“Rebel Spirit,” My First Album on Streaming Platforms.

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I had been in my birth country of Honduras at the time of my 2 previous solo rap releases, in 2017 for Musical Alchemy and in 2019 for Expanding our Horizons, and during the time I was there I got the chance to work on some music that didn’t really fit the feel of either one of those two tapes. The beats were more intense than chill, the lyrics more controversial. These odd tracks became the base for what would become the album “Rebel Spirit.”  Some of the first tracks I made for this album were “Mass Mental Manipulation” and the first track “Rebel from the Start”, which I produced the beat for, along with the remix of the track “Rebel Spirit” from the Musical Alchemy mixtape. Since I couldn’t acquire the rights for the initial “Rebel Spirit” beat and I really liked my lyrics and flow on there I decided to make my own beat for it so I could fully release it on my first album on streaming platforms. Being in another country really inspired me to make music, both lyrics and beats. It provided me with a different perspective on life, which travelling always does. I had a simpler life in a way, with more time to dedicate to music, and more privacy to record music uninterrupted as well. I had taken my mic and laptop to Honduras, along with the mic stand. In those days it was easier to move my setup anywhere in the world, since I was still recording on a USB mic and laptop, and had no notion of what an audio interface even was. I was also making beats using only a mouse and keyboard on FL Studio. Regardless of all that, I returned to Canada 5 years later, at the start of 2022, with a good amount of work done for the album, then finished up the rest of the tracks and all the editing, mixing, etc. I also re-recorded some of the tracks with my new XLR mic and audio interface. I had been learning a lot about setting up a studio, something which has always been a dream for me but I just never took seriously, and when I got back to Canada I knew it was time to level up, including the way I made my music. Maybe I never took the studio idea too seriously because I never thought I had the money for it, but now I know that setting up a decent home studio is a lot more affordable than I had originally imagined. You always see studios full of equipment, but you don’t realize that one doesn’t need all of that to make music, only some basic things. I also picked up a great 61-key MIDI keyboard which I use both on FL and on my MPC to get melodies down in a much quicker way, which is also a lot more fun and hands-on than clicking on a mouse. In a way, although this is a kind of debut album for me, being the first I’ve released on streaming platforms, it also marks the end of some things. For one thing, this album only has three tracks that I produced, but on future records I plan to focus on all or most of the production myself. I’ve been making beats for a decade, but only recently do I feel more comfortable using my own productions to rap my lyrics over. These past few years have been instrumental, hah, in me getting into the craft of making beats, both sampled and from scratch. I had been making beats only on FL Studio since the beginning, but when I got into the MPC workflow I started to really see the beauty in crafting a beat, like a piece of art much like a full song, and now with a newfound appreciation for music production I can enjoy making beats on any platform, and I’m excited to see how I can craft the sound of my music more deliberately. As previously mentioned, this album is recorded only semi-professionally, with the other half recorded on my old setup, my USB mic which I had been using since I made my first song ever more than a decade ago. Moving forward everything will be recorded the proper way, and I’ve been learning lots about mixing, mastering, production, and just audio in general. None of this is to say that this album is lacking in quality. As I mentioned, some of these tracks were in the works for years, since 2017 when I first got to Honduras, and they’ve undergone many changes to get them to their current state, ready for release. I really put a lot of time and effort into the songs on this album, as well as a lot of thought into the lyrics, so I appreciate any and all of you who are willing to give it a listen, as well as to all of you reading this. This album, true to its name, focuses on various aspects of life from a rebel perspective, from a perspective that I feel is not always noticed, or is actually actively ignored due to a widespread, sometimes unconscious, fear of facing reality, of accepting positive change.

I hope you enjoy it! You can listen to the album on Spotify, and if you’d like to support me you can purchase the album on Bandcamp. Much love fam.

DAY 36 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

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Some days I feel like I can’t find the right inspiration to write from, like I can’t find any solid ground to stand on to make any sort of concrete point. All I really have are my own often contradictory ideas and opinions, which are colored by my own life experiences, my own confusions and my own beliefs, which I wouldn’t want to think are beliefs but I have to be honest about and admit they are. I think beliefs can be really limiting, because once we believe something religiously it becomes easy to shut ourselves off from any other ideas that might contradict our own. On the other hand, it seems like it would be really difficult to live life without any beliefs at all. Obviously there are things we can all tell are or are not a certain way, and it would be absurd not to believe the facts of life just for the sake of being open to new ideas. We all go through life believing certain things, and disbelieving other things, whether we know it or not. Belief gives structure to our lives. I used to think that I wanted to learn about everything, I imagined myself finding mystical truths of the universe while deep into mystical experiences, either induced by heavy meditation or by psychedelics. I even visited a Float Tank downtown a few times, always searching for some trippy meaning to life, as I mentioned yesterday. These days though, it doesn’t seem as fun as I’d expected. The more I spend time thinking about life and the world in its current condition, the more I realize how backwards everything is, how divided everyone is, and how it’s all going according to the plan of higher powers who wish to control us. The worst part of it all is that I often can’t say anything, and this is why I rarely write about this sort of thing, even though I always think I should more often, because I know that I’m part of the problem. I’m contributing to the destruction of our planet just as much as everyone else, because even though I see the problem, and I’m sure many others do as well, I don’t really do much to go against it. Why? I don’t want to make excuses but it really doesn’t seem like there’s much one can do. We’re all dependent on the same things, I need my internet, my music equipment to record and release music, my computer to write on my blog, social media to share my ideas, the customers who call me at work need technical support with their cable issues, some older people crying and obsessing over their TV’s because they have no other company and nothing else to do. Materialism is the religion of the modern world, and we can’t dare say anything about it because we wouldn’t be able to turn back even if we wanted to. It’s sad how disconnected everything and everyone is, and I really think it’s all deliberate. Things get more expensive but people don’t make more money, people can’t keep up, families don’t work because there’s no time to be together, kids go out on their own and end up on drugs due to lack of guidance or simply because they’re following trends and idolizing artists who glorify living like junkies and justify it just because they’re rich. Why is it that kind of music that ends up popular? Probably for the same reason we see alcohol and cigarettes in movies, everything is a business and everything is advertising. The media is also owned and it’s crazy to think that whatever narrative the people with money and power want to promote can be promoted with no problem. People vote but in reality everything is probably manipulated in order to keep people divided and fighting rather than waking up to realize it’s all just a show they’re putting on. So why am I saying all this? Simply because it just came to my mind, just like it often does. I kind of wish I could still feel like I did back in the day, when I didn’t really care about anything other than partying and being reckless and getting high and trying to hook up with girls. At least back then I could have fun, and I don’t recall feeling much anxiety. In a way, although I hate it, I’m kind of thankful for my anxiety now, because it really keeps me from doing a bunch of dumb shit that I know I shouldn’t be doing. I know I wouldn’t really enjoy living how I did back then if I was living it right now, but I guess I just wish things didn’t seem so hopeless. I used to think of the world as a magical place to explore, like some sort of adventure from a movie or a Zelda game, an open world with challenges to beat. It’s hard to hear like that when all you hear about is problems all around the world, knowing I’m already in one of the best places to live makes me even wonder what the point of travelling would even be now, even back to my home country of Honduras which is super dangerous. I feel like I don’t want any problems or even possibility for problems now, I just want guaranteed peace, peace of mind. Well, as I said at the beginning of this post, I have nothing to offer other than my ideas, even when they’re not too positive or optimistic at times. This is just a day in my life, a stage I pass through as I continue living and learning, and if life really is positive deep down, and good, then I’m sure I’ll eventually experience that, because I know it deep within, I know that life and the world are good, even if we haven’t created the best civilization on it, it is our fault, not the world’s, so I’m sure there’s still hope for recovery, so I’ll see where life takes me.

