Who I am now

Not too long ago, someone I cared about called me a liar. She said I contradicted myself constantly, I seemed to speak out of both sides of my mouth, and I had a forked tongue. Ouch. It was a profound thing to hear these blunt words from someone I cared about so deeply. Far more profound was my eventual realization that she was right. I have always had a habit of suppressing my own thoughts, replacing them with those I think need to be heard. In the process, I rather lost touch with how to express my actual thoughts. I think it was the first time I understood the idea of "doublethink."

Yes I've made a liar of myself, probably for most of my life. I've held back my true thoughts, often dispensing what I want to say in favor of what (I thought) I should say. It's a habit that's been trained into me from a young age, since birth even. And I think I often realized it, felt deep down that my true self was lost, trapped beneath layer upon layer of convention and protocol. I'd lost sight of how to be honest with myself long ago, and as a result I wasn't even sure who I was or what I believe in, what I think is right or wrong because someone's always been around to tell me those things. I was taught how to think, even though thinking isn't something you can learn. At least now always.

Awakening involved a lot, a total shift in perspective. To me, it involved admitting that pretty much everything I "know" is wrong. Casting off the years of conditioning and "education" and learning to see the world for what my eyes could see and not what I learned from a teacher or a textbook, or from a face on TV.  Or any other number of educators who are really just passing along things they learned from a teacher, who learned from a teacher, who learned from a teacher, and so on. Knowledge is passed on through the generations, but like anything it becomes diluted with the course of time.

So I decided to question things. Not because someone taught me to, but because it seems logical.

Here are a few things I think about now.

I see planes making trails in the sky and wonder what they're dumping on us, and who tells them where it's safe to dump that stuff. Prince talked about chem trails. He talked about a lot of other things...he's dead now, btw. Celebrity deaths take on a whole new meaning for me now. Watch the episode of Southpark where Brittany Spears is being sacrificed by an Easter bunny cult. People don't understand how real that is.

I learned recently that George Washington wasn't the first president, he was the ninth (country was founded 1776, George was elected 1789). Also funny, I learned in gradeschool that he had wooden teeth, or transplanted cow's teeth by some weird accounts. That's cute, but no, they were probably slaves' teeth. George had lots of slaves. That's not a secret. Why in the hell would he use cow's teeth?

I learned that George W. Bush and Barack Obama are related. Tenth cousins, yeah probably as related as any two rich people on earth, but the shit goes deeper than that because it looks like all the presidents of the US may have been related. Yeah you can chock it down to the Pyramid Genealogy principle--millions of us are interrelated if you trace it out to the seventh cousin--but all the presidents linked under the same tree?? All descended from royalty?

I'm going out to vote tomorrow, civic duty and all that but I'm now cursed with the feeling that the presidency is a tale of succession. Who wants to bet Hillary wins?

Think about the birthplace of western civilization. Ancient Greece is the first place that springs to mind. But where did the Greeks send their best and brightest to learn about math and reading and philosophy?

Egypt.

Egypt invented the phonetic alphabet, remember? Egypt is where Plato learned how to read and write, and also how to do math. Reality check: Plato was a mathematician, moreso than he was a philosopher. Read about how he and a guy named Pythagoras (known now for the "Pythagorean" theorem, a pittance to his name) all but founded the field of geometry. They mixed it in with numerology to attempt to uncrack secrets of the universe. Worth reading about. Plato's famous myth of the caves is actually an old African proverb he managed to stretch out into a 300 page book.

Fun fact: the Arabs invented numerals--not the Roman ones that are useless for complex math, but the 0-9 that we use daily. Math and reading are not native to Europe, what has the west really pioneered?

Paleogenetics seems to agree that humanity originated in  South Africa--how can we assert that it had to crawl all the way to the Fertile Crescent to invent civilization? What untold wonders have been buried or destroyed in Africa? How many civilizations existed before Mesopatamia? Archaeological digs cost a lot of money--would the powers-that-be ever shell out the coin to find out what else is buried out there? Or are some things simply supposed to remain buried?

Africa has largely been written out of Western history, a history written by white hands (hands of the victor). Lets face it, it would be pretty embarrassing to acknowledge how much we owe to a people we enslaved, spent most of history whipping into a place of inferiority.

Case and point is, we should question everything. We're taught history in school, alongside reading and math and science. We're taught that things like astrology, numerology, alchemy, herbalism, and other "alternative" medicines and the like--they're all bullshit because they don't work according to the laws of science, apparently. We're taught that magic is impossible, because it just doesn't make any sense.

Says who? Imagine someone killing all the good witches and wizards, teaching us to hate magic and burn those that practice it. So afterwards, they would be the only wizards left, right? And how would we know they existed if they could use magic to keep us in ignorance? That's just my fun crackpot theory.

Witches and magic aside, there's someone up there, higher than we can see, writing the "facts," telling us how the world works, moving the chess pieces on the board with hands made of money and power. They choose who wins and who loses, who gets elected president, or crowned king, where borders get drawn and where countries and people get wiped out, or propelled into power. These are the same people that orchestrated the fall of the Twin Towers and plunged us into a war with a third world country. Did it in Vietnam too, and countless other wars. Forget magic--what kind of power would you have if you controlled the banks, or the oil companies, or the media conglomerates? Did they fund Osama bin Laden? Are they funding ISIL? Our information is being controlled constantly.

My vow to myself is to be true to myself. My true self, not my taught self. I do things because I feel like it, not because I feel obligated to. I keep people in my life when I feel they make it a better place, not out of some sense of duty or debt to them. I believe things because I want to, not because I'm told to believe them.

I think the world is flat--not because I don't know how the round world works, but because I don't think I'm ever gonna see its shape. Think on this--if the world is flat, north pole is the center, Antarctica is the giant wall of ice surrounding it, and East and West are directions that will only ever lead you in a giant circle. Sounds like something they would like.

Oh yeah, and I think magic is real.

Now call me crazy.

Aaaaaand we're back!

So it's been a lengthy hiatus and sure you've all missed us dearly. I dropped regular correspondences with my beloved blog shortly after dropping out of college....like 5 years ago. I've recently come to the realization that I do need a place to store my crazy thoughts, and conveniently, this was here.

My beliefs and thought processes have changed drastically since my last post, so please do your best to ignore all that other stuff that came before this. It will remain here as a testament to where this blog began, but I'm hoping to make future posts more coherent, thoughtful and relevant to the world in general.

To anyone interested, I'm a big fan of nature, photography, and photography of nature and I have an instagram @shakesupreme. Don't ask where I got that handle.

I'm a part-time short-story writer, bagpipe player, and a world-traveler. I'm a history freak, conspiracy-realist, and a reality theorist.

This blog is dedicated to the post-worthy moments in my life, and all content will henceforth be original, unless I spot something awesome on the net that's really worth expounding on.

Here's to our rebirth and the awesome fulfilling life story yet to be written. See you on the feed!