World Resolution

After a period of absence (I know, I know, you could barely stand it while I was away), I have returned to my customary white screen, white box, verdana small font typeface mouth. And I have returned as somewhat changed, somewhat the same. 2008, like everything in life, was a process - no start, no finish, just an endless muddle through the middle, from the shallows to the deep. A process begun at birth, to continue until after even death. The process is external - the situations we face each day, the circumstances we live through, the friends we make and the ones we lose. The choices we make. The morals we follow. The lies we tell. But the process is internal, also. It is a path stemming out from the tiniest of cells, slip-sliding through the bloodstream, manifesting in the squishy folds of the brain pan. The internal process is your consciousness, and its constant expansion. Today I finished reading Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out by Timothy Leary. Surprisingly, as anti-chemical as I am, I agreed with a lot of the things he said in there. I expanded my consciousness enough to understand his point of view, and even acknowledge some truth to his words. Although Leary preached a mass movement towards LSD, it wasn't about a pleasure-trip, so much as a religious, sensory, exploratory experience. Through LSD, Leary believed people could touch God, the God within themselves, the God that we all are. Each person is God, a manifestation of God, an infinitesimally small piece of the perfection pie. LSD was about breaking reality. LSD was a sacrament. But the key point, the reason I could agree with all of that despite my disapproval of drugs, was that the sacrament did not have to be LSD. The sacrament could be the Catholic host, the dervish dance, your own "breathing, fasting, flagellation, dancing, solitude, diet," according to Leary. "There are hundreds of ways of turning on. But at the present time, man is so sick that there are very few people who can use these ancient methods, so that today is it safe to say that drugs are the specific, and almost the only, way that the American is ever going to have a religious experience." We've past the Hippies. Past the counterculture. Sure, pockets of it still exist. There are still people like me who just want peace and freedom and happiness and love. But I think we're past the point where drug = sacrament, because I think that drugs, like laughing and dancing, became too trendy, too commercialized, in a sense. Religious power diluted. But we have to do something. So let's go out, and find our own sacraments. Anything that can change your conscious, expand your mind's capacity. Meditation, mental, mathematic, marvelous processes. Pay attention to the molecules. Pay attention to the motions of everything. Pay attention to the movements you can feel, the tones that resonate within your organs even if you can't see them. Pay attention to the colors. Become aware. Here's the New Year's resolution for the whole world: Find your sacrament. Turn yourself on. And through this process, we continually grow, and we continually help others to grow. Through this process, we strengthen the shimmering strands of connection between us. Through this process, we unite our tiny fragments of God into a greater whole. Dig it.