The mind is a wondrous thing.

Oh I am not talking about the "brain", although that certainly must be considered and plays its own part in the input and distribution of information and our perceptions, but the mind, the part of us that is quite separate from the physical aspects of matter, if not actually at least virtually transcending physicality's and time and space. I'm not a psychologist, or a psychoanalyst, but I have read a great deal of Carl Jung and a number of others and it has greatly influenced my thinking. I certainly am not a scientist or a physicist, although I have studied the theories (to a limited degree) of Bacon, Newton, Einstein and now the quantum physicists. I'm not a theologian though I have studied Bible extensively and generally come up with unorthodox conclusions, and in more recent years have studied the writings of the Gnostics, the mysteries, eastern philosophy and these associated religions. Metaphysics fascinates me. I am an artist - a musician - I use both left and right brain - they both serve an intrinsic purpose accomplishing what it is that my mind perceives and I wrestle in life to express. Many have commented, in many varied and sundry ways, that I am a philosopher. Though I have a very difficult time conceiving myself as such I am highly honored that they would think so. Because I am no one particular, I'm just a man struggling to make sense of it all. In many respects I've had a good life. I've loved and lost; I have married and raised a large family. And I've lost that. And I have found that love does come again. There was a time I was very hard, probably for most of my life. It is easy to rationalize, it is a hard world. And hoping to prepare the ones I love for such a world I instilled into them hardness that I was feeling wrapped in a cloak of what I now understand to be superficial pseudo spiritual religiosity. But this is what we were taught. This is what our religion was giving us. And it's not only my religion or that of a single world religion. It is the religion of modern contemporary reality. Not Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or any of the rest, but a mindset that takes the input of the brain - the five senses - and deduces from it, "this is all there is - there ain't no more make the most of it baby". I highly respect the knowledge that can be observed and recorded as the operations of physical dimension. But I find these lacking of any true purpose meaning value to what it is to me to be human. I have found my purpose - my meaning - in the cries for understanding of others who allow themselves to come close to me. I've found my value in the expressions of joy and laughter and delight in the one I would hope to please. There's so much external - physical - that never enters the equation. That is not to say that we do not delight in our most basic human capacity. The pleasures of the flesh are no less real and human than all that high in nobler stuff that many wish to separate and divide me from what I am. Yet all that I know transpires in my mind. Is it the cause or the effect? Is it the elemental reality of all? The thing we have called consciousness and only a portion of our collective consciousness? Or are we totally separate - isolated - and divorced from each other? I do have some conclusions here (or at least relative conclusions to who I am right now - I'm sure they will evolve as I do), and though I cannot prove them with any objective criteria my own subjective

experience continues to expand and I can feel confident I am not separate, I'm not alone and time and space do not define who or what I am. And I experience all reality in my mind. Where allowed, I find I can probe the minds of others, and we are not separate. We can "know" the other. And though some cannot conceive such a thing, we can create our own reality and often manifests transcending but now invading lower planes of contemporary existence. Love, magic and miracles call them what you will. All begin in the mind what shall I create today?