Going Offline

In my on-going quest to escape the Cone of Light, I have been experimenting with going offline on the weekends. It’s been excellent, a relief really. I feel like the web and apps and chats and all the other stuff is so deeply engrained into your brain… if you think of something, you have to go Google it, or tell your friend, or… it goes on and on. It gets way way way deep inside your brain. It’s there all the time, coiled and crouching, dragging you ever deeper into the Cone of Light.

Maybe the tectonic plates in my subconscious were just already all lined up for this, fertile ground for the moment, but the outward sign I can point to is my decision many weeks ago now to block most images and videos. To prevent the Cone of Light from firing off certain endless signals into my awareness. Things I don’t need and can’t use. Images that don’t concern me. Fights that aren’t mine. Land grabs in the mind. No thanks, let me be. I will abstain.

The IRL-only weekends game has showed me that I probably spend way too much time chiseling away on random bullshit that goes nowhere, is not necessary, and either doesn’t actively aid me, or potentially even acts as an impediment to further movement, to the ability to think deep long slow thoughts. To not be chained to the screen, constantly checking. Constantly checking, and finding nothing. Blips. Bloops. Nothing. Computers that want me to do something. To drive my behavior. To fit me into a box. An algorithm. One not my own.

I’m still painting nearly every night, and loving that so much too. Makes me reconnect with all these deep parts of myself… I had the experience recently, a few days ago – I’ve been meditating 20 minutes twice a day for a little under a year now – where I was meditating, and dropped into that sort of hypnopompic/hypnogogic image realm, the same one I think we visit or adjacent to Dreamspace. I found myself in my mind before a painting. There was orange on my brush, and I was adding line work to the upper left corner. I could see sort of flashes of impressions of what the whole canvas was, but not clearly.

Since then, I took that impulse, that basic gestalt feel, and tried my best to put it down onto real canvas. It didn’t come out exactly (or remotely) like in my inner vision… or did it? Aspects of it are true and right, and somehow lock us into the same latent space, or one at least at points contiguous to it.

I wonder if this inner vision didn’t bubble up unbidden suddenly because of turning down the luminosity on the Cone of Light, and re-showing my brain, my heart, my nervous system, that the web does not control it. That there is life outside internet. That there is too the Innernet which wells up to replace it when you can step away, give yourself the space to feel and to listen for the mystery.