On the Existential Threat of Selective Censorship

(A loving reminder and warning I offer out of heartfelt concern and genuine compassion for you all.)

The society we have known thus far is unraveling and failing for many reasons, but let me try to briefly identify one particularly fundamental cause based on the behavior I have noticed people actively engaging in lately: namely, disconnecting from others who challenge us to grow and learn and be invested in one another. People have generally forgotten or were denied the gift of knowing how to truly listen to each other with genuine presence and emotional investment. Many have forgotten how to respect others by giving them their full, open-minded attention and appreciation, denying the dignity and invalidating the existence of the other person. We do this quite commonly while failing to recognize that such treatment is a major source of our own suffering, loneliness, and despair when the tables are turned.

When there is a society-wide culture that promotes a disrespect for and avoidance of different points of view, that society is inevitably doomed, because society is a system and all healthy systems require healthy feedback loops. We all need to be heard and have our concerns acknowledged and our fears validated, or we start to go a little crazy inside because suffering must be transformed for it to not consume and corrupt us. Although transforming our suffering requires personal courage and personal effort, we all need our pain to be acknowledged and validated along the way, and we need others to help guide us through the difficulty. Through truly listening to one another, we can see that all misbehavior stems from ignorance or a place of deep suffering. When we recognize this, we lose our instinct to be fearful and mistrustful of others by default.

The potential destruction of civilized society will, ultimately, be a result of this behavior of willful avoidance generating a huge buildup of anger, resentment, fear, and despair in us all. Why deny others the kind of attention and appreciation you want others to pay you, and that you need in order to be sane and happy? Being truly emotionally invested and involved in the wellbeing of others, as well as in their hopes and doubts, dreams and nightmares, staves off disaster for us all.

– With Love, Respect, & Gratitude for You All

Destiny 'Trip' (Remastered)

Destiny 'Trip' is a musical metaphor for the human lifespan, with every stage of development represented, from birth to death. It is the first track off of Wise 'Trip' EP, produced by WiseFromWithin/dJ_5entIn3L.

Wise 'Trip' EP is a "concept album," falling under the sub-genres of ambient, ambient industrial, and "space music," that provides the listener with a variety of unique mental impressions united by a thread of universal metaphysical concepts concerning life and reality. 'Trip' has a double-meaning: trip, as in a journey; and trip, as in a "head-trip".

A Paradox: Struggling Against Our Own Humanity

//Remembering What is Worth Remembering//

None of us can get through life without making serious mistakes.  Most of the time we do our best to do what we think is right in an imperfect world, using the scattered pieces of information available to us, trying our hardest to make choices we think will lead to a better future--a future that is always totally unknown and unpredictable.  On top of this less than ideal environment for even knowing and understanding what the right decisions to make are, our countless imperfections, our engrained impulses, our baser instincts, our unintentional short-sightedness, and the constant struggle we have within ourselves, often lead us astray.  Inherently, "to error is human," and, in fact, all life in existence struggles to the make the best of things in a chaotic world and necessarily makes mistakes along the way.  What is more important than the mistakes themselves is that all that can be learned from them, is, and that newfound knowledge is proactively applied to do better in the future.

Nevertheless, we cannot ignore, nor excuse the impact of, those mistakes we make that are excruciatingly painful to others and ourselves, made in our darkest hours, when it seemed there was no light to guide us as our own light had faded in the darkness of the pain and the fear.  Though, were we, and those we've loved but deeply hurt, not victims of our own blind humanity in the times we were truly lost?  Must we judge the character and value of a person's entire life based solely on their worst errors?

Can we accept that we all share, among a great many other things, the common experience of inducing pain and sorrow we never wanted for ourselves or our loved ones?  Can we all agree 'we are not magnificent'--that with all our natural flaws, whether they include in any particular person a mental disorder, disability, or malady, or none at all, we do our best to find a sense of happiness and safety, even if we are looking in all the wrong places?  Is it not true that we all abhor living in fear, being controlled by sadness, bitterness, and regret, and that we quite often do things that seem to make us feel better in the moment but leave us just as empty as before?  Is it not clear the 'human condition' is an inherent paradox, and to be human is to be a walking, talking paradox of mixed emotions and mental conflict, having only a dim perception of the real world whilst possessing dangerously limitless but immature imagination?

We all want to be loved and remembered fondly, despite the very serious, yet very human blunders we've made.  I, for one, believe our best qualities and greatest achievements are the only things of value worth remembering once we are dead and gone...




//"We're Living at the Mercy of the Pain and the Fear Until We Dead It, Forget It, Let It All Disappear"//

"Yeah, yo
This is not the end, this is not the beginning
Just a voice like a riot rocking every revision
But you listen to the tone and the violent rhythm
And though the words sound steady, something empty's within 'em
We say 'Yeah', with fists flying up in the air
Like we're holding onto something that's invisible there
'Cause we're living at the mercy of the pain and the fear
Until we dead it, forget it, let it all disappear (yeah)

Waiting for the end to come, wishing I had strength to stand
This is not what I had planned, it's out of my control
Flying at the speed of light, thoughts were spinning in my head
So many things were left unsaid, it's hard to let you go

I know what it takes to move on, I know how it feels to lie
All I wanna do is trade this life for something new
Holding on to what I haven't got

Sitting in an empty room, trying to forget the past
This was never meant to last, I wish it wasn't so

I know what it takes to move on, I know how it feels to lie
All I wanna do is trade this life for something new
Holding on to what I haven't got

Yo, yeah
What was left when that fire was gone?
I thought it felt right but that right was wrong
All caught up in the eye of the storm
I'm trying to figure out what it's like moving on
And I don't even know what kind of things I said
My mouth kept moving and my mind went dead
So, picking up the pieces now, where to begin?
The hardest part of ending is starting again!

All I wanna do is trade this life for something new
Holding on to what I haven't got

This is not the end, this is not the beginning
Just a voice like a riot rocking every revision
(I'm holding on to what I haven't got)
But you listen to the tone and the violet rhythm
Though the words sound steady, something empty's within 'em

We say 'Yeah', with fists flying up in the air
Like we're holding onto something that's invisible there
(Holding on to what I haven't got)
'Cause we're living at the mercy of the pain and the fear
Until we dead it, forget it, let it all disappear"

Poem - "Evil's Safehaven"

It's sad to see,
Under apathy,
That we are not free.

For evil flourishes,
Yes it twists and bends,
Destroying our friends.

And surely we should know,
We're corrupting our own homes,
And building our tombs.

Yet all it would take,
Is to stop being fake,
To end the mistakes.

