"Ha, Ha, Ha, Bless Your Soul...You Really Think You're in Control"

Just had an online converse with a nice chap who follows this blog and after wondered, 'why the fook would anyone follow this blog???'

Funny how life unfolds as it does...

Past experience has shaped the very contours of your brain and "you" go on as if none of that has ever happened, making decisions based on the excitatory and inhibitory electro-chemical impulses darting to and fro in your cranium but, as far as "you" are concerned, that's irrelevant to the decisions "you" make that arise from the fat between your ears.

I'm the boss of "me," gawd dammit!

Your entire life was sculpted to bring you right here, right now. Every experience drove you to the next experience, which influenced the next, on and on, wiring up your head fat to bring you here, today, to this moment right...now. In fact, without the 'happening' of a quadzillion historical precedents, "you" wouldn't even exist. But you do exist in your consciousness as a result of everything occurring exactly as it did over the last 4.543 billion years (none of which, I might add, did "you" have anything to do with in relation to how all that shite happened as it did and could not have happened in any other way than as it did)

You can't be anywhere else then where you are right now, because if you could be somewhere else right now, you would be there and nowhere else, especially not here.

I know, I know...(sigh)... it's a fooking suxs that you're here,  right now, reading this stoopid drivel, while you could be doing something important. But here you are, nonetheless.

But whadefook are you doing here? How the frick did you get here?

I'm from Phila and the surrounding subs. Did 6 yrs in the USMC and enjoyed running around in the woods playing combat and so, 25 yrs ago bought a house in the mountains with plenty of woods to run around in, but got bit by a dirty tic and now have protracted Lyme Disease, that I can handle most days, but right now I'm suffering through a full blown flare up. Right now, as I write these words, I am in total pain (not to mention had to shovel out from the snowpocalypse just dumped on me, which fooked up my back, reminding me that I'm a friggin old man...Lol).

But here I am, right now, right here...

I certainly could be somewhere else and, sometimes, God knows, I would like to be somewhere else then here, but ideas like that now quickly fade in the acceptance that I'm here...now. Not there, but here, encountering the experience here provides. I may NOT like the experience, but why deny it. It is and I'm experiencing it as it is, until it is something else entirely, which it, inevitably, will be and I have nothing whatsoever to do with what it will be when it will be something other than what it is, while for now, it is what it is, and "I" am here now, deeply in it, not wishing to extract out of it, cause that ain't up to me and I understand that fact fully without an inkling of a doubt (HINT: definition of "enlightenment")

I know some of my more astute and assertive readers will respond, "oh, how sweet, Mikey's giving us the 'be here now' script that we've all heard a million times before." Ha!

This "enlightenment" shite really sucks sometimes, but when you're here, there's nowhere else to be but here...

"It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to
Cry if I want to, cry if I want to
You would cry too if it happened to you."

Artwork by Naoto Hattori

DOPAMINE: Shut up, sit back...and fry, baby!

I would suggest that anyone seeking to fry his/her motherboard just do nothing for long periods of time, because just sitting back and letting the brain do its shite, without firing up socially programmed neural response circuits, tends to accelerate the burning up of programmed neural response circuits.

In other words, to be more succinct, the more "spiritual" you attempt to be (by adopting "spiritual" ideologies and practices) the more you seem to think you can avoid the boiling putrid Crisco of life that your brain must fry in, the more likely you miss out on the experience of being fried. Just sit around day after day and let all the shite of your don't-worry-be-happy existence just drop in the pan to be fried in the hot oil of nothingness, so that the edges are crispy golden brown and absolutely tasteless.

Besides, since your day to day existence is predicated primarily on subconscious thought processes arising from hardwired genetically programmed instinctual drives, (survival and mating instincts) or that which requires no conscious attention whatsoever, post-modern human egocentrica mammalia seems to have placed entirely too much value on his conscious thought processes, which only result in cascading fountains of anxiety, depression, anger and guilt, because his subconscious processes, those hard-wired circuits endowed him by the determined causal order, has it's proverbial 'hand up his butt, moving his head to and fro, while he vomits senseless words that have no meaning and nobody gives a good rat's arse about, but that he thinks makes a difference in the grand scheme of the unfolding universe that allowed him existence.

I mean, lets face it, Einsteins wonderous theory of relativity has not made one bit of difference in the fact that "all men ever think about is sex" and "why do all women pick jerks" (instinctual drives motivating human egocentrica mammalia since the days he survived on a Paleo diet, which he now desires to return to for some God only knows reason)

But for me to 'suggest' that "you" engage a particular behavior, would require the seemingly tangled mass of brain circuitry in your cranial head cheese be formatted exactly in such a way that my suggestion would provoke a comprehensive engagement of the necessary neurons firing in the precise sequence to light up the brain in a perfectly coordinated transmission of synaptic messages down trillions of miles of dendritic fibers to eventually branch out to the body, ergo, demanding the behavior be performed as 'suggested' and, even then, with slight and gross nuances as to how that behavior was performed, based on other circuits that existed long before the influence of my 'suggestion,' but altering exactly how my 'suggestion' was processed by the brain....

