Note:   This is all gonna be in chronological order as far as I can tell.  This is a series of unedited emails, which detail my experiences for the month of March.  If you haven't read my past blogs it'd be a good idea, it gives a little bit of context to the situation, just hyperlink: http://www.ashtarcommandcrew.net/profiles/blogs/a-very-weird-imagination

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So I lie down after drinking boiled and filtered and cold water (yum) and I relax my body… head to toes… and I thought, Well, maybe knowing my name is not really that important.  Let’s just go there.  I get relaxed, and I relax my mind, and I’m there at the top.  I walk down, almost forgetting to go 13 to one, and I get to the door, and I see it.  But I don’t read it.  It’s just there, and I go up to the door and just kinda think, Open.  And it does.

I see… grass sloping down to a sea, about maybe 100 feet away to the ocean, with blue skies and clouds and all that and the sun was shining.  In the distance I see a person, a little off to the left.  I tell them to wait, I want to feel where I was.  I got down in grass on my knees, and bent over and felt the individual grass blades, stuck my finger into the soft moist earth.  I look up, and there she was.

She was black, with an afro, followed by a light red headband with white borders, then her face, and she was wearing a light purple jogging suit.  I think I can get a sketch by tomorrow.  But, man alive, I was overcome by this happiness!  It was as though I were being reunited with someone, that I had missed very dearly!  I know we hugged, maybe kissed (not passionately), and we were both smiling and I was crying, it was so good to see her.  I tried a few times to collect myself, and largely did not succeed.  I was alive!

I look up again, and there’s a guy roughly in his twenties it looks, white, black hair maybe, tall.  He had a smile on his face, but he looked a bit more serious.  After a little while, after I’m not so tearful anymore, he tells me that there’s stuff that has to be done.  So I get up and run towards the sea.

Somehow, in between getting up to run, and diving into the sea, enough of my clothes came off so that I wouldn’t be soggy, just something appropriate for swimming.  I dive in, and it was real!  I swam for a little bit, just alive in the sensation of being there, and I got on the beach again.  She sat down next to me, maybe with her hand on mine, I don’t know, and the guy came back and told me I was experiencing this incredible emotion so that I could get back to being there, to make it real.  He told me about how there were serious things to be done, but I really could not listen.  After a while I just told him, those things are going to have to wait, I’m sorry.  He told me that lots of people were going to suffer or die, and I needed to act.  I told him, those people are going to have to wait, I’m sorry.  I didn’t feel selfish, I was just being alive! 

He challenged me, not because there was a tiff or anything, but to get me back and serious.  I got up, he got out a sword, and I went through a variety of weapons, wondering which one to choose.  A part of me wondered/told me that I used magic, not weapons.  I threw down what was in my hands at the moment, a sword, and told him, Screw it, I’m not fighting.  I turned to the door to leave (the door was set in a knoll in the grass, there was a forest a little ways away), wondering aloud how the stair worked, and she caught me, told me that there was something she wanted to give me.  She took out a necklace, with blue and purple (diamond?) beads, at the end of which was a brownish, old looking kunai knife-like thing.  She put it around my head, and told me it looked good on me.  I turned and went back into the door, shut it, and went back up the stairs.

So that was it!

Well, I lie down, and spend a while relaxing my body, and then once I’ve done that, I count down from 100.  And somewhere around twenty-five, something popped, I suppose, in my mind.  I was instantly more aware.  I continued down to 0 and I was at the stair.  As I go through the door, a name flashes through my mind, Talson P’tewa, or something like that.  Is it mine?  I don’t know.

Somehow I think I figured out that the black girl’s name is Anna.  She rushes me as I step through the door, and I’m knocked down.  I notice that I have a particular outfit on, that belongs to a character that I drew.

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I get up after she hugs me some.  She must really really like me.  I try to get myself accustomed to there, and I’m thinking, I think I know who I am now.  The guy welcomes me.

Now, I can’t remember how it got to be, but somehow I saw the guy from the picture Demon, he was wearing a blue jogging suit, and he still had those dark purple eyes that creeped me out.  He started fighting me, and somehow I then fell from the sky after chasing him and carved a hole into the earth about ten feet deep.  It hurt.  He came up to the side of the crater and threw kunai knives into the crater with strings so that above me was a cross made out of a string.  He did something and the knives/ string started pulling together and caused the earth to cave in on me.

