was too much as I glued pretty much stationary to the hardwood, hands gripped by my side for stability. I skipped a floor and tried again, this time applying a stronger vector of myself. Again I produced a sliding action that failed to garner the satisfaction to stop, so I carried on downwards before reaching the third floor down. The reckless energy was peaking. The balance of fatality potential versus going for it began to attain harmony. My numb body and mind were ready for the risk.

Deranged, trying to overcome the friction, I chose to do a run-up. About eight feet from the point of touchdown, I set off, one, two, three strides and a hop, positioning myself with a twist mid-air for landing. There I was mid-flight, attempting the most stupid action in my life, moments away from meeting my destiny. Hitting the bannister with a thud, I’d got my angles all wrong, coming in way too close to perpendicular. As my bottom touched the bannister, the friction failed to stop my body’s momentum in the direction of the stairwell. My legs, bent at the knee, caught the bannister, but my momentum was too much. The torso began to lever, and by the time my arms reached out to grasp onto the railing, I was too far gone. Hands slapping nothing except the cool resistance of abyssal air.

The silence of the unknown took over me. I was diving into a reckoning and knew the inevitable was drastic, yet I endorsed a calming acceptance, free-falling through God’s waiting room. Sent into a spin reminiscent of a missile clipping an object, my legs had come round 270 degree’s as my face smashed against the next bannister below. I blacked out.

My eyes opened to the insular viewpoint of insects, retrospective of those who lay on the floor. I’d stolen tonight’s spotlight. Overlooked by an audience of concerned faces lining the stairs, The Sound of Calamity’s – So Long, Farewell. I must have been knocked unconscious for some time because there was no way these guys had beaten me down. An attendee, trained in medical attention, knelt over me, her outfit ruined with my intoxicated blood. People were in panic stations, their faces a confection of sour distress and sweet relief.

On the contrary, my cocktail of alcohol and adrenaline combined to deliver a heedless attitude. You’d have thought I’d slipped over and banged my head, not escaped death from a 30ft fall. My dazed adamants to smoke the cigarette I was journeying after. People probably thought delirium; I was only trying to wipe the worry off their faces.

The escape part was a peculiarity. Although my memory blurred after the excessive drinking and knocking myself unconscious, my memory of arriving sober wasn’t so hazy. One memory, in particular, has stuck with me to this day. As we entered the hallway, I remember taking note of how empty it looked, lacking in furniture for such an open space. As we began climbing the flight of stairs, I pointed to an inlet created by the staircase design winding up against the walls. Remarking what an ideal place for a sofa, especially as the security guard on the door had no place to sit. Lo and behold, the same security guard had to dive off a couch placed precisely there to evade 70kg of human descending upon him. Landing head first, that sofa, positioned upon a hard, masonic tiled floor, saved my life.

About three hours after my fall, my memory stabilised. I was drunk, lounging on a bed in the trauma ward of the Royal Liverpool hospital, my dad sitting beside me. Continuing in my numbed state, I acted as if what had taken place was nothing of importance. You wouldn’t think I had escaped death by a whisker. I was doing what I’d always done with these traumatic instances, playing it off with humour. Whistling The Life Of Brian’s – All Ways Look on The Brightside in the trauma ward of any hospital is inappropriate but not unsuitable.

It wasn’t until the next evening I began to deal with the emotions of what had happened. In my room, alone to myself, on one of the highest floors of Royal Liverpool, I could remove the brave overcoat I used to alleviate others of worry on my behalf. Thinking about all that happened, I relinquished, submersed in the moment’s gravity. I gazed out my bedside window, comprehending how lucky I was to be alive. To my astonishment, my location aligned with the top of Hope Street, and directly down my view, accentuated above the skyline, were the two great cathedrals of Liverpool. Here it hit me; the synergy of events, landmarks and road names transmitted overwhelming relief and gratitude. Staring at these architectural monuments of religious reverence, I felt eucharistic with the higher forces of life, indebted for the way things turned out.

There was a peculiarity in the air after the fall. I, at the time, branded it as extended feelings, but life itself felt different. I was within something greater than benignity. Maybe it had something to do with the spring equinox-super full moon combo that weekend. Or perhaps the solar eclipse I witnessed the morning after, still drunk in search of breakfast, so unperturbed by the crowd, stood pridefully bearing my back-to-front hospital gown. The confluence of these cosmological rarities is a consequential facilitator of subsequent espoused esoteric beliefs.

Admitted from the hospital and back home, sleeping in the room next door to my parent’s bedroom, the house was quiet with sympathetic peace. I spent my days resting or at the hospital for various operations and check-ups. Many moments had an undercurrent of deja vu; it was everywhere my attention turned. The surrealness of sitting in the doctor’s office, watching the trees perform a winding wave in the window, half-listening to his muttering clarifications. How the sun’s light shone through breaks in the cloud, infusing the room in silent prescience, the denudation of reality. I had been here before, at this very moment. The certainty was irrefutable.

The deja vu, sporadic in the run-up, was now following me from location to location, a passenger to every scenario I travelled through. My days spent asking, ‘what on earth is happening?’ It unfolded as if I was living a dream, one I had dreamt for sure. Every cell in my body indicated this was the case. I couldn’t pinpoint when these dreams occurred, like grease splatter upon the hob, a stain in time, its origins definitive, its date of conception a victim to absent-mindedness.

Two weeks had passed since the fall, and I was back at work, yet life’s perspectives did not follow my routine in its subsidence towards normalcy. The new paradigm was relentless in reinforcing itself. Remerging with life, people were attentive to recent events. I was experiencing days far out of line from a typical day in the life of Fin, the oddities fuelling the recognition of deja vu. The mundaneness of everyday events watered-down coalescence. Igniting recognition increased in infrequency as existence lengthened on. There were too many similar memories interacting with my ability to recall specifics. However, the reversal proved a symmetry. The places I had never been to before, the extraordinary events witnessed, the creation of memorial antiquity made it obvious. Life was the residual of initial dreams.

A month after the fall, my father wanted to take me on a drive around the perimeter of Scotland. With the itinerary of visiting family friends and work-orientated visits before concluding with a family birthday celebration in Newcastle. I was expecting an uneventful journey. The weekend prior, plans were made to socialise with friends for the first time since the fall. A night we had chosen to celebrate in dedication to 4/20. Going from a devoted stoner to a repenter and back to a hobbyist, I’d most years since knowing of the event, celebrated 4/20 without knowing the true meaning behind it. No one seemed to. There were urban legends, small-scale stories, teenagers having pacts to meet at certain times, and so on. Little did I know I was about to witness the matrimony of our synchronous significance.

We’d usually celebrate in the day, doobie galore, but this year was the year for something different. We were of an age now to be part of working society, so many of us had to work during the day. Moving around this, we planned to celebrate in the night without weed alone. Deciding to take an ecstasy pill each in honour of the occasion.

Precisely one month after my escape from death, this was my first night with a partying vibe, and the energy was emerging from its chrysalis. Since my fall, I perceived sincerity in most social interactions. Exalted kindness, a sense of upliftment, celebration due to something associated with me taking place. Tonight had a cordial stench in the air, which I excused for the awaiting ecstasy’s euphoria.

We picked up, ingested and sat in anticipation, waiting for the come up. It was slow for me, my inner jingle a solitary bell, air traffic signalling towards the latent energy, anticipating what was to come. After what was probably little time, we grew tired of the lag. With it being late into the night, deciding to venture down to the park in the hope of a change of scene and a marijuana mix may hasten the opening of the gates.

Lighting a joint and two tokes in it hit me. The cargo landed with roaring vibrations, a fountain of ecstasy spewing from the stomach. I couldn’t tell if it were the drugs or my cognitive development as the euphoria seized the moment with such artistry. Leagues above the vivifying events of times prior.

I was above myself, not like the perceptions of Amsterdam, where my literal perceptive awareness hovered above. Vision played no role; a sole rivulet of visceral exposure stroked refreshing remarks down the crown of my delicately palpable headspace. I was above, boarding a realm of providential savvy, empowered with piercing conviction. Pieces of the puzzle to what had been the strangeness of the past year were beginning to make sense.

The deja vu was so clear I could remember the dream like it happened yesterday, vivid imprints upon my memory by the hot iron brand reserved for prize cattle. The wavering experience mitigated by the absorptive trampoline I lay upon. Staring up at the stars, riding the composite wave of euphoria produced in the combination of pill and realisation. My life was racing into an extraordinary existence, and those stars looked to be playing a part. First, the flow, with its grappling spread of my inner eye and now this… Living the pre-seen understanding of living the pre-seen.

Does this mean I’m creating my life in my sleep? How long ago was this dream? Was it all in one sleep? Have other people been included in this sleeper’s experience? Do they reminisce upon themselves? Or through me? Is this why it feels like people are in my head? How come it escapes me, unable to remember the specifics of what happens next until it passes through the present? When did this all start? So many questions raced through my fidgety mind. Overwhelming yet joyous to realise the universe had answered my prayers for the bridging of my consciousness. Not only was my wish for sharing consciousness granted, but it also seemed the universe had cooked up something of far greater complexity. Some sort of telepathy was at play, and as a consequence (or product), projecting my manifested future upon my dreams.

This stupendous discovery vanished a submersed concern. There was a part of myself debating if this mystical lifestyle had some sort of mirage to it. Something was there, I could see it in the interactions with people, in the blossoming of mind, but I couldn’t wrap my hands around it. These deja vu experiences validated this reality. Effects on people and my thought stream were telling of change. This was an extract of the change, the fruits of my essence, a vector from the source. The only question left was how far would it go? I would have to wait and find out. The gut-churning mystic energy, the conviction of the extraordinary, the validity of knowledge and experience entrenched into life. This was my first real 4/20, the practical realisation of my life’s preternatural circumstances. The oddities were finally getting their metaphysical context.

A little under a week later, Dad and I were on our escapade around Scotland. Every turn was some vivid memory relived. A pungent kick would come over the scene, a sudden screen view of ‘hang on, I’ve been here before’, holding for however long the moment lasts before it dissipates into the ether and life continues. Coming to terms with this, to begin with, was heart-thumping. I would ponder the possibilities of what indeed lay before me? What did this mean for me and my life? What is enclosed in this gift from the universe? A hamper only at the beginning stages of its revealing? Will I soon be able to see the future? Ready in the present, anticipating its arrival with precise detail? The sowing of seeds in the dreamscape gave a tantalising fervour to my potential.

We drove around the periphery of the beautiful Scottish coastline, east to west. Staying overnight in the Hebrides amidst no civilisation, only the nature of the landscape and the occasional passing straggler. The next day driving towards Newcastle, I remember a passing at the roadside in what would be called the middle of nowhere. We came across what looked to be a University geography trip examining the different layers of sediment within cut-away roadside mounds. Driving along, listening to Joan Armatrading and I feel the dream’s presence, knowing as I pass through this unusual roadside student safari, I had been here before. Wondering to myself whether they, too, know this? I recall the night before, sitting at the table of our hosts, eating my dinner, when deja vu strikes the moment. Someone at the table reacted within the instance, commenting, ‘i just felt it.’ A remark out of conjunction with the conversation, carrying no further than its handful of words. Whether coincidental or not, the synchronicity was too salient to dismiss.

After these many years, I’ve come to recognise when the intense Deja Vu’s emanate into the moment, the setting configures itself. Social observers clutch at a momentary silence, followed by designating glances and the occasional comment. As like this scene, where we were the only ones in the room, and there was absolutely no context to the statement apart from the intense deja vu.

We arrived in Newcastle for the night of the birthday celebration. I was dropped off with my cousins and friends as my dad went on to the hotel he would be staying at. Time to start the party, and as usual, I brought my nervously upbeat spirits and jittery greetings. Sinking a couple of preparatory drinks while getting ready, already trying not to bring attention to permeating predicaments.

I treasure family get-togethers today, having overcome the issues my mind created for itself. From being a child and just wanting to have fun to the teenage years where you’d rather be somewhere else, there comes a time when you feel thankful for having those you love around you, especially when celebrating something in unison. Unfortunately, when I was coming to this stage of life, good feelings were dispelled by my introverted tourettes.

Sitting around the people I cared for the most, enjoying a special moment, I would sense the pressure building. It felt like I was fighting against a pit of hideousness, clenching to hold back an eruption of inappropriate thoughts. Holding yourself together becomes magnitudes more difficult as the perceived repercussions of failing rise. My presence didn’t belong, or so I thought. Perceiving myself as a thorn in communal celebration. My invitation from a place of necessity rather than avidity.

Have you ever been somewhere where you felt so unprepared for what you expected of yourself? The depth overwhelms you exerting too much pressure above every moment to stabilise yourself. Mobility is solid and stiff, the mind in a gaseous panic. So afraid to take action because the consequences dwell in the unknown, whatever you approach, the first thought is a worry of whether you’re going to fuck it up. Trying to wiggle yourself out of this state of panic only leaves you sinking further. Curses crept in cursive fashion to the foreground of the mind’s calamity vents before their vivacious escape.

I was a medium, and as a medium, I provided content on a consistent provision and, in a broadcasting sense, beyond my control. I didn’t seem to have an on/off switch; I had continuance, come rain or shine. A conflated threat to prick my insides. Emotionally driven internal twisting to a harsh jibe, excretions of a rinsed dirty cloth. Not to say I stopped having fun, although it had re-diminished considerably. I was heading deep into Fin’s downstage part 2, the fight for positivity – a battle for public, not private emancipation.

To spare me from renouncing this new hurdle, it seemed the universe, knowing I’d lack any relative specific experience par the guidance of my intuition, set a list of fiascos in the run-up to my expansion. Put simply, they ensured I could swim in the shallow end before dropping me into the deeper section of life’s waters. None of it was comfortable, but it was necessary. I incessantly quizzed myself, why me? Being no stand-out performer intrigued me about what I had to offer. Because looking at it from a probability perspective, I am here not for myself but for humanity at large. My life can potentially affect millions upon millions of people, hopefully in a positive direction. If the dream was universal, then at a subconscious level, I must have been having some sort of effect, minute or otherwise. So the universe had a lot invested in me. You’d think they would have made sure I was a sound investment. Yet analysing my life beforehand, I couldn’t make out why.

In the end, I forced the conclusion maybe I’m a litany of above-average traits that, combined with my geopolitical and cultural setting, gave my life one of the highest success rates. Well, still didn’t stop me from asking for armbands when my feet failed to touch the floor hence the drinking. Although, this wasn’t a day in and day out; I’ve never been a consistent drinker, but in intimate social settings, it became a necessity; my medicine, a bottled coping mechanism, encased its own lesson.

The inflated carelessness gave me room to breathe. As I encroached into an inebriated state, it handed me the armour to force my way out of my shell of nails using the rugged, insensitive exterior alcohol shrouded over me. Free to feel some sort of resemblance to normal again. I assumed the theory, the less in tune with my senses I was, so too would my broadcasts be. The medium would become indecipherable as I drank myself dull. A poor connection, static, like a defunct tv ariel or the closing of a daytime tv channel – “back tomorrow folks!” I could be free from prying awarenesses. Even though people seemed to react to my thoughts in the present, drinking also helped if I was working with dream theory. The more I consumed, the more blurred the memories, leaving people more comfortable with themselves being around me, knowing I was less likely to show them up to the viewership.

As the night wore on, I had knocked back a fair amount, sitting for 4 hours in a room trying my best to enjoy the evening while clashing with my psyche, fighting to keep the monsters at bay. Finally, I was pretty exhausted but drunk, and as the rate of uprising discontent fell off, I found room to enjoy myself and relax. Loosening up, the night began to enter its joyous stage. Us youth had ventured to the next part of the evening. Entering the nightclub scene, my heartbeat celebrating, the coin had flipped.

Away from the family elders and back with the students, stimulants made their entrance. A behavioural pressure valve was released. It was time to blow off some steam. Stimulant drugs exhibited an assured vigour different to alcohol. Instead of reinforcing my shell, being picker-uppers, they lifted me above the pain, way above it, where it stopped being a worry I had to defend myself against. I was high, and that brought inspiration, and uninterrupted inspiration was the calling card for flow. Flow didn’t have to always be insightful, grandiose messages; although I’d argue, under my experience, that was its inherent nature. There would be times when flow was something everyone should have felt. That is feeling good, feeling the self, the spirit glowing through the skin. Chatter streams fluidly, complimenting the discourse, dancing fitting to the emotions. You aren’t thinking much because you are too busy having a good time, too busy outputting the spectrum of your soul. This is why drugs were a powerful tool for me; they brought me to a flow state in themselves. I just had to latch the trailer on.

I, whisked towards a loving state, silently observing the sweet, serenading thoughts tabulating all these experiences into the possibilities of my, of our potential. Although my memory is faded, I remember being in such love. My mind was untouchable to the nagging fears. The love was overpowering. Gracefulness of the mind dancing through reality, outpouring a trail of blissfulness.

Time took flight. It may as well have been a matter of minutes between arrival and us leaving in a taxi. There was an underlying excitement in the vehicle. Passengers were eager to get home. I assumed it had something to do with me and the soulful wisdom arising in my mind. We arrived back at the house, and I remember the simple action of walking through the front door being supplemented with internal realisations. The majestic flow felt unstoppable as if I was expressing the heart of my potential. We congregated in the kitchen, music blaring, drug-fuelled conversations verging on jabber. I was somewhat silent in speech, busily in-tuned to the inner harmony. Expressing myself through my flowing thoughts, highlighting the fountain of wisdom my mind became when my energies allowed. Then the ganja came out.

Smoking up only increased the potency of the flow. As if the outer world fell silent to the sounds of a meditative bird song. Identifying with supreme feelings, my energetic body suggested it could take off. The vibrations within were on a frequency that saddled being to spirit rather than matter. Emphasising projection, not growth.

Most of us are in the kitchen, the music is pumping, and I’m still enjoying every piece of the serenity. This was when it happened. The way my surroundings developed with the rising like a projection from within, an inner connectedness to the setting. I was one with the moment, the shared server to where we were situated. The vicinity felt first fed through me, filtered by the editorial dreamscape. And with no warning, there they were. Two spirits stood side by side, formed over by the kitchen door. The room’s atmosphere appeared telling. The matching silence made it seem I wasn’t the only one there aware of this.

I intuitively knew they had come through me, manifested in my making of the moment. I felt imperative to their arrival, they were here dutifully, and I knew very well who one of them was, the spirit of Tupac Shakur. As you know, I have shared a strong affinity with his soul since the days his music picked me up and showed me I wasn’t alone. Now, this was a spiritual reality. I was gobsmacked by the event, but the two passengers effortlessly explained their selection in the light of it.

Their presence was furtively profound, the evisceration of flesh. Their appearances faceless, body-less, matter-less, the ingrained energetic body isolated. The energy of reality, all-encompassing, subtle, invisible to the untrained mind, highlighted as the two spirits intertwined with it, shifting its balance and shaping it around their presence. Invisible cloths of form.

Fearing to approach in case I interfered with the connection, I remained fixed, standing within my location. All I could do was repeatedly say, ‘it’s all good’, as I danced to the music, in awe of what was happening. One person hastily left the room. I assumed because they found the whole situation overwhelming. So I chased after him, attempting reassurance with vague words, our righteousness to be an audience. Although strange, it was one of the most beautiful experiences life had produced for me. With the honour that I was a contributing factor in this magic, I, the host, felt impelled to help others overcome their discomfort.

The night fades away memory-wise. I remember them being there for a scene, but the length of time eludes me. I wasn’t saddened by their departure, with the passage fulfilling its fated destiny, contented to have been a blessed witness to a peaceful humbling. These states were chemically fed, usually THC combined with another psychoactive compound. The spiritual experiences I produce, although substantial, are predicated on chemicals uplifting me to those Olympian heights. I had little control when the effects wore off. Relying on substance-fed spiritual fulfilment leaves one with decaying rewards. Instinctive evasiveness, chasing wild horses instead of taming a pony. I rode what would flee and neglected to call upon graduality.

The morning was a weird one. Was that real? It reminded me of the night after 9/20, the awkward silence. I succumb to surveying events with vertigo. My state of mind at the time struggled with downers. The lack of serotonin in my system stopped any symbolic inspired happiness. Instead, I felt ashamed, sunken by some loud part of me acknowledging the consequential factors. I had to hold myself together, coming down around all my family, the people I cared most about. This was why I never took drugs too often because even though stimulants were a guaranteed ticket to flow, there was an ugly cost that proceeded. However high my vibrations the night before this would have to be faced and at the beginning, still figuring out how to handle myself, made it a dire affair.