much love

~ rebel eye

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DAY 35 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

Yesterday I wrote about my fascination with learning about spiritual ideas from different religions and trying to learn if there’s any common origin between them. Today I think I’ll write about another fascination of mine, which might not be as intense anymore, but is still a part of my life, and was definitely a huge deal for me when I was a bit younger. It might not be the healthiest thing to be obsessed with, but I gotta tell the truth. If you’ve read some of my earlier posts in this series of a thousand daily words then you might be aware of how I’m just recently starting to cut down on weed after about 15 years of daily use. These days that’s a big deal for me because weed has always been something which I thought I’d never really need to cut down on, but what you might not know is that weed is far from the only drug I’ve used throughout my life. In fact, my unhealthy fascination I mentioned at the beginning of this post is drugs. Yes, drugs in general have always been extremely interesting to me, and I feel like that is very intimately tied with my love for spirituality, philosophy and all things weird. I’ve always loved learning and researching (about things that actually interest me), and I knew that drugs were dangerous, so even though I was in the eight grade and still very young, I knew that I had a lot of research to do if I was going to embark on this path of experimenting with psychoactive substances, but I was determined to do it so I learned as much as I could. Weed was my first high, and at first I hadn’t decided to make it an everyday habit, but I was completely interested and started learning about it’s effects and even history. Since I had no tolerance at all, weed was super psychedelic for me, something that has never been the same after years of heavy use. I liked how it made me more aware of my thoughts, how everything i thought seemed interesting and meaningful, and as I started learning online about other drugs I naturally gravitated towards substances that offered the same kind of trippy, introspective effects, more specifically psychedelics. I became fascinated with mushrooms and LSD, and I don’t remember whether my interest in psychedelics or my interest in hippie culture came first, or if they both sort of grew together and eventually inspired me to try to live a spiritual or philosophical life. I’ve always thought of the world as extremely unjust as well, and I guess it was the whole anti-establishment thing which made me really like hippies, as well as their use of psychedelic drugs as some sort of sacrament to look within themselves and see what they could find. That life seemed a lot more meaningful to me than working for money my entire life, chasing more power and status. So I started reading countless trip reports on Erwoid, from first trips to heroic doses, to all sorts of combinations, so I was learning about more substances as I learned about mushrooms and acid. The trips were so insane, the visions people spoke of and the feelings they described were so interesting to me, and so I started asking people if they knew anyone with shrooms or acid I could buy. I didn’t have much luck at school at first, but I eventually met this kid, I don’t really remember how, who sold me some acid. I mean, he was a nerdy looking kid from my school, but I don’t remember how I knew to ask him or how our meeting came about. Anyway, I had some crazy acid trips, and from then on I decided to try all psychedelics. Although a lot of it was curiosity, I know that deep down I was never using these substances for the sake of “having fun.” I’ve always had a huge desire to search for truth, to find some truth that will help me live life in the most meaningful way possible, and I was always looking to have mystical experiences that I could learn from, maybe learn something that could change my life, and I can’t say that I didn’t find exactly that. I really think that tripping so many times since a very young age has a lot to do with who I am today and who I grew to be. When I started getting into drugs and drinking, outwardly I was trying to fit in. I was rapping about nothing, about being cool or whatever else I thought would impress people, trying to rock fake designer clothes and smoking cigarettes just to look cool, looking for fights. I don’t want to blame hip-hop because ultimately I was the one who was trying to copy a culture, and a pretty toxic one at that, but it’s obvious that the way I dressed and the way I acted in those days was was inspired by hip-hop. Who didn’t want to have nice cars and clothes and to have any girl you wanted? Tripping made me see the deeper meaning of life though, and eventually I stopped writing those types of raps because I started to see it as an art form, as poetry, in the way that even 2Pac saw it. I also stopped trying to rock designer clothes because I started to loathe materialism and completely rejected being someone who is constantly trying to impress others with meaningless things such as the amount of money or luxury items I have. Tripping hard really let me see that life is way to deep not to take responsibility for my life, to waste it on meaningless things. I started reading a lot of philosophical and spiritual books, such as Aldous Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception” where he talks about the similarities between reported visions of psychedelic experienced and the art and mythology of ancient religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, and this inspired me to learn even more. I’m at the end of this post and I really only got to touch on my relationship with psychedelics, which is one of my more positive experiences with drugs. Other drugs, like alcohol, I haven’t had the easiest relationship with, but that’s a topic for another day.