So, then after all the dirt collapses onto me, and I can tell he’s walking away, I move through the earth to his position.  I get under him, and grab his feet, and start pulling him down.  But then he jumps out of his skin.  His skeleton literally comes out of his body, and I’m stuck with his corpse.  I get out of the ground, and then we fight some more.  I remember wondering if fighting is the way to solve this, and I think, no, fighting is the only way to solve this.

I think that I had thrown a kunai knife with a string around it, got it wrapped around his leg, and spoke some words and did some hand motion and it electrocuted him.  His skeleton fell to the ground along with me.  As I watched, a portal like thing opened up, and his corpse along with his fractured skeleton started to draw up into it.  Right before it went in, his body came back together, and he looked at me with that crazy grin and said something like, This isn’t the end.  Then it closed.

I get up and brush myself off, and somehow I’m aware that his body is still over where he first got out of it.  I go over to it by blinking.  Actually, I notice that only about half the time I actually experience things I do up there in the first person.  Other times I’m simply outside of my body, watching things happen.  Anyway, I get to his body, and open his eyelid.  The eye is fading purple, revealing a normal eye underneath.  The other eye is the same.

A woman with orange hair and way too much eyeliner, almost like Gaara from Naruto, comes up to me.  I spoke to her, and I called her Ayakara before I realized that I just called her something that I didn’t even know.  She picked up the body and started walking off with it.  I wlaked next to her, and she said something about how his body is badly hurt, it needs to go to the infirmary immediately.

She suddenly flew into the sky, and I grabbed her boot so that I was in the sky following her.  She still has the body.  After a while her boot comes off in my hand, and I’m stuck in the sky.  So, naturally, I fly after her.  I never quite catch up to her, and then I remember that I can blink.  I’m not sure where she’s going, but after a while I figure out the general direction she is going in and realize it’s an infirmary.  So I blink all the way there.

It looks like a regular hospital, with a helipad and everything.  It looks sort of out of place sitting in the middle of the forest next to the ocean.  I land on the helipad right after she does, and she rushes to a door that goes down a steep metal staircase, with me following.  The end of the staircase comes out into a hall with medical personnel going about, and behind a curtain on the right I hear a crack and a guy scream in pain.  I’m not sure if I want to go there.

There’s an elevator on the left that I manage to get into right before the door closes on Ayakara.  I’m standing in the elevator next to her, and suddenly I’m tired.  I tell her this, and she says, You ought to go, then.

I don’t realize it, but a big flashback occurs here.  I’m lying on the ground, with a sword in my chest, bleeding, in a dark, heavy rainstorm, with the demon-guy standing over me.  He’s grinning.  He starts talking about how, after all this time, he finally gets to kill my tribe.  They have been harassing him forever, and now he gets to kill them.  I remember that this guy was one of my tribe, who had gone out and tried to take on a monster himself, and I realized that this was that guy, but with the monster inside him.  He had been possessed.

He walks away, talking about destroying the village, and I try to get the sword out of my chest.  I realize this may have something to do with the spider, from the first installment, who had put five swords in my chest.  Maybe he was trying to get me to remember something.  I get it out of my chest, and I lay hands upon myself, and take about thirty seconds to heal myself enough to stand up.  After getting up, I see him in the distance, and he sees me.  He starts to pull this HUGE rock out of the ground, and I see, once he has it out of the ground, it looks like a huge kunai knife.  What is it with these?  He swings it around onto his shoulder, it dwarfing him in size, being roughly 50 times bigger than him, and flies off to somewhere behind me, which is the direction the village is in.  I get up after him.

I arrive only to find him pointing the huge rock at the village from fifty feet in the air, and he’s laughing, as a huge ball of fire erupts from the end of it and completely annihilates the village.  Even though I was kind of unattached to it, I still remember it being incredibly emotional.  It was my village being destroyed, after all, the only thing I knew.  I was sitting there in awe, simply unable to handle what had just happened, and I think he swung the thing at me and knocked me out.

