The people I know living full lives, lives full of power, they choose to believe in impossibilites.

My friend the internet marketer, who started out from nothing. Making a few hundred dollars a month. He got stuck here, for a year. Finally, he chose to believe he could make $10,000 a month with his tiny business. Within a few months, he made that $10,000 in one month. He believed in another impossibility, and he now makes that in a day.

My friend who is riding is bicycle across America. He started out a frustrated liquor store clerk who could barely pay rent. He choose to believe he could ride his bicycle across America. Now he is on his way towards becoming another philosopher king, another source of great power and goodness in the world. And he’s more than half-way done in his ride across America.

My friends who believed they could have a band, that they could become famous and successful without compromising their artistic integrity. Their label bailed out on them at the last moment, and they had to borrow money to make their latest record. Now their record is doing incredibly well, a much better label bought it, and they’re touring the world. They are living the impossible dream.

You see, rational dreams have no gravity behind them. Nobody wants to help out that liquor store clerk who just wants to pay his bills on time. We must get incredibly bold and daring dreams, in order to live life fully. Everybody wants to help out the young man attempting to ride his bike across america, or the young band who doesn’t compromise their integrity.

The universe and god want people who grab the impossible with two hands. It does not want people who settle for less, because that is what’s more rational.

What is your impossibility? What incredible dreams do you keep hidden from the world?

So don’t dream small dreams. Don’t dream rational plans. Build your world in the sky. The whole universe will be behind you.

Can we ever move away or closer to our inner selves?

I left home at 18 on a vision quest. I wanted to find, I wanted to seek, I wanted to experience adventure and come back with something real. I searched for the answers to the great questions:

Who am I, what is the nature of this world, what is the nature of this self?

I left, I traveled, I gave, I lost, I changed. And I failed.

No immediate wisdom came from the journey, no inner transformations and no wisdom grew closer. Just a little less sure the nature of things, and caught in the same cycles of self-doubt and insecurities.

Sitting on benches still, unsure about the progress within. Or even, if there is such a thing.

I still worry about everything I see. I forget about lessons learned, about trust and journeys and divine interventions. That every walk could prove fruitful, if only I paid attention. That everything worth doing takes great effort, but that great effort is really nothing at all.

I try my hardest, but can’t remember doing anything difficult or challenging. It all seemed like a walk downstream, in hindsight. I forget the challenge immediately, and only remember the accomplishment. And even that is a ghost.

Is that what we’re chasing here?

Ghosts?

Ghosts of accomplishment, ghosts of advancement, ghosts of value, ghosts of loss. My worst day on earth is still just a ghost of a memory. It spins outward from the center. It has no center. It just spins.

What to grasp, what to hold? That I could sit here and enjoy these trees, enjoy the river. Laugh at the absurdity of the ghost world.

It comes, it goes. No worries, no losses. Just ghosts who know their ghostness, and ghosts who don’t.

A vision quest to wisdom is a vision quest to nowhere. Stay home and fold your laundry, pay your bills.

Truth is, we invented the vision quest because we wanted entertainment and meaning. And depth. But we are never to believe it is real. Or that anything else is, either.

Wind and trees and birds singing again. All so carelessly, all so chaotically. That we could all write like that, a symphony of cacophony.

A bird sings. The leaves change. Do I?

“This selfishness is what I need to master. When I do, I will be rich and I’ll be happy. People will love me.”

But then the selfishness would always come back. He was a mess. He would talk to people, and as he talked, he would try to remember his life and how it played out.

Eventually he grew tired of poverty and loneliness. He thought:

The world wants style and poverty and rebellion in a cute little package. It wants fakers and liars, slapchops and snuggies, billionaires and drug habits. I will become that billionaire. Those monkeys will be on my back. Can you see them? They’re made of gold, they’re like nothing you’ve ever seen. I am a shiny new thing.

