charlie 5 - The Immortal Perspective: On Who, What, and Where We Really Are

I call myself "charlie5", and my goal is "boundless universal salvation" ( )

Being five is like having died, and then come back, as yourself but filled with an ecstatic form of salvation called "five". Im a shaman, and charlie5 is my medicine name. Five is a light that I use to see - to see the universe all around me and inside of me;

Unlike a typical human ego, five is not separate from the universe; it is an integral part of the universe, mystical and profound - from the five elements (wood/earth/water/fire/metal) and the five directions (North South East West and center) to the five notes of the blues, to the five fingers on our hands, and the five senses, five is quintessential; five is everywhere, and really nowhere, solidly unreal; five is outside of space and time; and five is a very special part of the whole. Five is immortal, in the realm of metaphysics and pure abstraction. A 5 can be drawn in the sand or carved in stone, and that can be said to be a "home" for five, but without it, five is still five. Five is a perspective not a limited or mortal one, but a transcendent and infinite perspective; five is a light that shines throughout heaven, five is a doorway to a fullness of vision, five is a tunnel through the nothingness of the altar of reality, through the classroom of 'a course in miracles';

Just a 5 in any language in any script anywhere and it's already all over my deck of cards 'cause when i was mortal i had my father's last name but the point isn't to die, right? Point is to pursue immortality, that's what my immortality instructor - the moon -says anyway; when I found the way and got on the track for immortality the universe named me charlie 5 'cause i look through 5 to see heaven, so now I'm not just here, in my body, I'm everywhere, I'm quinopulus from quintopolis, 5-town, outside of space and time;

Five is everywhere, and charlie 5 united with the universe is charm 5, a net cast out to gather beauty, like a ringing bell, and take it in to the secret storehouse amplify it, and finally release it as an explosion of outward flowing re-radiated ideality;

Heaven and Earth are embedded within 5; resting in the maroon milk of anterior heaven;

Five is a pencil that has the universe for lead;

Five has a contract with the universe, to forward the evolution of the universe toward the universe by the universe;

- charlie5, "bound and river-lithe" - "lithe" like a young river otter, twisting and turning in the River of Way, "bound" for transcendence to the other side of mundane reality across the sea of ideation;
"bound and river-lithe", I live in the capital of Understanding on the side of a mountain called Raging Hope, far from the illusion capital at the corner of power and glory.

Take a dip in the wonder sea that's bright blue in front of me,

down horse drive number five, with a luck bucket;

Like monkeys or crows, that know where the fruit has been placed, but act like they don't know, so that the others won't know that they know,we walk around acting mortal, finite,acting like we don't know where the magic is,the divinity, the power, the universe,and maybe after a long time of practicing that behavior,we convince ourselves that we really don't know where the magic is,but looking back at the monkeys and the crows,their behavior was fear based, not faith based,so Im just gonna go ahead and admit, I know where the universe is:it's everywhere.

My problem is with the definition of self; Ive seen philosophies that have two, self with a lower case s and Self with an upper case S, that works better for me; of course I realize that I constantly change, my personality, my spirit, like a city thats been growing for a long time, some factories fallen into disrepair, some bigger than theyve ever been, a city thats always expanding, with some parks that have been there since the beginning, and skyscrapers that stand where wooden shacks used to, with ever widening corridors for blood flow and chemical busses and trains that usually keep pretty regular schedules delivering workers to the factories, and even, deep beneath some of those buildings, tunnels into caverns of ancestor temples, tunnels that continue to be dug with spiritual practice. Different people outside myself may see only the end of a day, when the factories have closed, or may only see my city during rush hour; I may invite someone on a date and take them to a theatre where I show a play, ostensibly about the city of the personality, but leaving out the run-down neighborhoods or the austerity years; I may invite a shaman straight down to the ancestor temples;if I deliver poison to the city or neglect the regularly required sanitation, it starts to look run down, and people notice as the rats and alligators snap; the opposite is washing into clarity, correcting into truth, into natural recovery, washing hearts with the weather, with the wisdom of water, clearing away the waves of dust, and either way, people may say youve changed, and really you cant help changing, its just a question of which direction youre going;

The living city of the mind is always changing, and that is what we can call self with a lower case s, and its the city designer, the planner, the one the city reports to, the one who makes the changes on how the city is fed, the one who pushes the blood through the corridors and makes sure the chemical trains run on time, the one the ancestors in the caves all look to with hope, thats the Self with the upper case S, and its always been here, changeless, and indestructible.

The self isnt who I am, its what I wear, its what I breathe through and dream in, and over time, while some things in the city are changeable, there are grooves that started at the beginning, like a well-worn footpath developing into Broadway, (Broadway in the mind is Amygdala Way) its traffic flow more difficult to divert the longer it persists, but the real me is the knowing acorn who arrived in this living forest some time between conception and birth, a divine energy that pushes like an elephant up against a mirror of Maya, driving the flow on the other side of that mirror that is the dream that were calling the changing self, the dream driven by the eternal Self.

The self will never be who the Self is; the Self with a capital S shines like the Sun; the lower case self is the garden that blossoms and fades in the Selfs rays; but what we call becoming who we are happens when the elephant of the Self pushes harder, widens streets, and breathes the clean mystery of wind and light through the city in storms of renewal that allow the smiling unworldly happiness of the elephant to flow more freely and easily through the pulsing city of the heart and mind.

There are many different theories of brain/mind, because people do experiments; but they are rarely explicit, and the pharma industry calls the brain a black box - put drug in, see what happens, sometimes it helps, no idea why; my brain mind theory looks at the brain as a city, with highways, and mind as the light that flies down those highways, pushed hard or too hard or not hard enough, ideally creating a beautiful flower of light, sometimes creating a dangerous blaze of destructive mania, and more often a clogged bog with little sparks that dont make it to the destination of happiness, due to road closures. I think what most of the SSRIs do is provisional, temporary, loosening the clogged bogs a little to let a few queued up sparks through, but as far as reconstructing the citys highway layout, maybe less effective; more effective but somewhat controversial is sending in the tanks of hallucinogens, Ive seen stories pushing ketamine lately, and I think of that as blasting a widening of roads wherever the sparks happened to be lined up when the tanks showed up; better long term answer is the arduous daily and never ending task of designing the flower of light out of life; for me thats daily spiritual practice, its reading, its walking hours a day, its daily sauna, its adequate sleep, its loving relationships, its deep mindful breathing; its absorbing the rain and the wind, its looking at the sun and the moon; ritual and altar; cultivation and practice; blending purity and stillness; pursuit of inner nature; a search for mystery and wonder; granted these answers are not as easy to hear as magic pill, but in the long run I found them more effective, and as far as the destruction from going on and off those drugs, I found the brain to have more plasticity than the psychiatric and pharmacological community infer; exercise creates new neurons, neurogenesis, it comes from healthy diet, daily high intensity exercise, a hard push for someone already on a clogged road system; maybe the drugs are to get enough light through to get started on building the roads.