What Do You Mean; To Be Human

     This past Tuesday, I attended an AA meeting with a friend, partially for support, but mostly out of curiosity about my own position in regards to addiction. While sitting in this meeting, I felt a desire to go up and share, although it's generally outside the tradition for newcomers to share, but sitting in that chair, listening to these people talk about what their lives had become before they chose to get sober resonated with me. I've never had any kind of a problem with drinking, but I had a couple of small realizations while I was there.      One: I do have an addiction to marijuana. It is an addiction . I've been excusing myself for months after the thought occurred to me that I should probably slow down, telling myself that it's just self-medicating, that it's treating my anxiety, my chronic pain, that it helps me to socialize with others who have the same habits--i.e. pretty much everyone I hang out with. I've always seen these as excuses, but ...

     I've always been significantly interested in magic and metaphysics. I've posted about what Authentic Magic is on this blog before, but after a recent trip on psychedelics with my primary, I found a phrase that helped even myself understand magic just a little better: My sensory experience has an atmosphere.      This is something I believe can be made true of anyone, and I should be clear and say that this isn't necessarily always true of myself. Whether or not I can sense the atmosphere of my being depends largely on how in tune with myself I am on any given day. Just in the same sense that the human state of consciousness is ever changing, between being alert or tired, happy or sad, sober or intoxicated, the extent of ones sensory atmosphere changes, and it's comparable to the atmosphere of the Earth: if the bit of atmosphere surrounding you is still, if there's no wind, odds are, if you make note of the weather at all it might simply be a comment o...

     Lately I've been sensing a deep and subtle commotion in the world around me. People seem to be waking up, asking questions, finding answers, and dealing with their crises in new and unprecedented ways. I myself have been working on and watching the balance of my chakras, trying to open the ones that are under active. It's been a relief, and a bit of an emotional adventure, and I am sensing active progress in myself. I feel different--and better. Previously, according to this little test I took on a website called Eclectic Energies, where you can be placed on the Enneagram, my first three and my sixth chakras were under active, and that's the root, under yourself; sacral (sex) chakra; the navel or solar plexus; and the third eye. I've read that you should generally work your way up from the bottom when working with chakras, which makes a lot of sense to me. I was thinking about it this morning, and I remember hearing in a particular video that depicts a global consp...