Or: My Attempt To Make A Purpose As Un-Pretentious As Possible
Two Dreams is focused on sharing ways to change experience and being through the magic of language (in its many forms).
Whether that's the I Ching, sigil magic, or self-help, the goal is to provide practical tools.
But I didn't always have these tools. I stand in front of a trail of personal failures, crises, and embarrassments that helped me evade stability.
Being born into the projects.
Angrily punching walls as a child.
Being choked until I was unconscious and shaking on my middle school recess grass, and then starting years of nonstop antibiotics that probably didn't do me much favors.
Isolation and depression like many high school kids, followed by deludedly and manically starting a fight that found me unconscious again, in front of my classmates.
I graduated into booze, dissociative events that I have no memory of, and crying in a Texas parking lot when I didn't even know how to correctly do laundry.
Then came an event that went from mania to me stabbing myself in the neck, and my grandmother in the shoulder.
'Recovery' from bleeding out looked like drunkenly thanking a bunch of strangers on Twitter for friendship that was non existent if we're grading it in terms of reciprocity. Or being an ignorant modern Roman coliseum spectator, spilling simple stupidity about subjects I had no business commenting on. Alcohol can make even your vices appear to be friendship.
Binge eating, infidelity, and unemployment, the path was paved with no intention. It was the same kind of free will exercised by a wind-up toy. A dukkha robot with no self-awareness.
My first and last initials became a way to say 'just kidding.'
I'll be a music writer ... just kidding
I'll go from a Team Lead managing 11 researchers to a supervisor ... just kidding
I'll be a copywriter (again) ... you get the idea.
You don't get out of your own way all at once. Giving up alcohol, not 'eating my feelings', a decade-plus of therapy, and stabilizing practices all helped me get closer to a glimmer of the potential I had as a person.
Tools take time. And then you need to know how to use those tools in a beneficial way, instead of how I used that knife to put multiple holes around my carotid artery.
Discipline doesn't become a state until you exercise some.
My mania helped me dedicate thousands of hours to the I Ching, a form of magical language, and I built up my own form of expertise.
But around my 36th birthday I stumbled into ontological teachings, and the Socratic Method.
It changed my relationship with language, and helped me see that our rational faculties can play a major role in regulating our state of being. That by changing the way the world around us occurs, we can automatically change the way we are in the world. Language as a way to wind up ourselves a bit, for a direction we might actually want to go in.
That leaves us in the present, where I try to use this website to offer a bit of the language magic that's helped me be a *little* less like the I Ching's "inferior man."
So, whether it's hoping that we all get a contact high from a three-thousand year old oracle, or experimenting with self-help that actually helps, I hope that you find something of value as you step on your own path.
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For an organized list of what this site offers, check out the Start Here page.
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