Experiments in Consciousness Expansion Pt3

The light show was phenomenal. The music was epic.
My mind, she is blown.
Than/ks Radio hea_d

Currently reading: Requiem for a Dream

I'd seen the movie before. What's not to like? Sex, Drugs, and Jared Leto. But even though the movie was an artistic masterpiece, that's all it was to me- a work of art. The book on the other hand... jesus. Hubert Selby completely sucks you into their world. When they are laughing at life, I found myself outwardly smiling. Even though you never honestly believe things will end happily (because we all know how it ends... if you don't then spoiler alert: Jesus dies on the cross. I know, who would have seen that coming?) you still get caught up in their excitement. You can feel their denial of harsh reality as vividly as if it were your own. And believe me, when they are on drugs, you are on drugs. The whole story becomes so disturbingly real... it's surreal. And then there is the last chapter, which is more than mildly traumatic. I don't know if I've ever read a more emotionally moving piece of literature. I couldn't move. Just ask my roommate, I was physically unable to smile for a good half hour.

I wonder if people like depressing stories because we are so utterly convinced that we can't possibly end up like that. Well I'll be the first to admit I have addictions I'm not proud of, but I know that I will never let it get that much out of hand. And that's the whole point, isn't it?
So. fucking. good.

Because I'm obsessed with Seeqpod:

Warning: fMRI may cause existential rambling

Days of whoring myself out to researchers for psych credit are over. Now I do it for money and pictures of my brain!

This really is the coolest thing I've seen all year. After staring at the looping video they gave me for a good five minutes straight, it finally starts to sink in. This is physical evidence that I am a biochemical machine. Whoa. That is me. It is that crumpled mass of tissue that makes me who I am. My thoughts and feelings and hopes and dreams and inability to write out thoughts without gruesomely running on sentences are all just action potentials and chemical imbalances being pumped in that gray lump of a factory. I don't know if I'm alone when I say that I tend to picture consciousness as a thick fog swirling around an otherwise hollow skull. Occasionally there is a disembodied voice floating through it, but you get the idea. It's easy to imagine our lungs as lungs, and our stomachs as stomachs, but I never really think about the fact that there is an organ throwing around electrical signals to make me think and act the way I do.
That just blows my mind.

I also never realized how hard it is it to write about consciousness without using at least one figurative representation (mental picture, blows the mind, etc).
Try wrapping your mind around that.