And so one night, delirious, he tried dreaming of shamwows and oxycleans like everyone else. He focused on that billionaire lifestyle of jet planes and champagne, and watched The Secret four times in a row just before bedtime. But instead of waking up rich, he woke up a sunflower seed.

And almost immediately, forgot about ever being a human, and started stressed himself out, about shooting out roots, about sprouting. It all seemed so incredibly difficult. Even after he sprouted, he grew worried he wasn’t good enough, his seeds wouldn’t be good enough, wouldn’t be worthy of his place in the soil. He woke every day in fear: “Will I flower correctly, or do fuck it up and die before casting my seeds into the wind?”

And indeed, he did begin to wither away, not from ineptitude, but from worry. The bees whispered amongst themselves: “A flower worried about its own flowerness never blossoms.”

Day by day, he grew sicker.

But a wise old bee came to visit him and asked:

“Why do you worry?”

And the baby sunflower replied:

“I worry because I used to be human. I don’t know what it is to grow for sure, confident you will fruit.”

The bee shook his head. And said: “What comes up always comes down. Messages are being sent to you, but there’s so much interference. You listen and you wait. You do the right things, enjoy the sun and listen to the whispers inside yourself.”

And the little sunflower, he asked: “But what if it doesn’t rain for three weeks, and I shrivel and die?”

The older bee just shook his head and left. “Then you’re dead, dummy.”

A month later, just as he began to flower, the drought came. After the first week, the sunflower was as sick as he’d ever been. He wondered if this was where he died, but somehow, his body adapted. His leaves withered up and folded within themselves. His peduncle got tighter than it had ever been.

But by the second week without rain, he began to see his own death. Each day he woke, deathly sick, dying for sure, but beginning to feel an inner glow.

A mean bee, the one none of the other bees had ever liked came to taunt him. He said: “Don’t flower, don’t try. Trying only lead to expectations, and expectations only lead to disappointment. Disappointment is where monsters are made, when we find out how indifferent the world really is. After we’ve told ourselves we flower, after we’ve invested our lives to being good servants, we die in droughts. We should be anything but good servants. We are cursed.”

But the mean bee’s sting failed to implant itself into the flower. He was too tired, and his inner glow was indifferent to anything the bee said. It knew death was coming, but it was glowing stronger than ever.

The mean bee flew away.

But the sunflower said to himself: “I was forever groping for substance and meaning within myself. My perfect children would be nothing but chicken scratch and emotion and another chance at an imperfect life. It matters not whether the rain comes.”

And the rain came, but the sunflower was too damaged. He had withered irreversibly, had begun his own descent into death. On the inside he started singing. The bees heard it and came close. They listened.

The song he sang, it went like this:

“Dale a tu cuerpo alegría, Macarena, que tu cuerpo e’ pa’ darle alegría y cosa’ güena,” and the bees got closer.

With his last breath, the sunflower sang:

“Heeeey macarena!”

Of course, 4chan is by no means a tame or innocent website. It is, instead, an example of how horrible and awesome the internet can be at the same time. It hosts everything, from nude pictures to pictures of cats. it is a public message board, and people upload anything, and often start online activist movements through it. They tackled Scientology a few months ago, and exposing deaths covered up by the church. It is, most basically, a beacon for free and open speech online. With all the dirtiness that entails.

So AT&T, having been accused of working illegally to spy on people, is now blocking an obvious activist website. What should we do?

Of course, I plan on canceling my business AT&T service immediately. I’ll call everyone I know and encourage them to do the same. But at the root of this, there is something deeper. There are really only 3 or 4 big internet providers within the United States, and most of them have open records of filtering and plans for future filtering of our internet.

How can we boycott a company when our only other choices are the same damn thing?

America is long overdue for a change. And it isn’t something that’s going to come from above, it isn’t some large sweeping change. America does not have any large problems. It never has. It has small, people sized problems. It’s time we stop talk of large issues and started facing our own personal localities. Freedom of speech on the internet is much too important to have 3 or 4 companies in control of all access. We need local providers, and we need more distributed forms of power. We need more locality, and we need a people sized America.