— M. L. Morgan

Reforming a Broken, Societally Self-Destructive Criminal "Justice" System

Hello Difference Makers,

Waking up the oblivious public to the disaster that is our mental health and criminal justice systems, and reforming them, has been near and dear to my heart since I was 10 years old, and even more so since living with severe mental illness for years as an adult and getting caught up in the criminal 'justice' system myself. I have always tried to make a difference in reforming society to actually live up to our values and ideals, with the little influence I have. If every adult citizen in America had the same intimate, insider's look at how screwed up both systems are, from start to finish, they would be massively and fundamentally overhauled immediately. The problem is the vast majority of Americans don't know any better or just don't give a shit, because "it's not their problem." Yet, crime and mental illness affect us all enormously, regardless of where you stand in society.

Award winning Producer, Director & Human Rights Activist Matthew Cooke is calling for your help to build a reform movement by supporting completion of the documentary, "SURVIVOR'S GUIDE TO PRISON".

This documentary will enlighten the general public as to the actual realities of our hypocritical, self-destructive 'hell-on-Earth' prison system ("glorified dog-kennels" is sadly accurate) and to the reality of our most EGREGIOUS FAILURES as a country in modern times:
-not living up to our responsibility to ensure the most basic of human rights for those we strip of all choice and freedoms (including assuring their safety, wellbeing, and dignity)
-not doing more to help victims of poverty, abuse, and mental illness, to prevent THOSE victims from creating victims of crime
-not upholding the moral high-ground we currently claim to live up to
-not having basic/natural compassion for our fellow, equally-fallible human beings, by not giving the incarcerated REAL support and opportunities to rehabilitate themselves through EFFECTIVE education, therapy, substance abuse, and other social programs (using money we save from reduced populations in our broken system of incarceration), not the half-assed, underfunded, misguided, or otherwise ineffective programs already in place
-in sum, not living up to our social responsibilities as individuals, communities, states, and country.

The documentary is "...a chilling exposé of the criminal justice system in America, told through the eyes of its victims and narrator Matthew Cooke. Executive produced by Adrian Grenier and Susan Sarandon, and featuring Harry Belafonte, Deepak Chopra, Russell Simmons, Michelle Alexander, Tom Morello, and Brandon Boyd.

"SURVIVOR'S GUIDE TO PRISON exposes the horror of the criminal justice system-- from the time you get arrested, to the time you are tried, to your incarceration, to (if applicable) the MOMENT you are released. We tell you what to do to survive... no guarantees.

"The 3rd act focuses on solutions & how we can survive prison as a country.

"Statistics:
-the Innocence Project estimates there could EASILY be anywhere from 40,000 to over 100,000 people in US prisons who never broke a law at all.
-77% of Americans going into state prisons return within 5 years.
-If you're an American, you're more likely to go to prison than
anywhere else in the world.
-More black men are in prison now than the total enslaved in 1850.
-1/3 of all the women in prison in the world, are in US prisons.
-The U.S. has the largest prison population on the planet ([>25% of the world's incarcerated;] larger than China)
-The US has more prisons than colleges and universities.

"Some people ask me, with all these famous people in the film, why can't THEY just pay for the movie? GREAT QUESTION! They are investing in the movie not JUST financially but with their time — which is also worth a LOT of money.

"Power in numbers speaks much louder than a handful of celebrities in the movement for deep political change. My ideal scenario would be 2 million people donating 5 cents each, because that would mean 2 million people were invested in changing this broken system. And that would make it happen.

"Anything you can afford - a dime, a dollar or more - represents your heart's participation in this movement to reform criminal justice.

"Your support isn't just about this movie. It's about a movement to radically reform the criminal justice system which so desperately needs our help.

"If we collectively inspire each other across political and cultural lines to free ourselves from the school to prison pipeline, get victims of crime the healing they need, give offenders the hope to actually turn their lives around, and rehabilitate we will have truly earned the title 'civilization'.

"If we want to break crime cycles in communities, we need prevention through investing in jobs & education. We need more restorative justice programs, which are proven to be some of the most impactful experiences with a 90% success rate in preventing people creating any more harm.

"But none of this information happens without us banding together, and it can start with this film.


"SOME OF THE ORGANIZATIONS THAT WE ARE AND WILL BE SUPPORTING:
-Prison University Project
-Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
-Amnesty International
-The Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for Justice
-American Civil Liberties Union
-Innocence Project
-The Drug Policy Alliance
-The Dream Corps
-Homeboy Industries ["...provides hope, training, and support to formerly gang-involved and previously incarcerated men and women allowing them to redirect their lives and become contributing members of our community."]


"There are two ways to help:
1. Contribute - even small contributions raise their popularity and give them more visibility on the site.
2. Post to Facebook - in the end, the more people hear about them, the more likely they are to meet their target."





Thank you!
Matthew Lee Morgan

On Cannabis (From a College Discussion)

[The following is a reply I made to another student's post, which focused little on the article's content but heavily on conveying opinions of a negative, and uninformed nature.]

I truly, honestly respect your opinions and point-of-view. This post is merely to point out a couple logical fallacies you use in your statement (not intentionally I'm sure), and to introduce some additional information to our discussion derived from the scientific method, not myths perpetuated over the last several decades since the racially motivated "reefer madness" campaign intended to alarm "whites" to further discriminate against African-Americans (just like what was done in the past with criminalizing opium because of the Asian labor-force in the SW that used it frequently to offset the effects of being worked half-to-death, and with cocaine to sour majority {"white"} opinion about the latino population).

I agree that money-making is the main motivator involved in the business "model" described in the article. However, your explicit and implicit correlations between the harmful effects of alcohol and tobacco smoking, with the effects of cannabis use are a Fallacy by False Analogy. I recommend anyone identify and review this particular fallacy, and try to pick out the others inherent in your post for themself (I learned them all in my "Critical Thinking" philosophy course, but if you need a quick rundown on logical fallacies I suggest what I believe to be the most comprehensive and concisely defined list available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies). What decades of scientific study has revealed (that you'll only hear coming from those who do not have a motive to hide or downplay the following facts) is that:

