The Inner Journey

Who are we, where do we come from, and what does it mean to be here?

By no means a specific field of study, I'm using the terms inner journey in reference to an individuated human organism's direct and honest experience of immediate sensory reality. This includes the signification that the individual imparts to the experience at hand. The working thesis involved here is that a gross majority of people have decided not to take the inner journey by their own accord and wit, and have rather whole-heartedly accepted a prefabricated worldview in substitution for their unique creative interpretation of reality that is our inherent natural right. I take this to mean that we are each able, if not existentially required, to make the inner journey of our own determination, defining the parameters of our own fundamentally unique experiential matrix.

We barely remember who or what came before this precious moment,
We are choosing to be here right now. Hold on, stay inside
This holy reality, this holy experience.
Choosing to be here in

This body. This body holding me. Be my reminder here that I am not alone in
This body, this body holding me, feeling eternal
All this pain is an illusion.

- Tool, Parabola

We live in a horrifyingly beautiful manifold world, full of different kinds of experiences, no two exactly alike. We communicate things in different ways to attempt an adequate approximation of what that experience feels like to anyone who will listen.

To accept anything (information, perspectives, world-views) willy-nilly, without scrupulous comparison to one's directly perceived experience of life, leads us to constant states of bewilderment, unaware of our connection to the general living matrix of which each of us are an essential piece. As a chosen form of operating in reality, Jean-Paul Sartre called this manner bad faith: a will-full acceptance of known falsehood in order to 'save face,' or 'go with the flow,' as it were. Much of this falsehood, however, is tacitly imposed through constructs of language and ingrained societal limitations of emotional imagination. It is my wish, here, to communicate my perspective on what I take to be an essentially human conundrum, with solutions readily available for all; and although i can't take anyone else's inner journey for them, I may be able to offer suggestions that help people along their own paths, as so many artists, authors, scholars, and scientists have helped me on mine.

This is all I wish to accomplish by communication. Having no special access to truth, all I offer is my honest and creative interpretation of what the unfoldment of my reality means to me. When applicable, I'll provide external context and reference to substantiate actual claims; otherwise, everything presented is my take on life and that alone. Neither am I, or should you, be committed to anything other than this: my (your) honest and creative interpretation of what the unfoldment of my reality means to me (you). That is the only imperative statement I wish to make.

Science, religion, history, politics, media, etc., are taken here as information to be processed, and not perspectives to inform the unfoldment of my reality. Information is necessarily neutral, even the perspectives by which information is generally delivered, be they slanted as much as they are. Offered as belief systems to be held as venerated dogma, information as reality construct is imposed as regular reality to any and all who wish to accept as such. Only when people wholly accept one particular way of interpreting information does the inner journey become occluded. As the sagely Terrence McKenna once put it, “when you believe in one thing it automatically procludes you from believing its' opposite.”

This bad faith, not engaging the inner journey, is most typically manifest in an attitude of being satisfied with the belief systems offered by status quo reality. That is, one feels there's no fault with the fundamentally malicious and unsustainable global reality construct that we are all constantly creating and perpetuating. The inner journey can best be characterized by an internal comparison of one's own emotional life in relation to the unfolding global situation we find ourselves in. Examining how and one feels certain ways towards this idea or that, we may come to realize that the experience of reality is primarily an emotional relation. As the emotions are the functional nexus of soma and psyche, honestly regarding one's bodily sensations and idea structures, social life as an emotional milieu becomes more lucidly interpretable.

“Truth means full contact with oneself as well as well as with the environment. Truth means knowing one's own ways as distinct from the ways of others.” - Wilhelm Reich

Analysis of one's use of language might also be a revealing study, insofar as each have their own unique vocal apparatus, life experience, and general temperament, but for the most part operate within a strictly refined political correctness that I prefer to call living with mutilated language. As no moment is identical to another, we find ourselves in novel situations all the time but are using the same old worn out metaphors to describe them.

Over thinking, over analyzing separates the body from the mind.
Withering my intuition, missing opportunities and I must
Feed my will to feel my moment drawing way outside the lines.

Black then white are all I see in my infancy.
red and yellow then came to be, reaching out to me.
lets me see there is so much more
and beckons me to look through to these infinite possibilities.
As below, so above and beyond, I imagine
drawn outside the lines of reason.
Push the envelope. Watch it bend.

Over thinking, over analyzing separates the body from the mind.
Withering my intuition leaving all these opportunities behind.

Feed my will to feel this moment urging me to cross the line.
Reaching out to embrace the random.
Reaching out to embrace whatever may come.