We went back to the hotel to spend the rest of the morning with the family. I felt way out of my depth. Worried about sharing my thoughts about what took place that night, fearful the elders would judge me for such crazy ideas. The disgrace of my own broadcasting soon overtook my easily conquerable, serotonin-deprived state of mind. It goes to show how fragile I was back then. I could witness something so mystical, a spiritual experience so out of the blue, rewarding and reassuring. Yet, the following day, any uplifting feelings were drained out of me. Having to overcome these depressive bouts the day after reminds me of Jay Electronica’s lyrics:

We came a mighty long way from standing near the stove

In the cold

Those nights were great back then, breathtaking magic introducing itself to a not-so-long-ago virgin mystic. The rest of the time was a struggle. Debilitation and humiliation dominated every setting. I was blowing hot and cold at the extreme ends of the scale, and the hot stove carried me through. The warmth of me demonstrating my purpose – the mitigating factor that made this suffering worthwhile. I have no clue where I would be if I didn’t have the heat of flow to warm my apprehension. Probably crazy in denial, thoroughly gaslit.

Comprehending what was at play had the beat of my heart blaring. The drum of a tribal ceremony, rhythmic backing to the generation of an internal tempest. The forces of happiness and sadness, the warm and cold fronts collision, whipping up one giganotosaurus supercell cloud of expression. Firing the energising lightning, beating the thunder drums of vibrational delight, pouring rains of regret, swirling icy winds of despair. Little did I realise they were watering my roots, strengthening my defiance, bringing enough stability to anchor myself in reality. Structured to face the future destined for me.

What an immense struggle is this conundrum. The mysticism revolving around my life is incomprehensible to most of the population. So reaching out to others for help and guidance was detrimental. Opening my mouth on these topics heralded eyes of indifference. The mysticism ran above what they were willing to consider. Let alone reaching out for advice, even thinking about my predicament when socialising with others made me feel uncomfortable, igniting a state of frustration. Being so misunderstood, a suffering alien enacting an extraterrestrial act of marginalisation via the self onto the unfortunate observers. I didn’t want them to suffer through their own thoughts worrying about me, especially as they lacked the evidential experience or judgment needed to over-stand the situation I faced. So I decided it would be too much for them to handle. Even with the subtle comments coming here and there, I’d keep the observations of my wake to myself.

We set off on our journey home after saying our goodbyes. This car journey would be the concluding moment of the craziest week of my life. A piece of the puzzle unearthed, bringing forward a belief beyond imagination.

There I am, sitting in the car, balancing the uninspiring thoughts of a comedown with celebrations of last night’s revelations. The last thing I want to be around now is people, so ignoring car etiquette, I plugged my headphones in, homing my sense to symphonic distractions. Resting, with the back of my head lodged between the headrest and door pillar, forehead pressed against the spring-chilled glass, I gazed upon the zipping inanimate settings beyond the motorway boundary. A prisoner fixed between bars, searching for a scent of freedom. Exploring the bright blue of the clear sky, admiring its rich tones, an escape from my imprisonment in this body and its ramifications. I would turn my attention back to myself, staring into the side mirror, fascinated by who I was. Alternating between introspection of my character and extrospection of the outer world. Calming the nerves until I could turn back towards myself and again begin refilling the bar of intensity. A behaviour pattern representative of the conflict I was under.

Finding solace in music, I was shuffling through songs, and in came this masterpiece of music that would become the number one melody to the soundtrack of my life. A gift of revelation reinforcing my perception, initiating my relativity onto a grander cosmic scale. Twisting and turning through each song, pondering the meaning of last night, in search of musical therapy, on came some 2Pac. My ear for lyrics was still inexperienced, appetite for the lyrical content of songs in its infancy. I would struggle to complete a whole verse, comprehending the lyrics at their passing tempo. So there I am, half-listening, half daydreaming when I hear the words ‘now I know the answers to the question, do dreams come true? Still staring at the world through my rearview.’ A shock whipped through my nervous system. What I’d dismiss as synchronicity after the previous night seemed far too much of a coincidence. Another something spectacular, an additional cosmic miracle, was illuminating itself.

My mind was racing; questions were popping off, ‘was Pac watching over me back then?’ I wondered how exactly he had experienced watching over me. Was that his dream figure last night? Did he see that night in his dreams? To be honest with you, although it sounds plausible, I’ve never added thought to that theory. Even though my memory was foggy, and the spirits didn’t speak to the room, there felt a subtle telepathic connection. I could feel their conscious presence. Their thoughts were one with mine. Like an inexperienced medium, I guess there isn’t much of a bookmark without speech in the transmission of knowledge, so the information you may attain can happen without relative acknowledgement. You just, for some reason, subliminally, know. I remember the communication being one telling me it is all good, not to worry. Maybe within that was the story of where they’d come from or where they were in life. Somewhere I’d gathered an innate understanding these were both afterlife spirits. Backed by the fact they had both passed on from this Earth.

I wasn’t comprehending time travel further than my own dreams until the next day, so the possibility of him being Pac before his passing would have been impossible or highly unlikely in my pre-revelation opinion. Let me add some context: I had a dream on the night of my plummet when knocked out. Although faded from the alcohol and hit to the head, I’m sure Pac was waiting in my dream. The memorial image shows a light curtain, himself standing to the side. A stance reminiscent of a best man’s, his supportive posture and eyes reinstating courage, facial expression a comforting assurance of ‘let’s do this.’

“The truth is not known, beneath the sky of stars. Whether they were of heaven or earth.”

I listened to the song with as much mindfulness as I could muster, trying to maximise lyrical absorption while entertaining investigative thought. Although it was my astuteness that drove the content forwards. The lyrics seemed filled with identifiers to a knowing of myself. An ethereal experience. My deep-rooted feelings of connection to this man’s soul were being verified. Showing off our strength in bond, watching time fly between us. When it first hit, all I could do was inflate with pride. As did millions of others, the man I looked up to was in with me on this wacky spiritual journey. A relieving realisation, just the person, the type of energy I needed by my side. Was the universe rewarding us both for our attitude towards life, for ‘being real’? The dream team was forming. We were cosmic draft picks for a 21st-century revolution.

After three hours of silence, head basking in the sun, thoughts in outlandishness, we arrived at the shop in Liverpool. Bearing in mind the day was a beautiful mid-spring Sunday, warm and sunny, the quietness was unprecedented. As if someone’s unwanted presence hushed everyone away. A ghost town, not a soul outside, only a single lady pushing her pram and its contents. I couldn’t help but correlate the empty nature of the scenario with my exceptionally fragile state of mind. This further heightened my vulgarity as I became re-aware of the potential effects of my own mind. I was a torrent of tourette’d taboo. Desperate for the relief of being only in the vicinity of myself. Although magnificent, the new revelation played a role in reminding me of my forfeiture’s negative polarities.

This war would rage with a vigorousness behind each breath. At this point, so soon after my revelation, producing upbeat emotions shot with excitement; there was a too and throw, dwelling in the shadowy alternation. Yes, I had lost conscious privacy but was experiencing a grand uprising of consciousness in return. So bright in scope, I could envision how much pain I could relinquish from the world with persuasive clarity. If society understood me, flow and what I had to offer, culture would remodel itself. All they had to do was tune in and resonate with my conscious content. It made all the easier, considering I was inherently connected to life, fixated within its origins. Having the groundwork laid for me, I only had to wait for others to begin catching up. To acclimate with my leap in consciousness, not only seeing and feeling my awareness but coming to terms with the wisdom it broadcasted. Once that happened, we’d begin to see the revolution evolve.

2Pac – Starin’ Through My Rear View

(Resurrection)

[Intro: 2Pac] Starin’ at the world through my rearview
Just lookin’ back at the world
From another level, you know what I mean? Starin’

[Verse 1: 2Pac] Multiple gunshots clear the block, the fun stops
Snitches is callin’ cops, people shot, nobody stops
I wonder when the world stopped carin’
Last night two kids shot while the whole block starin’
I will never understand this society
First they try to murder me, then they lie to me

Product of a dyin’ breed; all my homies tryin’ weed
Now the little babies crazed, raised off Hennessy
Tell me, will my enemies flee when they see me?
Believe me, even thugs gotta learn to take it easy
Listen, through intermissions, search your heart for a plan
And we turnin’ bad boys to grown men, it’s on again
I give a holla to my n***as in the darkest corners
Roll a perfect blunt, and let me spark it for ya
One love from a thug n***a
Rollin’ with a posse full of paranoid drug dealers
To the end, my friend, I’m seein’ nothin’ but my dreams comin’ true
While I’m starin’ at the world through my rearview
See, I’m seein’ nothin’ but my dreams comin’ true
While I’m starin’ at the world through my rearview

[Hook: 2Pac] They got me starin’ at the world through my rearview
Go on, baby, scream to God, he can hear you
I can feel your heart beatin’ fast ’cause it’s time to die
Gettin’ high, watchin’ time fly
And all my motherfuckers
Starin’ at the world through my rearview
Go on, baby, scream to God, he can hear you
I can feel your heart beatin’ fast ’cause it’s time to die
Gettin’ high, watchin’ time fly
And all my motherfuckers

[Verse 2: E.D.I. Mean] Now you see him, now you don’t
Some n***as be here for the moment, and then they gone
What happened to ’em?
Well, let’s see, it seems to be a mystery
But all I know I never let the money get to me
Stay down like the truest
Thug Life until I check out this bitch, I thought you knew this
Who is gonna catch me when I fall or even care to?
While you thinkin’ I see you lost up in my rearview
Hear you is down with them Outlawz
Outcast, left far, I’m through like southpaws
But still we keep mashin’ until our dreams come through
Starin’ at the world through my rearview

[Verse 3: 2Pac] Now, I was raised as a young black male
In order to get paid, forced to make crack sales
Caught a n***a so they send me to these overpacked jails
In the cell, countin’ days in this livin’ black hell
Do you feel me? Keys to ignition, use at your discretion
Roll with a 12 gauge pump for protection
N***as hate me in the section, from years of chin-checkin’
Turn to Smith & Wesson war weapons

Heavenly Father, I’m a soldier
I’m gettin’ hotter ’cause the world’s gettin’ colder
Baby, let me hold ya: talk to my guns like they fly bitches

All you bustas best to run, look at my bitches!

[Bridge: 2Pac] Now I know the answers to the question
“Do dreams come true?”
Still starin’ at the world through my rearview
I said, now I know the answer
“Do dreams come true?”
Starin’ at the world through my rearview

[Hook: 2Pac] They got me starin’ at the world through my rearview
Go on, baby, scream to God, he can hear you
I can feel your heart beatin’ fast ’cause it’s time to die
Gettin’ high, watchin’ time fly
And all my motherfuckers
Starin’ at the world through my rearview
Go on, baby, scream to God, he can hear you
I can feel your heart beatin’ fast ’cause it’s time to die
Gettin’ high, watchin’ time fly

N***a, Kadafi say!

[Verse 3: Kadafi] Back in the days we hustled for sneakers and beepers

Nine-six for Glocks
‘Cause fiends hittin’ up blocks with street sweepers
Bless myself when knowin’ rules to these streets
Somethin’ I learned in school
On some Million Man March shit for the peace

True that, only one life to lead, a fast life of greed
Criminally addicted, infested since a seed
We all die, breed, bleed like humans
Towns run by young guns, Outlawz and truants
Shit’s deep, turn eighteen, burn my will when I go
Burnt my body with my shotty, or choosin’ my dough
So while you reminiscin’ all nights out with the crew
Smoke a blunt for me too, I’m starin’ through your rearview

[Outro: 2Pac] Hahahaha, you ain’t knowin’ what we mean by starin’ through the rearview
So, since you ain’t knowin’ what we mean, let me break it better understandin’ the world…The world is behind us
Once a motherfucker get an understandin’ on the game, and what the levels and the rules of the game is
Then the world ain’t no trick no more, the world is a game to be played
So, now we lookin’ at the world from, high watch, behind us
N***as know what we gotta do: just gotta put our mind to it and do it, it’s all about the papers, money rule the world
Bitches make the world go round
Real n***as do what they wanna do, bitch n***as do what they can

They got me starin’ at the world through my rearview
Go on, baby, scream to God, he can hear you
I can feel your heart beatin’ fast ’cause it’s time to die
Gettin’ high, watchin’ time fly
And all my motherfuckers
Starin’ at the world through my rearview
Go on, baby, scream to God, he can hear you
I can feel your heart beatin’ fast ’cause it’s time to die
Gettin’ high, watchin’ time fly

Life was moving with vivace. The first anniversary of Amsterdam, I able to look back on the curing of an egotistical nightmare, mind refurbished. Then came flowing deep every time I’d get with Mary. Projecting spirits, dreaming my future and witnessing its recollection unfold in the present. Then to put the icing on the cake, people of the past were observing my life. They hacked my perception, communicating the experience to grant acknowledgment to both parties.

What had taken place this past year was going to be engraved into the history of humanity, and I was still a whisker from turning twenty. I theorised this spiritual expression was gifting me a platform to project an impactful influence on this world. Flirting with the contrivances of using the offspring from my dream world copulation to bolster humanity in our next conscious evolution. I was one human being of billions, and never had I anticipated my life taking this road, not until it unfolded before me. A grain of salt accompanied by the whispering support of the sun, hoping to tip the scales towards humanity’s betterment.

Leading by example, we would build an environment on Earth designed in light of the human spirit. To give all that lived the opportunity of reaching their zenith. I would daydream about all the reciprocal achievements that lay before us, expanding love, breaking runaway inequality, maximising harmonious innovation, healing the traumatised, upending the inheritance of toxic traits, nurturing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and so on. Brimming with them, most through flow, coming to me as I’d be deep in contemplation. A lightning bolt realisation, followed by the warm, fuzzy, pleasurable feeling, spreading throughout the body from the epicentres of the gut and head—portals of ecstasy from the most high.

My deep insights into the workings of reality weren’t only exploring solutions. The solutions found themselves in recognition of society’s impediments. Some were the issues inherent to man’s psyche, our struggles with handling the ups and downs of life, the ego’s demands clouding our judgment, handicapping traumas tying us down with reluctance to build a better world. Other parts, meanwhile, broached how our environment was being moulded to exaggerate these problems. These environmental factors, influenced not by the people submitted to them but by people in power positions, looked to be deliberate weapons. The convincing implementers and the societal engineers targetting threats to and farms for their power, us. People who could coerce society into formulations most beneficial to them and their compatriots, disregarding the functional at the behest of individual agendas. Using the subservient to pick up the slack or be submitted by one form or another.

The narrative of utter complacency rang true in parts. People on this planet have a tendency to chisel their ethical standing into a shape that best fits their ambitions. It takes a defiant variable to induce the adoption of ethics that resort to life rearrangement. Decisions preceding political misdemeanours weigh the warranted versus wanted, defiant repercussions versus prosperous rewards. A world enticing the latter, but does one feel encouraged or compelled to do so? You’re best asking the chisel, did the hand quiver with avidity or apprehension? Or was it psychotically calm?

Are the political and financial classes encouraged or compelled not to police themselves? Complacency should be irrefutable, being so common, so universal, so inherent in our natural order. However, complacency necessitates self-satisfaction. Where is the satisfaction in turning a blind eye? Snitching on competitors is beneficial, so why isn’t it satisfying? Is that because the repercussions outweigh the benefits? Do they hold the same attitude as the streets, leaving it best settled in house, away from interfering eyes?

They say people fall into a life of crime because their lives lack direction. No where else left to turn. Understandable for those who live in material or emotional deprivation. But what about those who have climbed to the upper echelons of society. You can’t deny they have a direction. After all, the rule of thumb is only the sharpest, most cunning minds make it to the top.

Omnipresent complacency would foretell a world of complete misdirection, conspirators’ agendas mismanaged, wilted on the grapevine, a victim to squealer’s selfishness. How strong is covetousness? Can it meld alliances of those who ‘compete’ to make their lives easier? To create a playing field closed off to imposters. A cartel crafted design to solidify the hierarchy. Survival of the fittest protoplasm, the grand inter-national of thoroughbred stock. There is only one way to find out. Seeing as the system will protect itself at all costs, those who dwell beneath have to get down and dirty in its details. That does not mean choosing a select side of political commentary and listening to their news of the day. Alcohol doesn’t make sporadic appearances at university parties; it’s guaranteed. Not every attendee drinks, but there will always be drinkers. A factor set in motion not by the party but by the institution. Yes, some parties may be sanctuaries for the sober, but drinkers will descend upon its ranks once she falls victim to word of mouth.

Go look for yourself, impartially. The internet is filled with verifiable documents and news articles the aristocracy wishes to never be common public knowledge. The ambitions of the global elitist are written up in detail, documented for the world to see, if only we can muster the curiosity to discover what the world’s most powerful desires for the place we all call home.

I knew these people would fight tooth and nail against my ambitions, so I became stubbornly fixated on the battle against them. For us to truly break free, they would have to be defeated by declarative insignificance, something a million miles away from what we were entrenched in. If the world around me had identified who I was, so must they. Postulating, they were preparing to counter my revolutionary metaphysical step. I was fazed by this but not daunted. The recognition of a competitor, a foe, riled me up. It came as a way to will me on, knowing I was here on the team of love to admonish this evil. Inflated with bemusement that I had won some sort of soul lottery. A young adult living at home with his parents, barely earning £200 a week, was helping to derail evil plans for the technological ensnarement of humanity.

I was emboldened with a warrior’s spirit, passionate for the cause, living the role with a solar plexus’ courageous acceptance. The metaphysical tools of this life chosen for me, was in my eyes, a celebration because without this happening, allowing me to bring to the table what I can, I could imagine the road to freedom being extended with one vehement, outboard-starting pull. The universe’s arsenal an answer to the spiritual anguish for those who chose to ask the question. A reply to Earth’s growing power imbalance in the eternal fight of good versus evil. A reminder of the power that lays dormant within us all. Neither devised nor crafted by the minds of men. This was relative to the stars above and their holographic planning.

I could see by the evidence of how people behaved around me. Society was intrigued by the person I was, an enigma, a wonder, a taste of something new. When in work, I began to notice streams of motorbikes would pass by the shop all day. This went on for weeks before I crafted the opinion it had a strong probability of being something to do with me. Bikers coming to witness the kid who may as well be from another planet. A Western-styled pilgrimage, although satisfying, the thought of people wanting to see you, celebrating your existence, the eventual reminder of my predicament, of how my life was utterly open. How I reacted to the identifiers rested heavily on how I felt at the time. In those teething stages, nothing short of a mental scuffle, two mindsets rolling over one another, each finding strength in the stigma and superbia.

We all have thoughts we wouldn’t wish to share with others. Although out of touch with that mindset now following six years of conscientious thought detoxification, I can imagine it would be a significant portion. Conversing with someone, people use their thoughts as an inner commentary, to speak the rest of their mind, so to say. Settling into the new paradigm wasn’t smooth. I had to eradicate those thought behaviours unsuitable for others. A task more challenging than it sounds, especially under the pressure of observance.

I look back at this time, how I despised its hindrance, the pain and suffering I put myself and others through. Although now a lot more understanding of the situation, the end goal was a priority. For me to become spiritually embellished, I’d have to remove the ugly tendencies. Thoughts engaging judgement, anger, impatience, lust, displeasure, humour at others’ expense, revenge, and the most extensive struggle, examination of others’ perceived deficits. Additionally, thoughts about myself, embarrassing parts of me I didn’t want to be known. Necessitating, I refrain from egotistical involvement in others’ opinions of the person I was, no matter how enticing it was to pander to their perception.

Spiritual engineering is not a significant aspect of modern Western culture. I had to figure out the requisition. The need to relinquish even the thoughts that seemed harmless to others but still bolstered identification with spiritual detriments. My society wasn’t a place that advertised a how-to guidance.

Daily experiences centred around my lack of privacy and its consequences. My attention became consistently submitted, violent grappling at the forefront of my thought cycle. There appeared no room for mistakes, as sharp bolts of pity would encumber me, the superfluous penance for every slip-up. I didn’t wish to hurt anyone, to startle their feelings, and I certainly didn’t want them to think it was done with purpose. So to prove there was no intent behind those actions, I’d punish myself, cursing the part of me that was allowing this to happen. No audible reprimand, the displeasure was communicated across like people’s discomfort around myself, non-contextual facial expressions: squirms, sneers, snaps of the neck. My self-disgust advertised with blatant body language.

If someone were to enter my vicinity, say they had a feature I’d assume made them feel uncomfortable, in an attempt to repulse acknowledgement, I would be doing so, homing conscious attention on the taboo. The supposed cure was actually poison. I was setting myself up for failure, my fear monopolising social thought patterns. This wasn’t practising damage control; I was embedding thought patterns. Identifying as a lonely sufferer stuck in a stained dilemma. I craved company, but out of fear of myself, this extraterrestrial experience destined me to be alone.