• Alcohol is, by definition, a "poison" to homo sapiens, because our biology neither involves internally creating alcohol molecules, nor needing to get it from an external source (through consumption), to fulfill a legitimate biological function/process; the human body is not biologically designed to make any biologically-productive use of this chemical, and, more to the point, the human body is not adapted to quickly and efficiently neutralize this particular chemical to keep it from causing physical damage to certain types of cells--especially neurons and the various types of liver cells there are--before it can be filtered out and expelled.
• The human body has, by design, what is called by biologists, an "endocannabinoid system," which is directly involved in biochemical processes of inter-system communication between the central and peripheral nervous systems with other musculoskeletal systems and especially the immune system. Not only is the endocannabinoid system a critical component of the molecular messaging systems of the body that we inherently have by genetic design, our own bodies (and the bodies of certain other animal species) actually constantly create their own endocannabinoid molecules for use with the endocannabinoid receptor system.
• Cannabis sativa and cannabis indica species are around today, and so effective at creating large quantities of phytocannabinoid molecules because humans carefully bred and cultivated cannabis for several thousand years to enhance the plant's hardiness against disease and pests, and to increase its cannabinoid output (in the U.S. up until the late 1930's with the marijuana/hemp tax stamp act, which was a ploy by government officials with corrupt personal socioeconomic motivations, under the public guise of just being a new tax, to actually ban it outright because not one, single stamp was ever issued by the government).
• The use of the word "marijuana," instead of using its scientifically-catalogued genus name, "cannabis," was popularized back then to serve a derogatory purpose, clearly because of the racial stigma the non-English word invoked towards another targeted minority (latinos), in concert with the "reefer madness" campaign against African-Americans, to affect a public backlash based on irrational fear towards the plant because it threatened the financial interests of powerful whites invested in the pharmaceutical, timber (because hemp, cannabis' "cousin," is the strongest naturally occurring fiber on Earth*), and other industries threatened by this natural plant they couldn't control the market for and make money off of (certainly nowhere near the amount of money they stood to lose with a plant that was greatly superior to products offered by the aforementioned industries and could be cheaply grown by anybody, anywhere). *(Besides hemp making vastly superior rope and other textiles, the first two copies of the Declaration of Independence were written on hemp paper, which is why after nearly 240 years they are in such excellent condition; if it had been written on wood pulp-based paper, it would have disintegrated long ago.)
• Decades of scientific studies, mostly done in Israel and European countries because of cannabis' designation under the U.S. Controlled Substances Act as "Schedule I"--despite cannabis not meeting the law's own legal criteria for that category, the fact lawmakers claimed the scheduling decision for cannabis was supposed to be temporary (to allow time for additional research to assist placement in the proper Schedule, such as III or IV), and Nixon rejecting the findings of his own appointed commission (the "Schafer Commission") appointed to conduct a rational review of cannabis that found cannabis to be relatively harmless and that it should not be criminalized--conveniently prohibits possession by any person or institution even for the sole, legitimate purposes of medical and scientific study), have consistently proven that:

1. it is literally, physically impossible to overdose on cannabinoids because they only interact with the endocannabinoid system which has a finite number of receptor/binding sites; every death ever recorded in which a person had consumed cannabis involved consumption of an additional substance you can OD on, like alcohol, heroin, cocaine, and, yes, even caffeine (caffeine ODs have made news lately because it is now being sold in a pure, powder form). Every scientific study done on animals to test cannabis' capacity to kill, has never succeeded in killing even one of its test subjects (except in the intentionally "fixed" study done in which the monkeys were asphyxiated because the researchers did not provide any oxygen into the masks attached to the subjects' faces).
2. the only scientifically documented bodily harm associated with cannabis involves smoking it (which, like cigarette smoking, involves literally burning the plant-matter at very high temperatures, creating aerosolized tar and thousands of byproduct chemicals, many of which are carcinogens); all scientific studies done on inhaling cannabinoids through the use of a vaporizer (in which "hot" air at much lower temperatures pass through the plant-matter, aerosolizing the cannabinoid molecules without inducing any combustion) have consistently shown no presence of tar or carcinogenic compounds in the vapor inhaled. There is also no biological damage caused by consuming cannabinoids orally in any of the many edible formulations there are.
3. the only negative psycho-neurological impact that has been scientifically documented on cannabis, is with extensive, prolonged use in a child, whose brain is still developing new neural networks. The myth that the "stoner effect" on intelligence lingers for years or forever, even after cessation of use, has been disproven time and time again.
4. you can not become "addicted" to cannabis, as that word is defined in professional literature, for two reasons: a) cannabis does not interact with the dopamine system in the brain (commonly referred to as the "reward system," although it serves various other purposes as well), as drugs like meth, heroin, cocaine, alcohol, caffeine, opiates, barbiturates, and half a dozen or more byproduct chemicals of tobacco combustion do; b) your body creates endocannabinoid molecules all the time anyway--its a "natural substance" always present in your body--thus, you cannot develop what is technically referred to as "physiological dependence." Can it become habit-forming because you like the euphoria, immense pain-relief, enhanced creative/open-ended cognition and sensory sensitivity, and other effects it has on you? Yes. Does your body develop a physiological need to continue consuming cannabinoids, like alcoholics, heroin addicts, caffeine junkies, or tobacco smokers develop, in which cessation actually causes a severe biochemical deficit? No. No one who only consumes a significant amount of cannabis, and nothing else, ever experiences a "hangover" or withdrawal effect, for the reasons heretofore stated.

• Do people do stupid and potentially dangerous things when "high?" Yes, as is true of most drug users, the mentally ill, and many perfectly sane, sober folks who just make bad decisions to try and satisfy a psychological motivation. Are cannabis users statistically as likely to do something stupid as, say, a drinker of alcohol? No, not even close--I welcome you looking up the stats yourselves. Do cannabis users get angry, aggressive, hostile, and have complete impairment of instinctual judgement like so many people do when they get drunk? No. They may just get temporarily lazy, hungry, lost in deep thought, and become "too" passive.
• Has legalization statistically increased minors' access to cannabis? No. Why? Because the vast majority of minors still choose to get their cannabis through the black market, because it is cheaper (because of being of generally lower quality and not being taxed), and the quantitative total demand minors have had for cannabis was already being fully met by the black market prior to legalization.
• The idea that cannabis is a "gateway drug" has been firmly discounted by recent studies. It is genetic predisposition and negative environmental influences that drive a person's desire to use "harder" drugs.
• The government has a real, bona-fide patent, Patent 6630507, entitled “Cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants.” Not only does cannabis provide these benefits, which has major implications for improving general health and slowing the progression of Multiple Sclerosis and other neurological diseases, it has a very pronounced anti-inflammatory effect, both generally and on overactive immune systems that are responsible for such diseases as lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, crohn's disease, fibromyalgia, and countless others caused by a dysfunctional or hyperactive immune system.
• The National Cancer Institute, a sub-department of the federal U.S. National Institutes of Health — before it was promptly gagged two days later — reported on their website a research finding that, “the health care provider may recommend medicinal Cannabis not only for symptom management but also for its possible direct antitumor effect.” As an official agency they are cautious in how they word things, by habit, but an official government agency that specializes in cancer research would never even mention such a 'possibility' if there wasn't significant evidence already documented of this likely being the case.
• There are many other diseases for which concrete evidence is surfacing supporting the idea that (because the endocannabinoid system plays such a vital role in inter-system communication and in interacting with the immune system) cannabis use directly slows the progression or even reverses the progression of certain diseases, not that cannabis only can alleviate many of the symptoms of those diseases.