Last week I drove cross country, from Michigan all the way down to Naples, Florida. And despite what all the news reports say about unemployment, Florida is worse off than Michigan. Michigan has a locality. There are people who grow food, there are people who make real things. In Florida, there is nothing. Everyone works in the service industry, which means they wait half a year until the tourists come. There’s a million jobs, but they’re all McJobs. They’re low paying, cookie cutter chain jobs. Not enough to get by on your own, and no room for upward movement.

Worse still, because everything is so new, there is almost no locality, no history. People haven’t lived through big depressions within Florida, nobody knows what it means to look out for your neighbors. So nobody pays attention to where their food comes from. There’s no question, it always comes from “out there”. Somewhere else, where people make real things instead of waiting on each other in restaurants.

If you paid attention during the bailouts, you saw the banks all got together, merged closer, and the big banks became mega banks. They consolidated power, and consolidated power is much easier to abuse. With smaller, more evenly distributed local based economies, we can fix these massive power structures that threaten to hold us ransom. Close your mega bank account and join a local Credit Union. Find a local farmer and patronize them. Eat at your neighbor’s restaurant. Let’s keep each other in jobs that respect human life. It’s much more important than saving $2 on your grocery bill every month.

These things sound so ridiculously small, but they really are the way things were meant to be. If we want to be free, we cannot afford to have such massive power structures. The costs are just too high, and their products are just too cheap.

It’s time to be awesome again. We can do it, we are a beautiful people.

Replace her with a mountain of facts
so high he touches the clouds.

Our leaders will climb and say,
“Humans have–
Transcended God!”

They’ll modify our genes,
Until we’re flawless.

Perfect pieces of a solved puzzle
Waiting to be put in place,
by the steady hand of pure logic and geometry.

I don’t like that I’m a dramatic nerd either. I focus on things and get myself worked up emotionally for horrible reasons. When I was falling into that dark little area, I was completely aware of it, and completely incapable of doing anything to stop it.

So what’s that mean? I about blew up but didn’t. Is it buried or did I let it go? What have I been eating, is that it? Or is there something in the water of Bowling Green?

I haven’t written because my life’s a mess and it seems like the solution to that messiness is more money. So I sit and work and brainstorm but forget what’s most important. Stopping is most important.

I’ve looked everywhere for that final piece of my purpose, that fits everything into perfect focus. When my life and my love and my money and my friends all turn into a laser beam of perfection.

It’s dirty.

Nothing fits anywhere, nothing just falls into place. If you fall forward you’ll really fall backwards into a pool of sharks. There is no up no down just a god and his will; we are little pawns and nobody is playing. I’ll sit and stare and please don’t grab my hair. I want a nice, mellow ride.

Everything worth doing is difficult to the point of being impossible. That doesn’t make the attempt any less worthwhile or noble.

So where does that leave me and my pen and this right hand and the left one too?

I ate painkillers for three days in a row, and they about killed me. They made me want to throw up, but I couldn’t. My head became cloudy and I couldn’t think straight. I walked around like a zombie, thinking I was alive and coherent, but completely dead to the world on the inside.

My dreams last night were nightmares. I got lost in one of them, became convinced I was drugged and then attacked. I called my dad within my dream to come find me, even thought we still don’t get along. Even though no one still gets along with him.

I wish I knew what I should be doing now, I wish there was a little keyhole you could look through and see your destiny. Because now and forever it feels like there’s a lot of static getting caught up in the message I’m supposed to be receiving, the one that really matters.

Look.

What is the most important piece of your life? Is it the people you love, the things you do, or the gifts you leave behind?

What does your face look like from the inside? Is that you in there or is it me?

I met a weak selfish man named Abram two years ago. He convinced me to lie, steal, cheat, and murder. He is an empty man, a confused devil, and he brought me to god.

Do you care if I live or die yet? Does my impending doom matter to you yet? Then why does yours?

There are sixteen feet between me and Abram. I could run to him and embrace him with the fire that sucks life from me.

