HELLO WORLD

Well, it's been a long hiatus since my last foray into the blogosphere, marking the fourth time my blogging has ceased. As always, I return to you, now, with a new project, under a new name, with new beliefs, new memes, and a new outlook on life.

Who is this strange voice in the unread outer wilderness, lost til now in the icy howl of obscurity? Why, I've been blogging a long time, dear reader, since I launched myself into the blogosphere all the way back in 2004 with strangerAttractor. Ah, but I've changed quite a bit from the callow youth who typed the screeds in that deservedly unread blog (unread save for one dedicated reader, a loyal troll). Those interested in charting my journey can follow along in the subsequent projects: 1+White = One Hundred, which chronicles my introduction to Japan during my three years there; the aptly named Cracks in the Sanitarium, in which you can watch me descend ever further into the depths of neocon madness; and finally Dancing in the Minefield, where you can see the cognitive dissonance finally start to open cracks in the walls of the mental prison that I am only now starting to tear down.

Ah, but who has the time to go through all that? Certainly not I, I assure you. I've provided those links not because I expect or even desire you should read anything therein, but only in the interests of full disclosure. There is much in my past to be ashamed of, but pretending I did not write those things I believed is no sort of solution. You see, my friends, one of the major themes of this blog - one among many others - is Truth. Truth about the world, and Truth about mySelf.

Truth is a hard thing to come by, in this age, in our world. Lies permeate our language and our mental environment like a thick post-industrial smog. We are lied to unceasingly by our leaders, both political and religious, with every speech and sermon; by our corporations, with every ad campaign and press release; by our scientists, with every contradictory study and jerry-rigged computer model. We lie to our friends, to our neighbors, to our familes and our lovers, with little white lies and lies of omission, mimicking in miniature the greater sins that dominate our lives. Inevitably, we end up lieing to ourselves with every other thought we think, rationalizing away our instinctive actions and reactions and refusing to acknowledge the seething mess of contradictions that underlies the great egoic I that we've all been raised to identify with. Lies are so ubiquitous that it seems our very world is made of them; like fish in water, we notice them only by their absence, the uncomfortable silence that follows the voicing of any inconvenient truth.

Will I succeed in keeping to the truth, like an incorruptible witness on the stand of an ideal court? No doubt, not always. Only you can judge if I am, and I'm relying on your to keep me honest. In a world so full of illusions, a world that very well may be nothing but illusion, it is inevitable that things will be written here that are not, strictly speaking, True. All I can promise is that I will never consciously pollute these words with Lies.

So, first things first, yes? The name of the blog. This one's called Psychegram: the intersection between mind and mathematics, consciousness and matter. The more observant of you will have seen that the URL does not match the title. There, it is psi, the greek letter so famously associated with psychic events, and ki, the Japanese for the better-known Chinese concept of chi. No, I'm not psychic - no more than most of you (which is more than any of us likely expect) - but I believe it to be among the possibilities in this very poorly understood universe in which we find ourselves.

By now you're wondering, why should I read this? Hell, why is this guy bothering to write it? The quick answer to both questions, of course, is that it's fun, and really what more reason do you need to do anything? Ah, but what am I doing here? Besides writing sentences ending in question-marks?

Well, questions are importent, ne?

I'm experimenting on myself, and in this blog, I will be - amongst other things - documenting the results of those experiments. Living in natural time, summong memetic entities from my subconscious, meditation, mindfulness, and in general exploration of the outer reaches of human experience ... or at least, the outer reaches of what it's possible for this human to experience. By doing that, I hope only to become more Human, and I think that's a worthy goal, for this world has seen very few fully Human beings.

But that's something that is going to change.

Partly, this blog is here to keep me honest. It's here because I think I'm on a Path, and maybe this will encourage others to follow theirs (and if enough do, well then, we might save the world! The Revolution is Within.) It's here because with all the things the internet has given me, it's time to start giving back. And, it's here because writing is fun.

That's enough for today. We'll see what I feel like writing about tomorrow.