I was driving down to Florida when I heard “Empire State of Mind” come on the radio. Before this point in time I had never really paid much attention to hip hop. I kind of liked this song and heard it play while riding in someone else’s car a few weeks before. Now on a solo road trip to Florida I challenged myself to listen to something new. So from Atlanta to the Panhandle of Florida I listed to hip hop stations and nothing else.

I found I really enjoyed the music, despite my previous prejudgemental attitude towards it. I think I never really gave it a chance because my parents and most of my friends made fun of it. Now it was just me and a chance to give something else a try.

I soaked up hip hop after that for a few months and stopped listening to rock completely, which was a first for me. It was a strange time in my life, but one that led to me discovering great artists like Kid Cudi and Outkast. I even started to appreciate everything from Snoop Dogg to Kanye West. I now am listening to rock again but I can’t help but lace in hip hop.

I am still trying to figure out the appeal of this genre to me. Part of it is the attitude, part of it is the way the beat makes me feel and another part is an appreciation of the poetry of rap music. It’s not all the most intellectual poetry in the world, but much of it does strike a chord with me, especially a handful of Kid Cudi’s songs.

I related to these two in particular on some of those insomnia ridden nights when I was contemplating my past relationships and trying to figure out what I wanted for the future.

So now I have a new Thanksgiving tradition that I’ve created completely on my own. Listening to hip hop as I drift into a turkey coma.

And other times I find that the exploration of a topic reveals that it says something different about me altogether.

After I finished watching another punk rock documentary tonight, I walked away feeling disillusioned by parts of what the interviewed artists said and connected with others. I connected with the feeling of helplessness and rage in the face of the established order that many punk rockers feel and was shocked by the violent response that many had as a result of these feelings. I felt a little scared because in the past I sometimes felt like taking the violent, self destructive route that many punk rockers do. I started to realize that the only punk rock band that I really identify with is Bad Religion, where the rest of them seem to take a much more self destructive path that I do not want to be a part of. I realized too that calling myself a punk rocker isn’t really accurate for me any longer. I identified with a key punk rock band and came to appreciate much of the genre as a result, but that doesn’t make me part of the concept of “a punk rocker”.

Then suddenly I saw another pattern. I saw my exploration of my artistic tastes as a metaphor for how I explore philosophy. I become enthralled with a certain branch of philosophy because of an idea that I connect with in it and dive in head first. I become that philosophy for a time until I find parts that don’t fit me. That’s how I’ve evolved from a Republican, to a libertarian, to a liberal, to a moral relativist, to an Objectivist, to a market anarchist and now to a “I am having trouble stuffing myself into a label anymore.” For now I’m calling myself a philosopher. I still occasionally refer to myself as an atheist anarchist, but really that’s just to help people understand my basic footing onto where I’ve arrived. Even the concepts of atheist and anarchist come with a whole slurry of prejudices that I like to distance myself from.

What’s changed? I used to look at all ideas as their own independent reflections of who I am. Now, I think I am starting to look at ideas compared to reality, whether that jives with who I am or not. That’s the reason I am giving up the concept of punk rocker. I’m Rich. I really like one band in the genre of punk rock. Bad Religion. An even then, I don’t connect with every lyric and every note. I like a lot of other bands in the genre as well, but mostly because they sound like Bad Religion and remind me of the connection I felt with that band when I was younger. That does not necessarily make me a punk rocker or less of a person because I no longer identify as that. What this does make me is a human who figured out a piece of myself through the music I like. And identified the ways that I am unlike this music as well.

I like music. I like philosophy. I like being conscious. I like finding others who are trying to become more conscious as well. Because of that I like figuring out what is true and what is not. Like isn’t quite accurate. I love it.

I recently watched the movie “Into The Wild” and it effected me deeply. So deeply that I sobbed harder than I have in awhile while thinking about the main character’s life. I decided that a reaction like that deserved all of my attention, so I next turned to reading the book this weekend while hiking through the forests of Georgia. I just finished it and wanted to express some thoughts and feelings about why this story effected me so deeply.

If you haven’t seen the movie yet and hate spoilers, you might not want to read further. Although the telling of this story stands strong on its own I know that some people do not like spoilers, so here is the obligatory warning.

“Into The Wild” is Jon Krakauer’s (great author) telling of a true story about a 24 year old man named Chris McCandless. In short, it is a story about his adventure away from his family and eventually into the wild of Alaska. It is difficult for many people to understand why someone who came from an affluent family, graduated with a high GPA from Emory University and had all of the wealth available to him decided to give all of his money away and wander the earth.