I embrace my desire to
feel the rhythm, to feel connected
enough to step aside and weep like a widow
to feel inspired, to fathom the power,
to witness the beauty, to bathe in the fountain,
to swing on the spiral
of our divinity and still be a human.

With my feet upon the ground I lose myself
between the sounds and open wide to suck it in,
I feel it move across my skin.
I'm reaching up and reaching out,
I'm reaching for the random or what ever will bewilder me.
And following our will and wind we may just go where no one's been.
We'll ride the spiral to the end and may just go where no one's been.

Spiral out. Keep going, going...

• Tool, Lateralus

Some choose to live comfortably within the proscribed 'reality tunnels,' a la Robert Anton Wilson, while other neophilic types will seek, incessantly, new ways of looking at the world. The language people use to describe their experience, I think, relate directly to the emotional constitution of their temperament, and often times telling of where people are at in their inner journey. And by no means do I wish to imply that anyone has even the capacity to, let alone ability, to comprehend the totality of another human experience; just that some are much more easily read by their language when their words can be accurately correlated with the categorized ideological perspectives that are expressed through their ideas.

In contrast, people who have taken the inner journey for themselves have a varied and creative use of language beyond the simple interpretation of television language, to be derisive. I propose, then, that the inner journey is only approachable having an absolute commitment to avoiding absolutist beliefs, a commitment to living according to life, pulsating with infinite evolutionary potentials. Insofar as beliefs are an operatively functional transactional language to accomplish intended tasks, as in, 'I believe if I do x, y will occur,' they are wholly important and necessary aspect of human reality; however, if beliefs are whole-heartedly accepted as world-view, people's abilities to use them as mechanisms to accomplish specific tasks becomes occluded by those ideological filtration devices. Those beliefs are then used as clubs for clobbering everyone around the believer. Beliefs work towards achieving our 'desired' goals or prevent us from realizing our true goals.

“All truth as a way of living requires an opportunity to express itself freely. It will then grow by its own devices.” - Wilhelm Reich

I am, after many years of intense self-reflection, very confident in asserting that I have at least begun my inner journey. This project will never finish, save for the expiration of my biological vessel. I only say biological as a matter of linguistic convenience, as that study can in no way provide an adequate representation of the human condition, even though it's an essential perspective as physics, chemistry, sociology, and phrenology. All of these linguistic constructs are useful belief systems to advance the understanding of life but cannot be reduced to a homogeneous governing principle. I propose that the best solution to the (post-?) modern conundrum is that everyone begin an inner journey, well expressed by Wilhelm Reich in the following passage from The Murder of Christ:

"There is only one common rule valid in finding the special truth valid for you. That is to learn to listen patiently into yourself, to give yourself a chance to find your own way which is yours and nobody else's way. This leads not into chaos and wild anarchism but ultimately into the realm where the common truth for all is rooted. The ways of approach are manifold and none alike. The source from where the sap of truth is streaming is common to all living beings, far beyond the animal man. This must be so because mall truth is a function of living Life and living Life is basically the same in everything that moves by way of pulsation. Therefore, the basic truth in all teachings of mankind are alike and amount to only one common thing: To find your way to thing you feel when love dearly, or when you create, or when you build your home, or when you give birth to your children or when you look at the stars at night."

I try my best to develop my use language so that I can more adequately express my feelings about the world, by learning new perspectives, doing the research to evidence that way of thinking, and not being afraid to speak my mind, albeit in a more cautious and reserved matter in sensitive circumstances. A sincerely directed effort has been made in regards to answering the questions of 'who we are', 'where we come from', and 'what it means to be here,' and I wish to engage that dialogue. On the other hand, I feel like a seriously concerted effort toward preventing everyone from doing exactly that, the inner journey, is at play in the social reality of 'western' so-called civilization. Language is the general mechanism to relate emotions to social life, bodily sensations to idea structures, and ought be encouraged to develop accordingly, uniquely. The emphasis is heavily in the opposite direction, methinks, as pathological behaviour of so many perversions is considered the norm in 'civilized' society. Through directed social engineering, we've been pigeon-holed into a suicidal death pact with each other so long as we want to consider ourselves special unique snowflakes that deserve the adulation and fame awarded by money and 15 minutes on the television.

Unfortunately, this has spread to almost every part of the world as a ubiquitous ambition, and is far from changing any time soon. Even though there is a strong alternative community in certain regards, I can only wish for more of every community of people to find their own way and notice that it is not the citizenship of the world's political system that matters at all. It is in fact what is holding us all back. Instead, each one's own way if honestly assessed, I believe, would all be complimentary with one another. And that is my functional belief system which I operate towards exactly that end.