I woke up to a bright day on the side of a mountain, next to a trail, with Anna (even though I didn’t know her yet) standing over me, worried.  The guy (the first one) came over too, and then I passed out.  I woke up again in a bed, in a cabin.  They were in there.  I woke up again, and I think they were trying to give me some food.

The flashback ended at this point.  I was still in the elevator, next to Ayakara, and we got out.  I asked her if this meant that I was the only one left, and she said, As far as we know, yes.  She walked away, and I took out a stone that was yellow, that was similar in function to a hearthstone.  I squeezed it, and I was in front of the door in this world.  Anna grabbed the necklace, looked at it, and told me it was doing what it was supposed to do.  I went to the door, and the guy told me that there were still things to do.  I told him I know, and went through the door.

Now that I think about it, though, maybe the demon-guy was part of my tribe, so he might be one left.

That’s it.  Is it real, well, I don’t know.

This is a sketch of the guy in the flashback, who I was; I'll make another better one, but for now it'll do.

I don't know about the face, but the weapon is a bow that is attached to a glove. It aims like a crossbow and shoots like a bow. I remember I practiced with that a little bit while in there.

And actually, I used that bow in a dream:

http://www.ashtarcommandcrew.net/profiles/blogs/am-i-being-told-something

Fun stuff.

So, Naturally, as is to say, I naturally started to scramble the hell outta there.  I busted through the front door, which I was fortunately located near, and ran out into the street ( a modern street, with pink streetlights and everything in suburbia ), looking behind at the mob amassing behind me.  I ran across the street, behind a fence.  I realized this wouldn't hold them off, so I went down to the back of the house that the fence belonged to, and got to the back when I realized, Crud, I'm trapped, because the mob had gone the direction I had gone as well as around the other side of the house.  So, I climbed over the frnce and dropped into a large field and started running towards a highway.

As I got closer to the highway, a limo pulled up.  Machine gun fire started blasting out of it.  It missed me, but it kept firing so I knew I had to get ou tof THERE before I got wounded.  So, I jumped into the sky and glided over the forest.

Now, this is where it starts getting really weird.  So I'm gliding over the forest, not very successfully, and I wind up landing in the forest, smashing against trees and tree limbs.  It hurt.  I got up again, and this time crashed into a glade, making a hole about five feet deep in the ground.  It hurt as well.  Then, that guy... that creepy demon guy shows up.  He threw kunai knives into the crater, which I realezed if I let him get away with that trick again, it'd be my grave.  So I jumped out of there and flew at him, aiming for the throat.

And I got up... slowly, painfully... and said Never, or some cheap thing like that. 

 I can't exactly remember all that happened next.  I remember that he got bigger again, and part of his tactics was trying to stomp on me or kick me.  I also remember that he turned purple, so that he really started looking like a demon, with with creepy photo-negative yellow eyes. 

After that... I realized there wasn't a way in the world I could beat him, at least as I was then.  So, I concentrated really hard... my body convulsed, here and there, and after about thirty seconds, I was done, and I was as big as him (taking a cue, I suspect, from the Twinrova battle in Majora's Mask).  I got out a sword, and so did he, and we battled.

I remember I went at him first, and there were things that if it were filmed, it would have won an award for special effects and best moves or something like that.  There was one point where he got me from behind, choking me with his arm, and I thrust the sword into my body, and it also went into his.

And so we both fell.

I took it out of me, and laid back.  I got smaller and smaller, until his boot was bigger than me.  By the way, he looked like an evil copy of me.  I laid back, and this piano music from Twilight Princess (legend of Zelda), or at least sounding like it would have came from that game, played.  The world was still dark, but I was lying down anyways, just kinda recovering. 

After a long while I noticed that the sky was a little lighter.  Everything was still dark, except for the sky showing a little light, as though it were an extremely cloudy day.  I waited more, and it became lighter and lighter.  Eventually I could tell that the world I was sitting in was a large grassland, with hills and stuff in the distance.  It kept getting lighter and lighter, and it started to rain.  Or rather, I realized it was raining.