Why could I not keep it cool? A repetitive question accompanied by the scolding flagellation of viscous tar. This was the transition. I had to move away from old behaviours that had solidified themselves as habits. It would always take time, but the bed of nails I laid upon, pricks of self-hate the consequence of mental agitation, lengthened the conflict. My fear of the savagery that festered upon the daunting naked stage fed its ghastly guts. The answer wasn’t punishment; serenity was my escape. The problem was, I saw serenity as a gift to be given to me by the universe, not something I could conjure out of thin air, not for a person in my position. So much to lose in every moment, given the excuse.

Having encountered evidential experiences that this was my new reality at least nine months before the fall, I had already begun to take on various coping mechanisms. The crystallising pattern of fear and discomfort in the eyes of the majority I interacted with, void of recognisable reason, yet triggered by my entering their vicinity. Acquaintances having unknowable context to my life, those indirect comments, when reminisced on shed attribution. The clues started to come together before the event, or maybe the event was not when I believed. I don’t think it matters in the grand scheme of things. People seemed to know me before they met me, and many feared my presence. I could see people’s fearful reactions in their body language, sense apprehension in their voice, obviated eye contact, head fixed pointed in a direction away from mine, tense stances as if preparing for a collision. A nerving reality I simultaneously accepted with intrigue and rejected with a wounded heart.

Many of my coping mechanisms had links to my original ego crisis, avoiding discomfort, unconstructive contribution to the room’s energy, and an inability to contain my anxiety. Heavy drinking in social situations was an easy re-adoption. The social stigma I felt towards myself, the prying awareness. Drinking was the obvious escape. Social situations where drinking was accessible were 1/20th of interactions. I was semi-chill with my friends – they’d heard it all before. Pressure upon my presence came from a bigger than usual set. People who didn’t fulfil the categories of regular interaction and minimal repercussions for chatting shit, well, now I didn’t have a board and was trapped in the break, with no room to breathe. Dutch courage was never going to be accessible in these day-to-day interactions. Coping came on the back of tolerance. This, sadly, didn’t follow the law of diminishing returns. The savage in me was a creative beast.

It is fascinating how someone so at war with much of their life would be balancing those tumultuous negative emotions with spiritual experiences that, at the time, I had no idea the value of. To this day, I am surprised by my attainment of spiritual prowess even though I delved into many detrimental behaviours. At times it felt like all I had. Normality was gone, joy with others embroiled in hassle, and any interaction with what it means to be human, a painful reminder of that fact. It was my cope, alone in its legitimacy.

A few months after the revelation, human interaction had hulled me to exhaustion. Worn out and searching for solace, I decided to save up and buy myself a games console. Since the finishing day of the revelation week, thoughts were inspired by the topic: What the fuck is happening regarding this conscious time travel? Because as I began listening to more Pac, it became clear this wasn’t a one-off. His songs were full of subliminal references to my life. Then it happened; I can’t remember how; maybe that one synchronicity too many. The thoughts in my head, especially the rhetorical questions, would get reactions. Prevalent verbal identifiers and changes in pitch of Pac’s voice in accordance with the topic of my thought stream. The evidence was substantiating, weighing towards the theory Pac wasn’t only witnessing my life in some sort of dream or vision and then relaying it through his music. He was with me in that present moment recording the song. I was in the studio booth.

This backed up my theory people had direct, present access to my consciousness, more or less convinced by this point. Challenging as the interior conflict was, evidence deemed itself undeniable. In times of shy reprise, I wanted dream theory to be the signal sender. Come self-veneration, the present broadcaster became a compelling implementer. One admonished me of present mistakes, hiding them behind the veil of blurred dreams. The other ratified my desire that the messages of flow were being screened. Both these desires alternated turns running my heart’s magnetic flux. The life philosophy of being real kept me ready to accept whichever unnerving reality was. However hard the ramifications were to handle, I had the motivation to face them.

In my heart of hearts, I aspired to be the present broadcaster. I craved this artful experience to be captured; the magic within casting seeds. So much of my ambition was settled in changing minds. Every day I hoped my encounters would prove a point, opening more and more minds. The amplification of my significance with a cohort following this mission. My mind wasn’t so keen. Strolling in public like a piece of prey, shit was cumbrous. With Pac it was different. I had someone watching, someone to make proud. All eyez on me hits different from his perspective. Walking in the club, spotting glances. No collision course, bouncing prances, if only they knew. Us against the world, after all. Until my awareness recognised it wasn’t just Pac at all.

This revelation solidified on the weekend I bought my games console. With the family away, I’d set up my own in-house entertainment complex, projector, speakers, game console, music at desired volume levels. There I was in the living room scrolling through the hip hop playlists on the internet, living a memory that, in its peculiarity, cemented for the long term.

It wasn’t just Pac at all. The subliminal messages of my life were hidden all throughout hip hop. Every song my ears tuned into, I would hear references to an archetypal essence. Undertones of a mystical story, capturing and relaying my thought sequences. Responding to my situation, communicating to my mental imagery. By the artist’s inner eye, they imitated my life through their music, placing discreet shout-outs, predominantly in the first person. To the onlooker, unawares, they wouldn’t have a clue. It was covert, the interaction only apparent when one understood the fundamentals. No Sherlock could break the code and find the respondent. It would take the most intuitive mind to recognise the pattern interlaced in the lyrical context. Nevertheless, it is too easy for the metaphysical content to pass over one’s head, interpreted as an artistic expression, a metaphorical explanation, an esoteric simile.

When I thought it couldn’t get any crazier here, there came the discovery I not only bridged past and present in the dream world but also in reality. Something more profound than I first anticipated; the years didn’t matter. If the data was there, so was the bridge. The lack of recognition to the significance of this dreamer’s tale in daily life was now supplemented by hip hop’s majesticness. Understandable; these artists weren’t just portraying a knowledge of the present but also laying reference to an extended timeline. Whether that be 24 hours or 2 months, forwards or backwards. Whether through communication with other artists or extended visions. I’ve always predicted the extension to function through dreams. A periphery that surrounds the conscious concurrent, a dreaming parcel sent as an introductory or conclusivity pack. An explanation for why the receivers always came with no surprise. An intimate invitation to my mental imagery they always seemed well prepared for.

Not only did they bear witness to some of the grandest abilities gifted to me by the divine, but the private levels of my life, the intimate experiences I had with the universe. Unfortunately, I was attached to these spiritual experiences having witnesses. Not necessarily for clout; somewhat, back to the point, if people saw what was happening to me, it would widen their faith in the universe and humanity. It couldn’t be anything less than base positive for those with an undercurrent of goodness flowing through their heart. As I shared too bigger portion of my ambition in the necessity of witnesses, it helped relieve those qualms of an unresponsive, detached solitude. Knowing that all I was going through, it wasn’t just me alone; I had an audience. An audience that showed a deep level of respect, who understood my calling and were willing to help pave the way to a better future. And not to forget, they also happened to be some of the coolest, most talented people to walk this Earth.

It wasn’t just my favourite genre hip hop expressing this. The revelation breached all avenues. Wherever my hearing senses sent my awareness, some references would be hanging around, blatant ones when high. I would have BBC Radio 6 on at work every day as I’d go about business stocking shelves and serving customers with an elevated spirit. You know those precious times when life seems to give you surprisingly more than you believed it ever would. That was me back then, except ten-fold because the would be a could, and the situation spelt out this is a gift, you’ve earned it. To feel so special, I’d never really felt special before. Loved, yes, useful, yes, but special in the way I had a unique purpose, a role designed for my calibre, a role so important too.

The comment ‘living the dream’ was the hint bandied at me the most by the public. People knew of something, signalling their involvement; how much they knew, from the lack of change in society, was not so blatant. In my eyes, the whole event added some much-needed mysticism to Western culture. Helping to open many minds to the idea of a grand power above the material forces we as a society had become servants to.

I could sense some sort of change in the air. People weren’t so ‘me’ as much, and some were becoming a lot more accepting of the idea these esoteric realities hold possibility. Whether the humbling attitude was only catered to me out of respect or fear, or it was life in general, I couldn’t answer that. I remained hopeful that an emerging revolution in humanity’s collective consciousness would soon happen, ascending us out of this mess. Nevertheless disappointed with the turn of events unfolding distant from my ideals. I expected combustion like a match, lit and flicked onto a heap of autumnal leaves. Leaves marinated in the inflammable fuel of a questioning expectancy. My proof ignites a pyrophoric party. The controlled burn of a field which needs a nutritive refresh. Instead, I faced the grievances of a candle in the wind. A wind of onlookers caught in their daily onslaughts. Myself wicking the wax of what was being waxed lyrically.

Convinced at how critical the situation was, signalled itself by the universe, I started to formulate a prescient understanding. How this retaliation by the noosphere bent the tracks of normalcy, taking us light years away from what was previously deemed possible. The universe was investing a lot of conscious energy into this through me, and things were about to get pretty crazy. My view at the time and still to this day, this is part of the divine plan to balance out the power dynamics between the rulers and humanity. No authoritarians throughout history have had access to as much power as they do today, and through deceitful convincing, that nefarious imbalance is broadening. The idea I could enter the consciousness of those around me, before me and seemingly the entire planet. I didn’t know exactly how I reached the whole globe, but evidence hinted nothing less. Somewhere, some sort of energy was being invested, crafting these abilities. My role? To figure out how best to utilise this opportunity and supplement humanities do or die ascension.

The counterweight, the every force has an equal and opposite reaction; this is what I saw myself as. Examining my traits in comparison to current power structures, fates composition for the shadows fracture. Transparent, overt, ambitions clear. I couldn’t hide, I couldn’t sneak, any action of deceit, visible in its measures. Openness, even though being the causation to everything else, was insurance against their abuse. No coercion, no bribery, to ulterior agenda hidden under wraps. Pure inspiration, au naturel. Influence via unbeatable clarity of my earnest attempts to be positive, no matter how much I failed in my endeavours. I backed myself, trusted my intuition, and believed with such intent nothing could sway me. When it was all so raw, I was compelled to obligate a noble giving at all times. I wanted nothing less, and that desires dominance? A requital of dubious self-belief. Behind all these extraterrestrial ambitions, I was a boy, a carrier, dancing in the highs. Submissive to a reality I could barely comprehend, let alone understand its workings.

Assured I was dreaming my future, I assumed the power source had to be funnelling through the dream world. The lyrics in some of the music hinted at a belief life had split into two separate existences. I theorised about this possibility from factors occurring the night of my fall. The memories I had in parts didn’t match the outcome. As I entered, I clearly remember spotting this open hall with nothing except stairs and masonic tiling. Commenting on how bare it looked, stating they had plenty of room for a sofa, pointing to the area directly below the gap between each side of the snaking staircase. Then the wormhole-like vision moments before it happened as I peeked over the side. Did reality split at some point, allowing for two separate scenarios? Was I jumping between the old reality and a new dream reality? Was I living in both for some time and said goodbye to one? I held the theory there was no sofa in one scenario, and there plummeting headfirst onto a hard tiled floor, I died.

I had left one reality for another or continued on a parallel timeline, similar to Back To The Future’s representation of a split in time. The night I fell asleep to dream countless years under one night’s starry passage, I pictured this as an arrowhead shooting upwards towards the heavens, a perpendicular escape from the linear x-axis of time. An introduction of a y-axis, a secondary timeline. Allowing, through my conscious bridging at whatever present moment I dwelled on the y axis, perception of that current position from my targeted exposition upon the x-axis. Like a tower upon the flat landscape, with visibility to stretch the distance of stars and its infinite possible relationships of duality. Whatever the case, coming from an understanding of consciousness as the origin of reality, my consciousness was either accessible to all or encompassing all. I potentially housed an internal server that could host other conscious beings. A secondary bubble within its original.

As life ticks on, at this moment, the methods behind the madness bear minor importance. We are here now, and here is the fundamental, not esoteric theories. I spent too many hours in this revelation period lost in thought, trying to wrap my head around answers when I should have been acclimating.

Most nights were spent out with friends blazing and exploring the new reality I reminisced under. The experiences that were occurring, I would later find out after investigating metaphysical culture, to be spiritual phenomena recorded in many religions and belief systems. One of those, a memorial bookmark, took place in my best friend’s car. Sat in silent anticipation, waiting for tonight’s magic to make its entrance, an internal energy dancing through my body grabbed my attention. Obscurity elusive in my childhood now mesmerising my focus all too often. An electric wind, reactive to the direction of my awareness but not always submissive to it. I’d concentrate upon its location and feel it creep from my feet up to my legs, reaching my waist where my focus waned out of fear, and it dispersed. Something new? I pondered gleefully, unaware at the time of the relationship between balanced energy streams and higher states of awareness. Every time I was entering states of flow, the energies were shaping the perception of my internal structure, although to begin with, I was too preoccupied with my thought streams to account for the change. It wasn’t until those energies danced exclusively did they capture my attention.

Flow the majority of the time was thought streams. Still, on some occasions, it would lead to my observance of a peculiar event. Again with the essence of visitation, energies within me would play out their sequence under autonomous directives. I, in a state of flow, would be a non-intervening observer to events such as total white light emanating from behind my closed eyes, the considerable shortening of breath to the point of elusiveness, blue light funnelling through my mouth, down the throat burgeoning within my core, and the most peculiar, an unforgettable enigma. A random performance, yet moulded into identifiable cultural constructs.

My flows were breaking esoteric boundaries. Having visions of the significance behind elements, views of the fundamentals that underpinned their reality, a presentation of the wisdom coding the existence of each classical element. At the time, locked into the flow, it all made sense. The insight was undeniable, but when these flows stopped, everything halted. I’d try to look back and understand it from an ordinary conscious view, but I couldn’t make any sense of it. As usual, only picturing vague mental images of what was envisioned. The message long gone in a snap, nowhere to be found.

Around the time of these happenings, we pulled up at my house one evening. As customary, all of us being stoned, the drop-off wasn’t the expected process of jumping out of the car after saying our goodbyes. We would all sit there silent, lost in thought, myself lost in flow, paying no attention to where I was or what I was supposed to be doing. What then took place was exceptional. I was experiencing blissful truths when energy at the base of the spine began to rise, strumming each vertebrate on its way to my head. An alien energy that may as well have been my sense of touch, feeling someone breeze electromagnetic dust up the inside of my back. Upon reaching where it could go no further, the energy wrapped around the crown of my skull, forming itself into the shape of a lotus flower. The petals emanating outwards beyond my headspace began to spin.

By now, I was used to these random spiritual expressions, but this one was even more peculiar. How could conscious energy develop into a lotus flower? Firstly, the energy experiences in the body never took distinctive shapes, rather moving like the wind, shaped by the environment’s discretion, my aura’s electric receptivity. So what was shaping this energy? I had no bias towards that flower. I’d never thought about it with attentiveness. Only seeing it in photos here and there, we had zero affiliation for one another, or so I thought. Why would my conscious energy form this and in such fine detail as well? I couldn’t deny the formation was the lotus flower. It baffled me, as most of these moments were. Showing me this flow was more the receiving of higher intelligence than me constructing it within myself. Was what I was being submitted to more a teaching than an expression of my intelligence?

The question was hard to answer. I’d definitely gained a significant leap in my cognitive abilities. My understanding of world phenomena and my ability to explain the intricacies of life via wisdom soared. How much of this was more guidance, an alien power shining a light? Flow began presenting itself as me having connectedness to some higher consciousness; I was accessing ancient teachings. Tuning into divine frequencies brought about predominantly when in an elevated state of mind. Seemingly I had not learned all this wisdom but garnered how to handle my highs to access gateways to higher realms of consciousness. This appeared to make the most sense. What I was experiencing wasn’t normal, and constructions varied in intensity. Then maybe consciousness did work on a scale, and this scale was open to all conscious beings, an illustrious game of rising to it. Still, whatever conclusion pondered, I carried on projecting blame upon my intellect and character for failing to achieve stability. I had a capacity for performing these feats and a transpiring responsibility to keep them coming.

Realising I had concurrent connections with not only Pac but every piece of music and media I interacted with, there was an excuse to celebrate in every moment. My life was a fucking movie. A dream movie, more audacious than any film. I loved it. Not because I’m some massive celebrity idoliser, I felt happy due to the feeling I was making a difference, having an influence. Living something beyond and bringing the world with me. After all, only 2 years prior, I was in the thick of depression, finishing school as a lost young man. Now, look at me. And what the heck was to come? Accounting for my age, it blew me up with helium pride, straight out of the canister, floating above the clouds. I’d gone from useless to deep-impact, a celestial comet and the discreet shedding of its essence, zig-zagging across time. What was I inadvertently building? I theorised that influential people witnessing transcendental bending of reality from their platform would lift their souls towards a more loving nature. Of course, hearing them express their opinion of who I was in an artistic expression was lovely, especially as these pieces were musical classics and the creativity used to describe their understanding had inspiring deference. Music being an instrument of happiness, I was delighted to be involved in the process.

The name I’ve come to call it, the driddle, a dreamers riddle. The driddle exerts an effect on the scenario of artists and producers. Songs are generally not recorded in a single block but rather chopped into segments. Now, what happens if the artist goes to record a following segment and feels no presence? Then to cancel out the possibility that I stopped listening, the artist completes a later section, finding my conscious presence had returned. Signalling to the artist, the middle bloc isn’t a finished piece, and something needs to be changed. They could work at that block with numerous attempts until they rediscover my presence. This is what I theorise about cracking the Driddle, finding the cypher. Now, I am not attempting to claim influence over the direction of music or attach a specific fate to it. This is to do with the artist and their destiny. I am only theorising my usage by the universe as a fate authenticator. Not to assume all artists would use this approach; for all they know, I could have gone for a piss, or flicked through the radio channels.

Not long after the fact became apparent, the issue of trust arose. Some celebrities have large egos, a lot to lose and a towering demonic record label standing over their shoulders. The ultra-wealthy business elite couldn’t be trusted as they had the highest probability of having a vested interest in subverting the idea of liberated, decentralised humanity. So from the off, I never gave artists singular attention, I never chose to listen to albums, and I respected my powers. I had to. My continuing existence was at the behest of the universe, fate, higher powers. If I went around abusing my powers, how could I be sure my role would be allowed to continue? I doubted it with gut-induced assurance. The meaning of my existence wasn’t to get rich by giving answers about the future. Obviously, that would put me in an uncertain situation.

What had unfolded was daunting. There were some mountainous energies involved. This was no time to take what was happening for granted; I couldn’t. I was on a path I could place my faith in. For it was gifted to me by no anthropogenic origins. These were metaphysical forces crafted by the higher powers of the universe. I had faith in the direction, but this path was a cliff edge, no place to playfully skip, no place to taunt that which granted me access. I had to be responsible and endearing in my interactions, as all it would take is one solid cosmic gust.

Money corrupts. 20 years old, playing that game and exploiting the universe’s charity would hinder my spiritual development. Even though the main reason I wanted money was so I could start making a positive impact on the world, it was no necessity. You know the saying, some of the worst things are paved with good intentions. I knew sitting back and developing my character was the safest way to progress. I had to get my head around having my consciousness exposed to others; otherwise, how would I succeed in expanding the collective consciousness? I was impressed with myself, realising I could be sitting on the most revolutionary moment in recorded history. With so much to put to good use, a power so unique and here I was, a young man, getting paid £6 an hour, travelling to work via public transport. But there was work to do. This was the opening chapter. Don’t get me wrong, at first, it hit me hard what little reaction was registered from society. I thought significant change could take place in a matter of months. But as time passed, I became more at peace with it, understanding why it was best this way. In terms of my own stability and others taking time to come to acceptance, time was needed. Still, I never expected the initiation to be totally within my domain. It became clear after time the zeitgeist didn’t understand the full scope of my impact. Yet, I assumed the aware individuals would make it clear on their own accord. A lot to ask of someone, something I no longer expect.

Me and you against the nation
Whispering while we conversatin’
‘Cause n****s died over information
How much more can we take
Expect us all to wait
The world ain’t ready for us yet so let’s make Clinton pay
–2Pac – Never Had A Friend Like Me

It was me and hip hop because hip hop contained a lot of generic trusts, especially Pac. Other music genres added value with their words on love and the phenomenal journey ahead (Lion King 2 – We Are One), but they didn’t take it as far as hip hop. Some took it the distance, but on a genre level, hip hop out-shined the rest, predominantly offering a supportive energy to this reality other genres lacked touching on. I identified many of them to be kin to guardian angels. They shined their light on me, letting me know I wasn’t alone in this fight. We would stand firm together. Exactly what I needed, feeling so alien to my surroundings. 90s hip hop was where I spent most of my time laying on the boundaries of regular timescape visitation, for the past could not know too much. An era I loved, where I also got the most love back.