What do you want and what do you believe? My skin is boiling because the heat is so hot. I see the first piece of flesh beneath. I breathe smoke.

Who is watching this happen?

Sixteen feet between awakening and darkness. I see everything but there’s nothing to say.

And so I sit in silence while the flesh burns and black smoke enters my lungs. I taste my burning body.

I have seen what happens to this body when I am gone; I have been where my spirit is going before.

They say enough fruit rots on the ground in the tropics to feed the whole world. I look at Abram and see myself.

I begin to pass out and I see this pattern repeating.

My mind is new to the world again, it grows, unfolds. It is lost, it finds its way. It repeats.

And so do I.

Some would say: Wherever the mind is directed, the whole person is liable to follow the direction and the enemy is sure to take full advantage of it, which means your defeat. It is after all better to keep the mind in the lower part of the abdomen just below the navel, and this will enable one to adjust oneself in accordance with the shifting of the situation from moment to moment.

While living
Be a dead man,
Be thoroughly dead–
And behave as you like,
And all’s well.
- Bukan

We have to distinguish between two ways of training: one is spiritual, the other practical. As far as spirituality is concerned, it is a very simple matter when it is realized to its full extent; it all depends on how one gives up one’s own Ignorance and Affects and attains to no-mind-ness.

And it’s here, if you’re smart, that you’ll give up. Start wearing some skate shoes and dressing the part, but quit actually going the park and rolling around. Find a couple friends and play video games and talk about skateboarding instead.

Okay, maybe you’re a bit of an idiot, and you don’t quit for the first couple years. You stick it out and make it into your third or fourth year of falling down and looking like an ass. You’ve done a million kickflips and yet you still can’t land one out of three tries.

By now there’s no chance in hell of anyone ever caring how good you aren’t at skateboarding. But still you’re obsessed.

For what purpose? To be cool? After a few years that shit just disappears. You’re just an old dude who still hangs on to a kid’s toy.

And so as you get older, skateboarding becomes less and less about what tricks you land, and more about what skateboarding does to your head. It clears ideas out, settles them in their places. It becomes a kind of meditation, but not the safe kind, where you sit cross legged. Instead, there are direct physical consequences for the loss of attention.

And the connection between your focus and the rest of your life gets caught into this sphere of skating. It only makes you more capable, to eliminate everything and focus only on immediate needs.

The years ran by. Enveloped in well-being, Siddhartha barely sensed their disappearance. He had grown rich, he had long since had his own house and his own servants, and a garden on the river, outside the town. People liked him, they came to him when they needed money or advice; but no one was close to him except Kamala.

Siddhartha had learned how to business, wield power over people, take pleasure with a woman; he had learned how to wear beautiful clothes, command servants, bathe in fragrant water. He had learned how to eat delicately and meticulously prepared dishes, including fish, including meat and fowl, sweets and spices, and to drink wine, which makes you slothful and forgetful. He had learned how to dice and play chess, watch dancing girls, be carried in a sedan, sleep on a soft bed. Yet he still felt different from others and superior to them; he had always watched them with a touch of scorn, the very scorn that a samana alaways feels toward people of the world.

Like a veil, like a thin mist, weariness descended on Siddhartha, slowly a bit denser each day, a bit dimmer each month, a bit heavier each year. A new garment grows old with time, loses itslovely color with time, gets stains, gets wrinkles, frays out at the hems, and starts showing awkward, threadbare areas.

The world had captured him: pleasure lustfulness, sluggishness, and finally the vice he had always scorned and scoffed at most as the most foolish vice: greed. Property, ownership, and wealth had also finally captured him, were no longer glitter and glamour for him, had become a chain and a charge.

Now Siddhartha knew that the game was gone, that he could play it no longer. A shudder ran through his body: inside him, he felt, something had died.

That same hour of night Siddhartha left his garden, left the town, and never came back. Was he not a samana, a homeless wanderer, a pilgrim?