DISCLAIMER: I do not use cannabis at all (nor alcohol), and have not used it once in three years. Why did I previously use cannabis and do such thorough research on it (which required extra effort to find unbiased sources)? Because after my 16-month army combat deployment was over, I came home with a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and PTSD, which developed into also having Major Depressive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and Social Anxiety Disorder, but I eventually ran into an article talking about how a research institution was trying to get government permission to conduct a study to see what benefit cannabis may have for veterans suffering from PTSD. That peaked my curiosity, and only after deep, extensive research did I decide to take advantage of WA and OR states' "medical marijuana" programs (which was before recreational legalization took place). I can't put into words how important it was to my recovery from the mental torment I had been living with every minute of every day. The editor of a widely-circulating NW publication did a cover story on my very real, life-saving experience with medicinal cannabis use.

Do I think cannabis should be legal for recreational use even though I personally choose not to use it now? Yes. Why? Because ultimately you can't stop people from doing what they want to do; all you can do is force it underground (black markets, "behind closed doors") by making it illegal, thus making it impossible to regulate and allowing all the money to flow into the hands of organized crime syndicates and violent cartels, instead of keeping the money in the legitimate economy and adding to government coffers to pay for social programs that can help the mentally ill and those suffering from real addictions, among other societal responsibilities we collectively have to each other.

If you want proof that the unwinnable "drug war" is not helping but only deepening social strife and societal dysfunction, look no further than our prison-industrial complex which makes some very wealthy (the U.S. houses 25% of all inmates incarcerated in the entire world), and the failed State of Mexico, whose collapse is almost entirely funded by black market drug money flowing in from the U.S. If you want proof that decriminalizing ALL drugs and taking all of the billions spent on a war on our own people and locking up countless millions in glorified dog-kennels that perpetuate dehumanization and "hardening" of criminals, but instead redirecting all of that money and effort into social programs that support rehabilitation, economic opportunity/independence, and a dramatic decline in drug abuse, look no further than Portugal and other European countries that have followed their lead.

Dichotomy, Unity, and Balance in Nature and Life

//With Respect to the Overall Nature of Existence//
All that exists is inherently a dipolar spectrum that is both "One" and simultaneously "All."  It is "One" because everything that exists, exists relative to something else, and everything is interconnected with everything else, thus constituting an undivided whole.  Because this undivided spectrum provides for infinite degree between its two opposite "poles" (has no division of 'intervals' along it), it is what is necessary for "All" things to have relative distinction from all other things.  For anything to exist it must exist within a construct that provides the "contrast" necessary for any thing's attributes to be mathematically or physically definable; the dipolar spectrum in our universe provides this contrast, which in turn provides the capacity of things to have different attributes and relative relations to everything else.

So prolific and apparent is the dipolar nature of existence, a large group of people formulated the belief system called "Taoism" in which 'all is One whole' yet has internal distinctions ("Yin & Yang") simultaneously.  I will provide you with several examples of Yin & Yang features of nature that you are already naturally familiar with: light vs. darkness, order vs. chaos, hot vs. cold, larger scales of space vs. smaller scales of space, past vs. future, mass vs. no mass, higher energy state vs. lower energy state, stronger gravity/acceleration vs. weaker gravity/acceleration, moving closer together vs. moving away from each other, "good" vs. "evil", life (animate) vs. death (inanimate), et cetera.  Everything that exists has defining attributes, each of which lie somewhere along and within this dipolar spectrum geometry, whether the attributes being observed are being observed quantitatively (objectively) or qualitatively (subjectively; e.g. based on values and morals, or other form of personal perspective).  It is important to reiterate that even though different things or areas within different space-time locations have these relative distinctions from everything else, due to the fact nothing exists separate from all else and that all things are completely interconnected through space-time, quantum probability waveform, and the continuous field of matter-energy content (a.k.a. a 'state' information waveform), there are no distinct thresholds that separate one thing or area of space-time from another; thus, "All is One" by definition.  A perfect example of this whole concept is a "fractal," which is infinite in its scalability, has internal distinctions, yet is "One" mathematically-defined construct.


//With Respect to Human Life//
Forgive me if this seems obvious to some of you, but many people seem to seldom actively consider balance in their life, and, largely for this reason, happiness is elusive for them.  I would argue that being happy is as dependent on having balance in your life as it is on having the basic necessities of life.  Consider a few examples of the dichotomies that exist for humans in their life: time alone vs. time with friends and family, free time vs. productive time, strict parenting vs. lenient parenting, trusting others completely vs. protecting yourself by being paranoid/suspicious, taking care of others at the expense of self vs. devoting yourself to taking care of yourself so much it is at the expense of others, eating too many sweets vs. not enjoying any, explaining the world through logic and mathematics vs. grasping for meaning or purpose through subjective experiences that are beyond the power of reasoning to explain, worrying too much about appearance vs. not taking care of yourself, living up to others' expectations vs. acting solely based on what you believe is right and appropriate, being naive vs. being judgmental, living a very sheltered life vs. constantly exposing yourself to situations with high risk to the point you must struggle to stay alive, always accepting the beliefs of others vs. only valuing your own, et cetera.

I have come to instinctively recognize such dichotomies almost every day of my life for many, many years.  Indeed, the duality of the human experience is so frequently apparent to me that I perceive it as being as much a 'law of nature' as gravity.  A person who finds or puts themselves too far one way or the other with respect to any aspect of life defined by a dichotomous nature ultimately suffers.  Achieving balance is about achieving relative harmony in your life.  In the past, I personally did not have balance in my life in many areas, and I suffered continuously because of it—happiness was elusive for me because of that lack of balance and, thus, harmony.

One would think that awareness of this duality in every aspect of our lives would be enough to guide our decisions towards establishing harmony for ourselves.  Yet, it is one of humanity's greatest flaws that we constantly struggle with our own selves in trying to follow the "better" path (if we are fortunate enough to recognize it) because of our instinctive impulses, other engrained behaviors, and having to balance our efforts in achieving balance in our own life with helping achieve balance within our society, which often naturally conflict with one another.  We often find some excuse, some weak justification, for not taking the path we know deep down, almost subconsciously, to be more beneficial to us and/or society.  Why?  Is it possible that part of the reason is that we define our existence to some extent through our suffering—that we need suffering as much as happiness to feel alive?  Or do we simply not always have the courage to move beyond the status quo?  Unfortunately, although I have a great deal of objective knowledge and subjective experience on this topic, I have not come to a complete conclusion about such matters.  Maybe the "answer" is inherently different for everyone.  What's yours?