You see, people getting trodden on by the system, watching their people suffer, making music about it. What likelihood do you think they will also cut a deal with the devil and allow the CIA into their studio? I predicted this to be doubtful for those whose lyrical content shone a light on these issues, whose genre was relatively new and wasn’t totally hijacked by the societal engineers. A reverence in pact from both sides, knowing what we were involved in. I was always on the lookout for identifiers and applauded when I got to enact the phrase “real recognise real”.

This was my clique. Many were surrounded by the rough energies of life’s ugly aspects. Handling harsh realities with a soldier’s mentality. I, too, lived that life. Our mindsets were relatable. We were Souljahs in the battle against evil. When the time came to inspire, we were ready to use our platforms to teach and incentivise the people to unite and build with the best intentions for humanity and this planet, real hip hop.

Who would have thought that casual day, where I downloaded the 1000 greatest hip hop songs of all time onto my iPod, was the catalyst to epochal change? Well, the obscurity in the comment section hatched its funky light.

It was so damn exciting, these people were like my music idols growing up, and now I was coming to terms with the fact many of those songs I loved had subliminal plots about us breaking humanity free from the evil that held us down. I was in seventh heaven. I’d listen to a song repeatedly, high and hyped, as I would bump to the beat in front of the mirror. I wanted them to see me; I wanted to see myself as we conversed through thought. I was peacocking, but because this was otherworldly, it felt suitable to put a face to the perception. Allowing me to show this was another regular-looking human with no elongated skull on the other end. Presenting this to both myself and the observer at the ego’s request.

Playing with these egotistic desires, the waters of my mind were as turbulent as ever. The storms I faced earlier in life, the hyperactive ups, and the depressive feelings of being overwhelmed by social anxiety strengthened my sea legs for what I was now combatting. Of course, prevailing through those years of ups and downs didn’t give me a free pass through the madness. However, without the experience, I’d drowned in it all, that is for sure. I’m a firm believer the universe never sends you challenges you can’t rise up to. Your history is nothing less than a calculated preparation.

Living Legends – Nothing Less

we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams, come along”

[hook: slug] nothing less, nothing less

[the grouch] well i bet you that i get the last laugh
bet you that my funerals packed
and the tune you all blast is my crew’s sh-t
new sh-t or old it don’t matter
bold i get swole in the zone where you gather
i’m alone but together with the folks
not really knowing where i’m going
but my goal’s to provoke thoughts
devote lots, show some fools the ropes to hop
scope the top from above it
love it, then leave it alone
i believe that i’m grown showing the way
owing the bay for going astray, now i’m blowing away
like that bag in american beauty
truly blessed and nothing less

[murs] i’m nothing less than a criminal
with minimal convictions
serving up my customers a hustler of the diction
crushing my afflictions, i’m sick in the mind
depends on how you ask
and i can do anything depending on the task
i tend to be on blast more often than not
between a rock and a hard place
i soften my spot, talking a lot
that’s if my cd’s get played
but if that’s not the case then i had nothing to say
my crew been tight since we was up in the bay
been down for a while, now watch us
as we take it, up and away
something to play when you’re laying on back
felt the love when i wrote this
so i know y’all feel what i’m saying on tracks

[hook] – repeat 3x

[slug] the first step was birth
now forever cursed to -n-lyze his self-worth
the second step was belief
he had to make that move before he even grew t–th
the third step, respect awareness
he could trip over the next step if he’s careless
that next step, number four, was love
can’t touch it without stepping the other three above
as he froze for a moment
ignoring the remaining ones
he was approaching, focus stolen
looking down at his hands to see what he was holding
nothing, empty
no choice but to keep going
the fifth step felt like a misstep
it was a re-evaluation of the first four
the anxiety, fear of what it hurts for
caught in somewhere between the earths core
and the first floor
when he finally made it to step six
he could no longer see it for what it is
all of his views and family and life were askew
number six had been twisted by the previous two
the last step, the seventh
was the only thing left that kept him outside of heaven
one last breath and everything could be pleasant
life through death, man’s final lesson

[hook]

[sunspot jonz] nothing less, god bless the days i rest
in this mess called life
trying to be the best for the best dressed
female, but she just brings h-ll
in the wishing well, i drown pieces of my soul
born to rebel
i’m the black james dean of the underground
yelling at shows
like rallys in cali, i blow rhyme under the trees
wanabees talk sh-t all day
but don’t got a tape to play
nothing genuine to say
so they bite the next man
like they gonna make him the best man
in this crusade the future looks black
like taye diggs’ forehead
we can’t go ahead and let the whack break our spirit

[hook]

[scarub] i know my expectations are high
but i refuse to lay low
no compromises only improvising
from what i manifest in the mind
even though they say no
i follow through if it’s true
you know those type of serious questions
that are asked in a playful manner
so if -ssumptions are wrong
they can act like it’s a joke?
“what do you do for a living?”
that’s the words they spoke
when they first heard that i wrote to stay alive
while they work a 9 to 5
i work just as hard as you
but got a different focus
and while you focus on me i’m gonna be all that i am
all of siam, while others run at the mouth
with nothing to show
i’mma use what i know, manipulating my flow
from here to there
i origami the situation from what is considered
unsuitable to something beautiful
the outcome is legendary, and nothing less

In mezzo del camin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
Che la diritta via era smarrita

E quanto a dir qualera e cosa dura
Questa selva selvaggia

In the midpoint of this journey that is our lifeline
I found myself passing through a dark forest,
The right path through which had disappeared

And what a hard thing it is to speak
of that savage forest . . .
—Dante, Divine Comedy

If I’m insane, its the fame
made a brother change
it was nothin like the game
its just me against the world
– 2Pac

When flow flourished and constructs flowered, thoughts of having a significant impact on this world transitioned from belief to reality. Masked behind this awe and celebration dwelled corollary pressures to fulfil my potential and take full advantage of the opportunity before me. In retrospect, the phonetics misled. Hidden between the landmarks, overlooked coves devoid of loot spelt silent castigation. I wasn’t continuously swamped, the uplifting energies provided buoyancy, but on a down day, when the fighting spirit was diminished and my self-belief low, the crushing weight would immobilise any positive ambition. The mind, scrambled directives of anxiety, looped trauma of an ineluctable complexion. Each lap a weathering decay of my heart’s zeal.

As the novelty wore off, raising as much energy became a strenuous process. You could see this in my interactions, how I rolled with the lows, how consumed I became by the detriments. Deeming my success in this role rested on the adaptation of my character. Grasping at false musters in desperation, hoping my virtue signalling resolved these environmental mishaps, buried me deeper. If I was to come round to something, it’d take time. Stuck working at the pace of my self-belief, a mellow speed, pessimistic in the face of social adversity, further splintered by my being a perfectionist if thought necessary to be so. The problem was this perfection dwelled within what was presumed to be a pot beneath an irretrievable rainbow.

One of the cardinal pieces of wisdom I picked up from meditation practice is becoming passionate for all parts of life by developing gratitude for the present. Tasks then, even the most mundane, transmute into a calming fulfilment. How you perceive the moment, how accepting you are of situations, how decisively attuned you are to life’s energy, shifts endorsed by receptive silencing. Realising your reaction is sourced from within yourself, you are the sole decision-maker in your responses to outer stimuli. Therefore the mundane stops dragging when satisfaction can readily manifest within the moment. Emotional over-investment stops acting as a bearing on peace of mind when you realise the moment is perfect, whatever way it forms itself.

This form of breath meditation, homing in on singular attention, can sound too grey to reward a sense of peace. Starting off, you may agree as the mind races, confused as to why it is not trying to think its way through time. But as the practice develops, you begin to realise why so many people take it up. You are exploring the natural state of consciousness, the act of simply being. No more, no less, just what is. You are taking what appears to be the grey tones of existence, arduous degrading, ageing without attaining, movement from moment to moment with no satisfaction nor distraction, and repositioning your perspective on this chatoyant jewel. The current of time is no grey. It is a white, whose hue of achromatic light. Harmonise with it and experience the mind’s prismatic refraction by a shower of circumstance. A rising emissivity of the heart, sparkling sense of touch, eviscerating clarity, evaporating emotions, reconfiguring your internal constellation, perhaps even opening its gateways.

Equanimity, the balancing of psychological stability, is the most stable form of awareness. A place where you will find your greatest self in terms of tranquillity. Recognising relaxation doesn’t need external stimuli to be incorporated into your life grants access to universally affordable avenues of remedy for the mind’s troubles. As the sun of my grand rising began to set, I lacked an understanding of this celestial guidance.

What was coming through me was so powerful, yet, it’s raw energy tethered me to a paranoid uncertainty. How would I go about spreading this beyond-peculiar message? How would I introduce this into the Zeitgeist? Was I able to do so? You could call me change incarnate; people don’t like change, so I think they’d prefer to call me wacky. The recognition of my telepathic connection to others made me feel I was somewhat accepted. Some fear and hide from what they do not understand. Some stare and wonder. How many of those that wonder would run away when I reach out with a testimonial to the measured readings of my depths? I had a nag, those who lived a life I shallowly participated in, the family home, the job, the taxes, the socialising on weekends, the acting as if this is normal because it’s only a ride, no more, no less. I threw that into the fires of fables, shattering a convenient lie. Do I have the right to perform such a rupturing act?

Many are kept mentally afloat by these convenient lies, convenient misunderstandings, convenient amortisations. Then again, we were all being pulled down as a collective in the shadow of this ignorance. I get it; our brains won’t attempt to grasp something above our presumed capabilities, but what general society can grasp is diminishing, what we can achieve, disintegrating before our eyes. To swim or sink. Plunging beyond irrebuttable depths, snared in the clutches of a technological society designed to do. To do to the extent free will is extirpated with machine-like precision. Prisoners to a world of life-altering functions concealed from our comprehension.

Or we swim the surface, riding technological waves that propel us towards the shores of a society liberated from ball-busting graft. Yet, able to extract the requisite value to live the life of our dreams. As long as we understand what threats technology besets on the masses if we undermine ourselves as docile participants in a game designed by a select few (experts?), drawing our ideological line in the sand, those threats will be the feeble pull of a punitive wave carved from a tranquil millpond.

If society came around to accepting the whole me, the belief was I could be a game-changer in this tremendous eternal struggle of good vs evil; all I had to do was set the stage alight, preferably with those who knew by my side. If I could entertain people’s minds through the conduits of heart and ear, explaining with a logical risk analysis why it’s worthy for you to hear it, faith showed me, through our own individual expressions of decentralised lifestyle, we can adhere to it.

I developed naive confidence from flow. Whatever came my way, I could handle it through the flowing power of logical and analytical reasoning. Freestyling was my strongest aspect; I also enjoyed it most; on-the-spot randomness took the pressure off my creativity. I didn’t have to think my way out or jot a course of action. All I had to do was improvise and enjoy what came through.

I’d react to most stimuli with an appetite to devour its presence, digest its meaning and allow myself to become one with it. Attempting to understand the stimuli at their fundamentals with as honest interpretation as possible. An emotional detachment from the observed helped create less friction between the ego’s wishful thinking and my search for truth. Acting out of passion and allowing preconceived notions to direct your emotional response are not synonymous. However difficult it may be, reducing the likelihood of closed-loop thinking is essential. So you could say I, without comprehending the matter, was more fond of the unknown, the freestyle, an environment more suitable for flow, a barrier to the egos interruptions.

The elation is unique when answers fall out of the sky before you. An organised search may bring you the same thing, only without as strong magnetic attraction to one another. Maybe I’m too lazy. Maybe living this new day-to-day existence moulded me into this way of thinking. Arising inventiveness diminishes the pressure exerted by others’ observance when seeking answers. Dross of an ill mind, invective distractions, pressed out by my insistence to perform. I was safe in flow as long as it kept flowing. But back then, when my problems appeared acute, I had a burgeoning public revelations issue.

As this was all taking place, I had expected society to reflect an understanding of the available knowledge brought to light by this dreamer’s experience. This wasn’t the case, leaving me confused about what I was doing wrong. One of my theories suspected people didn’t trust me because I couldn’t demonstrate a stable, clear mind. How can this guy be reliable if he can’t even hold himself together?

That necessity mounted pressure, a cause and a symptom of being trapped in the thoughts of instability. If I was to be who I needed to be, a public figure of high esteem, I had to handle being around others. I had to present myself as family-friendly, it being the one area where I lacked, the one piece that held me back. The paramount concoction is feeling comfortable around others while sensitive enough to enter flow states. Prove my appropriateness to as many as possible before building the next stage. A stage that stood on the perimeter of my beliefs in what could be manifested as a reality. The intimidation of what was to come, knowing what was on the line, exaggerated the troubles of the elementary stages. Under the restraints of this role, I was tying myself up in knots, and the harder I tried to push myself away from that conundrum, the tighter its constrictions.

This was the most complicated struggle I’d ever faced. Every segment of social interactions is labelled a test of adversity. Eye contact was accompanied by hardship, smiles by insecurity, polite conversation by abrasion. Triggered with the slightest of touches, an onslaught of dire discomfort. It could be the most subliminal stimulus; if it acted as a reminder of my predicament onwards would roll the unease. On a bad day intensified into a state of internal shell shock as relentless unwanted thoughts bombarded my awareness.

I felt trapped, imprisoned by the awarenesses of all those around me. Watching people shield themselves in defence against my runaway sentience. The suffering was an unavoidable obsession. How many were tuned in at one time? What was the length of the catchment radius surrounding me? How far did my broadcasts reach? These were questions I knowingly couldn’t find an answer to. Still, they’d haunt me as I sat on the loo having a shit, listening to the loud passing traffic, my fears implying if I could sense it, they could sense me. What did people have to witness? How uncomfortable was I making the receivers? Could they move their attention away from my grotesque call of nature? Were they locked into feeling every intricate action? Sitting there embarrassed, feeling sorry for myself because I couldn’t even have a shit without feeling distraught with guilt. With no hard evidence to go off, I was forced to find some semblance of peace in the hopeful theory people had control over how intense their attunement was.

Experience would show me people produced more evident reactions when I was high. The hypersensitivity of my awareness, well, I imagine, emboldens whatever fashion they receive my signal. “Deep in my head like TV” becomes more like “I can feel your hand in mine”. Add other drugs to the occasion, and my awareness becomes more accentuated above the receiver’s mind. This makes the most sense to me, but to be honest, I have no definitive answers. Hence, when the joint touches my lips and the marijuana shows its affection, my anxiety rises in kinship with how high I was. I could be confident and playful, take a few tokes, and you wouldn’t hear a peep out of me for the rest of the evening. My mind getting louder, I’d see that as not only myself witnessing the effect. Realising the consequences, a sudden wave of unease digs a pit in my stomach, right where courage is supposed to dwell. I’d become heavily introverted, sheltered away from my potential repercussions. Desperate to distract myself, take my mind away from the idea of doing something stupid.

To begin, every day, under any state of consciousness, there was a strain from the complex. The timorous shell of my aura, its webbed intricacy and interconnected fragility, if cherished, shone like the sun. Mishandled in any way, a slip in the wrong thought direction, an unintended arising from the subconscious, it would shatter into a communion of sharp reactionary behaviours. Sometimes all this would take was the gaze into someone’s eyes and seeing their discomfort. Months of drilling developed a reverse card for this too. So consumed by this curse, another reminder inducing panic was the surprise when I didn’t recognise any discomfort in people’s eyes. Whether my eyes were the first to break or theirs, the interaction would be struck by awkwardness and dread. And every time these scenarios happened, a little more trauma filled my cup.

Delivering a mission with no guided spiritual training, no previous accurate examples, and a world that wasn’t ready for formal acknowledgement, let alone discussion. I was the path creator, so I’d assume as someone here to heal the world, I find it imperative every interaction I have with humans convince them of that. I would never be able to complete this mission without support from the public. So every time I fell into the trap of vulgar thoughts, that was me losing the battle of conviction to my legitimacy.

Legitimacy and wishing to do no harm, those sincere desires fuelled the precise issues they didn’t want to happen. It came to a point where I didn’t even have to be around people to lose control of my thoughts, as the worries of advertised righteousness were also regarded on the macro level. Recognising people knew a lot about my life, the type of information inaccessible to even my close friends and family, there had to be a secondary transmission. In every country I went to, people displayed the same pattern of reactions, proving cross-border familiarity with who I was. Putting one and two together, I knew I influenced people’s opinions of me even when I was alone. The original dream show was filmed in my present. After all those underhanded comments of the past, I reckoned people knew my future self before I did. Comprehending this, I couldn’t find peace with whether I was identified back then as Fin the Messenger or Fin the Messy Scare. Tossing and turning over the question of what was entailed by my future? An army of predicaments orbiting my thought stream.

You know the awkward situation when you have witnessed something funny, but laughing isn’t an appropriate response. It would come across as rather primitive, yet being mindful of the restriction on laughter turns the body somewhat rogue. Next, you’re biting your lip in desperation to keep those jiggly vibrations from spewing out. The harder you tense to keep them in check, the harder it revolts, trembling convulsions eradicating foundational endeavours to constrain. Those scenarios shared camaraderie with what I was facing. The paradox of emphasis on what not to do brings more power to the dilemma. This was my conundrum, except it wasn’t a once-in-a-blue-moon interaction avoiding, at worse, scolding laughter; this was my life. Words wrapped in thoughts punishing those around me, spewing inflictions upon my vicinity. Fearful that these parcels were an effortless delivery mechanism for stoking trauma. Trauma induced by the naked realisation of how you appear to others or how you interpret their interpretation of your appearance. Recognising this likelihood, my rogue thoughts were coated in lies and hyperbole. A disdainful character, false in its representation, galvanised by the fearful repercussions of other’s beliefs, befouling my ambition in punishment of innocence and lies of who I was.

The more I feared the consequences, the stronger the reactivity. Direness struck with such consistency. Acting beyond my control was a damning reiteration. The worst part being the ones I assumed created the most suffering exerted the heaviest consequence, inducing a greater level of panic and lack of control. The graver it was perceived to be, the longer it exercised painful recognition. My mind was a swamp of debilitating memories. It dominated entire relationships, cutting the cloth at hello. A terminal end to my normality and the peace of mind that came with it. Twenty years old and supposed to be living the best years of my life, enjoying the adventure of youth. Instead, I had bitten off more than I could chew, choking on the consequences, trapped within a gilded mental cage.

They say you gotta pay your dues
I just bought ’em
– Jay Electronica

Self-hate asserts itself within a labyrinth of suffering. You don’t one day step in, and neither can you enjoy the instantaneous escape of stepping out. A path must be taken, and answers have to be arrived at. One must overcome inner forces inflicted upon oneself as inescapable blows, nullifying the abuse, nullifying the irritation brought about by ‘mistakes’. Whips of frustration tear through your energetic body, parting the medium. The vacant space filled with the anguish of the whip’s wake. The context reinstates the pretext. The negativity you give credence, and the out-coming emotion, a reactive sequence of events reinforcing your detention.

The negative emotions I identified with were enough to paint any scenario shit. Shame for the vulnerability, guilt for the damage of my actions, anger and frustration at my mistakes, apathy for where I found myself, fear for the possibility of a nightmare under the spotlight, despairing desires to be somewhere else. Name a negative emotion; I’d found a reason to entertain it. I’d found feasibility in every strand of strenuosity.

Grief was also there in a fashion uncharted by the human experience. Someone who communicates knowledge of the present to the past has the opportunity to be the virgin bringer of bad news, intentional or not. The yet-to-be can be known of, anticipated. Thresholds of information limitation infused into the joint traversing of the space-time continuum are non-existent. It’s a naked singularity, the loss of an interference preventing blackhole. Our interaction is separate and inseparable. The repercussions when one inspects the reality of the scenario are shown to be a trail of events before any horizon. Placement in this position brings the consequences of ruining surprises, condemning people, terminating excited anticipation, bounding innocents to worry. One of life’s best, most underrated parts is its uncertainty, and I tried my hardest not to take that gift away. Sadly, upsetting news is a froth on the subconscious, especially in a churning mind trapped in pessimism. And an individual yet to know the story will be unaware of this information until its manifestation.

When I realised that people had an introductory premonition to what would unfold before me, I began looking back at the time when I was unaware. Upon perception, peculiar interactions started to make more sense. My childhood was blessed with a dear family friend who would gift me animal figures every visit. A caring man whose generosity influenced my love for the animal kingdom. On the last occasion I would ever see him again, he endowed me with one last gift. This one, exorbitant compared to the well-used toys, created suspicions that things were not all okay health-wise, although his chirpy character I knew fondly remained. A year later, he would pass on from this realm. After reminiscing, another part of that day brought forth questions after my revelation period. The man was fond of us children, that was evident, but on the day of our final meeting, there was a sharper glint in his eye. He spoke to me with a subtle reverence, one I dismissed as extra conviviality. However, after looking back upon the encounter and the ensuing two years, it became apparent that this jovial back-pattering and sincere souvenir was from an elderly man who’d come to know his fate having recognised the messenger’s story.