...and all in virtual nanoseconds, without any conscious intent, whatsoever

But I wouldn't recommend adopting any particular ideological practice or meditation (religio-spiritual) since that tends to result in additional circuitry which will eventually need to tossed in the deep frier, and your post-modern brain is already suffocatingly inundated with miles of circuitry that serves little purpose then to insure the cat litter is emptied on a weekly basis and instinctually motivated sexual urges are engaged in a timely manner.

Dump your asanas, your jhana's and your chakra's, etc, etc, etc (cognitive neuro-circuits allowing for additional circuit-forming alliances in the brain to ideological bovine excrement, that only results in the arousal of D2 dopamine receptors in the reward centers between your ears).

Ignore your socially programmed "enlightenment" concepts (which tend to engage amygdala and hippocampus neurochemical transmissions that we call "emotions" based on your imaginary "desires" for some physio-mental state devoid and extracted from nature) and your umpteen million formulations of "awakening" that your dopamine (motivational/seeker chemical) allows you to invest in while paying for the guru's health insurance and 2015 Beemer.

Just jettison all that historical human egocentric mammalian psycho-spirituo-religio-ideo drama and let the brain perform it's natural process of neuro-circuit pruning (weeding the garden). Sit your boring, mundane arse down in a chair, follow the breathe, and let your slow cooker do the work.

I can guarantee that when you come out of it you will be like barbecued pulled-pork. Succulent, juicy and mouth-watering, in that nothing makes any sense and it all falls apart in the bun, while the grease that squirts on your tie doesn't come out in the wash.

Your addictive dependence on neurally programmed mental scripts (beliefs) are no different than the junkies dependency on heroin and, when the drug is absent, withdrawal will be painful (obviously depending on the frequency, intensity and duration of the addiction), because dopamine (the seeker/motivational brain chemical) will demand you pursue your spiritualized drug of choice, until brain 'tolerance' demands you seek another more novel drug, and then another and another and another until...flat earther's (This is an example of what happens when the neuro-circuitry of the brain becomes a tangled thicket of confused excitatory and inhibitory impulses all competing for superiority within an addictive stupor)

You have been in the neuroplastic 'pruning' process since the moment you were born, only neuro-circuit formation was predominant in the development of the younger forming brain, while other needless womb-based circuits were eliminated as useless. But genetics must always precede social programming in that there must be a regression or circuit pruning as age increases (definition of senility). This age-dependent pruning is not contingent on any 'free-will,' just as pruning of circuits outside of Alzheimer's is not contingent on free-will but demonstrates consequences absent senility, but similar.

Human egocentrica mammalia considers 'Alzheimers' a diseased brain state, while "enlightenment," through a long process of circuit shutdown is considered a progression of understanding through pruning of useless circuitry. Yet neither engage any semblance of free-will, since any and all attempts to make it happen are predetermined by a causal order that, from the start, has clearly predetermined every event that has ever been manifested for your full enjoyment or abject suffering.

Hence, my 'suggestion' to simply keep doing what your doing (sex, drugs and rock and roll) and let the brain do it's thing is absurd to programmed brain circuitry that requires constant action and behavior in order to activate dopamine receptors, through which all life is experienced and eventually destroyed, as is clearly demonstrated by human egocentrica mammalia, whose dopamine based arousal addiction motivates him to decimate his ecosystem in complete utter ignorance that his need for arousal will eventually cause his extinction (such is the nature of the dopamine dependent human egocentrically fooked-up brain which nature allowed to unfold in its current structure and so, human egocentric mammalia is slave to that structure because he will never, despite his chronic endeavor to the contrary, extract himself from the natural order that allows his dumb arse to exist in the first place and run around performing the stoopid shite that gives him pleasure by consistently raising his dopamine).

Which makes this entire post a goddamn waste of my fookin' time and, hence, every preceding post equally wasteful, based on socially conditioned beliefs as to what is and is not a waste of fookin' time and anytime spent by your reading it is equally as useless.

But I got a good goddamn dopamine rush outa writing it!

PREFRONTAL CORTEX: "Flying with the Pixies"

"Your mind, your soul, your hopes, your dreams, your emotions is about a cantaloupe size of meat crackling with electricity inside your skull. There's nothing sancrosanct about altered states of consciousness.

You've always been told that altered states of consciousness are higher states of consciousness. The hallmark is that altered states of consciousness is the subtraction of all the mental faculties that make us so special in the animal kingdom. Hypofrontality means that the very pinnacle of human evolution, the prefrontal cortex, must be down regulated, which means that you lose these higher cognitive functions that make us so special. 