As it got brighter, I noticed that day and night were speeding by remarkably fast.  Hundreds of days passed within a minute.  The giant demon guy was a big rock formation around me.  I watched people go by, and a couple of buildings pop up, and then some more, and soon a little town had sprung up.  I watched this go on, and decided that I was well enough to get up.  I did so, and I placed my hand on the shoulder of a person who was blazing past me.  When I touched him, time immediately slowed down to half a second per second, and I saw who he was.  It was night, but there was a fire nearby.  He was tanned, with hair that shot out from his head, a headband on that kept all of his hair above his head.

He expressed extreme shock at me touching him.  He fell down, and then got back up.  He greeted me, I don't remember if I told him my name ( if I did I don't remember my name ) and I asked him if I could have somewhere to stay.  He offered to take me on a wagon that he was leaving with anyways.  I said yes, and then he punched me.  As I got off the ground he told me that if he wanted to stick around I'd better be able to dodge things like that.

So I think it was day when we left, I was sitting on the back of the wagon.  It was like those traditional American western frontier type horse and carriage things, just one of them though, and four guys on it.  I think I fell off, and scrambled to get back on.  I decided instead of sitting on the back I'd sit in it.  In it were two guys, one was the guy I'd bumped into and the other was an associate of his.  There was also a guy driving the horses, he looked Slavic, I think; he looked like a guy in one of my drawings.

I remember we had some conversations, a few pieces of cargo almost getting broken including a red jar, I remember the driver yelling at the guys to not break stuff.  Eventually I fell asleep.  I woke at night, we were at another town.  I got off, and so did the guy I met, and we went into an inn.  I went upstairs to quarters, while the guy asummably talked to the keep.  It was a tavern downstairs with an inn upstairs.

I don't remember anything after that until I woke up to some people banging on the door of the room I had gone to sleep in.  They came through the door, and there was a sherriff standing there, with some lackeys standing behind him.

 "You better get up," the sherriff said.  He had a blue uniform on, sorta like what you'd expect for an American frontier.  Not cowboy, just frontier."Why?" I asked.

I don't remember if he answered, but his boys had me by the arms and they were dragging me down the stairs. I think they even got me to the sherriff's office, I think, before the following happened.

I remember standing at a desk in a dark room, I guess it was the sherriff's office, it was lit by moonlight from a window behind the desk. He was sitting behind it. He accused me of killing his leader. I went, What? He got up in my face, and his face changed. It was weird... the eyes glowed yellow. I figured out real quick that the leader was the demon guy I 'd slain, and that I'd better get the hell outta there.

I got out of the office through a window, and started running. The sherriff and his men ran out from the building and started shooting at me. They were missing horribly, but I knew if I let them go on they'd eventually hit me. So I ran.

I can't remember how it transitioned this way. I think it had something with the night being really dark. But, once again, I was in the pitch black world of the demon. I realized that the way I was doing this, by not going down the steps, I think I was letting myself be open to the demon's influence. I was trapped in his matrix, the world I was just in one of his creation.

That's some messed up shit right there.

The demon came back again. He was, to put it one way, bigger than ever. He was in his dark purple form, since I already knew what it was anyways. He started fighting me, or rather, trying to torture me, since I really couldn't fight back.

I remember at one point, this may have been the first time around, but I remember someone flew at him with a sword, I think Ayakara, but he swatted whoever it was off.

He said, "This is my world, you can't do anything here. I am god here."

I thought otherwise. I'm not sure of what I did in between, but at some point I had gotten out a sword. I tried to fight him, and he made me fall. It was his world after all, he could remove the floor if he wanted to.

So I was falling and falling and falling, trying with no avail to stop, when I thought of something.

I started going faster. Then, once I was going really fast (even I couldn't really tell, there was no air to cause friction, and there was nothing relative to measure my speed against, except for the demon, who was getting really far away) I thrust out the sword.

The sword started grinding. Sparks flew, and a tear in the demon's world opened.

I continued falling at a faster and faster rate; I'm not sure where the gravity came from, but I don't really care, all I know is as I kept traveling, the tear in his world got bigger and bigger. He was shocked, and started wailing stuff like NOOOO and such.

Eventually I saw that his world was collapsing in on itself. My path began to curve, as though I were going down a sphere. After a little bit, everything in his world (him and me) were sucked into the tear, and the world collapsed.