Wisdom Concerning the 'Self' (from Some of Humanity’s Greatest Minds)

[The following quote's are some of the ones that were compiled by Maria Popova in her article on brainpickings.org :]

Mindfulness in the Present Moment
"I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to Society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is — I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?" — Henry David Thoreau ('Walking' - 1861)


"On the Shortness of Life" by Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC – AD 65)
"It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it."

[…]

"You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply — though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire… How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!"

[…]

"Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately."


Knowing Who You Are
"There is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out."

[…]

"We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that 'I myself' is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body — a center which 'confronts' an 'external' world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. 'I came into this world.' 'You must face reality.' 'The conquest of nature.'

This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not 'come into' this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated “egos” inside bags of skin." — Alan Watts ('The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are' - 1966)


The 'Fixed Mindset' vs. the 'Growth Mindset'
"Believing that your qualities are carved in stone — the fixed mindset — creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character — well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.

[…]

"There’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way — in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments — everyone can change and grow through application and experience.

Do people with this mindset believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training." — Carol Dweck ('Mindset: The New Psychology of Success' - 2006)


Never Cease to Ask Questions and Pursue Answers About the Unknown
"By posing the unanswerable questions of meaning, men establish themselves as question-asking beings. Behind all the cognitive questions for which men find answers, there lurk the unanswerable ones that seem entirely idle and have always been denounced as such. It is more than likely that men, if they were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions, would lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded…

While our thirst for knowledge may be unquenchable because of the immensity of the unknown, the activity itself leaves behind a growing treasure of knowledge that is retained and kept in store by every civilization as part and parcel of its world. The loss of this accumulation and of the technical expertise required to conserve and increase it inevitably spells the end of this particular world." — Hannah Arendt ('The Life of the Mind' - 1978)


On 'Perfectionism'
"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.

[…]

Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here — and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing." — Anne Lamott ('Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life' - 1995)


On Evaluating the Validity and Usefulness of a New Idea
"The kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration. If the new idea survives examination by the tools in our kit, we grant it warm, although tentative, acceptance. If you’re so inclined, if you don’t want to buy baloney even when it’s reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken; there’s a tried-and-true, consumer-tested method."

[…]

"1. Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
2. Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
3. Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
4. Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
5. Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
6. Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.
7. If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
8. Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.
9. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result." — Carl Sagan (' The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark' - 1996)


Get Lost to Find Yourself
"Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I copied it down, and it has stayed with me since. The student made big transparent photographs of swimmers underwater and hung them from the ceiling with the light shining through them, so that to walk among them was to have the shadows of swimmers travel across your body in a space that itself came to seem aquatic and mysterious. The question she carried struck me as the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?"

[…]

"How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us."

[…]

"To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography. That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost." — Rebecca Solnit ('A Field Guide to Getting Lost' - 2005)


Be Like Water
"After spending many hours meditating and practicing, I gave up and went sailing alone in a junk. On the sea I thought of all my past training and got mad at myself and punched the water! Right then — at that moment — a thought suddenly struck me; was not this water the very essence of gung fu? Hadn’t this water just now illustrated to me the principle of gung fu? I struck it but it did not suffer hurt. Again I struck it with all of my might — yet it was not wounded! I then tried to grasp a handful of it but this proved impossible. This water, the softest substance in the world, which could be contained in the smallest jar, only seemed weak. In reality, it could penetrate the hardest substance in the world. That was it! I wanted to be like the nature of water.

Suddenly a bird flew by and cast its reflection on the water. Right then I was absorbing myself with the lesson of the water, another mystic sense of hidden meaning revealed itself to me; should not the thoughts and emotions I had when in front of an opponent pass like the reflection of the birds flying over the water? This was exactly what Professor Yip meant by being detached — not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling was not sticky or blocked. Therefore in order to control myself I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature."

[…]

"Water is so fine that it is impossible to grasp a handful of it; strike it, yet it does not suffer hurt; stab it, and it is not wounded; sever it, yet it is not divided. It has no shape of its own but molds itself to the receptacle that contains it. When heated to the state of steam it is invisible but has enough power to split the earth itself. When frozen it crystallizes into a mighty rock. First it is turbulent like Niagara Falls, and then calm like a still pond, fearful like a torrent, and refreshing like a spring on a hot summer’s day." — Bruce Lee ('Bruce Lee: Artist of Life' - 1999)


Making 'Good' Out of 'Evils'
"Throughout our nervous history, we have constructed pyramidic towers of evil, ofttimes in the name of good. Our greed, fear and lasciviousness have enabled us to murder our poets, who are ourselves, to castigate our priests, who are ourselves. The lists of our subversions of the good stretch from before recorded history to this moment. We drop our eyes at the mention of the bloody, torturous Inquisition. Our shoulders sag at the thoughts of African slaves lying spoon-­fashion in the filthy hatches of slave-ships, and the subsequent auction blocks upon which were built great fortunes in our country. We turn our heads in bitter shame at the remembrance of Dachau and the other gas ovens, where millions of ourselves were murdered by millions of ourselves. As soon as we are reminded of our actions, more often than not we spend incredible energy trying to forget what we’ve just been reminded of."

[…]

"To show you … how out of evil there can come good, in those five years I read every book in the black school library. I read all the books I could get from the white school library. I memorized James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. I memorized Shakespeare, whole plays, fifty sonnets. I memorized Edgar Allen Poe, all the poetry — never having heard it, I memorized it. I had Longfellow, I had Guy de Maupassant, I had Balzac, Rudyard Kipling — I mean, it was catholic kind of reading, and catholic kind of storing."

[…]

"Out of this evil, which was a dire kind of evil, because rape on the body of a young person more often than not introduces cynicism, and there is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. In my case I was saved in that muteness… And I was able to draw from human thought, human disappointments and triumphs, enough to triumph myself."

[…]

"We need the courage to create ourselves daily, to be bodacious enough to create ourselves daily — as Christians, as Jews, as Muslims, as thinking, caring, laughing, loving human beings. I think that the courage to confront evil and turn it by dint of will into something applicable to the development of our evolution, individually and collectively, is exciting, honorable." — Maya Angelou (Documentary: 'Facing Evil with Maya Angelou' - 1988)


Living by Your Own Standards (the Basis for 'Happiness')
"Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively. After a short time, a very short time, there would be little that one really enjoyed. For what keeps our interest in life and makes us look forward to tomorrow is giving pleasure to other people."

[…]

"Someone once asked me what I regarded as the three most important requirements for happiness. My answer was: ‘A feeling that you have been honest with yourself and those around you; a feeling that you have done the best you could both in your personal life and in your work; and the ability to love others.’"