much love

~ rebel eye

DAY 34 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

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One of the biggest fascinations of my life has been with the root of spiritual truth. I always wonder where the great spiritual traditions stemmed from, because they all seem to share a lot of similarities yet they seem very difficult to reconcile if we get into the fine details. Jesus said “I and the Father are One,” and this is the main idea in Hinduism, that we are all one with the Godhead, and that God is always creating, manifesting everything that we see in the world. A quote by Meister Eckhart expresses this same sentiment: “The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love.” Swami Vivekananda, who was one of the most important Hindu monks when it comes to bringing Hinduism to the USA and to North America in general. He said that when he started his journey as a monk the two books he had with him were the Bhagavad Gita and The Imitation of Christ. It makes sense that he would take the Gita with him since it’s a Hindu holy book, but why The Imitation of Christ? It’s because Vivekananda could see the same truth in Jesus’ words and life as he knew from his own life as a Hindu monk. That reminds me of another great quote by Meister Eckhart, “Theologians may quarrel but the mystics of the world speak the same language.” It seems to me that this is correct. If you study the mystical or esoteric side of most religions, there are a lot of concepts which are the same, and it makes me think that these are universal truths that will always remain true until the end of time, and which have been known since the beginning of time and passed down through the ages. One thing which always seems strange to me is how the Old and New Testament are considered two parts of the same book which make up a whole, but there are so many differences between the commandments of the Old Testament and what Jesus stood for and lived by. For example, in the Old Testament Jehovah orders Moses to stone people for all kinds of things, then Jesus comes up to a group of people who are about to stone an adulterous woman and tells them that only he who is free of sin should throw the first stone, obviously meaning that no stone should be thrown since we are all sinners. In another story Jesus tells some people that they should heal the sick even though it was the Sabbath, which I take to mean that people’s lives are more important than following some rule. So why are there these contradictions? Why is Jesus the second coming of the same God of the Old Testament? In a way it makes much more sense that he was a spiritual man who saw the evils of the society he lived in and decided to stand up for what he felt to be correct, things I’m pretty sure most of us would agree with him on, like how ridiculous it is to stone a person even because of something like adultery. Jesus was a rebel in my eyes, and if he was a man then that’s a huge inspiration for us to aspire to live in such a way. if he was God, on the other hand, the same God of the Hebrews from long ago, then why was he so different? There are many thoughts about the God of the Old Testament, the Gnositcs even went as far as to refer to it as the demiurge. Now, I haven’t gotten too deep into Gnosticism, so I have no opinion on that matter as of yet, but I know that things may not be as clear as Christianity makes them out to be. if Jesus was really a mystical man, a spiritual and philosophical person, then maybe the concepts he was learning and teaching about were those of the Kabbalah, which is the mystical tradition of Judaism. The crazy thing about the Kabbalah is that it refers to things such as reincarnation, which makes it more similar to Hinduism in that regard than to Christianity. The Kabbalistic concept of the big bang, or the tzim-tzum as they call it, is that of bread of shame. This concept basically means that, at the beginning of creation, all souls were one, and they all received constant energy from the Godhead, but somehow these souls, since they were all part of the Godhead and filled with its energy, became conscious enough to want to transmit energy themselves, rather than just receive. It’s as if you got something for free and so you feel shame about it, because you couldn’t get it on your own. God, or the supreme consciousness that was at the beginning of time, granted the wish and put all these souls into bodies, creating this physical world, a world where we could exercise our free will to give, not only to receive. The problem that arose was that, the souls felt that something was missing, since they were not fully receiving the divine energy which they were receiving at one point, and this created unlimited desires. Now we desire everything, and we desire things non-stop, and we are doomed to always feel desires we can never fully satisfy, until we finally come to understand that all of these desires are just masking the true desire within, the true desire of all humanity, which is to reconnect with the Godhead, to feel that completely satisfying energy once again. The Kabbalah has a concept of emanations, meaning that the divine energy is filtered many times before arriving at our world. I’m not an expert so I can’t go into the specifics of it, but the main idea is that there are many realms of reality, each more material then the next, and every dimension mirrors, in a way, the dimension above it. Things in the higher planes make things happen in the lower planes, and vice-versa. This seems very similar to the Hermetic concept of “As above, so below.” Hermeticism is another very deep science, and it is said that it comes from Ancient Egypt. Isn’t it strange that there is a very close connection between the Ancient Hebrews and the Ancient Egyptians? I wonder how exactly the wisdom of the Kabbalah and the wisdom of Hermeticism are interconnected. I wanted this to be a post about the main spiritual ideas and how they all seem to connect, in my eyes, but I see I’ve gotten to the thousand words and have only rambled randomly! I can’t help it though because these ideas bring up crazy trains of thought in my mind, and everything seems to connect in some form or another. At times I feel what Buddha meant when he said that he would rather focus on the practical aspects of spirituality rather than wondering about God or Gods. Anyway, I just have to keep learning, and I’ll probably continue these ideas in some future posts. Blessings to you all.

much love

~ rebel eye

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DAY 33 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