I popped out, strangely, in my garden. He was pretty frickin huge. He towered over the trees and oceans like a person over grass and puddles. He started trying to destroy things at random. I remember I ran up his body and went into his mouth. I landed in his stomach.

Here's a piece of advice: esophaguses are uncomfortable.

I don't know why I did that, or how I got out, or what happened. But I was out to no avail.

I remember maybe a dragon at one point came and fought him. They were evenly matched, it looked like, but the demon fought it off. I wonder what the dragon was...

I remember that I was standing next to the guy and Ayakara, wondering what to do. I came up with the great idea of putting him in a glass box. So I did, I just summoned a glass box around him. It was my world after all. He realized he was in a glass box pretty quick, and he started punching the glass. It must have been pretty resilient, because after five punches the glass was cracked only a little bit. I removed the crack and made the glass box smaller. It hit me: I can shrink the box and trap him. So I shrunk it a whole lot, and the demon got more and more compressed until I couldn't see him, because the glass box had gotten smaller than the trees that he was originally taller than.

Ayakara went through the forest over to the box, and I followed. The glass box fit in the palm of my hand, but I remember it was incredibly heavy. Ayakara picked it up, and said something about recycling it. I already knew about that (recycling a soul) though.

So that's pretty much the end.

Now, for the next day, I did it again, unofficially going to those realms like I had before. I can't remember exactly what happened, so I'll just kinda conglomerate it into a list:

Right before the demon had been trapped in the box, he had let off a little of his essence, so that part of him was still bouncing around.

He was stuck to me, or parasiting off me rather, and he was using my memory in order to remember what he was; he had lost almost all of his memory when he detached himself.

I'm not sure about the following here. I'm pretty sure it happened after that last time, but not specifically constrained to any particular situation. I know it happened though.

While I was in the dark of the demon's world (after it had been destroyed(?) I think) a guy that I had not seen before who had black on was with a woman that I could never see quite clearly helped me up after the demon had done something to me. I don't remember why, I don't remember how.

Another time later, he came up to me and took his sword (a katana I believe) and made a crucifix-shaped cut in my lower back. I said "Gotterdammerung," and he replied, "Are you sure you want to say that?" I said no, and he cursed. He healed that portion a little bit, then started again on the upper back, with the cross. Once he'd done that, he peeled back the skin and made marks on the muscle and under-skin tissue. Part of it looked like a lopsided 4. He did that, put the skin back, and healed it. I remmeber then I went down a tunnel of water. I don't remember after that.

I also remember that I actually did go down through the garden, going down the steps and the door, but right as I went through the door, I immediately became weary. The guy was there, I had gone there to find out his name, and mine, but he advised me to turn back, and I did.

Ok, THAT's all that I've done. Phew. Some/all may not have actually happened, some/all may be just my imagination skewing everything up.

This is sort of a representation of the demon.  I actually felt my right side, it was different (more "discordant") than my left.

I doubt I actually look like that on the right, but I don't know.

And last night, wow, that was amazing.  I had laid down with the intention of getting to my garden and finding some stuff out about myself.  In order to relax my body, I visualized a power breaker, and I flipped the switches to close down muscle lines, starting from my arms to my neck to the torso down to the groin and then the legs.  After I did that I visualized a large sector breaker for each region (left/right forearm, left/right arm, etc.) and I shut those down.

The weird part happens when I do my head, which I do last after everything else.  As I relax the head the mind, I get this sensation on my temples, after a while I realize this was electricity, which I knew from the times I had touched a live plug.  It started to move up towards the center of my head, and I got the image in my mind of two rods, looking sort of like soldering irons, but they were conducting electricity.  The guy holding them was slightly overweight and bald.  He was in black, with a white undershirt.  He looked like a pallbearer.

What he did essentially was trace the electricity to my head, at one point delivered shocks through the center of my forehead,and drew electricity through my right temple to a point which traced the path of an earlier implant, which he said was to fry it because it was still in there, it had organic and plastic parts that would melt, and screw up the circuitry.

Another thing he did was to drill a hole in the side of my head, stick a probe in there, and check my body for damages, along with a possible solution to the music that always plays in my head.  Not like I'm crazy, it's just a crappy version of "Dream On" had been playing in my head for the past three days.  He didn't succeed, but it must have done something.  I remember he said that doing that was incredible breach of ethics, drilling into someone's brain isn't exactly the sort everyday thing you do.  He had a laptop he used to look inside my brain.