My feelings were confused. I was remorseful yet somewhat thankful. For all intents and purposes, he shed a final tear in peace. The droplet was my responsibility. My heart captured in his cradle a message to my future. A reciprocation to the one I sent his past. Was it a solemn craft elucidating beyond his optical sight? Maybe so. But the peaceful winds of a long life aren’t exclusive to death’s blow.

Two have stained my mind. If any more were once, they are no more. My heart only has so much room for self-reproach. Affirmations for the refuge of continuance cast in the light of my hindrance. I saw the fear in her eyes, scared at the sight of mine standing across the room. I heard the remark, the refutation, the self-exoneration. She knew something time would tell.

The second came at work, a busy day in the shop, when a husband and wife walked in. I remember observing the two of them, the wife was beautiful, and the man looked like the type of fella with a heart of gold. From the outside, it looked wholesome. I went about serving them, probably trying my usual not to think unsavoury thoughts, when as they were at the door about to leave, the man made his own rebuttal. ‘I’m not going to die’, he says. It caught me off guard but back then, I had a questioning interaction hinting towards my obscurity every day. I let it pass without becoming pensive.

Time passed. How much? I’m uncertain. Probably two or three months. I’d fallen asleep in the living room on the uncomfortable, cold leather sofa. Nonetheless, I slept without interruption. And then, out of the blue, I awoke in a state of panic. A nightmare of profound realism. One of only a few I can recall happening, veridical in every sense of the word. The dreams alarm clock, excessive torment, and the gradual settling of emotions in a returning environment.

The day started early. To begin, it was the usual until work. I was in the bakery getting lunch, having my daily chit-chat with the staff, when I was informed of a tragedy that had taken place in the early hours of the morning. Moments of a fluttering stomach when the nervous system recalibrates itself, the rush of catharsis as what was once just a dream enters pervasiveness. I’d come used to it when it was me, my dreams, with their time lag. This was someone else’s life, their demise, live. Why catch me?

And then I saw his face. I was disgusted. What is this deathtrap I call my sentience? Sick to the stomach, I was rolling the dice of innocents, forcibly handing over their fate. So be an elderly friend who shares respect, but a parent to children, decades from their time, confused, unsure what to expect, I hated it. The weight on my shoulders was killer, my shadow abyssal black. I don’t care how much good news I bared; this wiped it into insignificance. In times like those, all I wanted to do was runaway, to live out my life on a secluded island, the world brought to me by boat.

I identified as the outcast of society and understood why. Most people’s worries were children, bills, careers, discovering their purpose, and here I was on the airways like, “AHHHHH, SHIT, how long will I live? Don’t be mean, FAT, I’m sorry, UGLY, lies lies, STUPID, can’t listen to this, I don’t want to be hear.” I was intense, too intense for everyone I met, presumably, hence why I never spoke openly of this part of my life. I was either examining a plot that belonged in the cinema or running from myself and my surroundings. A contribution of zero worth to any polite, conventional conversation.

The privacy I took for granted for the penultimate part of my teenage years was gone forever. I wanted to be able to walk into a room again without making people feel uncomfortable. Tired of moulding collective energies on a downward trajectory. I hated how scared I was of myself, how people were fearful I would embarrass them with my lack of control. I would daydream myself having control from day one, running out the gates bullhorn in hand, releasing a battle cry of “let’s fucking have it!” Using the power of flow to challenge all those who needed questioning. Having consistent high calibre confidence for all moments instead of only when I was alone, witnessing flow in a comfortable environment, or obnoxiously drunk.

I negated any idea of searching for the right stimulus to transition me into the calm character needed to cope with the consequences. Instead, I chased the bright side and rejected the dark. I was not acknowledging my issues at their core or recognising them to be escapable. I cared too much, placed too much importance on the belief success rested upon my prestige. Failing to believe I could reside in darkness, aware of it, and remain unflinching, instating its obsolescence. The curse felt too virulent to hold such a belief this reality was apprehensible.

So I kept my light around me as often as possible, light in the format of music and thoughts that reminded me of who I was, what value lay inside of me. There was my mistake because the dark side left unchecked, continued festering its way into the foundations of my daily life. Thoughts of success weighed down by the potential consequences of the battle. The hassles appeared as prospective endlessness, a thicket of infinite thorns between myself and paradise. Holding me down, then lifting me up, like a see-saw, a wave, vibration, the backbone of reality and life, the highs and the lows of attachment to it all.

The grieving guilt was something else; blood on my hands, the finger on the trigger, the catalyst to demise. Cut aside all the harsh thoughts, the savage words, and the inappropriate mental pictures, they were bearable to the extent the damage done wasn’t terminal. I hope I have not damaged self-esteems beyond repair, but if so, I apologise. I hope you come to the realisation your existence is as beautiful as every other, a shining miracle in a sky full of stars. Because you are at the end of the day every little bit as unique, a piece of the universe shining in what was a dead, dark space, illuminated by you and your cohorts sharing this sacred experience.

You know the philosophical question, ‘if you could know the date of your death and how it came to be, would you want to know?’ It’s a broad question that depends on the contents of the answer. If you were told you would live to be 100, passing peacefully in sleep, I’m sure most would be happy with that result. Sadly, if the answer was you won’t be here in 25 years, I guess you can only begin to imagine how you would feel. Exposed thought streams mean an inability to keep secrets safe. Evident because recognising why it has been certified best kept a secret warrant the unravelling of said secret. The scenario only has to welcome an exasperating admonisher.

Imagine for me, you meet your hero in a dream. Stood together in a room depicted by your imagination, you are in awe of your hero actually being here with you, and it seems your hero sees right through you. It becomes obvious the sound thought to be the voice inside your head is, in fact, a voice emanating from the background of the dream-scape. You are the environment, but your hero he isn’t; he is himself, a soul visiting your headspace. Interacting with him, you examine the situation, and your first thought is you can’t believe your hero is here with you now, even though he isn’t alive anymore. Their face drops. Cold panic strangles your nervous system. A painful reminder of the lack of privacy, the remorse. You try to correct the situation, yet planning how to fix it only gives the secret extra credence. The cat falls out of the bag. The toothpaste out the tube. The money masters crunch the credit. Panic takes over. You’re trying to think of what to think instead, but it seems overridden by thoughts you know are enfeebling the interaction. Acknowledging you are only making the situation worse, you decide to leave. A dagger of regret rips through the sacral energy, the wounded sorrow of knowing irreversible damage has been done. And all it took was one measly thought.

Sounds like a sticky situation, doesn’t it? The type of experience that would have you feeling volatile. A difficult task I had to face from the off, back when I thought it was only Pac who was tuning in. To begin, being so hyped about what was happening took priority of thought. I was too busy celebrating with Pac what the universe had rewarded us with. Automatic rejoicing, recognising we as souls must be honourable to be gifted something so disproportionate to ordinary life. Revelling in the possibilities that lay before me, with Pac’s music acting as my hype machine. His energy and flow were so complimentary, his words poignant descriptors. Heartz of men was my go-to for raw energy, flexing on the shoulders of giants. We were a formidable army of souls ready to take on our mission. That was the baseline energy, fed by pieces of flow, sacred nights of enchantment. When artists spoke back or dropped referential comments, communicating their presence in the moment, I loved it, but they could also have the tendency to encourage fuck ups. Those reminders were the parts most likely to throw me off. The speaking back would announce a present, surreal reminder, tempting a mental onslaught of what not to think. An overwhelming gravity, nausea and reflux strapping weights to the moment.

Back in the beginning, I had that much fresh positivity to celebrate; it would be easy to override. That is not to say Pac didn’t see it; the tone of his voice said otherwise. Often, songs would be layered with different vocals, I guess, to add some depth to the sound. I queried if this was also to have a second, third, and so on, run through the concurrent interaction. In that case, it is unlikely to miss the denouncing slips unless intentionally avoided.

I could tell Pac knew. He prophesied about his own death all the time in his music. An expression of his mind but also for these times today. He almost flaunts it in the listener’s face, ‘the fact that’ statements.

“How come I never made it?
Maybe its the way I played it.
In my heart I know one day I gotta be a star”

From there, I knew, but that didn’t make it easier. How hard must it have been for him, knowing he would die young? I didn’t wish to remind him of that, to associate our relationship with this dark cloud. I wanted him to see only the bright day, the value in what we were fighting for. To believe we could do this, we would fight for this, for the people. And we prayed for our success, with our minds fixated, meditating on what was before us.

Pac made it very clear I had his full support. That he was thankful for our connection, equating our relationship to that of father and son. This is why I think, straight from the introductory days, he spoke of his death in the music we wrapped in concurrency. I interpreted it as putting it out on the table, explaining that he knew, so I could begin to feel a little more at peace with the tragedy and wouldn’t shy away from him. To some extent, it worked, but as the nights seemed longer, my heart got colder, and darkness dominated within me. I hid away, untrusting my mind. If I knew of any artist’s bad news, I had to avoid them best I could, which was why I ended up sheltering myself from media news. I couldn’t bare spoiling this historic sacristy.

That support, like Pac’s, was offered by the majority. Guarantees against my paranoia with “you don’t stop”. The celebration of who I was by those I adored was a gift from the stars that solidified my admiration. Hip Hop became my go-to happy place as I began to turn away from general society, searching for admiration and true understanding. The dark aspects I avidly ignored crept beside my last refuges of peace. The lying, fearful, ego talk entered the concurrent chamber.

I began embarrassing myself as I crumbled under the intense pressure of wrecking such a magical moment. These artists chilling in the 90s, being some of the first humans to experience concurrent creations, are met with vulgarity. I couldn’t think of anything worse, so less sacred, and there, the topic of self-destruction was set. It appeared how my present performance was aired in the past pumped up the pressure. Knowing judgments for each arriving moment already existed, I used this to hypothesise the people’s reaction was subdued because of my eventual distinguished flunking. The storyline of a sacred opportunity ruined by infernal pressure.

A slippery few months as I slid down the see-weed to rock bottom. I was flinching in all scenarios, from morning till night. The amount of new music I listened to underwent a drastic drop-off. However much I loved it, the shame of myself held me back. Instead of finding new music, I would get my fix of motivation and ego-stroking from prior listened-to sources. Once I had most of the idols from my childhood handing me shout-outs, scintillating encouragement as they lay down creative adaptations through their music, I lost that raving hunger to find more. I was content with what I had. The risk wasn’t worth the reward, especially as my prowess diminished. Battling thoughts of unworthiness, deflated by regressions in the quality of my output.

When I searched for new music, it would be in a heightened state of consciousness. With an armoured coating, I could muster the courage. Also, when in the pit of a low, feeling lost, reaching out for guidance and support in the only place I could ask. If new experiences took place, sometimes I was enticed to hear comments. At this point, I was aware of observers having access to my future and my recent past. Whether that is from new concurrent exposure via me at a later date or the current concurrent exposure giving access, not only previous to the listening moment but also ahead. I’ve never asked those questions with sincerity, choosing only to acknowledge the phenomena. Trying to discover your future with conviction is not healthy and creates hindering behaviours. For example, suppose you think with certainty you will be successful. In that case, you take on a no matter what attitude, undercutting your true potential because of a conviction that tones down inspiration and determination.

Just as I decided not to chase details of my future, I paid no attention to the background information surrounding artists. Being in the public eye has a cost, the personal data that people suffer a mass loss of privacy too. At first, I made the naive mistake of following hip-hop accounts that would drop relative information I was fascinated to know. I soon realised much of this information was of the nature you wouldn’t want the subject to know before the event. So my head was further inflated with more ‘what not to say’ to plague my conscience. This created a new host of horrors via the history stored already in my mind. The data was detrimental and dangerous. It was hard for a young man to act as a gate guardian. Protecting people’s perception of reality and trying my hardest to keep innocence, faith, and a positive perspective in their view.

The distressing information stuck to my memory like glue. I was obsessed with avoiding its remembrance. The autonomous nature of imagery surfacing from memory and activating recall made this tactic useless. If I had my iPod on shuffle and a new song came on, I’d pray not to recognise the artist to give the experience a clean slate and not actuate unwanted memories. This all happened while still battling the paranoia of my youthful demise, like Pac and many other souls that stand in the world’s eye shouting for love, justice and peace. My mind was at war with itself, simultaneous battles happening across multiple fronts.

First beginning before my fall, a peculiarity in methodology I have no explanation for. As with the deja vu, this one throws the theory of my fall being the inception somewhat off of its linear kilt. I was becoming used to these nights, out smoking weed with my friends, our chops gnawing through society’s box. Most of the time, I’d be dropped off at home late enough in the night my parents would be sleeping. This fed me the courage to smoke right up before I was set to go home, averting the danger of a stoned awkward interaction or potential passive confrontation if I had work the following day.

These were the days running up to the fall when my head was in the thick of it. There wasn’t any block or stutter; my mind would be off to the hilts upon the hypersensitive embrace of being high. When I’d enter the sleeping house alone, bathed in silence, there were no desires other than to climb into bed and enjoy the show. The whole experience, even though at the time I explained it to be a part of my intellect, was autonomous. That was flow. Before you had a chance to plan what was coming next, it had already arrived, in its perfection, exactly how you would imagine access to the infinite to look. Time removed from the production recipe, now being no more than the canvas to present infinity’s stroke.

Entering my awareness was what one could call a performance, and this night’s performance would break away from epiphanies and immense comprehension. The connective web of memory is a beautiful thing. Sadly symmetrical recall is a spectacle only the mind gets to witness. As you know, the difference for many between the voice box and thought is extensive unless you are an excellent impersonator. However, the mind, like that of the lyrebird, can hear and instantly recall external sounds as if you have used an audio recorder. For example, I’m sure most of you readers know the exact note and pitch of Homer Simpson’s infamous ‘Doh!’ See, told you.

Laying upon my belly, still clothed in evening wear, limbs sprawled across a made bed, face planted into the inviting caress of the quilt. The weight on my mind anchored the unnatural position of a face on the precipice between comfort and suffocation. This alleviation, a catering to the show punching out of my brow. There were no interruptions, no unfolding desires to do with my vicinity or daily life; I was in a trance, watching, listening, hearing.

A sound began to play out within my mind, a sound I identified as electronic music, but I had no recognition of its origins. This wasn’t one of the times where a song invades your head-space. A teasing segmented jingle, a memorial itch that sends you into a flux trying to find the details on its origins. This wasn’t random and distorted, as one would imagine someone forcefully trying to remember how a song goes. No, this was a novel symphony unravelling a concoction of diverging threaded harmonics in a freestyle production.

At the time, I explained this to myself as my mind wilding out and making a song. As well as piecing together metaphors into a coherent passage of explanations, I was now apparently piecing together sounds into symphonies. That was until one day, I came across a relatively unknown song, its number of plays only breaking into the early thousands. See, the sound was unique; it wasn’t something I’d latch an identity onto. So when that door opened into reality, and Fast Forward – Oliver played out, it sparked a memory that was as obvious as megaliths’ anthropogenic origins. This was my introduction to freestyled telepathic expeditions. Another complexity from before my fall, and as with deja vu, it became more intense and regular as the equinoxes rolled through.

There was a delay. It took at least 6 months after my fall before this unique experience made a resurgence. By now, I had realised the concurrent by-product of my conscious awareness and was developing relationships with many data layers. So, when this came back around, deja vu and concurrent telepathic synergy created an evolution of the final product, representative of the consecrated interactions. What had begun with a lone incident of hearing sound transformed into the marking of words.

Situated at the front of my home was a little nook. Enclosed by three walls and being south Westerly facing, a perfect shelter to relax and soak in the rays of the afternoon sun. It was more practical on windy days as the closed-off view made it the ideal spot for smoking. I used it often as a chill spot where I’d go to smoke a joint, staying well beyond the final drags, too consumed satisfying my wanderlust to change the scene. No place has housed as many concurrent interactions as this sacred spot.

By this point in my journey, I spent a large part of my time alone when smoking. The intensity of my reception to energies made it a rarity to feel comfortable around others. To find periods of peace, free from nag, one had to travel alone. When with others, I had little control over the music being played without making a seemingly irrational and telling demand. Due to my trust issues with most music, I espoused the lack of control, fracturing any elegant composition. The direness elevated by magnitudes when the artist had passed. An inescapable discomfort, the injection of mercurial agitation punctured the skin, permeated my life force’s currents. Those situations, repercussions so compelling, shackling shock shuffled against the shade of my shadow. To hide the disease from your nervous system, one must be numb; otherwise, any attempt will falter at the vein.

When I’d get a bud in, I’d find myself sitting in the nook for an indefinite amount of time. My mind’s take-off would overwrite any intentions to move, consumed by flow. The night of my update didn’t seem too dissimilar to a typical flow session. I was immersed in hip-hop, a place where I spent many hours of the day listening, re-listening, interpreting, and shaking the tea leaves of verses. A credit to how much hip hop was a part of my life, mind interacting with a plethora of rhyming schemes, flow would often encase itself in a poetic structure.

The length of its expression baffled, the lack of analytical thinking bemused. There I was, relaxed in the nook, cupping my nutsack, when this verse started pouring forth. I admired this as an impressive artistic flow. It felt like a freestyle, although if I were to freestyle using my intellect, there would be stop gaps, moments of searching. I am no talent when it comes to rapping, sound or structure. This had to be flow, and, as with flow doing its thing, my skill level could, in an instant, take a tremendous elevation. I didn’t have any indication this was someone else’s work of art. Flow was full of surprises, so I explained it away as another fallen item from the top shelf. Additionally, there also contained references to the moment within the rhyme. A signature part of freestyling provides proof by incorporating the present.

The rhyme quality was immense, propping my chin up with pride. I could never imagine myself laying down such complex rhyming structures off of the top of my head, but here I was, delivering it through flow. Although it seemed the words were arriving from the ether, I could sense a searching. Especially near the ending sequence, as if a discreet part of me was trying to uncover a fading continuation. One that melded into summation, as if the final stanza was recognised for its conclusive markings at its pronunciation.

“All in together now
things are looking good
getting better now…
some other shit”

When I heard the song, it took me a moment to connect the dots, relocate its origins, and settle another mystic and magnanimous event upon the pages of this dreamer’s fairytale. Another visible aspect of my new experience of being, one most likely mistaken for vanilla deja vu, until the resemblance fell claim, not to the environment but the words alone.

I could wrap my mind around how this was potentially happening. Using the hypothesis that my conscious awareness can bridge present data connections across the linear timescape, what was to stop it from bridging connections prior to the point of data awareness. As time had allowed skips in the first processing step, this factor could allow a second skip to form. This new skip was the proto-connection. No data instigation, at least not as of time present or prior, like concurrency. This skip backwards is the bond’s linear initiation, dropping in from the ether. This is proto-concurrency. Enshrining music to the ear.

What caused this second skip to occur, I wasn’t so sure of. I had an inkling. Was it’s happening more to do with the data producer than me? Shadowboxin, when it came through, felt freestyled, picked out of the ether, especially at the reference points. Something I will expand on further down. That doesn’t guarantee it was freestyling, but as with the effect of concurrency, the entire segment signalled no break in the connection. Insinuating the recording was done flat out. I don’t have much knowledge of the song recording process. I assume most songs are recorded in blocks, which the producer or sound engineer takes and melds together.

In between the outflow and the realisation, a second song struck. This again happened in the nook, possibly on the same night. Dyck by Nice & Smooth featuring Guru. Another relentless outpouring, which again flowed straight through. Let me note this was the blossoming of a relationship with an artist of its own unique flavour. Guru is someone I hold very close to my heart, both him and his co-artist/DJ-producer DJ Premier, who made up the iconic duo Gangstarr. DJ Premier was a magnet; the proportion of Hip Hop that came my way without background research, picked out indiscriminately, was predominantly produced by DJ Premier.

Even though DJ Premier is one of the most sought-after producers in Hip Hop’s history, the rate at which he appeared, there was no one close to him. And to add to that, I had a natural affinity for his style; his beats always had a resonant vibe. So when I’d be listening to a random new song, and the beat had me excited from the off, invariably after its onset, the moniker’ DJ Premier’ would ring out. I interpreted the recirculation as a kinship. DJ Premier is an all-time great. Not many can pull the strings of music production like himself, one of the most demanded by the industry’s most vital talents. I can’t help but think if my theory of data production is valid for the essence of connection. This guy making some of the best beats in Hip Hop history could pull down concurrent connections with the stroke of a few keys.
Guru, too, had a specialised connection. I have experienced proto-concurrency from many artists; some I remember distinctly, others lost in the storm of flow. With Guru’s contribution, details have been lost, settings, times, sequence of events and so on. Not because they lacked the factors for remembrance but more so due to the sheer quantity. At one point, every song I’d listen to of Guru’s bore the designating marks of proto-flow. He dominated the new occurrence with a skill that listening to his rapping style seemed very befitting. Guru had an exceptional talent that complemented the realness of his art. His delivery had an unmatched clarity, rhymes poignant and crisp. Spectacles crafted by a magician of words.