Although I’m not even close to passing my previous record of 81 days straight of writing a thousand words for my blog, I’m actually thinking of cutting it down to 500 words a day. Now, you might be thinking that I’m starting to get lazy or running out of things to write about, but that’s not it. Today I was listening to some of my old music from back in 2012, and I realized that I really need to keep writing raps, constantly, if I want to keep improving and if I don’t want to lose the skill. I finally learned proper recording techniques, I finally picked up an audio interface this year and an XLR mic and I barely record any music at all, since I barely write any new music these days. I guess I just feel like whatever I write has to be really inspirational and poetic, which is kind of holding me back, whereas back in the day I feel like I could write songs in a flash. I’d like to say that it was because I didn’t focus so much on trying to say the right things, but a lot of the lyrics from my old songs are actually pretty good, so maybe it just might be that I’m falling off after not writing consistently for so long. I have a bunch of old rhyme books, some of those lyrics are recorded already and some never got recorded, others will never be recorded. Although I have all these old rhyme books though, I feel like I need to write something new and fresh, and this is what I’m thinking of doing: Instead of writing 1000 daily words for my blog, I’m gonna write 500 words, and I’ll write a full 16-bar verse every day, that way I’ll never run out of music to record and I’ll keep improving my lyric writing skills, not to mention my rapping itself since I’ll be practicing a lot more now that I’ll have lyrics to work with. This will probably also keep me from overthinking my writing, as I’ve been doing lately, since I’ll have to write a daily verse. I think it should be a cool exercise. I’d love to do that but there’s just no time, between making and trying to sell beats, between trying to learn guitar daily, to exercise for a half an hour, as well as writing on my blog and hanging out with my wife, not to mention working, there’s just no time to do both. I could complain for hours about how there’s not enough time to do what we really want to do in our current fast-paced way of life, but I know you don’t wanna hear that and I’ll probably just come across as whiny, so instead I’m just gonna cut the complaining right from the start and split my time across everything I love, strategically. So that’s the basic explanation for why I’m planning to start writing 500 words a day instead of a thousand. Today I’m writing a thousand words though, since I didn’t write a verse today, I barely just thought of the idea. While I’m writing about writing I thought I’d mention something else I’m really excited about, which is the fact that my wife Maria and I have been working on a novel together for about two or three years now. It’s about a couple who meets and falls in love and have some crazy adventures together. Basically the idea came up one day when we were out at the park on a sunny day smoking a joint and she started telling me the idea for the story, about a couple who meets and falls in love and travels the world, kind of based on us and what we would like out of life. I said that sounded cool, and we started chatting about ideas of things they could do on their adventures. I’ve always been inspired by novels that convey philosophical messages to the reader, or that simply provoke philosophical though through the scenarios in the story. Some books like this that have inspired me greatly are Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and “Island.” I thought Maria wouldn’t mind if we threw some philosophical subjects into the mix, along with trippy things like psychedelic-like mind altering substances, maybe meeting some strange monks up on the mountains, and even time travel. Since we had our iPad with us we just started recording, and since then every once in a while whenever we went to the park to blaze we would always record our ideas for the novel, each time making it more intricate, creating connections between the characters and scenarios. Once we had a lot of recordings, about a hundred of them, I started transcribing them into a Word document. Not only transcribing but translating as well, since our conversations were half in English, half in Spanish. The novel touches upon a lot of important issues that I feel are relevant to life in our day and age, and I’m really excited to eventually publish it. Recently I finished transcribing all of the recorded voice notes into the Word document, so the next step is to actually write the conversations, write the detailed descriptions of the places and scenarios that will take place. Right now we basically just have the words we spoke for the voice notes, now it’s time for me to take all of that and write the story out of it, so we’re nowhere near done with it, but it’s definitely in the works. I think I’m close to today’s thousand words so I’ll just wish all of you amazing people out there a great night, I appreciate every single person reading this, since that’s basically my whole point in writing this, getting my ideas out into the world and to other people so they won’t make my mind eventually explode! Blessings to you and yours. Until tomorrow and keep being awesome and pursuing your dreams!

much love

~ rebel eye

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DAY 32 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

We are who we are. Just like the world and its inhabitants are all so different, just as there are so many different viewpoints, ideas and beliefs, cultures and traditions, which make up the world we live in, there are also many elements which make us who we are. Each person is a world within his or her self, with many different sides, some of which they may never show the world. We are a product of our environment, yes, of the way we were raised, of all the people we have known and interacted with throughout our lives. Every second changes us, every idea is taken into our consciousness but it is also imprinted into our subconscious mind in some form or another. We are also who we are because of our genes, and maybe we all behave in certain ways because of our shared collective past as part of mankind. Maybe we might even carry something over from some past incarnations, if reincarnation is indeed real. We are all aware of the complexities of the human mind, we recognize this within ourselves, yet it seems like we often forget this when it comes to other people. We see only what we are shown, or only what we want to see, but we forget that usually there is much more than meets the eye. We are born, we live to the best of our abilities, and for what? Some of us are afraid of trying to find out, while others spend their entire lives trying to find that ultimate meaning. We often take pride in being part of a specific group, but we don’t realize that one group is not big enough to fully describe what all of its members really are, only a small part of that. We become entangled in ideologies and make ourselves believe things beyond any doubt, when we really should be humble and understand that we can’t even fully know ourselves. Even with an entire long lifetime, there will probably be things about ourselves which we’ll only understand when we reach a certain age, as well as things which we’ll never fully understand. Life is too complex to make sense of, to apply one ideology to it and to base all of our decisions only on that. We are also extremely complex, and we are impossible to fit into one box, one label. We might feel some way about something now, but as we learn or as we experience more of life, we might come to a different understanding, and this is why we should always be humble and open to learn. Belief might provide us with comfort, but it is often the end of learning, since we choose to close ourselves off from anything that might go against our beliefs. I get it, as I said, life is hard to make sense of, maybe even impossible, and it’s a relief to feel like we’ve found an answer, something to help us get by with a feeling of being in control. I’ve never been able to believe in anything to the point of having absolutely no doubt, because I know that life is unexpected and mysterious, and I know that the more I learn, the more I realize how little I know. Who am I to pretend like I have it all figured out, when I’m just one person living one life, among billions of other people who inhabit the world at any given moment? What about all of their life experiences, their thoughts and feelings? I’m sure that many of the conclusions others have come to from their own experiences are probably completely opposite of what I think I’ve realized in my twenty-something years on this earth, and that’s okay, that’s the way it should be. The beauty of life is trying to understand others, to connect with them, to share what we can and to receive what we can so that we may come to some sort of mutual understanding. In the same way, all of the elements within ourselves can lead us to many different conclusions about life, but if none of them are constant, then are we really the same person at all times? I am no longer who I was ten years ago, or even yesterday, and I’ll probably be much different many years from now. Life is a constant learning journey, and learning from others can help us understand ourselves. We can see the similarities in our differences. The Greeks had the concept of the world as a Mother, Mother Gaia, and although these days we use the earth for our own monetary gain, because of greed, it could possible that the earth is a sentient being, maybe every planet and galaxy is alive. Just like little microscopic bacteria live on us and all around us, and they probably see us as a huge landscape to walk on, to live on, perhaps we can’t see this planet earth for what it truly is because we are so small. Even though we are physically small, we are connected to the entire universe, and our spirit is immortal, the same thing that keeps me alive is what keeps you alive. We breathe the same air, the same air that humans breathed thousands of years ago, we are all connected by invisible bonds. Sometimes I feel so overwhelmed by such complexity, and I’m not exactly sure what to make of it, what to do with it all. Then I remember that this is the beauty of life, observing, learning, understanding, not understanding, putting pieces together, taking them back apart, making mistakes and growing from them, failing and feeling the motivation to succeed. In this age of materialism, I really think it would do the world much good if we would all look within, if we could all stop trying to associate with groups and ideologies, and instead look within ourselves and ask ourselves who and what we are. I think if we looked deeply and honestly, we would find a lot of good within ourselves, and this would inspire us greatly to connect with others, to do something great in the world, not in terms of amassing wealth, but in terms of creating genuine connections with others, in terms of being there for those who need us, being overall more attentive to the world around us.