I am not convinced that it is as difficult to understand if you are in touch with your true desires. At least for me, it made perfect sense to me why he acted in this manner. In both the book and the movie you quickly learn that he came from a family that did not try to understand his desires but rather tried to project their own onto him. When he did not fit the mold that his father and mother expected they rejected him. They did this by trying to shame him for who he was. He made an effort for awhile to fit into their mold by going to school, getting good grades and succeeding at multiple ventures. Eventually something inside him could no longer take the lie and he fled to discover who he really was.

I think that more people have this desire more than they would like to admit. Admitting something usually means that action is just around the corner. I know that is my biggest fear in admitting my desires out loud. It means that I’m no longer ignoring the desires of the multitude of personalities in my mind and allowing them access to the wheel of my fate. I think this is why most people hide their desires and keep them in their mind or deep within the pages of a journal.

To hide from others is to kill who we are as humans. What’s even more frustrating about that is that we usually suppress our own desires because it brings to light the regret others feel about suppressing their own.

Chris surpressed his desires for 22 years. Once he was done with college he donated $22,000 in savings to a charity, burned all of his identification and hit the road. He renamed himself Alexander Supertramp and spent the next three years of his life trying to find himself. He canoed down treacherous parts of the Colorado River all the way to Mexico, hitchhiked back to The United States, met other tramps of all different walks of life (and effected each one deeply) and then set out to Alaska for his greatest adventure. This is where the story took a deep turn and one that I had to face in myself due to the outcome. Alex went into the Alaska wilderness fairly unprepared and died there from starvation.

That’s where the unconscious can be tricky. If you go against the grain of society without understanding why, then I think the programming in your brain, that your parents instilled in you, sets off a time bomb that leads to some form of self destruction. It’s programming that is your parents harshest way of saying, “I told you so.”

It’s not tragic that he died. Tragic implies that it was just a random uncontrollable act of nature. It’s extremely sad that he died because he did not have to.

I spent a lot of the movie and book feeling anger towards Alex’s parents. They set up that time bomb in him to keep him in their mold. This effects me personally because I decided to take a break from my own family a number of years ago. I know the early programming that my parents instilled in me is activated every time I do something that deeply connects to my desires and is against their own. Even though my parents are not in my life to tell me what I should and should not do, they still have a deep unconscious effect on me. Where this shows up most in my life is when new relationships are brought into my orbit. It’s an effect that I spend much of my time and money in therapy trying to counteract. I also counteract this through having conversations with myself to figure out what is true and not.

Although I feel a great amount of anger and frustration with the knowledge that I would not have to go through this effort on my own if my parents had have just dealt with their own issues before having children, I want to emphasize that it is exhilarating to achieve personal freedom through this process. Unlike Alex, I understand the necessity to continue to face the demons of my past before I throw myself into my desires.

One of my biggest desires at the moment is travel. I would like to quit my job for a year or two and explore this country (and eventually the world). I think and feel that it would be a healthy and enlightening experience. It’s one that I plan on continuing to explore with an open mind and heart. But before I set forth to make the most of this short existence, I want to make sure I defuse this bomb in the brain.

To Alex… I’m deeply sorry your parents never tried to understand you. From what I read, they still refuse to understand you to this day and are in their own personal hell because of it. I’m happy you made the effort to escape and am sad that your history caught up to you in such a cruel way.

And to those who connect to Alex like I do… Learn from Alex and defuse that bomb (and keep defusing it). After that, life is yours.

“An idiot repeats his mistakes. A smart man learns from his mistakes. But a genius learns from the mistakes of others.” -unknown

I have my own revision to this quote: “An unconscious human repeats his mistakes. An awakening human learns from his mistakes. A conscious human being learns from the mistakes of others. Each is a stage of the journey to truth. Each is important in its own right.”

I call people like this scrambled egg brains. They took their active minds and stimulated them in such a way that made them more connected with their thoughts and emotions than connected with reality. Philosophers like Nietzsche and Krishnamurti come to mind when I think of great people who have been inflicted with this condition. It is this condition, this kind of uncontrolled stream of data, with nuggets of genius, that lights me up.

I don’t show this part of me openly in my day-to-day, or at least I don’t think I do, but I consider myself as a carrier of this condition. I think this is where my fascination and fear of these people comes into play. I love to tap my own creativity and let myself spill out onto paper (or pixels) and get a tea leaf reading of who I really am as a person. That coupled with disconnection with reality, however, is what I have observed leading into self destruction with myself and others. I don’t think it’s a conscious self destruction by any means. I think it is in our programming from our childhoods. It is the illogic that was inflicted on us as children. Being told stories about hell and sin and then given no answer to a simple question, “Why?”