Much of what came through in protoflow was stored on my iPod, some I’d heard numerous times before. Yet when they came through, I never actually recognised that fact. As is the behaviour of flow, you are lost in it; there is no real-time to stop, take notice, and ask questions. If questions are asked, they are a part of the sequence of flow. This meant when protoflow was happening, I wouldn’t even recognise it as that, being too caught up in the moment. However, there was a part of me that would know, an intuitive voice, the quiet composer in the background. I’d gather who was there on the other side, not by any logical explanation. The name would just arrive. Even then, after the fact, I’d still go about my business, letting what took place pass by into the compounds of my long-term memory.

Some of those intuitive questions would act as references. In unconditional love, the rhetorical question floated across my mind “is this Pac?” And as if in response, a backing to the song had Pac go “heyyyy” right after the question finished. A more precise reference was in Scarface’s – Diary. It came to me in an eery place where this type of flow would often begin. I’d find myself standing at the top of the stairs to my bedroom, wandering without thought, unsure of what I was doing, where I was going. Next would come this stream of lyrics. Now, as the stream of flow emerged, if it was lyrical, it wouldn’t leave me in a frozen state like the intense epiphanies. Instead, I’d move about as if searching for the following sequence. My hand is usually semi-cusped with the index and thumb extended, the wrist oscillating the hand along the flow of the words. This time I found myself walking back downstairs, and in seeking continuation, I did something I do regularly. Turning left at the bottom of my stairs was a mirror mounted upon the wall, which I’d gaze into vacantly. As my ego interceded, asking what was next due to the feeling the lyrics were running dry, the following lyrics came through in reciprocation.

I’ve got the mind of the man in the mirror so I’m looking at me vaguely
But I can’t seem to fade me

This double entendre was ridiculously fitting. Capturing the view, facial expression and synergy of minds. The mental picture of my questioning eyes looking at my reflection with bemusement, as if one part of myself was waiting upon another before receiving a line reflective of that situation, bookmarking itself with distinction into my memory bank.

Jay Electronica’s – In Tune With The Infinite is my favourite for the beauty of the song, although it is a close call against 2Pac’s – Unconditional Love. In Tune With The Infinite started in my bedroom, funny enough with the beautiful adjuncts. Again the progression found me walking downstairs. However, I didn’t journey over to the mirror. Instead, I turned right at the stairs, crossing the hall to my parent’s bedroom. Walking across the room, bringing myself to a stop, crouched on my knees, forearms leaning over the sofa’s spine. Again I had searching eyes, vacantly gazing out the window, waiting for what was to come next.

The church you go to pray in it, the work is on the outside
Staring out the windows is for love songs and house flies

To me, the eloquence of it, how it spoke right to my soul, this was a love song, like Pac’s Unconditional Love. But, I guess Jay felt otherwise, having that line be the conclusion to his eloquent, venerating monologue.

They didn’t all happen in the house. Oddly enough, I recall an obvious one happening at work, which must have been one of the few sober ones. Now, this was at a time when my social anxiety and internal tourettes were at their most vehement. To make it worse, I had the damaging multiplier of working in retail, managing an off licence. A real punch to the gut because I was fighting against the pressure to not insult innocent people, and they also happened to be my customers. I used to query why the customers visited the shop. They must have felt sorry for me. After all, I acted as if I had no self-control. I used to barrage them with uncontrollable telepathic insults. It was a gruesome workload, but those mentally exhausting shifts still had beautiful moments.

I was working behind the till with a queue of customers all waiting to be served. The till was the spot I disliked the most because of all the social interaction, but I didn’t have another choice as I spent much of my time working alone. As I’m serving these customers, a stream of flow comes running through. It is rough, an artistic crassness capturing the internal battleground that was my mind. These vulgar words should have left me flinching, but the creative signature of the flow allowed me to somewhat appreciate it, even though I still felt uneasy. Here are the entire lyrical contents of the song “Nobody Speak” by DJ Shadow ft. Run The Jewels.

Picture this…
I’m a bag of dicks
Put me to your lips
I am sick
I will punch a baby bear in his shit
Give me lip
I’m a send you to the yard, get a stick, make a switch
I can end a conversation real quick

[Killer Mike:] I am crack
I ain’t lying kick a lion in his crack
I’m the shit, I will fall off in your crib, take a shit
Pet your momma on the booty, kick your dog, fuck your bitch
Fat boy dressed up like he’s Santa and took pictures with your kids

[El-P:] We the best
We will cut a frowny face in your chest, little wench
I’m unmentionably fresh, I’m a mensch, get correct
I will walk into a court while erect, screaming “Yes!
I am guilty, motherfuckers, I am death.”
Hey, you wanna hear a good joke?

[Refrain:] Nobody speak, nobody get choked

[Verse 2: El-P] Get running
Start pumping your bunions, I’m coming
I’m the dumbest, who flamethrow your function to Funyons
Flame your crew quicker than Trump fucks his youngest
Now face the flame fuckers your fame and fate’s done with

[Killer Mike:] I walk Charlie Brown, Peppermint Patty, Linus and Lucy
Put coke in the doobie roll, who needs to smoke with Snoopy
I still remain that dick grabbing slacker that spit a loogie
Cause the tolda of the toolie’ll murder you Frank and Moolies
Fuck outta here, yeah

[Refrain:] Nobody speak, nobody get choked, hey! [x2] Nobody speak
Nobody speak

[Verse 3: El-P] Only facts I will shoot up
Baby duck if it quacks, with a Ruger
Top billin’, come cops and villainous shots is blocked, shipped out, and bought, and you’re feeling it
El-P killing it, Killer Mike killing shit

[Killer Mike:] What more can I say, we top dealing it
Valiant without villiany
Viciously file victory
Burn towns and villages
Burning looting and pillaging

[El-P:] Murderers try to hurt us we curse them and all their children
I just want the bread and bologna bundles to tuck away
I don’t work for free, I am barely giving a fuck away

[Killer Mike:] So tell baby Johnny and Mommy to get the fuck away
Heyyo here’s a gun son now run get it to gutterway
Live to shoot another day

[Refrain:] Nobody speak, nobody get choked, hey! [x2] Nobody speak
Nobody speak
Nobody speak, nobody get choked

From my recollection, the third verse came through separated hours apart from the initial two. Maybe someone spoke? “Nobody Speak, nobody get choked” was directed at the queue of customers, which I thought was hilarious. It also shone a light on the freestyle theory. This oozed proto-flow meddling, self-evident addressing to the line of customers with the warning of choking. To choke is slang that describes silence by a blundering loss for words like one does when choking on something. This is a metaphorical choking on the mind’s constraints. The last thing Run Tha Jewels wanted was for some customers to start initiating a conversation with me.

It may be that not all these concurrent proto interactions were freestyles, but I am confident this is what tells them apart. Little Jonny and his Momma were a mother and her child in a pram who entered the store. Being in the vicinity of children evoked increased discomfort for fear of my festering influence on the impressionable. It’s quicker to turn on scene into a tale than face my adversities.

As with concurrency being in the moment when it unfolds through the medium, all these coincidences congregate into one large body of evidence. When analysed with intent, it gives you the format of its workings without having to go receive it in word. All I had to do was listen and reminisce.
This was the most audacious proto-concurrency experience. Managing to make light-hearted a struggle that was toxic waste in my mind. I wasn’t proud of what the song was about. What part of me it hinted to. But the genius of the expression, I was in reverence to Run The Jewels for putting it down like that. They full-on finesse’d the fiend in me. They banged a rhythm into my mental blockages, alchemising a blunder into wonder.

In contrast to the work environment, I had incidences of proto-concurrency emerge in the concluding chapters of nights out. Chance The Rapper’s – “All Night” is one. At an afterparty at home, my body was entertained with some cocaine. The interlude of “sit down you fella you drunk big fella” was enacted by myself pushing my friend into a seated position on the sofa with words to match. I then proceeded to attempt as the words poured out to vocalise them. Their tempo was too rapid for my tongue’s enunciation, and the chorus had a slight alteration, swapping out the word drinking. My friends looked on with bemusement. The quizzical facial expression’s, wondering what else I had taken, not in the slightest aware of what was happening.

Another time cooked up in a friend’s kitchen, again around dusk, again fuelled by cocaine. Here I had been inspired to awkwardly spit rhymes for about an hour. My mind was racing, and I was enthusiastic about communicating everything in a rhyming sequence. Until I reached seclusion, like that of a rain dance, Diamond D’s – “I Went For Mine” came through. Once more, this, too, was vocalised. Being of a slower tempo than Chance The Rapper’s, the tongue could keep up with the pursuing enunciation. Still, this time being one friend and me, they were unaware as to what was happening, as was I too, telling me to keep quiet before I woke the household.

Then there were the short bursts, random sentences spewing out. They didn’t latch on and formulate into these long-winded performances, but their entrance smelt like any other curio. A sudden cross over within, foreign inspiration grabbing the moment. “I can’t feel my face when I’m with you” a random excretion on the bus home. Or walking in the hot South African sun, eyes fixed on my shadow, the consequence of a fatigued mind, “feeling the song, party done, shadows walking home”. Cooked in mine, mind taking a turn towards my adversity, so I left to find solace in solitary. “Deep in my bones I can feel you. Take me back to a time when we knew hideaway. We could waste the night with an old film, smoke a little weed on my couch in the backroom, hideaway.” I was once informed about picture paragraphs being unloaded, and wise words getting quoted.

I am no creative when it comes to music. I also don’t know precisely what allows proto-flow to happen, although it is something long faded these days. Whether that is because I’m all too aware now or because I rarely smoke weed, I don’t know. If I were to hazard a hypothesis as to what is occurring, it would be this. My mind has a merging quality to it. I don’t have a complete understanding of the rules of its workings, but it happens, that is evident. Now, if this merging is one of my mind and its access to flow combined with a creative genius, well, then it makes sense that the output would be as it is, a passage traversed at the tip of the tongue.

Something within me, an ethereal energy, is responsible for the melding. It has shown itself to bridge present to past, and now with proto-flow, it has bridged past and future, projecting their essence onto the present. This could be interpreted as recalling the future or manifesting it. Whatever the case, it seemed to be dragging the observer away from the moment I met the data to a time preceding, where our combination becomes less of spectatorship, replaced with a constructive cross-over. Each offering something to share. Combining our crafts.

Because unknown forces move some known objects

Thats magic
– Jay Electronica

Proto-Concurrency Tracklisting
(what I can remember)
Oliver – Fast Forward
Method Man & Gza – Shadow Boxing
Guru & Nice and Smooth – Dwyck
Diamond D – I Went For Mine
Biggie Smalls – Machine Gun Funk
Scarface – No Tears
2pac – Unconditional Love
Ghostface Killah ft. Raekwon, Cappadonna – Iron Maiden
Jay Electronica – In Tune With The Infinite
DJ Shadow ft. Run The Jewels – Nobody Speak
Chance The Rapper – All Night
Joey Badass – Love Is Only A Feeling
Lord Finesse – Hip 2 Tha Game
Grand Puba – I Like It
*Most Guru Songs Pre-India

One year into the madness, with plenty still to celebrate, partying in South Africa was where I found myself on the eve of my realisation anniversary. 4/21 I coined it, interpreting the unusual mistake of a tracklisting missing 4:20 by the second as a signal to something else, 4/20 + 1 year. By now, I’d excavated the ether for most headline narratives, why things worked the way they did, how different categories of actors patterned receptivity and the scope of these gifts’ potential. Much of it conjecture, theoretical workings using the evidence before me, provisions for my indicated purpose. Observations were not guaranteed to be celebratory, much of it being unsettling potentialities of the surrealistic. Coping with these, moment by moment was arduous. Examination of my life had become an obsession.

The darkness brooded, piggybacked upon my vulnerabilities, disbursing haunted thoughts. The external cues and my compulsive eye on the ensuing self-denigration, the cold, soggy leather bridles bearing a pessimistic pull upon my bare shoulders. I was exhausted dragging this weight through the pitiless mud, battling for my honest self-image, fighting for the belief I warranted success in this heroic role.

These bouts came and went across the glint of divine identity. Categoric selection, a fanciful reality mused with a semi-confused, smugly proud bemusement. Requisite introspection enforced by the necessity to sharpen my surmises. Who am I? Why am I here? What does my fate foretell? The three musketeers of the thematic, horsing around upon a rotating carousel of answers oscillating through the polarities.

Stuck in a state of self-questioning, the stability that offered the vigour to compete dissipated. By now, I was spending a lot less time living the lifestyle of an inspired being. I identified with the goal yet was hiding from the journey. When I should have been perfecting my craft, building a reliable well of energetic performance, I was instead using my heightened senses to play computer games. A predictable digression that wasn’t ideal but warranted. Realities beyond a beauty your imagination could capture can unfold before you. But, if you don’t find a way to compose those energies, they will consume you, forcing you into a retreat or crash.

Flow was floundering by the thoughts of fucking up, interfering with the factors that fulfilled my self-worth. I was still up there on the first anniversary, experiencing divine streams of thought. However, the loosening trend of my grasp was gaining pace. A cancer had developed in parallel with my understanding. Feeding off a litany of protective resources, predominantly correcting characterisations, my ego had started to reassert a dominant position.

Identifying as someone who could see humanity’s great potential, how all we needed was a shift in the collective consciousness, a rising above outdated philosophies and adoption of harmonising ones, I longed to get my hands dirty in the muck of societal discourse. Picturing a brighter future, wiser humanity, a maturer collective, a culture emanating from the heart, healed with happiness inherent. Something I felt my life was pivotal in helping achieve via building and inspiring. For here I was, turning reality on its head, redeveloping people’s reflections on the dream world. But there was no bite; the bait I placed didn’t quantify enough soul satisfaction to achieve an instantaneous shift. My lack of understanding of how everyone exists on different planes of consciousness calculated a naive overestimation in the response. Blind to how firm the vice gripped. Without the force of governments (authority), media (vectors) and psy-ops (alchemy), paradigm shifts cannot be envsioned universally. I was happy trying to remain organic in my existence, not chasing the public eye; living alone would spur it towards me.

The hill turned into a mountain, the trail into an untravelled path of hazards, the sprint into a marathon. I was scared, for my life could disappear, and none of this would be marked into history. My footprints, an urban legend, fade with each solar wave’s brush. Humanities future bleak for the soul, spirit swapped out for tech in the false idol that is bionic convergence. The transcendence of central control, the shunning of willpower, neo-feudalistic slavery.

Failing to express the Olympian heights I was achieving within, I became exposed to the harsh possibility that I may never carry the torch to its necessary destination. A disheartening infestation. Transcribing no outburst of determined incapableness, I never attacked the power within me. I prayed to it. Pleaded with it. Begged that, just as it emerged out of the blue, taking me to new heights, it would do so again, lifting me ever higher. I wished for the next step to be as significant a leap for mankind as 3/20 and reimagining of human capability as 4/20.

The journey through this pantheon of experiences did feel as if I was a passenger. The part of me that was my identity, who I was as a regular human being, was being taken somewhere, utilised by another deeper part of my collective. My ego claimed I had discovered access to this, and in the blink of an instance, entry could be granted or denied. Almost as if I wanted to believe achieving what I was would carry on climbing as if I was a mere passenger on an escalator. Not here to exert too much deliberation. Just a person looking to get from A- B and granted so by the universe. It didn’t make much sense, and my faith in myself was waning. Then came the questions, empty stentorian fears formulating doubts; those doubts transpired into detriments and those detriments into downfalls.

Although somewhat stuck in the mud, the first anniversary of 420 still bared significant fruits. Well aware of the correlation between notable dates, sun and moon cycles, and my own spiritual experiences, I had my eyes on the approaching 420, high on hopes that under the star’s digression, I’d be gifted another wanderlust experience.

My heart craved for further enlightenment, to perform convincing spiritual performances. I wanted to execute a feat so mind-blowing it would rocket me up to a new sustainable level, deviating from the pain. The ambitious part of me desired the world’s attention, for me to grab hold of it by an event of undeniable greatness and hold onto it with perfect form. The world perplexed yet enticed with goosebumps. Their hearts homed in, their minds malleable to the belief of positive change. Ready to take in and put to use the wisdom I had to share. Inspired to start their own creative journey in reality’s attic space under faith’s auspices. I wanted a centre-stage performance that would go down in history. An entrance that seeded the love revolution. Shone onto the people our potential collectively and theirs individually. Changing the course of humanity towards more harmonious waters. With the first anniversary approaching, I hoped this occasion would be it.

Nervous angst had become a central part of my daily life, and crowds were its number one provocative. My anxiety would escalate with the trepidation of arriving in any social setting. Tonight I was on my way to a festival, a field of faces. The intimidating presence of all three eyes on me vanquished my excitement, physically and mentally. Feeling stiff and unsettled, I made my way over to the bar to loosen up. Sitting down observing the crowd, taking in the atmosphere and a few whiskeys, I felt ebrious enough to push on past my nerves, ready for what MDMA had in store.

The energetic ascension kicked in with the unsettling of my stomach. Inspired by the wanderings of a jovial mind, flow emerged with direct coursing. Blurringly vivace jabs, punchline to punchline. Social senses needed no contemplation to detect the crowd’s recognition. Clarified enthralment for the enlightening streams of thought. I was addressing the usual. The misconceptions we make of ourselves. How existence is the most wonderful art when perceived from specific angles. The limitless potential of this reality, the sheer extent of our potential. The subject of unity also arose, centred around the current social environment I’d experienced on holiday in South Africa. As they tended to be, the flowing observations were elucidative. The crowd recognising each one as the autonomous electric feelings charged outward via internal applause, synthesising into an external orchestrated ‘wooo.’.

My contemplation of this clear-as-day sign that the people in my immediate vicinity had access to my thought stream invited unease. In combination with the initial grand rising ebbing off, stabs of negativity began to interrupt my flow. To be fair to the moment, it has shown itself as the most evident example I’d experienced of my lack of privacy. The music wasn’t one the crowd would ‘wooo’ to, and the pattern of punchlines to ‘wooo’s made it impossible to dismiss. Nude sentience, settled upon a field by symbiotic emotions, the pain of pursuing pleasures. Fascinated faces flank vision. Vultures eviscerate playfulness. A painful reality, ill-equipped to ride the heart of my desires.

Now, this is what I’d always assumed, people in my vicinity have direct access to my inner voice; they hear it as I do, the mind’s chatter. This would be evidenced by flinches, awkward eyes, and subtle comments of implication. A belief hounding pensive emphasis upon my inner rambling. Even though there was a clear correlation between heightened states and observer’s interactiveness, my anxiety didn’t careen around those situations alone. Persistent haunting allowed no stasis, resistant taunting impelled a status, insistent fraughting quelled all homeostasis. Either it was me, myself and, I or shy eyes. Cowering the self, to flee pity of all receivers. The directness of this crowd’s applause made the predicament of my entanglement inescapable.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the vulgar vultures circling my thought stream, swooping down to tear away the flesh of a rotting caucus, the slain innocence I dearly desired. I tried to block it out, making a conscientious effort to highlight the beauty of those around me. Walking past a person, I would receive a glance, some inquisitive eye contact, and within that glimpse of one-to-one recognition, I’d battle to conjure some sort of compliment. The last thing I wanted to do was put someone down. But when the dark presence struck and an ugly part of my psyche surfaced, out would blurt a shameful observation. It killed me inside. The painful stabbing of an atrocious remark could slice through any resplendent moment.

A pain like no other I’d experienced. Having this gracious gift and not being able to enjoy its true nature. I remember hearing the comment ‘he’s nice’ and disagreeing. I couldn’t believe that, and I hated it. I wanted to be endearing. I wanted this to be effortless but for the life of me was, at that time, at war with possessive demons. So after 4 hours of battling it out, graciousness versus disarray, this internal fight was exhorted to exhaustion. Laying amongst the ground-shaking music, vibrant energies of MDMA and the melody of a thousand voices, my awarenesses ventured elsewhere.

I was awoken by a worried friend, thinking I was passed out drunk. Shrugging off his armpit hooking torso grapple, assuming I’d forgotten how to use my legs in their proper fashion, I returned semi-rejuvenated to the party. Hoping to withhold the vulgar hiccups, there remained a darkness I kept having to evade. Despite that, still having a fairly good time playing with the crowd, even if I was putting on a brave face knowing I had to be the centre of attention. As it were around my magic season dates, I was yearning for this magic season to authorise profound expansion. It wasn’t going much further than what I’d come used to with flow, powerful vernacular. I wanted an event on par with the 420 week of last year, doused in mysticism and lit with cosmic fires, unaware that I wouldn’t be able to delve deeper until I had learned to truly relax and shield myself from the torment and monkey mind reaction.