much love

~ rebel eye

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DAY 31 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

I really wish I had done my writing earlier today, I gotta stop leaving it for the night. I’ve been thinking about that, just because I don’t want to rush my writing, but now I’ve got another great reason to actually write earlier. I sit here with a massive, pounding headache, wishing I could just go to sleep and wake up tomorrow feeling normal again. It just seems like I always end up writing during the last two hours of the day because work and other things take up the rest of the day. Sometimes I try to write an idea down while I’m working, in between calls, but the downtime is usually not too long, so a lot of the time I don’t even bother because I don’t want a cool idea to be interrupted by a phone call where I have to focus on the troubleshooting I’m doing. Yesterday we ended up sleeping at 2am, and this morning woke up at 6 to go walk my wife to the bus stop for work. She works from home also but does have to go work at the office a few days a week. We really need to work on our sleeping schedule, just for our overall health. Time management has always been a big issue for me, it always feels like there’s not enough time. This is probably the biggest reason why I hate the 9 to 5 life, but I get it, I have to learn how to work my own time out, this is just the fast-paced world we live in. I should have slept for a few more hours when I got back from walking Maria to the bus stop, since I didn’t have to work until 10, but I just felt like actually doing stuff I enjoy for a few hours, rather than going to sleep only to wake up and work, so I sat at my desk to work on some music, and made a pretty cool beat. I should mention I also had half of an edible, so about 10mg. The effect was not too intense, even though I just finished my 3 sober days for the week. Before I started cutting down I would eat even up to 150mg at a time to get a decent high, so 10mg shouldn’t mess me up too bad, and it didn’t. I mention this because I don’t know if it might have anything to do with this horrible headache. I never used to get headaches from edibles before, and I’ve been a stoner for years. I suspect I’m suffering from a combination of the after effects of the high, mixed with my lack of sleep last night, and the fact that I didn’t eat anything until about 2pm, on my break from work. In the morning I was just way into the beat I was making, so I didn’t wanna stop to go make food, and when I started working i felt ok so I didn’t bother to eat. I finally made some spicy noodles on my break, and they were pretty good. By the end of my shift at 5 though I was starting to feel the headache coming on. Good thing it didn’t hit hard while I was still taking calls, because that would’ve been pure hell. Maria got back home and unfortunately I couldn’t really chill with her like I wanted to. I told her about my headache and we decided to try and sleep a bit. I thought if I just slept I would wake up feeling much better, but that wasn’t the case. I woke up with my head pounding just the same. I did the Win Hof breathing method twice, once before sleeping and again when I woke up. It helped a bit but not enough, this fucking headache wouldn’t go away! I heated up some good and woke Maria up to eat, but the even with nutrition it didn’t go away. I’ve given up at this point, I know it won’t go away until I sleep the whole night and wake up tomorrow. It sucks because I can’t joke around with Maria, i feel irritable as hell, and also I have to write these words and post my daily beat up on Beatstars. Anyway, now that I’m halfway through this post I realize it’s not as bad as I thought it would be. Writing is actually helping quite a bit to distract me from my headache. Posting my beat up, on the other hand, I don’t think will be so great. I have to put my headphones on, I have to master the beat, I have to put my producer tag on it, then post it up on Beatstars and YouTube as well. I’ll try to do it as quick as possible, since I really don’t feel like hearing any music right now to be honest. Well, at least my headache has provided me with some writing material of the day. Kind of random, but it is what it is, every day can’t be amazing. I’m a bit scared to eat edibles now, it feels more intense now that it’s not an everyday thing, even with such a small dose, and I can’t help but feel like I could have avoided a lot of pain today if I would have stayed sober like the past few days. It could also be that the weed is making me more sensitive to the consequences of not taking care of myself, like not sleeping well and not eating anything from. 6am until 2pm. If you get anything out of this post it might just be a reminder to watch your habits and health, to make sure you’re taking care of yourself and sleeping and eating right. I also didn’t drink much water during the first half of the day, so there’s that also, i just thought of that. I guess the next goals I’ll be setting will have to do with sleeping a certain amount of hours a night, and maybe drinking a set amount of glasses of water per day. Much love to you all, stay healthy and hydrated, and remember to get enough rest.