Many of us grew up with parents who were completely mind fucked from the hippy movement (aka Vietnam War), coupled with the superstitions and bigotries of the past. Even if our own parents didn’t do drugs themselves, they were still inflicted by the type of thinking.

Everytime I see someone else with scrambled egg brains, I feel deeply sad that they were unable to connect their beautiful creativity to reality. I feel joy in their self-expression through their art, but I also feel the pain in their utter confusion with the world.

Part of my personality wants to take me down to the end of that road. Down the road of letting down all barriers and letting my mind explode open into whatever form feels most natural. I fear that form will take on a self destructive quality because of the twisted thoughts that were inflicted upon me by my parents, teachers and other hurt people when I was a child.

I have been trying most of my life to develop a methodology to combat this unconscious desire to live in my own head and escape from reality through subjectivism. So far what has kept me grounded is the scientific method. I know that as humans we are pattern recognizing machines. That unfettered can lead to making connections that don’t really exist in reality. That in itself is not really a problem. That is what helps us to abstract and understand the world and our interaction with it. However, patterns can be created in our own minds that do not correspond with reality in any way. That is what leads to false-concepts such as god, the state and other self destructive thought processes. We can trust our senses, but only to the point that they are actually able to interpret reality. The rest we need to leave up to trial and error and leave conclusions aside until we can be sure enough to function in reality.

It’s a fine line I walk because I love deep thinking philosophy as I love deep feeling psychology. However, both left without a methodology will leave you disoriented, confused and ultimately destroyed. Worse than that, it’s a disease that can be passed onto your children. There’s nothing more self destructive than participating in the destruction of a young mind.

Here’s a video that helped me to understand the brain better:

And here are some videos from artists that I appreciate but also think have the momentum towards scrambled egg brains.

I’d love to hear others thoughts on this because I think it’s a topic that is close to the surface for most people but one that is hard to admit because letting people know you have that potential often makes them treat you like a time bomb. (I think because they feel that own potential in themselves and have that fear about themselves)

Information flows so easily now-a-days.  Your children or future children will grow up with a wealth of knowledge available to them.  When they begin to discover the truth, they will be angry for being lied to for so long.  There is no hiding the truth anymore, so please stop hiding it from yourself.  For your children’s sake, and your own, educate yourself.  Otherwise you are going to learn a hard lesson.

You say the information wasn’t available to you?  I might have believed that a century ago.  I started to read a great book today called Parent Effectiveness Training.  It was first published in the 70′s and information about it was available in the 60′s.  Sorry, but you’re out of excuses and your children are pissed.

If you are going to become a parent or have young children, please do yourself a favor and read this book before it’s too late.  After you read it, spend the money on therapy.  If you can’t connect to yourself as a child, what makes you think you will connect with your own children?

If we deconstruct what spanking really is, perhaps we can gain a better perspective. Slapping the bottom of a strange woman would obviously be seen as sexual harassment. Fondling the bottom of a child would obviously be seen as a sexual violation. However, miraculously, when you combine these two elements to the slapping of a child’s bottom, it becomes…not a sexual violation? We must denormalize these commonly acccepted practices in our society. According to research, the slapping of the buttocks leads to stimulation of the nerve endings that lead to sexual arousal. This means that even if a child is in extreme pain, he can simultaneously be experiencing arousal. In the worst case, this may lead to a lifelong association with sexual arousal and pain. Many people, like the BDSM culture, take pride in these fetishes, but I can’t help but think that given the choice, children would decide to grow up with a normal sexuality.

…

It generally falls on us, the survivors of sexual molestation, rape, and exploitation, to take up the torch to protect future generations from these atrocities. Not many people are willing to discuss these crimes, because, frankly, large segments of the population benefit from them. Sex abuse is recognized by psychologists to have the worst effects of any other kind of abuse, often leading people into lives of crime, drugs, alcohol, early motherhood, low-impact jobs, and even sex work. A brilliant thinker points out in a book that will soon be released that these effects clear much of the competition out of the way for more functionally-raised people in the workforce. So in addition to sparing the parents and family members who perpetrate these crimes and allow them to occur, the silence and inaction of people on issues of childhood sex abuse proves very economically advantageous for those who do not have to suffer it. Of course, none of this is consciously realized, but our instant recognition of it as a potent truth shows that this is something we have perhaps unconsciously realized all along. In a world where child abuse did not take place, those with functional upbringings would have to work harder to achieve what they can more easily achieve now. They would have to compete with more well-adjusted people. They could not indulge in the vanity that they are just “better” than the people who have ended up as criminals, prostitutes, or single-mother fast food employees.

Read the rest here