[…]

"It’s your life — but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else or a community or a pressure group, you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being." — Eleanor Roosevelt ('You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life' - 1960)

Homosexual Equality (the Lessons of History & Clarifying the Concepts of "Marriage")

[Originally Posted 9/24/09; edited and expanded 1/10/15]

Despite being 100% heterosexual, I find choosing to support homosexuals having equality of social status, as well as rights and protections provided under the rule of law, in amazingly simple decision to reach given the constitution and lessons provided by history.  I realize large social changes take time, but how can so many of us still be so blind to the lessons of the past?  It wasn't so long ago in the annals of world history that the majority of men struggled vehemently to deny women equal rights to own property and participate in the voting process of democracies.  Not so long ago the majority of whites in this country so passionately fought, either through force or active bigotry, to deny blacks genuinely-equal social status and legal rights.  And now, our society once again finds itself socially polarized, this time on the topic of homosexual equality.  Well, let us be honest with ourselves.  As past generations had their social revolutions, this generation is, too, experiencing a social revolution, and I would argue success in overthrowing the current social status-quo with regards to granting homosexuals equal social status and legal rights is as every bit as inevitable as the successes hard fought for by blacks and women over the last couple hundred years.

I was told a story recently about a black man who was obliviously broadcasting his side of a cellphone conversation about homosexuals to a small crowd sitting nearby him.  Needless to say, his opinion of homosexuals was passionate, egregiously unfavorable, and, quite simply, astoundingly hypocritical.  Past generations of this man's family, as recently as his parents undoubtedly, poured their blood, sweet, and tears into fighting and struggling against that very same prejudicial attitude towards blacks—simply because they were "different" in some relatively benign way compared to the majority.  Nevertheless, there he was, as blind to the absurdity of his irrational attitudes towards homosexuals as whites' attitudes had been towards his ancestors.  It just goes to show that personal self-awareness and rational reasoning can be absent in anyone, even someone whose heritage should have made him realize what a hypocrite he was being that day.

We all must always be on guard against and actively fight against prejudice and hatred, especially within ourselves.  We each harbor a degree of stereotypical thought processes in our daily lives, usually without being consciously aware of its subconscious influence on our thinking and behavior, and occasionally have what would be deemed by our own self to be 'undesirable' emotional responses to certain circumstances we encounter.  To provide a relatively clear-cut example: if you were a middle- or upper-class white, who genuinely believes they do not have a racist "bone in their body" thanks to a non-racist upbringing, walking through your nice, mostly-white family suburban neighborhood at dusk and see a young African-American male heading towards you on the sidewalk wearing a hoodie that hides all but part of his face and sagging, baggy jeans, there is a really good chance you are going to have an instinctually negative emotional reaction upon first recognition of those circumstances, such as a degree of anxiety, even though your conscious belief system reminds you seconds later that you should not judge that person and their potential threat to you based on a stereotype; despite this rational reminder you may continue to feel tense until you pass him without incident.  This example was constructed to maximize the understanding of the general concepts, but countless, less clear-cut real life examples exist in practically everyone's daily life in which the brain is naturally, inherently, constantly interpreting and evaluating the things in its environment at a subconscious level, using probability as its guide in prioritizing how it evaluates what things should receive what percentage of the finite resource of one's attentive awareness at that moment, and judges what the safest instinctual interpretations of the things going on in that person's environment are.  Because of the way the brain automatically processes information about its environment based on probabilities, which are determined by patterns recognized in past life experiences and engrained "background information"/knowledge, stereotypes we know about, whether we consciously object to stereotyping or not, factor into how the brain instinctively reacts to its environment.  To a large extent, instinctual responses are unavoidable at the moment they occur, and can only be overridden through conscious evaluation of a given situation using good reasoning.  Thus, the path towards social prosperity and harmony, which benefits us all in the end, must begin with a thorough, objective self-evaluation of the quality of one's own rational and moral reasoning and knowledge-base which forms one's established worldview, belief systems, and values.

We need to recognize that marriage under the law and marriage 'under God' need not, and should not, be considered one and the same thing in this debate.  I myself was legally married in a court of law to my wife almost five years before we married through the church.  The argument by the majority of religious people, who improperly entwine the concepts of legal marriage with "spiritual" marriage, and, in so doing, believe that allowing such legal marriages some how sullies the 'sanctity of marriage' ("sanctity" being a term that, by definition, can only be associated with religious marriage 'under God'), that legal marriage should be prohibited for homosexuals, despite the fact that our constitution specifies the necessity of recognizing a 'separation of church and state,' is simply untenable.  Measuring how sanctimonious a marriage is has everything to do with how faithful, loving, and selfless the behavior of the two partners towards one another is, and has nothing to do with what is in their underwear—in similar fashion to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s belief that a person should not be judged based on the color of their skin, but "by the content of their character."  There is no doubt in my mind that there are countless homosexual couples whose behavior is far more laudable than many heterosexual couples.  Let us leave the religious side of the debate to the religious establishments and stop letting conservative religious arguments unconstitutionally influence our government from obeying its own constitutionally established protections.  The 14th Amendment to the Constitution states, "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."  This constitutional amendment did not happen by accident.  It was one of the most consequential and direct results of the Civil War and the overall social struggle to restore the human dignity of, and establish legal rights and protections for, blacks.  It will take time but it is certain that the 14th Amendment, and the same kind of revolutionary social attitude that gave birth to it that exists today, will earn homosexuals equal social status and protection under the law across this country in the years to come.

[The prediction I made nearly five and half years ago, when I first published this post, concerning the social progress that would occur to provide for equal social status and application of law for homosexuals turned out to be correct, though the good fight against prejudice continues....]

Press Release & Background Info. on My Album

First: a mass, global press release for my music album and my record label has been published to over 500+ media and industry outlets, as well as the blogger-sphere and social media which you can check out here!

Second:
[Transcript from my Kickstarter project video presentation.]

"Hello Everyone!

My name is Matthew Morgan, though I usually go by Matt, and I am a 30 year old partially-disabled army combat veteran who is currently nearing completion of my college degree.  There is a major abundance of detailed information about me on my Kickstarter project page (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wisefromwithin/wise-trip-eptm-album-completion) and especially my blog pages, so I won't bother covering all of that here....

On the internet and when referred to as a music producer I go by the alias "WiseFromWithin."  This alias is simply a reminder to myself and others that true wisdom concerning anything (even right down to the very nature of existence itself) must be rooted and developed forth, first, from a genuine and deep understanding of 'thyself.'

I am seeking your support in investing in the completion of what is my debut album as a music producer, called Wise 'Trip' EP, which is currently in the "demo" stage.  There is plenty of detail about my project on the project's pages, including where to go to listen to all of the songs, but I'll give you some background information on the concepts and meaning behind the album itself and a couple of the songs--information that you will not find anywhere else.

