Final Day, Act One

A seraph approached me last night
Gave me a burning letter and flew away blazing
As I broke the wax stamp a black phoenix fluttered before me
It took me to the fractal spiral and shattered my body
And with it all of my self-proclaimed sins
The eternity that is to be was one and I was told that
There is nothing to regret and there will never be
If I should go through this scabrous wildwood again
I would, just to live again that night when we met at the cemetery
The bird sent me back to believe that there is nothing to regret
Aye, there is nothing to regret


























When the time comes for gentlemen Their ethics to deprave
I’ll be standing in front of my children’s grave
I’ll be asking with a brain gone illogically brave
Where is my promised final day
That has been taken from the grievous away
Who will kindly grant it to me
Where are the pages of Genesis Lost
And who will pay the cost
Where is my promised final day
That has been taken from the grievous away
Who will kindly grant it to me
Where are the pages of Genesis Lost
And who will pay the cost
Better than my noose in the company of I to be tossed
I to be tossed
Who will kindly stand in front of me and say
"There is still a cigarette to finish in the ashtray."

Inverted Pyramid

Back when I spent a year of my life as a full-time volunteer, during our initial meeting in the organization I was working for, we – the volunteers – were entertained with a peculiar world view, which was given to us as an insight to how the organization works. This theory had no name, nor specific details. It was just a basic outline of a simple idea. I keep thinking about it since, and today I would like to share it with You. My version might have a bit more of an in-depth shape in order to deliver its message in a (hopefully) more applicable manner, but its main proposal remains the very same. I have given the concept the name "Inverted Pyramid", which task was not hard to achieve, as You will soon see. It is not to be confused with the metaphor used by journalists.

Before we get to it, I would like to share some background information on it. Mainly, the Inverted Pyramid is a theoretic socio-organizational structure and an outline for functional behavior. A structure such as this can benefit us greatly. Some of You have undoubtedly heard of many scientific works pointing to the increasing troubles we, as a collective, have. These troubles are among the most significant we have ever had, and their weight might just be superseding all poverty, wars and ruthlessness combined. On this blog, I already mentioned two scientific explorations of these dangers: the one about a modeling of societal collapse, and one which was a warning to humanity back in '92. I am now also drawing attention to a recent one, which reminds us about the necessity of bringing change to the paradigm of our worldwide system. This need is not a mere idealistic, new-age dream, as many people tend to write it off: we either do it or the society as we know it perishes anyway.

Instead of waking us up to our senses, all these mentioned forecasts are mostly bringing out the pessimists in us. I meet so many people who are at least vaguely aware of how deep we sunk in troubles, but I can count on one hand how many of them actually have a positive attitude towards our prospect. When I ask how we should proceed to successfully respond to these challenges, the answers I usually get go along the lines of "we ought to die anyway" or "there's nothing to be done". These defeatist views are not present because all people are inherently fatalistic. It is because we are not used to thinking far outside of our daily concerns and are bombarded with useless information all the time.

A Malevolent Defect

Up until now, I intentionally avoided writing about the current immigrant situation in Europe. My reason for this is that there are many people with a much better insight into the topic than me, who are actively discussing and acting upon the affair. Adding my own opinion just seems redundant. Be that as it may, it happened so that today two similar online projects were called to my attention; one being done in the Slovenian, the other in the Croatian language. These projects are focused on a certain aspect of the whole immigrant issue in their respective countries, both of which's languages I speak. And this certain aspect I always found to be the most alarming of all. Its scope surpasses the concerns around the immigrants. The circumstances in progress purely demonstrate a fertile ground for observing this phenomenon well, and these two websites provide an excellent viewpoint. Thus, I decided to write an exclusive blog post, sharing the message of these websites, in English.

Paranimalia: Deer Witch

If it wasn't obvious by now: I love writing. This pleasure exceeds the pages of Asylum for Thoughts. One of my ongoing writing projects is entitled Paranimalia. As I see it now, it will contain short stories, all of which tell tales by forging motives of animals and mythological creatures into the fabric of the wording, but with a specific twist each. The animals will never be directly depicted as They are usually imagined. Rather, Their symbols are to be used as stepping stones for hopefully enjoyable plots.

Until recently, I thought of these series as a project only to be publicized once it is finished. I changed my mind. In order to one day finish the whole collection, I'm proceeding in smaller steps. A neat element to this approach is that I can also tell the story of each story (i.e. what inspired me, and how the writing evolved until its ripeness). These descriptions will follow after each of the texts.

Dear Reader, I present You the first narrative of Paranimalia I penned, the: Deer Witch.