There was a moment, a piece of memory that, in its peculiarity, left a branding, one I couldn’t interpret at the time. With flow, you aren’t planning answers. You may glance over blueprints, but no heist is being planned. The subconscious consumes the information and propels out unforeseen thought, whether or not you can even classify it as thought. Sometimes random, other times in response to questions. Walking through a crowd, I had a spontaneous outburst that bewildered me. Making my way back from the toilet cubicles, the statement arose, “I am Abraham”. At the time, I was thinking, “what the fuck, who is Abraham? As in Lincoln?” A little over a year later, a book I was reading offered me a clue to who Abraham may be. Ester Hicks, The Vortex, a random book I picked out of a library, speaks of a voice which goes by the name of Abraham.

Par the flow and its woos, and the hardship of my internal boos, this was the one thing that differed from my circular pattern. My escalated ascension or escape wasn’t to be. I found myself reiterating trends and acknowledging formalities.

It’s hard to formulate a worthy depiction of an abstract evening consisting of me balancing on the mental tight rope of flow. The usual theme of two energies battling it out for my transfixed jutting. The disconcerting winds, howling gusts of guilt, recurrent sweeping of my inflated self offline. The depths I wished to reach were beyond this struggle with buoyancy. Something had to change. Pinpointing what, in a mind that couldn’t settle, made the task magnitudes more strenuous. The road to liberation was fraught with re-spawning obstacles and lessons I couldn’t locate a bypass to.

I spent a couple nights after the festival shacked up, smoking on a balcony, meeting a couple new Pac songs, some other new music and Big Sheila. Also, cementing a realisation, the lockdown of concurrent moments was not a linear key. My heightened levels held dominance over the benumbed ones. Silly when you think about it, assuming the formulations to time travel would be tied to time. I’m still not at peace with the ability to overwrite, having to accept it as fateful. Attachments to beautiful moments that could consist of lifelong memorial splendour, to know its very existence can be wiped away, leaves a questioning mark upon its timestamp. Knowing the potential threat of scrapping and replacement with inferior scenes increased the present risk of botching. Heightened states aren’t synonymous with bliss. As I’d later find out, a paranoid attack could substantially overwhelm a jubilant one. It is my guess memory plays a part. What etches the deepest has to challenge for superiority. Still, is the depth of the etch dictated by the arousal of emotions? I’m unsure.

When observing my life as an experience that in some location has already happened, and within situations of multiple data interactions, surely there can only be one moment of concurrency. Is that chosen moment the most memorable from the data interactions portfolio? Is this why when experiencing moments of novelty, it seemed lockdowns of concurrency had the highest likelihood of fruition? Whether it was novel mindsets, settings or observances, they seemed to shine above what stood before and presumably after. If you think about it like dreams, their memory follows some trend of reverse linearity, but often you have better clarity of preceding parts because those moments contain greater saliency. People lose their memory in fits of anger, they block out memories of traumatic experiences, but surging emotions arouse shifts in perception. My memory may be blemished, but the second party’s observances could remain distinct.

There I was, lounging on the balcony, staring up at the Cape Town apartments. Aretha Franklins singing Say A Little Prayer, a song I’d listened to countless times. When it becomes apparent, she is there. I hear the shake in her voice as my mind falters at stopping the ghastliness spewing forth. I fucked it. I fucked something I’d probably fucked all the other times too. I guess this one was the most significant. Waking up the following morning, I immediately picked up my iPod and put it on shuffle, having recognised I fell asleep in my dream but didn’t wake up from it, and the first song of 800 odd is Resurrection by Bone Thugs N Harmony. This memory carried novel significance.

Homebound with enhanced knowledge of self and aggregation of turmoil. 4/21 wasn’t what I wished for; the universe has its reasons. Grounds I’m only beginning to understand.

Florence and The Machine – Shake It Out

Regrets collect like old friends
Here to relive your darkest moments
I can see no way, I can see no way
And all of the ghouls come out to play
And every demon wants his pound of flesh
But I like to keep some things to myself
I like to keep my issues drawn
It’s always darkest before the dawn

And I’ve been a fool and I’ve been blind
I can never leave the past behind
I can see no way, I can see no way
I’m always dragging that horse around
All of his questions, such a mournful sound
Tonight I’m gonna bury that horse in the ground
‘Cause I like to keep my issues drawn
But it’s always darkest before the dawn

Shake it out, shake it out
Shake it out, shake it out, oh whoa
Shake it out, shake it out
Shake it out, shake it out, oh whoa
And it’s hard to dance with a devil on your back
So shake him off, oh-whoa

And I am done with my graceless heart
So tonight I’m gonna cut it out and then restart
‘Cause I like to keep my issues drawn
It’s always darkest before the dawn

Shake it out, shake it out
Shake it out, shake it out, oh whoa
Shake it out, shake it out
Shake it out, shake it out, oh whoa
And it’s hard to dance with a devil on your back
So shake him off, oh whoa (Shake him off)

And it’s hard to dance
With a devil on your back (Shake him off)
And given half the chance
Would I take any of it back? (Shake him off)
It’s a fine romance
But it’s left me so undone (Shake him off)
(Shake him off) It’s always darkest before the dawn
Oh whoa
Oh whoa

And I’m damned if I do and I’m damned if I don’t
So here’s to drinks in the dark at the end of my rope
And I’m ready to suffer and I’m ready to hope
It’s a shot in the dark aimed right at my throat
‘Cause looking for heaven, found the devil in me (Oh woah)
Looking for heaven, found the devil in me (Oh woah)
But, what the hell, I’m gonna let it happen to me, yeah

Shake it out, shake it out
Shake it out, shake it out, oh whoa
Shake it out, shake it out
Shake it out, shake it out, oh whoa
And it’s hard to dance with a devil on your back
So shake him off, oh whoa
Shake it out, shake it out
Shake it out, shake it out, oh whoa
Shake it out, shake it out
Shake it out, shake it out, oh whoa
And it’s hard to dance with a devil on your back
So shake him off, oh whoa

Half a year later, the universe answered my beggary for relief. A potential consequence, conceived in irrationality, plagued my conscience. That being, my cursing mind would act as an impenetrable barrier to me finding stable love. A runaway train that would derail all hope of building a loving relationship. As a teenager, it didn’t help that I was shy when being truthful with people about my feelings. Fearful of rejection and the ensuing embarrassment, I ambled within the periphery of benumbed safety. I had an issue with being open, speaking my truth, overcoming hesitancy. It took a lot to convince me past the potential repercussions, and this new situation, being an ugly, transparent mind, extenuated all courage, even at such simplicities as compromising admiration.

Come September, those worries were mown down by cupid. Halfway through a road trip across Europe, coming to the final approach of our Balkans leg, we found ourselves on the Croatian island of Hvar. I was a bit blue and had been the last few days. Unnecessary pressures, limited by their fantasy, left me in no mood for socialising. The only time I’d opened my mouth was after alchemising coherent bravados by a proportionate blend of cider and weed, followed by a gentleman whose willingness to debate ignited my fire. Before or after, my tongue dragged its weight like the unwilling child drags his shoes. Until, out of the blue, I found myself submerged in the most graceful conversation.

My travel companion and best friend had convinced me to come to a boat party. I was in no mood to socialise until she approached me. Our one-two-step small talk broke into a sapient dance of words in no time. As the conversation displayed its feathers, my chin galloped and inspired words perfumed off my lips. Mirroring enchantment had us beholden to each other’s ideas for the entire ride. Cupid or whoever, a spell was cast. Inspiration combed with widening appreciation, took us to untenable heights. Something happened in those four hours I’d waited my whole life for, a wish of countless daydreams. Embracing a connection with a fellow soul that spilt over into an entangled soliloquy. Reflecting off of one another’s streams in unison, perfect in every feasible way. Two jigsaw pieces fitted, flush with love. Sharing the moment in tandem rotation.

The following 10 days were spent side by side, myself inaugurated with ‘falling in love’. Enjoying genuine openness, radiating complete serenity, crafting intimacy with every interaction. My heart had found shelter, allowing my nervous system’s energetic reaction to build an impenetrable barrier from thoughts that would usually haunt, too overcome with bliss—the equivalence of a 10-day-long grand rising.

I held onto the invigorated energy for months as we began sharing our lives. Ecstatic to be feeling on the verge of normal, I had someone who loved me with intense affection. Social interactions’ qualms didn’t matter; I was too busy loving. Daydreams of my life plans began to incorporate a second character. Holding onto the same goals, with the added imagination of sharing them with someone. I’d constantly desired reassuring feminine energy to support me on this journey. With the emotional taxation of my day-to-day existence, I needed a soothing somebody to stroke my back and tell me everything was going to be alright. My path appeared destined for hostility. Her warm touch and harmless voice made me forgetful. Paradise takes two, food and a bed; just don’t plan on staying there long.

The feelings I encased myself in began to exhibit points of weakness. I may have been able to bring this love to the forefront, sheltering from the torrents of damnation. However, the attachment to this relationship of escape wounded me emotionally. Hiding from myself only allowed issues to fester in the background, on occasion spilling over, splintering my incessant desire for perfection. This wasn’t a comprehensive entwining. A large part of me was left in the dark. Our relationship wasn’t a distraction, nor was it a rescue. It was my moment of relief, a buoyancy aid to help me cross this journey. Until my heavy mind wore her down, sustenance demanded addressing wounds.

Five months to the day of our first becoming acquainted, we were boarding a plane headed to India. At this point in my life, I didn’t know where my future was taking me, only that I would be spending the next six months in India with the possibility of starting a new life in Australia afterwards. My partner housed a deep love for India, being what brought us to her paradisical shores. At her core, she believed to have spent a lifetime there, gowning wind-swept saris, fingering spice-laden foods. On the other hand, I shared no similar affinity, going for the sake of the relationship and my natural wanderlust. Still, It wasn’t long into my arrival before I understood her adoration.

The first 2 months were spent travelling the West Coast, Sri Lanka and India’s Dravidian heart. The hospitality of the Indian and Sri Lankan cultures caught me by surprise. Indians have a saying, one I’d repeatedly hear when justifying their exorbitant assistance. “A guest is to be treated like a god”. Not that I could begin to comprehend how gods are to be treated, but wherever we went, the people treated us with the utmost kindness. Whether asking for help navigating the public transport system or seeking guidance on places to go, we’d soon find ourselves at the centre of a helpers huddle. Kin to modern-day culture’s demi-gods, the celebrity. But this wasn’t fandom. A significant proportion of endeavours were supplemented with evident sincerity, an altruistic desire to enshroud us in peace of mind. I have experienced endearing hospitality in all manner of places across the world. However, something, in particular, a symptom of Indian culture, had me taken aback.

From my experiences in England, South Africa, and Europe, the fear of my transparent mind cast a shadow over the bulk of all interactions. Severe or not, there was a persistent awkward tension within the periphery. It felt as if only a tiny percentage were unperturbed by my presence. This ceaseless identifier offered no liberation from my mental qualms. Reminders were constant in the eyes of many, even those of passers-by, presenting a body language that spoke the words’ stay away from me.’ The people of India exhibited a response in reverse of what I’d become used to. Even if I were to flinch, their eyes showed no unease. Everywhere I went, my presence felt invited.

The burden that was my mind had found itself in an environment that didn’t necessitate projecting its inner fears. I, a callous creature by nurture, soothed away from adversity. It took me some time to get used to it, to forget. The compounding of greeting eyes, a gradual dawning upon a place where I could be a normal human being again, enjoying regular human interactions for the first time in years. As the continuous dire forecasts preceding social interactions relented, the muddy field returned to green pastures where I was once again free to roam the main features of human life with no additional, extraordinary encumbrance. I loved it. No more timidness, returning to my social element with the natives. The cursing voice became an inaudible whisper as soon as the worries wavered, except for the occasional crossing of paths with glaringly intimidated Westerners, a jabbing reminder of my repercussions dormancy.

It wasn’t only the people of India’s friendly offerings that endorsed rehabilitation. India had an ancient mystic history that still reverberated through its modern-day culture. Expressions of Eastern philosophy via the teachings of Buddhism, Hinduism and the Vedas. Since my spiritual expansion sprouted from a place within myself, it took time to recognise what I had been through echoed throughout the world’s religions. Figuring out that when high, what I was experiencing when immersed in these states of flow was a form of meditation. Somehow I was allowed access to higher states of consciousness. Now I was journeying through a country that’s spiritual cultures were the forefather of many religions and was to this day a mixing pot of the world’s religions. The perfect place to attempt to expand upon my spiritual endeavours. In the hope of reversing my regression trend and finding a route to higher states of consciousness without having to call upon marijuana.

Our itinerary was plentiful with excursions to religious holy sites, although not until April did we partake in any spiritual practices officiated by teachers. We started big with a gruelling experience, my first Vipassana course. A practice with origins in Buddhism, as a beginner, you would be requested to spend 10 days in complete silence, with no communication of any sort, no eating outside of the meal plan, no reading. You could do zilch except for daily ablutions, not even practise other meditation techniques.

A singular practice aimed at developing equanimity and mindfulness, the main feature being to avoid everything that interferes with the goal. Hence, our phones were taken off us not long after walking through the gates. It did give a slight impression of incarceration. The metal fencing, the strict rules reminded in every instance. Even some of the attendees had the face of someone serving time. Others, though, looked gleeful, later finding out some chose to be here while the rest were sent by work, probably in an attempt to tame their bigmouths. The fascinating polarity of mindsets when it comes to being incarcerated from our sins. I hoped to hold out with the enthusiastic. My heart was eager, but my impulses electric.

I struggled straight away for several reasons. First, I hadn’t routinely sat cross-legged since primary school, some twelve years ago. My body could hardly sustain thirty minutes before agony would reverberate from my locked knees. As if they were filled with concrete, my misfortunate self having to endure the exclamatory pain of a cracking release from their tense muscular cast. In addition to the inequitable trade of pain for respite, my back’s posture was flaccid, and without any support, it would usually give way not long after. The burdens of a body finding comfort without the lieu of furniture. It is the everyday, mundane things you take for granted.

We were expected to perform these tasks for 10 hours a day, in multiple-hour blocks split up by short rest stops or one of two meals. The practice revolved around still mindful observance of a particular body part, attempting to act as an equanimous witness to its sensations, in other words shutting down the monkey mind and overcoming restraining boredom. My body simultaneously screaming for relief made it all the more problematic. I would argue the hindrance of pain did help facilitate extra development of my endurance and focus, having exercised with additional strain. The painful weights lobbied upon my mind nurtured resilience, a critical requisite for my 100 problems. Fitting for the fact the challenges I had to face came with the burdensome backpack that was the consequence of this bizarre life.

As I reinforced my tenacity, moments of less struggle lost their bite, making it easier to keep the peace. The weights on my mind in casual circumstances transmuted from bricks to feathers. However beneficial these resistance bands were, the problem with continual distress is the inevitability of reaching a breaking point. My physical wall arrived a little after halfway through. I couldn’t go on sitting cross-legged any longer. My knees had a strain on them like a rusty outside tap, having spent decades in abandonment. I persuaded myself that if I wanted to continue making meaningful progress, I had to convince my teacher that I needed a chair.

The teacher was reluctant to adhere to any of my pleas. He didn’t speak much English, and we were the only foreigners there. So when I tried to explain to him my knees hadn’t done this for twelve years, he was having none of it. I assumed he misunderstood the intentions of my plea because every time I approached him, he’d tell me of Vipassana locations in the UK. I wasn’t giving up; in my eyes, I was playing with a handicap. Everyone else in the room lived a life of cultured physical preparation. Me, I had two weeks. This wasn’t a plea for a chair to see out the rest of this trail in relative comfort. I wanted to succeed; I dreamed of the advertised benefits. Eventually, he relented after two days of begging with sore puppy eyes.

The chair brought new perspectives as to why he was so adamant. His endeavours weren’t to push away what he assumed to be someone giving up but rather damage control. See, that next day, sitting pronounced above the hall of floor dwellers, I became acquainted with his actual reasoning. Those that were also struggling, their eyes were magnetised towards me. The gleam of jealous bewilderment as to how I, a young man of similar age to them, was granted to sit out the rest of the days in relative comfort. He knew my presence would be another debilitating distraction for those on the verge.

I felt awkward in the sight of their glances. Unsure of whether I deserved their judgment. As I noticed their stares, the irresistible need to smile would surface. This smile could be interpreted as chuffed pleasure or scolding laughter, depending on the squint of one’s eyelids. My privilege was circled by those less fortunate, and all I could do was produce a sympathy-banishing face. Awkward scenarios seldom bring out the best in me.

Alleviated from the physical wearing, the mental strain took its turn to aggravate my thought stream. My theory is the concentrated focus was surfacing parts of my psyche that obstructed my ascendency. I remember going to the toilet, one of the most eventful parts of the day. Time’s mundaneness had me examining my stool, and on one particular occasion, it looked rather disparate. This discovery was a revelation to my dreary brain. Sitting on my chair, I couldn’t resist thinking about the stool’s oddity and potential repercussions. Was I dying? Was it cancer or some other terminal disease? I summoned emotional fantasy as if these were to be my final months, indulging how I would go about living them. The chosen parley of my inner conflict emphasised making sure my story was heard. I thought of moving to the mountainous regions of New Zealand. Having someone at my bedside transcribe my stories, too ill to do so myself. A peculiar gearing up to accept this fate using a creative imagining of saddening daydreams. A waste of time, considering the circumstance, but my ego was in overdrive, my mind at its wit’s end. I put up an intense fight, which was the conclusion of a battle, not the war. My soul satisfied, having laid solid groundwork on the road to spiritual emancipation.

As the end of the 10 days approached, there were no significant singular breakthroughs, no enlightening experiences like I’d aspired for. I did, however, attain new levels of stillness. The vicinity of my vision developed a knack for inspiring admiration. Modest progress, no great life-changing insight, but a realisation that the availability of inner peace was plentiful. I walked out of the gated residence with an invigorated craving for the satisfactions of life prior, although this depleted thirst wasn’t a relapse. Within contained a fresh spark. The equanimous mind had planted itself.

` With the progression of our travels, what was an idolatrous relationship had faded into an agreement. Burdened as one could not travel without the other. It wasn’t workable, me leaving her to complete her travels alone. For all of its beauty, India was still a dangerous place for a woman to travel independently. What once was a blissful agreement was more so now two individuals, each distasteful of the other, stuck living under the same roof. Deterioration on the verge of snapping, and for all we could do, there was an inevitable split on the horizon.

We reached our next port of spiritual refuge in May, the holy town of Rishikesh. Famous for its many Ashrams, one in particular iconic for hosting the Beatles, the sprouts of pilgrimage soils. It is amusing how cultural icons from my home left monumental footprints standing the test of half a century amongst the routes of my spiritual excursion. I mused to myself whether sitting in the Beatles cafe, where their music chimed with the scenery, influenced their decision to take the journey.

We planned to stay for a month, a duration feasible enough for us to spend some serious time apart. Deciding to stay in two separate ashrams located on opposite ends of the town, I spent most of the month alone to myself, finding solace in the drive to push on with my spiritual advancement. I woke in the early hours of most mornings to begin a basketful itinerary, morning meditation, followed by yoga and breakfast, with the evenings being spent doing the same in reverse order. How I spent my days in between varied on how I felt. More often than not, start by walking 20 minutes into town for lunch. Reserving some low-value rupee notes for the homeless on the way to help harvest the compassion I’d cultivated with meditation. I’d enjoy the walks because I’d get to revel in the feeling of fluid movement in my hips, the product of doing 3 hours of yoga a day, but, more so, this was the first time during my travels I could adequately take in the surroundings. Walking, for once, didn’t necessitate a guardianship role. My eyes could wander the landscape with no culpability. A lone ranger with no responsibilities outside of myself, immersed in the scenery of a spirited flowing Ganges beneath the verdant hills.

What I’d do after completing the walk depended on my frame of mind. Some days feeling rather homesick, I’d spend the day in a western cuisine cafe eating western food and surfing western media. On other days I’d go to a bookshop to find texts to help with my spiritual advancement.

Unlike the gruelling Vipassana, this approach evoked a steadier evolution of the mind. I had a robust enthusiasm for self-development, rising to the challenges my responsibilities had laid upon me, encouraged by the mental distress of a breakup. With each passing day, inner peace sang higher notes of gratuitous satisfaction in reverence for life. This enveloped me into a retreat from the selfish tendencies my mission had caused me to enact. I took a step away from the self-importance of my vacillating necessities and removed the cloak of burden. Now was the time for me to stop pressing for specific interplay in acknowledgement of my entire predicament. A recognition that submerged the ego and faded obsessions over my quandary. It gave me the space to reflect, without disgruntlement, on how I could improve relationships with those around me, starting with my partner. I tried to approach with mindfulness on the idioms I’d developed, attempting to keep my reactive slate blank so issues could have the constructive addressing they deserved. With replenished enthusiasm, we rekindled in the final week of our stay, both willing to give it a second shot.