At one point, I asked him which organization he belonged to.  He replied that it didn't matter.  I replied by saying, You're in the IDSA, aren't you?  Then I went on about how I didn't know that, I'd never even met a member of the IDSA, I didn't know if they were even real.  He just kinda noncommittally replied, Well, who knows.

After that, he left, and as I laid back that was when I felt the difference between the left side and the right side.  And, a lot of the fears and worries and general stress I'd been nurturing that day had disappeared.  That was pretty neat.

That was last night, and this afternoon I met who I call the Schoolmaster.  That's another guy I'll draw, I have a cue now.  His name is Vindicai, I think.  I was actually talking to him before I laid down to go there, so maybe I can actually walk around whilst there.

He explained to me that I could only control where I go if enter through my garden, otherwise the places I end up are controlled mostly by others, which'd explain why the demon was able to catch me so.  He exemplified this by taking a globe and pointing to various places, which I would then see.  The last place was the ice cap, and he left me there.

There I battled three skeletons.  I could write it all down, but pretty much every time I knocked them down they'd come back up.  Vindicai gave me a spell that I'd have to use to shatter them, and I figured out that in order to use the spell I'd have to set it up so that I had five spare seconds in which to cast it.  I eventually beat them.

I think I also saw Reiz.  If not, then somebody who looks like him took me various places, then settled at a bar, where I sat down at a table, and he went off somewhere.  A lady came over to me, started playing cards with me, and the guy made her go away.  At one point I looked over at a table where there were five men in black, and they looked back at me suspiciously.  I kinda looked away trying to be casual.

Then, a hobo came up to me.  He told me he needed four nickels, he had two, to buy a lottery ticket he just knew he'd win.  I held back for a while, then took out two more nickels but held them back.  He lunged at me with a sword.  I fought him off with chairs, and beat his head before laying off him.  I don't think I hurt him too badly, just enough to get him to stay away.

I fell asleep after that.

And that's the end of it.

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Ok, I laid down, and went down to the garden.  I'm just gonna summarize, since it'd go on too long.

*swam in ocean, breathed water

*flew around, dodged random arrows, got hit in left shoulder

*the guy caught me, took me to hospital, I almost heard my name when he registered me, took me to ward Left A 16, threw me onto bed

*nurse came in, expertly removed arrow, healed wounds, put on bandage saying can take it off in six days

*guy (that looked like Reiz in scrubs) takes hypo and uses it three times on my chest, which paralyzes me

*taken to black sedan, and to interrogation room

*man coaxes my real-world name, what I was doing (projecting) out of me

*wake up in padded cell in straight-jacket, see metal cage and electrodes assembled around me

*bust out of metal cage and straight jacket using energy from electrode shocks to fuel melting the iron and burning the straight-jacket

*big action scene that involves killing two guards, leaping across cells, killing guards with random automatic weapon and grenade, hating having to kill them, getting clerk to open all the cells them killing the clerk, and cutting everyone out of their straight-jackets

*screaming, then waking up in  garden as though I'd just dreamed it all

*doubting every second of it

That pretty much summarizes it.

Mostly it was Saturday night/ Sunday morning, the first thing is that I had a dream that I can't remember in its entirety, but I do know that in it three cats (two of whom I know) were in the big screened off portion of a house, that was exposed to the outside, and the cats were climbing all over the screen really fast.  The one cat I didn't know was white with some beige on its head.

And at the end of the dream I was at some minor ceremony in the same house, with an older guy in a blue mage suit perhaps.  He had a book or something that he had me place my hands on, in the background I

I went to sleep at nine-ish, got up around 12 30.  I sat around awhile agitated that I couldn't get back to sleep because of the "Refreshing Cola" coursing through my veins (remind me to never drink caffeine again, especially the 79 cent variety), and stayed up to about 2:00.  I finally was lying down, and I sat there and tried to do some energy-feeling, and after a while I get this big power surge, my ears are ringing and my body is like WHOAA, and at one point I swear I might have actually gone out of my body, at least with my hands, because I got this feeling that can be described as though my left hand was put on backwards.  After a while it subsided.  But I want to induce that again.  I think it was the kind of feeling that my body would have had shocked me, had I not forced my body to stay still and let it come in, whatever it was.