Both in the album's title and the 1st track's title, Destiny 'Trip,' the word "trip" has a double meaning, which is why it is in single quotes.  It both means a trip, as in a journey, and also a "trip," as in a mental high that the music is intended to induce in the listener.  The album concept is to explore the different, important aspects of human life through the use of music that serves as accurate metaphors for conveying those ideas in a way that is more emotionally engaging, more intuitively understandable, and more enveloping of consciousness for the listener, than could be achieved through words.

Destiny 'Trip' is a song that does not follow a standard musical song structure, as most of the songs on the album do not.  Destiny 'Trip' is structured musically to be a metaphor for the human lifespan, with each of its stages represented in the proper, relative proportions.  It begins with early childhood (which is the piano intro).  It suddenly builds up, transitioning with a crescendo into the song section representing the phase of later childhood and adolescence.

The point in the song where  there is only a duet of intertwining countermelodies, represents the transition in a person's life between adolescence and adulthood--a time when they retain their excitement for life, but, as a person, feel considerable uncertainty about who they are, what direction their life should head in, and also is the time when the person often feels alone in terms of not being able to understand their destiny through what advice others have to offer them--only they, them self, can figure all of that out use their intellectual conflict plays itself out (represented by the two countermelodies).  When the rest of the music reenters, the person is a young adult, still filled with a sense of discovery and excitement about the world around them and how they are just beginning to understand how they fit in to it all.

When the song reaches the point where it modulates to a new key, speeds up, and is beginning to fill with even more energy--this represents the stage in a person's life when, who they are as a person, is stabilizing and settling into an identity the person at least partially understands.  At the same time, the person finally has some degree of grasp on what meaning and purpose they want their life to have--in other words, what their destiny is; and they move forward with the next phase of their life that roughly spans between their late 20's and late 50's (the phase in one's life that begins musically at the point in the song when the "bridge" transition ends with the energetic drums entering and landing in the next section of the song).

At this point in a person's life, they are fairly confident in themselves and what they want out of life, and they also are applying--through their actions, not just their words--the values and ideals they identify with in most everything they do.  The heightened energy and slight swagger of the music in this section intends to represent these ideas.

Finally, in the music (with the moderately loud atmospheric splash and instant drop in tempo), as in a person's life, a point of "old age" is reached, where everything seems to suddenly slow down while the person still retains a sense of dignity and identity that they had during the previous phase of their life.  As the song ends, like the end of one's life, their is a last moment of uplifting melody--the last beats of the heart.  As the person's heart, and the music, sounds its final note and their breath slips away, so too does the music, gently and brightly fading into the rest of the universe....

The piano melody that can be heard repeating throughout the song is like a spiritual "marker" that uniquely identifies that particular person's consciousness, regardless of the countless changes it goes through throughout their life.  Destiny 'Trip' is, overall, positive in its portrayal of the human life, not to ignore the negative realities and experiences that exist in real life, but because the whole purpose of my music is to uplift and inspire the listener to make the most of their life in the most positively-minded way possible--in part by reminding them of the common experience all humans have in life and in death.  Keeping in mind that death as a part of life for us all helps a person realize that one day, all that will remain of them is their legacy--the memories others have of them and the influences they had on the world around them during their life, which will reverberate throughout all eternity.  Keeping this truth in mind motivates a person to make better, more positive choices in how they live their life and in how they interact with others and the world around them.

The last song I will explain here, to further show that every song on the album has a strong conceptual basis that drives each songs' theme and motifs, is "A Brief History of Memory."  Even though this is one of the songs I wish to expand on in terms of its length, the theme and motifs, which are already represented in the song, are based on the concept of a person, who could be anyone, and probably has been all of us at some point in our lives, who is quietly reflecting back on the memories of their life history.  The positive and negative emotions associated with each of those memories is heard in the harmonies of the first, quiet section of the piece.  As the song transitions into the second section, the music is composed to convey the sense of wonder, mystery, and uncertainty that that same person feels as they try to make sense of how those memories relate to their life in the present and how those memories should influence the way they move forward with their life in the future.

If you would like to learn similar background information on the other songs, you can be rewarded with a 30 or 60 minute phone conversation with me (among other incentives), depending on your donation amount.  Be sure to check out all of the incentives; they are all good rewards for your support, regardless of the amount you choose to donate.  The truth is, even the smallest investment on your part will make a big difference and will be greatly appreciated.

I sincerely thank you for your time and careful consideration.  I know there is a lot of information to digest about myself, my music, and my record label.  It's up to you how deep you want to go into the details of these things, but if you choose to dig deep, you won't be disappointed--I am an "open book" as they say, and that has a lot to do with the fact that I have always been a kind, loving, considerate person who is grateful for every achievement and contribution I have been able to make to benefit my fellow human brothers and sisters.  I offer you all my best wishes.  ONE LOVE..."

Insights from "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor E. Frankl

[Book Section 1 of 2: "Experiences in a Concentration Camp"]