much love

~ rebel eye

DAY 30 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

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One of the first books I ever read which inspired me greatly was Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road.” I don’t remember how exactly I decided to read that book, but by the time I finished reading it I was determined to one day travel the world and find whatever was waiting for me far, far away from home. I guess I ended up reading On The Road because I was always fascinated with hippie culture and history, which eventually lead me to look into the beat generation and their literature. I’ve always sensed that something is off in society, and it felt really cool to learn about a group of people who one day challenged the standard way in which society worked, taking a stand against materialism and war, and embracing spirituality and community, living with presence rather than for money and success. As I’ve grown up, I’ve come to realize that I probably romanticized the whole thing way too much, and that, although their hearts were in the right place, it takes a lot more than non-conformity to actually make a positive change in the world. This doesn’t change the fact that I still feel like a hippie at heart. I’ve always thought that living life on one’s own terms, staying true to oneself, is what really matters in life, far more than success or wealth. Today it doesn’t seem like most people would agree. Most people are trying to chase dollars, to accumulate as much money as they can, living in fear of being left behind, of never having enough, of not having anything to pass down to their future generations. It seemed amazing to me, to read about Dean and Sal’s adventures as they made their way through the United States, hitchhiking, drinking and meeting new people. I wanted that so bad. They weren’t worried about the future, they were ecstatic about the now and going wherever life took them. I’ve always admired that a lot, having the courage to face the unknown and to really embrace whatever life has to offer us wherever we may go. I also have always been super interested in strange things, everything weird from mysticism to psychedelics, and basically drugs in general. I guess what both mysticism and drugs have in common are altered states of consciousness. I know there wasn’t much of that on On The Road, but that was even better because these guys were actually enjoying life sober, just high off life itself, apart from some beers here and there. Actually, now that I think about it there was probably more alcohol than I remember. I always wanted to live like that, and I’m a bit sad to say that my dreams of adventure haven’t really come true. I don’t mean to blame the world, but the fact is that the idea I had of the world when I was a kid doesn’t really match what I started noticing as I became older. The world now seems like a cold and heartless place, and it gets worse as time goes by because we are all becoming more isolated and divided. Rather than coming together and bonding over our shared consciousness as human beings, we close ourselves off from others because of things such as politics and religion. In a way I guess my dreams have come true. I travelled back to Honduras, my home country, and I met my wife Maria there, as well as some great new friends. I guess I just expected more adventure, more running around from here to there, more of a hippie life. Maybe I did get the hippie life I wanted, but it just wasn’t what I thought it would be. I did party a lot with a lot of people, using all kinds of substances, I had a lot of laughs over the years, but it seems like a lot of it was just super shallow, like there was no substance. Perhaps I was expecting too much, I expected philosophy, to find a deep meaning in everything, and instead I noticed how people are mainly focused on their day to day activities or on “making it” in some form or another. I don’t know if things have always been like this, but I suspect that the more we merge with technology, the more we advance technologically, the farther away we seem to step from trying to find any deep meaning in life, or even thinking about it. Maybe we all think about life and its meaning, but maybe we’re all too afraid to discuss these things with others, so we choose to engage in small talk instead. I realize that, over the years, as I started feeling like life wasn’t really like the idea of life that I had in my mind, I started closing myself off from life and people in general, and I wonder if this is what happens to many of us. Children are magic, they’re full of dreams and passion, they’re excited for life, they don’t need any external stimuli. They say what they think without fear of ridicule. It’s only when we start growing up that we start to see how the world works, and it feels like dreaming will keep us from functioning and succeeding in society. Maybe this makes us close ourselves off from others, further amplifying the feeling that the world is a cold and lonely place. I don’t really know, I’m just trying to make sense of it. I have to be grateful for my life though. I haven’t travelled all over the world as I wanted to, but at least I got to immerse myself in my own culture again, which I had left behind at the age of nine when my parents moved to Canada, and I even met my amazing wife there which I wouldn’t change for anything in the world. I also travelled to Brazil, where I met some family from my dad’s side, and I also met a lot of cool people there and partied in some beautiful beaches. I love travelling to places and immersing myself in the culture, and living there for a good while. For now I’m just focused on establishing some solid ground to stand on, trying to finally make something happen with my music, while I’m in Canada, but I really can’t wait for another adventure, to travel somewhere else and feel like I’m on the move again. I guess I’ll always be a hippie at heart.

much love

~ rebel eye

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DAY 29 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

The days pass and everything changes like the year’s seasons. We search for meaning but things happen seemingly without reason. We laugh and we cry and we try our best to forget the fact that we were born to die. We were born to die but we were also born to live. We were born to love and to find the treasure within us which only we can give. We say goodbye, we sit with our memories of brothers and sisters who relocated to the sky. It’s a beautiful thing to believe, but sometimes I can’t help but wonder if we all just choose to be naive. We try to distract ourselves but we know deep inside that we’ll always grieve, for the people we wish we could see again, the dreams that we fought our hardest for but still couldn’t achieve. Not everything is meant to be, and I hope we all come to realize that, eventually. We roll with the punches, we swim with the waves, we give in to pleasures which keep us enslaved. Everything’s a mess, the passion and the stress, the love and the hate, for injustice, for the hypocritical and fake. We apologize, then we make the same mistakes. We don’t know the game we’re playing in, some day it’s karma, some say it’s a sin. Nobody wants to lose, but there have to be losers for others to win. Survival of the fittest, could it be true? Could this be the way we’re meant to live? Is there anything about it that we can even do? The strong kill the weak, we struggle with the deepest truths within our soul which are to complex to speak, 60 seconds make a minute, seven days complete the week. Did God create it all, at the genesis of creation when the wild birds sang? Did we all come from an explosion of elements? The big bang? Religion and philosophy, division and atrocities. We move through life with an insane velocity, accumulating more than we need but never practicing generosity. I can’t provide hope, my rhymes are all over. High me doesn’t recognize me sober. Drugs, alcohol, fascinating substances, some live their whole lives attached to them but never know what substance is. Pleasure takes the place of meaning, entertainment becomes more demeaning. We try to escape reality through books and movies, or daydreaming. We can’t face the facts, so we try to out others down to make up for what we lack. Fighting over male and female, white and black, we sell our time for money that we can stack, up as high as the sky like the tower of Babel, we kill our own brothers like Cain did Abel. With words, with looks, with spite, we never forgive, as if we were unable. I don’t mean to generalize, I guess I jus feel like venting about what I see with my eyes. What I hear with my ears, people living full of fear, media propaganda which is toxic, like Britney Spears. Not talking about her, just a reference to the song. I used to spend all my nights with my speakers and bong. Weeded, never thinking whether I really need it. When I trip I think of family, the time I’ve wasted, the tears I’ve tasted. Addiction, got me thinking things stranger than fiction. Though I love it, often times I hold it all back because I don’t wanna be seen as a walking contradiction. But not anymore, I know we’re all very complex, universes live within our soul. Yet we hide out spirit just to fit into the mold. For the right price it seems any man can be sold. Slavery was never abolished. Nowadays we just do our work with our suit buttoned up and our shows perfectly polished. Just an exercise in rhyming, I wish I had better things to say but I can’t find the silver lining. I guess I need to work on my attitude, need to exercise gratitude so I’m not always whining. All this grinding, business meetings and contract signing, yeah we’re making more money but what are we really finding? Does truth not matter? What about all the functions that are installed in our greet matter? We live through tragedies and dreams that are shattered, broken in to pieces that the world tries to scatter. We suffer and we dwell in the pain, only end up feeling sadder. We receive wide advice but only end up getting madder. Some of us live in the moment, others plan to forever climb a ladder, up to the top of the world, higher up than the purest shatter. Concentrate. Attention spans decreasing, can’t concentrate. Constant technological stimulus crippling our ability to contemplate. To reflect and to realize. We only see the physical but we don’t exercise seeing with out real eyes. Relativity, truth seems to be what we want it to be. Inactivity, stuck in the house with nowhere else to be. But I still suspect that hope isn’t completely lost. We can make a change, but the more we wait the higher the cost. Stream of consciousness, I don’t know if I’m getting any point across, but this is just my mind, doing what I do, writing rhymes, attempting to find a bridge to cross. To where, I don’t know, but I feel like going. I feel like moving, I feel like feeling the rhythm and grooving, I feel like truly knowing. Instead of feeling confused, in a world of abusers and the abused, of people who feel like they have nothing left to lose. I’m already crazy, I don’t follow the collective opinion, so I might as well continue loosing the screws. Life can hurt, but I have to learn to heal quickly from whatever bruise. I’m not pessimistic, I know that in life we have the right to choose, but it just seems like in the test of life there’s more false then trues. Duality. The blues inspired the blues, now we jam to the emotions, music can have us feeling deeper than the ocean. Fuck all the commotion, I rhyme because rap is poetry in motion. Vibration, words that can uplift like levitation, we all do what we can and what we enjoy, or at least we try, before we die and head to our next destination. So don’t think too much, just do what you do, like I’m doing now, otherwise you’ll be stuck in procrastination. Your time will come, so just wait patient.