All altered states of consciousness are lower states of consciousness. You connect to nothing but your own reduced mind. Some people find the idea repugnant, beneath the significance of the mystical experience and that's alright if you want to hold onto some sort of stone age, medieval sense of spirituality, but I think you will only find this counterintuitive if you hold onto the idea that in those special moments, when you catch a glimpse of some parallel, mental universe, in those very moments, the mind, somehow, can transcend the machinery of the brain, become a ghost in the machine, ride above the fray, and enter some sort of platonian world of eternal truth and beauty in flying off with the pixies." (quote from video below)

The prefrontal cortex is where "you" exist. Right behind the eyes is the "I-me." The ego-self is a product of a huge frontal lobe, the size of which is not found in any other species. It's where self-actualizing egocentric decisions arise and these ego-self conceptualizations influence the neuro-chemistry of the brain, thereby, influencing the body. 

What else could "enlightenment" be, but a complete reduction of prefrontal activity (ego-self) and what other than prefrontal lobe "thought" thrusts you into your own personal heaven or hell based on conceptual interpretations made in that brain region? Suffering is a prefrontal phenomenon occurring right behind your eyes and found nowhere else between your ears.

Hence, as can be clearly interpreted from current neuroscience research, any higher state of consciousness, i.e., "awakening," "enlightenment," etc, is nothing more than a progressive shutdown of the prefrontal cortex and for most, this shutdown is brief, (a kind of spasmodic blip of depersonalization, which occurs naturally for many peeps not seeking "enlightenment") after which the prefrontal then floods with conceptual interpretations as to what just happened, ("I have attained spiritual awakening!" or "Oh my fucking god, I'm going crazy!") which then results in firing up the reward centers of the brain (source of all addictions) or the fear-survival centers, to the point that the conceptual description of the experience becomes an addictive response which, through reward-based synaptic impulses, is pontifically verbalized ad infinitum, ad nauseam (eg, Eckhardt Tolle, Deepak Chopra, etc.), but from fear-based impulses can lead to mental illness and concomitant physiological symptoms.

Yet, alas, without repetitive experiences to reinforce the conceptualized interpretation, the electro-chemical current begins to dissipate and eventually the memory circuits dissolve and you are left with a spiritualized conceptual definition that means nothing, because the experience has dissolved into nothingness.

Pain is immediate, but suffering is simply your chronic, prefrontally generated, complaints of pain, repeated incessantly in the prefrontal cortex (the thinking cap of human egocentrica mammalia). To be more specific, right behind the eyes is where almost all insanity prevails (neuroscience shows how the prefrontal cortex actually shrinks in chemical and behavioral addictions, resulting in poor decision-making and frequent relapses and this is called "hypofrontality").

As Cognitive Therapy proclaims, "it's not reality that disturbs you, but your interpretation of reality," and all interpretation is a product of prefrontal hard-wiring. Interpretation of reality is a conditioned response and after many decades that hard-wiring becomes immune to neuro-plasticity (change) because, for wiring to remain 'hard,' it requires vigilantly filtering out opposing data that might disprove the interpretation to essentially demonstrate how stupid you are (and in post-modern social order, acknowledging your stupidity is tantamount to death).

Since all "enlightenment" is a prefrontal product, while the rest of your brain, bio-genetically functioning to keep your dumb arse alive, has no interest in your prefrontal hocus pocus bullsheit and keeps doing it's thing no matter how expertly you have memorized and repeatedly provide lip-service to the Deepak Chopra quotes that gets you all jiggy in your neuro-circuited reward centers.

So here's the rub, peeps. The difference between my "enlightenment" and the "enlightenment" you seek is that I have arrived at a state where what arises from the prefrontal cortex has absolutely no significance whatsoever...to the prefrontal cortex. In other words, the prefrontal cortex is now hard-wired to cease to care what the prefrontal cortex...'thinks.' In other words, even though the prefrontal lobe (location of the 'mind') cannot stop 'thinking,' it simply has lost the capacity to care (give a rat's arse) what it thinks.

The operative term/signifier is "care," which is indicative of experiencing "emotion" and, contrary to general opinion, emotion is also a neuro-chemically induced brain state influencing bodily/physiological symptoms through the central nervous system (and peripheral nerves), but it is prefrontally 'conceptualized' (while actual emotion is more grounded in the hippocampus and amygdala, yet, engaging reward centers throughout the brain) and this is maintained through fixating on the "enlightenment" concept which is NOT "enlightenment." This is similar to those who experience "panic attacks," in which hypothetical fears, produced in the prefrontal, generate physiological symptoms throughout the entire body, even though the fear is hypothetical or NOT real.

Hypothetical "enlightenment" makes you feel good for a time. But without an accompanying actual experience (depersonalization), those circuits soon wither on the vine and eventually the brain will "prune" them out and your enlightened emancipation proclamation will become more psycho-spiritual drivel to be completely forgotten (i.e, Eckhardt Tolle, Deepak Chopra, etc).

Just as the prefrontal lobe can generate hypothetical terror, and the accompanying psychosomatic symptoms based on unreal fears not oriented to reality, it can also generate intense feelings (symptoms) of joy and pleasure, and the accompanied physical psychosomatic symptoms based on hypothetical thoughts of enlightenment not oriented to reality.