One morning we were exploring the North-Western part of Rishikesh. Having walked one of the rope bridges to cross the bulky Ganges, we climbed the first set of steps toward the main road before a young Indian man stopped us. He wasn’t much older than me, yet evoked a mystical appearance. Powerful magnetic eyes accentuated with a bit of eyeliner had him look the part in his offer of a psychic reading. I’d grown tired of these repetitive interactions at this point, sick of being identified as money and haggled. So with as much politeness as I could muster, I rejected the offer and left on our way.

My aversiveness was heightened with these psychic salesmen because there was a nagging part of me thinking this guy probably knows you to some extent already. He may just be using that to his advantage, I questioned. So used to people knowing more than they should, I presumed it unlikely his service would have me taken aback. He didn’t have to peep beyond the clairvoyant curtain. My life was a shop front window. Whatever the case, I wasn’t going to give him the time of day. Although one part of the interaction played on my mind, more so than the other usual encounters with Indian hustlers. Before making his offer, he looked at me with a confident, stern look, announcing the judgment, ‘You think too much’. His statement could have been a guesstimate. Knowing most westerners probably overthink to some degree and being an ambiguous message open to wide-ranging personal interpretation, a large majority would agree and feel more inclined to pay for his services. Nevertheless, his declaration set off a train of thought, whatever his intentions were.

The self-work dictated in the ashrams was premised on quieting the mind and consciously merging with the energies of existence. What I hadn’t managed to do was ponder the philosophy behind this and how it interceded into my life. But as I began to analyse my thought patterns, I redirected my methodology to reach where I felt I needed to be. From the beginning revelation, my mind was in a whirlwind, scolded by the rising of a different sun. I went from a nobody to an incomprehensible in over a matter of months. Suddenly I valued my existence as absolutely vital, my everyday interactions labelled with life-changing importance. I reacted by treading cautiously, treating manoeuvrers and interactions with a General’s planning. My mind did not shy away from its supposed duty; I encased my life around it. Even though on the material outside I did nothing, within I was relentlessly planning, reasoning, preparing.

In return for receiving my role, I showered admiration upon the universe for the grandness of this honour bestowed upon me. This didn’t become a vehicle for prayer or religious service. I reacted to it as a job offer, trying to prove my capabilities by not letting the situation off my mind. Keeping my intent focused on integration and prevalence, behaviours that displayed my opinion on its importance. One major issue with this was the re-overactivation of my default mode network. Just as with my first crash, I had fallen into the trap of an overactive ego. Even though its casus-beli was from a selfless destination this time, my role had enacted the same obsession with the self’s performance. My mind was caught up in circles, and even though this was an ingemination, I accepted it without judgment. Something to do with how I interpreted what was happening to me, how I got so wrapped up in success that all I could do was watch out for failure. The taunts of it were everywhere, and I was thinking at a million miles per hour in some attempt to find clues of assurance. I chose not to do acts that bolstered faith, instead letting the left hemisphere of my brain try and calculate its way out.

The driving force of my desires was flow, to prune from its abundance. I had reasoned with myself flow was the dictate of my psyche, and to find it meant applying pressure through the default mode network. I relied upon an erroneous relationship between flow and pontificating acquired knowledge. Although similar, the two had a distinctive difference that separated them. This mistaken identification allowed me to take one as the other and hurtle myself into default mode network domination 2.0.

Searching for flow wasn’t the only factor contributing to an overreaction of the DMN. The anxiety, paranoia, and pressure to succeed all fuelled it, reciprocating with further investment into their prominence. I would always have to overcome these hurdles, just as before. However, the stipulation that my intellect was the key to my success kept me trapped within their boundaries. The realisation I had naively misidentified the source of my spiritual prowess delivered emancipation, relieving a good deal of strain. I was on the verge of believing what was required of me wasn’t to be clawed out from within, running down a multitude of thought avenues. All I had to do was learn to still myself, observing in silence, and what I needed would appear at its own fruition.

Tremulous ties to my energetic body, connecting the hardship submitted by my racing DMN, began a ceremonial unravelling. Relief wiped down the remnants of hardship. I had admitted defeat to my game, path, and chosen storyline. A victory for the true man within. The road to his ambitions usurped by the adamants of an ego. This understanding dressed many of my issues in a reassuring bandage, although some bondages had decayed beyond restoration.

Compounding damage inflicted upon the relationship destined it too far gone for us to re-establish. She was set in her mind we were not going to work out. I, beholden to physical comfort and ideals, was forced to accept. Two weeks after rekindling, we parted ways for what would be the end of the adventure we shared together. Although I was upset by this, I’d developed an unhealthy attachment via escapism. It seemed clear the universe had no plans for what was to carry on, sending me back to England when my time in India was over.

We’d left Rishikesh for the tourist hotspot Dharamshala a week before our final split. As I still felt like an unwelcome alien amongst most westerners, the imbalance that was our relationship once again displayed its feathers. I wanted a shelter of romanticism, away from people who felt uncomfortable around me. I was tired of feeling awkward, and nothing was better than expressing myself to someone I could trust and felt comfortable doing so. I remember one of our final nights together; we sat out on our veranda, just the two of us. I had Charas to smoke, which we shared under the moonlight. I spoke a few clever lines sent from above, and we vibed with intriguing conversation, enjoying what would be the final performance of the essence that fused our hearts together.

The following day I had a proto-concurrent moment, one that etched itself into my memory. The references were clear. The entire piece flowed through unabated in the space of a few minutes between me waiting for my partner to finish up getting ready and us taking our first few steps out of the door. One last look at my own inspiring ideals before the dust of the matter scattered in opposing trade winds.

Joey Badass – Love Is Only A Feeling

Look, I love her curves but what’s more preferred
Is the way she articulates words
Can’t help observe and stare when she in the mirror
Masking(masculine) the massacre while she fixing her hair
I mean she’s so perfect in her own little world

We built the foundation, everything I want in a girl
And it’s a matter of time until her last name mine
You got potential baby, just imagine us combined
I wanna see you shine like the gem that you are
Want you be so secure that they can see from afar
That you don’t need not a man and you can stand on your own
Let’s keep stacking your bread and one day, we gon’ get gone
And get away from here
You’re the only reason I be staying here
Wanna paint a picture, let’s make it clear
The future so bright baby, race you there, girl

Love is only a feeling
Love is only a feeling
Love is only a feeling
Love is only a feeling

Look, girl you talk too much, need to relax
No stress please, just please roll us a fat
Blunt so we can smoke and fill the room with love
You buzz ’cause I’m feelin’ the groove with this one
Come take you a sip, let’s dance under the moon
The way that it’s lit, got me feelin’ the mood
To vibe and be tuned, I’m so into you
Let’s lose track of the night and stay up ’til it’s noon
Watch the sun rise and watch the moon fall
Asleep if you will, surprise when you spawn
Back from the world of infinite beyond
Roll your eyes back and let’s keep on goin’
Come take a ride, I’ll be your chauffeur

I wanna make you sing to me as your toes curl
I love it when she doing all the things I showed her
I thank the Lord for her, man, I swear I owe her

She wanted to try all sorts as if her signing up and mixing was signalling my time to leave on an individual adventure. So I visited one of the travel agents and booked myself on a minibus heading deeper into the mountains. It felt like the right thing to do, returning to what I knew best, wandering this life alone, bumping into destined events headstrong with only my hands on the wheel. This was always when the universe would be most intimate.

Arriving early morning, I wandered the roads until finding a bargain-priced accommodation, shacked up feet away from the Parvati river. The heat of June was busy rearranging the seasonal aspect, and her snowmelt vehemence roared through the valley. The locals warned if I fell into her ferocity, my body would be found miles downstream, if at all. Knowing this, I couldn’t help but feel nervous crossing the modest rope-planked bridges as white horses furiously galloped the rocks beneath my feet, their crashing sound of vulnerability vibrating through the planks and up my intimidated loins.

Parvati is a goddess covering many beautiful aspects of feminine and masculine energy. A crucial part of her story is her marriage to Shiva. I found this fascinating as Shiva, one of the three key gods of Hinduism, his presence followed me all through India. Locals would point out landmarks relaying the ancient stories behind them. Almost every time, the story was about or included Shiva. Some were eldritch folk tales that cast a reflection upon my life. As soon as I parted ways with my partner, I found myself shacked up next to Shivas. There seemed undoubtedly a poignant connection between us.

Thirty-six hours after my arrival, I found myself walking through a small mud-tracked village, halfway to completing my 40-minute walk from town back to the accommodation. Nearing the end of the village, I noticed a cafe sign fixed meters beyond a fork in the pathway. Approaching to investigate, I felt an urge from within to enter. A discreet-looking cafe of a simple rectangular shape, no bigger than the waiting room of a local dentist. The layout was composed of an economically sized kitchen connected via a serving hatch to one modest room. No furniture except for a low-set coffee table surrounded by floor cushions and two diminutive bookshelves fixed against walls, standing perpendicular to one another.

As I approached the doorway, a man smoking a joint approached, mutely reaching out his arm to offer me the final drags. I thanked him with my eyebrows, taking a couple tokes before disposing of it. Making myself comfortable inside, the host soon came to offer a food and drinks menu, hinting there was a second, illicit verbal menu I could contemplate. I ordered tea and asked for further details to ruminate over. The house was serving hash, oil and LSD, heralded by the waiter for their fine quality. Sitting next to me was a travelling Indian. We exchanged pleasantries, speaking on life, expectations, goals and the other usual aspects of polite conversation. Having run its course, we turned to the illicit menu, where he informed me of his plans to take LSD. As doing so, others in the room chirped up to share their intent to do so as well. LSD was the one that stood out to me, and the atmosphere in the room helped back the decision. After all the spiritual work I’d put in, it seemed a good time to put it to the test. I was long overdue for a mystical experience and eager to see what would shed from my spirit. The fact I’d ended up here by happenstance wasn’t something to disregard. The evening had a venerable veneer, like so many of the other drug-induced scenes of mystique. I could see it in their eyes. The glint of anticipation.

I, still yet to make a final decision, watched my fellow Indian traveller receive his order, a glass of water with a sugar cube floating on its surface. I asked how it worked, to which he informed me you select the strength, and they drop the liquid LSD onto the sugar cube. Dissolving itself into the water like your ego into the unity consciousness. An intriguing method I hadn’t come across before, all I’d ever seen were dots and tabs. Recognising they had it in liquid form and were producing their own dilutions, these guys were serious about their formulaic work. Drug dealing scientists literally shacked up in the foothills of the Himalayas, upon the nest of Dehli dweller’s psychedelic escape.

I removed myself from the room for a contemplative cigarette. These were strangers, characters I could only judge off of appearance, and some did come across as somewhat shady. Others, however, were young Indians, younger than me, innocent youth searching for a good time. This was a public place, a cafe half-filled with travellers, the environment hospitable, an interdimensional saloon. Rentering, I sat myself down when the speaker opposite caught my attention. It had been playing psytrance since I’d arrived, and a new track was melding in. Not long into the start, a woman began to interlude. She spoke some words my memory lacks access to; however, I will never forget the next part. This soft feminine voice pleaded, ‘take the sugar cube.’ Recognising it as a concurrent statement, one I’d come to expect. A signal I responded to in faith, making myself an order for 200 mics. Bigger than I had ever gone before.

I found myself out on the patio, this time enjoying a cigarette of anticipation when an intriguing man appeared. He was dressed in smart clothing with a briefcase to match. A telling scientific persona, long straight hair pulled into a ponytail with added facial hair, both coloured in a sooty residue, both complimenting one another. Encapsulating the stereotype of a professional hippy, aka LSD-producing scientist, with his smart clothing and apprehension towards pruning. He opened the case, making visible the vials and pipettes strapped within, and meticulously placed chosen apparatus on the table. I gathered this man was readying my order and, from the corner of my eye, paid attention to his proceedings. He measured out one substance, holding the vial at eye level and began to mix it with another, swirling the contents like that of a potion producer. I assumed this was the dilution to my requested order, marvelling at the cliché of this Teppan-yaki psychonaut chef experience. Finishing my cigarette, I left the malapropos-dressed man to complete his work.

I didn’t have to wait long until my water and sugar cube were served before me. Spoon in hand, I partially spun the cube’s contents into liquid before taking a tentative sip. Both lips kissing either side of the rim, a ceremonial closing of tonight’s matrimony. There was an instantaneous reaction in my stomach, responsive energy exhaled from the gut. A tingling lightness within the belly as if communicating he knew, despite its odourless and colourless contents, this was much more than water alone. Continuing to swirl the water until the cube became one with the liquid and consuming the contents across short intervals. Sat in patient suspense, waiting for a neurogenic flowering.

Before that was to happen, the body had to make room. I positioned myself into a meditative pose, legs crossed, hands resting on my knees. Exercising the abilities I had been accustoming myself to. Even though I was standing at the precipice of one of my greatest unknowns, my mind was calm considering what was warranted. The LSD was reacting quicker than expected, perhaps due to meditative training on observing the subtle energies within, permitting an increased awareness of the transformational process.

After what felt like a short period, I opened my eyes. The room was different, a reflection of the inner shift. Attention was acute; however, the room in its entirety felt distant, as if I was falling away from it, my vicinity giving way to the self. Vision began to express its own custom dimension. Objects told an eery presence, some merging with others in the process. Beginning at my feet and legs, I was starting to lose bodily sensations. Limbs, similar to a relaxation technique, were falling asleep, drifting away from the nervous system’s vigilance. I’d have expected under my own digression, but in reality, I was observing an independent trend. It felt as if the conscious energy was accumulating, my life force crawling up the spine, receding into my headspace. Against what would have been predicted, the experience of losing sensation in the body didn’t intimidate me; instead encouraging the opposite. I was becoming consumed by ardour on a runaway train toward it. A desire struck, crafted from intuitive inspiration, to lay my body down at ease, still. As my head rested on the cushion, the retreat of the energetic tide hastened. In little time my body folded into inertia. I shut my eyes to substantiate the experience of this sole head space energy.

The perception of this single-pointed awareness left me musing over my relationship with the forefather of consciousness. In contrast to the body, my mind sparked into fresh life. In a heightened state of repose, it came to my attention that my iPod sat waiting in my pocket. I felt in the perfect condition for concurrent communication. A new eternal memory was in the delicate vicinity. So I lifted myself out of the headspace to retrieve the time machine lever. This had to be a moment for shuffle, as anything that entered my awareness would overwrite any previous history. I just had to keep an eye on what I was listening to. I didn’t wish to dictate what would and wouldn’t be; the responsibility was too much. This was a moment for fate, dictated by the godly expression of RNG.

The music was a rich tapestry of sounds, their vibrational harmonics resonating within. Akin to the truffle experience, yet these sister events each had their own unique expression. Unlike the truffles’ spinal harmonics, the LSD resonated within the mind, echoing into its depths, alighting its vast expanse. This was an induction to the deeper layers of the mind. A journey towards the seed of consciousness.

The first song hit profoundly different from usual, even in some of my ultra-high states. From the off, the concurrent connection was more attuned. I have always held the theory this is a bridged connection where separate conscious awarenesses meet. How this would act out, the concurrent connector would gravitate toward my consciousness, having an awareness of both in tandem. I was the role of the observable, playing witness to being observed. I theorised this role was not the sole aspect of my possible experiences. If a bridge is constructed, both parties should, by theory, have access to one another. I could enact a reversal of roles. What would that take? If I am in meditative silence, dissolved from the ego, maybe then I can find a crossover. Was it the gravity of my identity that held me back? That which is empty of all except source can see through itself.

Since I first experienced concurrent connections before witnessing with proto-flow, I realised the bridge was being crossed by both parties. We met in the middle and projected onto the past before the data introduction. These moments always weren’t noticed by myself, protruding in free states of flow when the ego had shut eyes. Unaware foresight creeping in and out like the tooth fairy. When the sound was uncovered, only then would I realise a treasure had been planted. Tonight the bridge was manifested and crossed in the present. We were there, together at the moment, fused.

It captured my attention like the child’s gaze, first laying eyes on their mother. A cube tilted to balance on its southern point, taking the form of a diamond of white light. My first indication, this was a visual manifestation of the bridge. A third eye representation of whatever has been planted in my consciousness. What allowed me to be more than the casual human I was. Live from inside me, my connectors danced through the infinite; I, dissolved in its presence.
A feeling incomprehensible to the imagination. Our awarenesses entangled (quantum?), the ties that bind us granting entry to gaze into the infinite. Something I’m only able to literate in a vague description of its reality. Give yourself a moment to try and picture this—the words manifested from the energisation of my lips a moment before the auditory senses. I lay still on the floor, my concurrent connection; they wherever, whenever they may be, both of us in a union. Entangled, frictionless concentration upon the infinite flowing through us. Our minds merged, our hearts resonating, the tune infinite. The moment was ours to receive, a gift to share that allowed a reaction of artistry upon a canvas weaved with timelessness.

What was happening was hard for my identity to handle. It’s what they call ego death; the interference between my self and my spirit was, at times, nothing. When a squeak did come out, it wasn’t long put back to bed. Outshone by the silence. The artists spoke to my identity. Politely reminding what lay beneath was my ultimate truth. Warning to beware, for my identity was acting as a hindrance. I could see it. As this greatness unfolded, I could sense him trying to lay claim. But now, I knew of his clamouring lies. I was that fateful evening gifted a proper perspective of what lay within me. Healing and terrifying. The glaring realisation of the consequences of being lost in thought. I pray to this day in hope to be able to call upon the state of mind. Sober. Kin to those that experience samadhi. That night showed me the real part of being, of living. A place where my true home resides.

Handsome Boy Modelling School – The Truth

Go …
Go to the mountain if you must
Go to the burning bush
If it would ease your troubled mind
I’ll be prepared to stay behind?

I know you better than you think I do
Don’t worry, dear.. this is why I fell in love with you
The man in the looking glass
Is looking back at you at last

You can’t hide from the truth
Because the truth is all there is
You can’t hide from the truth
Because the truth is all there is
You can’t hide from the truth
Because the truth is all there is
You can’t hide

If happy times are too few and far between
It’s a pity dear, we can’t erase the things we’ve seen
So disappear, vanish if you wish
Just go before you’re swallowed up by bitterness

And the truth is you can’t hide from the truth
And the truth hurts because the truth is all there is
I realized some time ago that I would have to let you go

May not be true to say that you’ll return one day
But in your present state you may as well not be here at all
You wear a thin(fin) disguise; it’s from yourself you hide
Just take a look at us; we are heading for a fall

Now presiding in this court of hip-hop, Justice, my rap forté
Judge, jury, bailiff or prosecuting D.A
Ceteris paribus, my modus operandi
Is carpe diem whether de facto or de jure, comprende?
The People vs you and your Sensei
Teaching that style of word-play, weaker than Wednesday
Regardless of what your friends say, they’re all diss-able
Stricken from the record and deemed inadmissible
While this long arm of the law grabs the mic to
Shoot dope lines first and ask questions later
The def sentence of this Live litigator
Close the case tighter than the jaws of a ‘gator
Stenographer are steady logging the jargon
That your counselors are barking, in hopes of a plea bargain
But when you read back verbatim, what they’re saying to persuade them
They realize exactly how I’ve played them
I come with the truth, whole truth, and nothing but
Cause the truth hurts just as much as fuckin’ with Live will
I brew skill with refills from now until
Plagiarizing MC’s get their flows distilled

Baby I don’t die without you by my side
As long as you return into these arms that burn
Baby I won’t die just take a look inside
Into these eyes that burn, come to these arms that yearn

I won’t die, if you leave me high
I won’t die if you’re not by my side

And the truth hurts because the truth is all there is
And the truth hurts because the truth is all there is
You can’t hide from the truth, cause the truth is all there is
You can’t hide from the truth, cause the truth is all there is
You can’t hide from the truth, cause the truth is all there is
You can’t hide from the truth, cause the truth is all there is
You can’t hide from the truth, cause the truth is all there is
You can’t hide from the truth, cause the truth is all there is
You can’t hide from the truth, cause the truth is all there is
You can’t hide from the truth
Because the truth is all there is
You can’t hide from the truth..

Acid Probiosis Tracklisting
(What I can remember)

Funkdoobiest – Lost in thought
Method Man & Redman – How High Part 2 (Part1 came through on an LSD trip in France short of 1 year prior)
Devin The Dude – One day at a time
Niki & The Dove (Goldroom remix) – Mother Protect
Handsome Boy Modelling School – The Truth