much love

~ rebel eye

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DAY 28 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

There’s a lot of things we would like to express to the world about ourselves, and at times it might feel like nobody cares, or it might feel like we’ll be judged for being our true selves, so we decide not to do so. Keeping the world unaware of who we truly are might provide comfort in the moment, since we don’t have to face whatever hostility or ridicule might come to us if we dared to show the world our authentic selves, but in the end this will only damage us, and it’ll prevent us from fulfilling our goals in life. We can’t truly connect with others if we don’t show them who we truly are, and even though we might end up meeting a lot of people, even having a lot of friends or acquaintances, deep inside we’ll always know that we haven’t made any deep, meaningful connections with anyone. At this point, as we feel the weight of loneliness on our shoulders, as we grow old and time goes by, we might feel like we don’t have a chance of forming any true connections any more, and we might start acting up in order to get attention from others. In the modern age of social media this is a huge problem. A lot of people might not even have a real connection with themselves, let alone anyone else, because they have been travelling a path of imitation, wanting to be the next big celebrity, for example. Their whole style is copied, the way they talk and act, even their opinions on important matters, are all copied, knowingly or unknowingly, from their favorite celebrities. Kids with low self-esteem are constantly bombarded with images of the perfect lifestyle, a life of luxury and constant thrills, and they decide that they want to live that type of life also. These kids barely know themselves most of the time, and since they lack proper guidance they don’t even have a chance to discover who they are, their true passions and skills, what really makes them happy in life. When I say happy I’m talking about true satisfaction, being at peace with oneself, not about chasing one thrill after the next in order to never experience boredom, in order to never spend time reflecting on life, learning from our past and planning out our future. The idea of living fast and dying young is appealing to a lot of kids who want to convince themselves that they’re fearless, that living in the moment means doing whatever is the most fun, or whatever will impress others the most, without thinking of future consequences. Too many people are also infatuated with money and are willing to do anything to get it, even if it means putting their dignity on the line or leaving their values behind and engaging in unethical behavior. In these peoples’ minds, having money will bring them happiness by allowing them to purchase anything they want at any time, to live a luxurious life with minimal responsibilities and the most fun possible. What they don’t think about is that, once they do have the money they dream of, they still won’t find true happiness. They might not care because they can keep themselves busy with pleasure, one expensive form of pleasure after another. They might go through their whole lives without ever even bothering to try to search for something deeper because pleasure might be enough for them, since they drown their true feelings out with drugs or sex. People need to realize their true worth. We’ve all faced our own hardships in life, we all come from different backgrounds and we all see things in unique ways. We never know when we could inspire someone just by being honest about our own life experiences, about our own opinions and innermost thoughts and feelings. Too many people are trying to fit in, not realizing that they’re throwing out all the hidden treasures within them, and all for what? Just to fit in with a bunch of other insecure people who are only trying to follow what’s “cool”? If you’re afraid of showing your true self to someone for fear that they might reject you, then think about why you would even want to be accepted by this type of person in the first place? They don’t actually like who you are, just the fabricated image of yourself that you try to pass off as the real you. I believe that we could advance more as a species if more people were willing to be themselves, to stand their ground regardless of whatever might be cool, or even whatever might be legal. Legality does not equal morality. People need to think for themselves, to analyze and understand themselves, then to share that understanding with others so that we may learn from each other and grow together. I know we are all flawed and none of us are perfect human beings, but it is precisely this understanding that should motivate us to be unapologetically ourselves. Who are other people to judge us? We were all born here and exist for reasons we don’t completely understand. Other people may offer advice, but we are free to accept such advice or reject it. We shouldn’t fear advice or criticism, we shouldn’t take it as an attack on our opinions. This comes from a place of insecurity. Unfortunately, too many people with worthwhile ideas second-guess themselves, doubt themselves, and never end up sharing any of those ideas, they stay limited to their own minds. On the other hand, there’s so many people who are simply following the crowd, and for this reason they are confident that they’ll be accepted. After all, they’re only following a proven model for success. It’s much easier to go along with whatever ideas the majority of people have in your day and age, than to find the courage to stand for yourself and to say exactly what you feel should be said. Being real might isolate us, but at least we’ll know where we stand, and we won’t feel disappointed in ourselves. On the other hand, if we simply settle for going with the flow because we are insecure and in need of attention, we might indeed gain the approval and praise of the world, but we’ll always know true loneliness, and resentment will grow within us, because we’ll know that we be rejected if we dared to be ourselves. People might scream our name, but they will never know who we truly are, and therefore we will be like ghosts, unknown to the world and probably even to ourselves, always trapped within a caricature we’ve created.