The Extraterrestrial Paradigm

When humanity began mindfully observing patterns during our development, it was only natural to one night look up at the sparkling sky and dream up constellations. It's not far-fetched to think that the stars shaped our lives according to when and where they appeared, and what we thought of them. Trying to solve the meaning of life, we brewed many inquiries about the nature of what may spread far above the deep azure. For many of those we discovered solutions and thus achieved progress; yet there are a few we never got around figuring out. Belonging to the latter category, one of our greatest unanswered questions can be paraphrased in many ways: are we on this planet, as a semi-conscious group, alone in the Universe? Are there other species in outer space, who pose Themselves with the same intrigue? Is life common throughout the Cosmos?

Given the recent discovery on Mars, we might find (traces of) life on the Red Planet. What mostly interests the common human, however, is not mere life that is outside of our planetary ecosystem, but life that has organized itself into some form of civilization or a comparable structure of sentience. A contact with such being(s) would prove to be one of the, if not the, most important events to take place in humanity's history.

The father of nuclear power, Enrico Fermi, had proposed His famous question "Where is everybody?", which gave birth to the famed Fermi Paradox. In short, this apparent paradox questions the puzzling clash of the relatively high likelihood of interstellar contact between developed beings, with the fact that we haven't experienced such a contact. Some decade later Frank Drake, a pioneer in extraterrestrial life research, came up with the Drake Equation, a probabilistic formula for estimating the number of other intelligent life capable of interstellar communication within the Milky Way. Its usefulness had been criticized many times over, although if it has at least some validity, then there should be at least two other such civilizations in our galaxy, regarding the latest estimates (valid during the time of writing this blog post).

So far we haven't noticed anyone. My expectation is that meeting any kind of intelligent extraterrestrial life with our current and estimated future capabilities is left to a pure twist of fate, since the scale of different barriers leaves us stranded between passion and unlikelihood. Some readers might find this post biased because of this conviction of mine – however I do assure You that it comes from the most eager of attempts in understanding the topic as much as an enthusiast can. To counter the effects of my doubt, I'm also presenting views that speak in favor of interstellar contact. In-depth descriptions of the most popular and related topics have been written by many other thinkers, so I encourage You, Reader, to broaden Your knowledge by bravely searching the vast Web. Furthermore, in this post I'm avoiding anything that might resemble conspiracy or any similar sighting theories. I am in strong disbelief towards such topics, but I'm in no position to fruitlessly argue against them, so let's just leave them at this.

Direct Democracy

A short and exclusive post this time.

There are a lot of strange things going on and around the European Union lately, many of which raise baffling questions about its sovereignty. I am not here to discuss any of these since there are plenty opinions already. I would like to raise awareness to a particular campaign happening right now. It is a crowdfunding campaign to bail out Greece.

The slogan is: "By the people, for the people." The initiative calls out the people of Europe (and the World) to donate a small amount of money in order to repay the national debt of Greece, as a third alternative to the upcoming voting on Sunday. The tone of the well-explained campaign has a slightly aggravated tone, one that speaks from the depths of frustration of many generations, I reckon. The following paragraph particularly explains the whole sentiment I'm talking about:

"So come on, order a Feta and Olive salad, maybe wash it down with an Ouzo or glass of Assyrtiko Greek wine and let's sort this shit out."

How true. The idea has been around, yet as far as I'm informed, this is the first time in history, that we have a chance of this scale: a large crowdfunding to solve a pressing political issue. Given the amount that is needed and the fact that there are five days left, it is a bit unlikely that it will succeed (even if the raised amount has doubled since yesterday). The funny part would be if it did succeed. It would be an unprecedented act of applied and democratic philanthropy.

Red Shoes

I lost my mind quite some time ago.

Sure at least some other people share the same sentiment. I know a few of us, and was asked by another mad individual: what made me go off the rails? Since me being crazy, as I experience it, is not suffering from any form of psychopathological issue in the clinical sense. It's rather about being daring enough to create my own vision against the tide of fashionable indifference and challenge and rethink whatever I do in order to get an exclusive lifelong experience. People keep saying that I'm weird, and that's the only proof I got that my theoretical approach is more or less consistent with my behavior. This doesn't bring me to any better position than anyone else, which is also one of the reasons why I think I'm crazy. Life is just something my arrogantly aspiring human intellect cannot clutch, and trying to do so makes it slip a bit askew. What this ambition to have a peculiar living practice does bring me, though, are stories. I keep hearing people don't tell stories as much as some previous generations supposedly did; that kids swipe away content on demand on Their screens instead of venturing into the wondrous world of the mind's eye.

Occasionally, I saw some people living talelessly, but I have to admit I saw more of the contrary. Spring has come and with it the time came for me to put on my red shoes again. I walked, hopped and tapped a lot of merry beats in them in the last two or so years. While wearing this crimson pair, I partook in many anecdotes in the making - obviously I was surrounded with adventurous people and couldn't see much of those living without stories.

Are You out there, people without stories?

Superpersona

Experiments have the property of not having a certain outcome. For this reason, self-experimentation can sound disheartening. I decided to share my own psychological self-experiment; either for the convenience of You not actually having to do it, but still read about the so far progress, or to perhaps bravely try it out Yourself and see where it leads us.