-Book is an answer to: "How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?
-Concerned not with the main figures, but of the xp. of the unknown and unrecorded victims.
-Capos: prisoner leaders; fed decently; often more brutal to reg. prisoners than the SS; demoted if "ineffective".
-Stripped of identity; known by number; prisoner numbers, not qualities mattered.
-Moral/ethical debate nonexistent, only the instinct to survive; only the most cutthroat saved themselves at the expense of others.
-"These former prisoners often say, 'We dislike talking about our experiences. No explanations are needed for those who have been inside, and the others will understand neither how we felt then nor how we feel now.'"
-Three phases: initial period of admission (into camp), distinguished by shock; the period when well entrenched in camp routine; the period following release/liberation.
-"Delusion of reprieve": condemned man has the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute.
-Consequential decisions (even life-and-death) treated with no regard or seriousness by the decision-makers.
-Stripped of any connection to former life; only had 'naked' existence.
-A grim humor developed (only thing that could now be taken was their life); affords an aloofness and ability to rise above any situation.
-A curiosity over the fate to be befallen; a objective detachment as a means of protection.
-The thought of suicide was widely entertained due in part to the hopelessness of the situation.
-The fear of death subsides after the first few days.
-"An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior."
-Entering the second phase, a "phase of relative apathy in which he achieved a kind of emotional death," a self-defense mechanism characterized by blunted feelings, unmoved by the suffering around him.
-"It is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all," that "hurts the most."
-Insult is more rousing of indignation than the cruelty or pain itself.
-"Regression" occurred in camp inmates - a retreat to a more primitive form of mental life, characterized by very simple wishes and desires.
-How helpful is it to dwell on imaginings of good food when you've adapted to poor food (applies to other things as well), "for the sake of knowing that the sub-human existence which had made us unable to think of anything other than food, would at last cease"; more harmful than helpful?
-"...my body, is really a corpse already"; great mass of human flesh behind barbed wire, crowded into a few huts, which rots daily because it has become lifeless.
-When in an austere environment, seemingly small decisions about how to deal with circumstances end up having a profound impact on a person's mental state and willpower.
-"The truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. ...The salvation of man is through love and in love."
-"I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss.... In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment."
-"Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance."
-The prisoner finds refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence by escaping into the past, finding solace in nostalgic memories.
-An appreciation of the beauty of art and nature develops far more than ever before.
-Meaning is found in the smallest of significances.
-"...suffering completely fills (disperses through) the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little."
-In such difficult situations "a very trifling thing can cause the greatest of joys"; "grateful for the smallest of mercies".
-Comparisons of wellbeing and luck were strictly relative to the experience of the person making the comparisons.
-"Freedom from suffering" was the primary source of any relative 'happiness'.
-"Under the influence of a world which no longer recognized the value of human life and human dignity, which had robbed man of his will and had made him an object to be exterminated... under this influence the personal ego finally suffered a loss of values. If the man in the concentration camp did not struggle against this in a last effort to save his self-respect, he lost the feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind, with inner freedom and personal value."
-Resigned to fate, combined with a great apathy.
-Guilt at the idea of escaping the situation when all the others would not be able to.
-A continuous fluctuation between hope and despair in the last hours and days of captivity.
-"We all had once been or had fancied ourselves to be 'somebody.' Now we were treated like complete nonentities. ...Without consciously thinking about it, the average prisoner felt himself utterly degraded."
-"...everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
-"...there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision... which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate."
-"...in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally... any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him - mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity.... ...the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom - which cannot be taken away - that makes life meaningful and purposeful."
-"...there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces. ...not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete."
-"It was impossible to foresee whether or when, if at all, this form of existence would end. ...A man who could not see the end of his 'provisional existence' was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. He ceased living for the future...."
-"This feeling of lifelessness was intensified by other causes: in time, it was the limitlessness of the term of imprisonment which was most acutely felt; in space, the narrow limits of the prison. Anything outside the barbed wire became remote - out of reach and, in a way, unreal."
-"Regarding our 'provisional existence' as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life; everything in a way became pointless."
-"One could make a victory of those experiences turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate...."
-"Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it."
-"The prisoner who had lost faith in the future - his future - was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay."
-Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how."
-"We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life.... Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct."
-"He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden."
-"When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life."
-"Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being."
-"'Freedom' - we repeated to ourselves, and yet we could not grasp it. ...Its reality did not penetrate into our consciousness; we could not grasp the fact that freedom was ours. ...Everything appeared unreal, unlikely, as in a dream. We could not believe it was true."
-"...no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them."
-"A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering has no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and still more intensely."
-"We were not hoping for happiness.... And yet we were not prepared for unhappiness."
-"...for every one of the liberated prisoners, the day comes when, looking back on his camp experiences, he can no longer understand how he endured it all. As the day of his liberation eventually came, when everything seemed to him like a beautiful dream, so also the day comes when all his camp experiences seem to him nothing but a nightmare."

Some Perspective on "Knowledge"

//Excerpts from:
"On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"
("Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn") — Friedrich Nietzsche (1873)//

"Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened...

"The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence. For this pride contains within itself the most flattering estimation of the value of knowing. Deception is the most general effect of such pride, but even its most particular effects contain within themselves something of the same deceitful character...

"Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself — in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity — is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them. They are deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see 'forms.'

"...What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him — even concerning his own body — in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers!

"...The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real. He says, for example, "I am rich," when the proper designation for his condition would be "poor." He misuses fixed conventions by means of arbitrary substitutions or even reversals of names. If he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful manner, society will cease to trust him and will thereby exclude him. What men avoid by excluding the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means of fraud. Thus, even at this stage, what they hate is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception. It is in a similarly restricted sense that man now wants nothing but truth: he desires the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth. He is indifferent toward pure knowledge which has no consequences; toward those truths, which are possibly harmful and destructive, he is even hostilely inclined.

"...Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?

It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a "truth" of the grade just indicated. If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions.

"...The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The "thing in itself" (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors. To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one...

"We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things — metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities...

"Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases — which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.

"...We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us...

"What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins...

"We still do not yet know where the drive for truth comes from. For so far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries' old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth...

"The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone excludes. As a "rational" being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions...

"Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries — a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world...

"One may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders' webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind...

"As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself.

"...When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding "truth" within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare "look, a mammal' I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be "true in itself" or really and universally valid apart from man. At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man...

"Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency. If but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his "self consciousness" would be immediately destroyed. It is even a difficult thing for him to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does, and that the question of which of these perceptions of the world is the more correct one is quite meaningless, for this would have to have been decided previously in accordance with the criterion of the correct perception, which means, in accordance with a criterion which is not available...

"Between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation: I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue — for which there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force. "Appearance" is a word that contains many temptations, which is why I avoid it as much as possible. For it is not true that the essence of things "appears" in the empirical world. A painter without hands who wished to express in song the picture before his mind would, by means of this substitution of spheres, still reveal more about the essence of things than does the empirical world. Even the relationship of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is not a necessary one. But when the same image has been generated millions of times and has been handed down for many generations and finally appears on the same occasion every time for all mankind, then it acquires at last the same meaning for men it would have if it were the sole necessary image and if the relationship of the original nerve stimulus to the generated image were a strictly causal one. In the same manner, an eternally repeated dream would certainly be felt and judged to be reality. But the hardening and congealing of a metaphor guarantees absolutely nothing concerning its necessity and exclusive justification...

"If each of us had a different kind of sense perception — if we could only perceive things now as a bird, now as a worm, now as a plant, or if one of us saw a stimulus as red, another as blue, while a third even heard the same stimulus as a sound — then no one would speak of such a regularity of nature, rather, nature would be grasped only as a creation which is subjective in the highest degree. After all, what is a law of nature as such for us? We are not acquainted with it in itself, but only with its effects, which means in its relation to other laws of nature — which, in turn, are known to us only as sums of relations. Therefore all these relations always refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their essence...

"We produce these representations in and from ourselves with the same necessity with which the spider spins. If we are forced to comprehend all things only under these forms, then it ceases to be amazing that in all things we actually comprehend nothing but these forms. For they must all bear within themselves the laws of number, and it is precisely number which is most astonishing in things. All that conformity to law, which impresses us so much in the movement of the stars and in chemical processes, coincides at bottom with those properties which we bring to things. Thus it is we who impress ourselves in this way."