And then I got up in the morning... I don't remember what the dream was, even though I knew what it was when I was waking up, and I was still in the dream as I was also in the real world getting up to go to the bathroom. so that I was in two worlds at the same time.  By the time I was a'tinkling, I was back in this world, but the dream world seemed much more real than this one.  It was as though here was the dream and that was reality.  Weird.

So... that's all for now.

Hmm... while we're sitting on our asses complaining about how it's not fair that we should do so and so or that so and so happens to us the world moves on and we sit there like a barnacle stuck to the bottom of the river.

Maybe we should just deal with it for now?

Sure, some things really aren't just and are really stupid.  Humans can be ugly, maybe they're just little material mosnters.  Maybe they're just perverts.  Maybe there's no hope for them.  Hope... for what, though?  That they'll stop it?  that they'll climb out of their little trap?  We're stuck in it too.  But whining and moaning about well shit this sucks and I want to do this, isn't doing it.

To me, Anush is just sucking up all the shit that she has to.  Yeah, there's all that about Oh well fate'll take care of you -- no.  Not all the time.  Buddha said, Attachment is suffering.  And he was right.  Attachment is suffering.  But are you willing to not be attached to anything at all?  Are you ready to screw everyone else, everything else, even yourself?  If you did that, then yeah, you wouldn't suffer.  There'd be nothing to suffer about.  Not even you.

So, now what?

I think that Anush really is a master at this Balance in all things thing.  Sure, she still has stuff to work on but she;s really got it I think.  I.. um, don't.  But, that's so only because I can;t see what to balance.  It's like if all our world is a bunch of floodgates and dams, and by opening up each dam and gate we come closer to balance and letting the water go where it needs to go.  Although, most of us can't really see the gates, they;ve been there all our life.  Just like, say, the sensation of sitting on something.  You're used to it, when you sit down you don't go Oh, man this really feels like... a surface.  At least I don't.  And so you don't notice it.

I'm not saying, pay attention to everything you sit on, unless you want to.  Go ahead and do so if you want to.  But, these gates, in order to lower them, we first have to realize that they're there.  Then, we have to lower them.  (oops, I'm starting to speak in 1st person plural, sorry) And some gates are really really big, some of them are extremely hard to pull down, partly because of all the pressure sitting behind them, and partly because of rust.  And you have to go gradually, if you pull down a big gate without doing others to soften its load first you might wind up damaging something.  And, the longer you wait, the longer it rusts, and after a very long time, a gate might snap and suddenly there's a large amount of turmoil everywhere.

You can't blast the dams... and you can't drink the water away... and eventually, every dam overflows.  If you build the dam higher, it only makes it that much harder to eventually let back all the water.

Where do the dams come from?  I suppose it's set up by ourselves, because the flow of life was taking us somewhere we didn't want to go.  And we set up the dams.  Sometimes we do it simply because we can't swim.  Sometimes we do it because we simply can't go down the river yet.  Sometimes we do it because we knew nothing else to do.  And we do it, because if we let the water take us away, we'd have nothing to hold on to.

But if we let them go, we'd be free.  But it's a slow and long and hard process.  Finding the dams, figuring out how to lower them, and lowering or sometimes collapsing them.  Learning how to swim, learning how to survive on the river of life that we sheilded ourselves from for so long.  (Cripes, I gotta stop with the "we" stuff, it makes me feel like some sort of guru!)  Learning how to deal with the sudden rush of life, and learning how to be free.

And of course, there are always others.  Sometimes their dam system is connected to yours.  Some people don't have much beyond a river dam, and some people have dammed their world up.  But they designed their dams, they are the only ones who know how to deconstruct them.  Others can help, if they are similar, or those who have escaped their personal dams and are only freeing up others to help themselves on their way.  Some try to help, not knowing that they can't do it, but ultimately those themselves can.

So...

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That's the end of March.  April:  http://www.ashtarcommandcrew.net/group/balancepath/forum/topics/anthology-of-adventures-for