Some of You might already know about the theory that describes how we humans wear behavioral masks for a variety of reasons, which we call personae. For the most part, we do this unconsciously, and I find that to be a shame. My reason for such logic is that, as with most things, if we are letting our psychical reality shape our behavior without our acknowledgment, our fate is less based on our supposed ability of having a choice. Therefore, I decided to coordinate my social roles, or to put it differently, I want to have a core sense for priorities to act upon. I'm sure that throughout history, certain people have already done things like this in Their own peculiar ways. By having an approach of my own which seems different enough from what I encountered so far, though, I consider this effort worth of its own theoretical framework.

The way I came to realize the divergence between my cognitive and behavioral patterns in different social contexts (including the secure feeling of being alone) was when I noticed my wishes changing from one minute to the other. Like at times not eating sugary foods made me a proud person who is pursuing a healthy lifestyle, just a few flickers later the same thought made me suffer and feel as if I'm depriving myself of the deserved pleasures of life. Or this other time when my aunt found me making weird sounds while I was browsing the internet. What made my brain pulsate with excitement was rendered into shame by a simple change of circumstance.

Dream Distillery: Africa, You Voodoo

I present another "series" on this blog. The one I already started is focused on clarifying principles from psychology. While this new one won't be outside of the mentioned scientific field, it is about exploring an area which I find to be missing a crucial angle of research. What I will be writing here are the re-imaginations and mash-ups of my most memorable dreams.

Oneirology, the scientific study of dreams, found many answers, definitions and ways to interpret dreams. Today we even have a machine that can record dreams. The way I see it, we are only accessing our nightly involvements from the waking world, from the outside. Far from that being bad practice in itself, it still misses a fundamental element: comprehending dreams for what they are, from within the dream side. Hardly could we call such an approach empirical by consensus, which is probably the reason behind the notable lack of this method.

These "dream semi-journals / short stories" won't be an attempt to unlock the secrets of the sleeping living. They will rather serve as expeditions into the intangible contents of my own symbolism, fur the sheer fun of it. The everyday common sense and logic may break under the conditions of my inspiration. These glances to a reality out of conventional time and space will have structural meanings of their own. Please, bear this in mind when reading. Comparing the inner rules to those of the external phenomena would, at best, be a philosophical effort. Instead, let's find out if we can leave our common sense behind for the sake of a different setup of reason.

This series of posts is labeled as Dream Distillery. Let me begin...

Dungeons & Daddy Issues

What happens in the dark? Not physically, but mentally. What monstrous realities do we imagine into the reflectionless moments of the world, like those of basements without electricity? In order to find out, let's add a couple of torches, and observe the whispers between the shadows. This is how every proper game of D&D should be played. That's how we used to do it, at least.

We did it hardcore: we used continuously refined house rules, went into endless negotiations with the DM in order to exercise the limits of possibilities that the multiverses of role-playing bring, listened to relevant ambient epic stoner, and quite often got lost between the boundaries of whatever is between our everyday personae and fantasy-flesh alter egos. (All this in a basement filled with dripping stalactites/stalagmites, of course.) Yes, we did it to pass the time and have fun. It's just a peculiar definition of fun. We did it to exercise our imagination and see how far we can go, when we bear the divine power of metamorphosis to take on roles of entities in worlds with yet undreamed qualities. How would we actually act if we could read minds? Or slit throats one after another in order to increase our reputation? If we lived among a gene pool of self-aware creatures so vast that with practically every adventure we could meet previously unseen races? What would our philosophy be; and which factually existing gods would we bow to? Would we decide against pursuing magic? And why?

As it turns out, leaving our own unconscious tendencies out of the picture is easier imagined than actually done. I had several characters throughout the years, of whom I'll mention the two I actually designed completely on my own. These characters lived, and they eventually died or went on quests to which our all-seeing powers had no interest in paying attention. When one of these two things happen, a player simply creates a new being to follow the rest of the adventuring party, who are destined to be played with by Their actual gods.

The Divine Projector

Do You have a pet? Observe it, Your real pet or the one You would prefer, in Your imagination. Don't do it only once, but for a while. Try to see It for what It is.

Since I was a kid, I was trying to unravel what is the gaze of non-human animals hiding when it's staring into our own. I have different theories about different species and individuals within species, and at least some of them, I believe, look at us in some kind of awe. We provide shelter, food, and constraint with conditioning techniques, leashes, bowls, cages, legal papers – not unlike how we sometimes act towards each other. If we humans are not aware of how most stimuli are affecting us, and we mostly shrug it off as faith, circumstance or whatever force beyond and larger than us – how are we not literally a form of a divine power for pets? The saying that 'You should first get a pet to see if You are fit to have offspring' is not without merit...