much love

~ rebel eye

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DAY 27 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

Not sure what to write about tonight, really. I guess I’ll just write about everything going on right now. I’m uploading daily beats, I’m writing my daily words, I’m trying to exercise every second day, whether jogging or doing yoga. It feels weird doing everything sober though, since I’m so used to being stoned all the time. I’ve been feeling weird sensations in my chest when I move, as well as a general shortness of breath, nothing extreme but just annoying. At first it was making me go crazy with anxiety, but after researching for a bit I’ve become convinced that it has to do with me cutting down on weed since I see a lot of posts from ex-smokers of many years who share similar stories. It makes sense also because the discomfort started pretty much a few weeks after I first started my goal of cutting down on bud. I’ve been smoking weed since I was basically twelve, and I’m 27 now, so I have a lot of readjusting to do. I’ve learned some new things from my research, such as the fact that THC is a bronchodilator, meaning that it expands the airways in the lungs or something like that (I’m not the best at explaining medical terms) so quitting quickly can have the opposite effect on the lungs and cause bronchospasms. I haven’t smoked weed in about a month now, but my idea wasn’t to completely quit, just to switch to edibles and to cut down on my consumption in general. I guess what I’m experiencing is a combination of my lungs starting to heal from all the constant smoking over the years, as well as me feeling the effect of no longer having the bronchodilator effect of THC so often. It should pass with time from what I’ve read, but I’m definitely never going back to smoking the same way as I did before. In fact, I’ll only smoke once a month or something, if even that, and just eat way smaller doses of edibles, maybe just 2 days a week. It’s crazy, I never even knew this kind of thing could happen from quitting weed, and although I’m not blaming weed in any way, it just goes to show how nothing is meant to be abused, and everything has to be done or used in moderation. I was definitely abusing weed for so many years, it was good for everything and wasn’t harmful like other drugs. It made everything way more interesting and chill, so I just rolled with it. Ever since I’ve gotten really into spirituality, years ago, I’ve been planning on cutting down just because I realize that we have all we need within us, and that attachments are what cause suffering in life. A classic example is how a drug addict feels shitty I’d they can’t have their drug of choice, which in my case is weed. I now have to readjust to real life, and get back out into the world, leaving my peaceful inner world on the side for some time. This is actually why I finally made the decision to cut down, because I was planning to go hard with my music and to finally get serious about it make the dream happen. I for sure didn’t expect to have this kind of reaction though. Anyway, I’m not trying to complain, I just think that too many people, assuming that weed is all good and can cause no issues because it’s natural and relatively safe for recreational use, don’t bother to do any research, and end up abusing it in order to mask their real feelings and escape from uncomfortable realities that may cause anxiety of depression. As I’ve been learning from Carl Jung, anxiety is with us for a reason, so that we may analyze the way we are living and make a change, but if we just mask our anxiety and never face it, then what will happen when we finally decided to put that mask away? Will we be able to deal with all the unacknowledged anxiety that has been building within us? Well, it’s tough but I know I can do it, I know I got this. I just have to keep focusing on what I’m doing, creating dope music and expressing my deepest ideas and feelings through my lyrics, which is what I’ve always been inspired to do with my raps. I have a beautiful loving wife who supports me through all of life’s ups and downs, and I have a good family I can count on as well. I’m still healthy, thank God, apart from the aforementioned issues, so I gotta focus on exercising as often as I can and eating healthier as well. I know that everything will be okay in the end. Other than that, I’m just really excited about life and where this music thing will take me. I’m almost done my next album, Rebel Spirit, which will be released on all streaming platforms, and I’m really feeling how all the tracks are sounding so far. Oh, something else I’ve noticed during my sober days is that I’m getting really tired and sleepy at times. When I used to get high all the time I would sometimes stay up until 3 or 4am, just fascinated by whatever ideas I was learning or whatever music I was creating. Now I actually feel tired, as I do right now while I yawn, and I know that means it’s time to go to sleep. I guess it’s because things don’t seem so interesting anymore, even things I love with a passion, like philosophy and music, but I know this will pass with time, it’s just part of withdrawal from being used to constant weed stimulation. I’m not sure what else to write for now, but I suspect I’m close to finishing today’s thousand words, so I’ll just end this on a positive note. I wish everyone out there the best in life, stay balanced and healthy, and I pray you have the power to break any chains and attachments you feel you need to grow from. It’s not easy, but moving on to a new stage of life often requires painful sacrifices, leaving behind some of the things that we strongly identified with in the past. It’s time to grow, to become new, stronger, wiser people.

much love

~ rebel eye

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DAY 26 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

Day 26 of writing on my blog, nice. It’s also my fifteenth or sixteenth day of posting daily beats on Beatstars, and now that I have a decent catalogue of beats I have to start looking into marketing strategies to try to generate sales. One strategy is simply messaging artists and letting them know that I sell beats, probably including a few free beats they can use, obviously with a link to my beat store. I have to start searching for artists who are up and coming and whose beats match the ones I make in order to build solid business relationships so they keep on buying beats on the regular. In a way I’m happy because it feels like I’m finally starting my own business based around something I actually enjoy doing, making beats and just music in general. I’m tired of putting work in for already established companies that have nothing to do with my interests just to survive, so I know I have to put in the necessary work if I want to put and end to it for good and actually enjoy what I do for a living someday. For that reason I’m super excited to make this work. On the other hand, although I love hip-hop, from the hard beats to inspirational and thought provoking rhymes, I can’t say that I’m cool with a lot of the low effort noise that passes for rap these days, commercialized garbage promoting materialism. Unfortunately in order to promote your beats these days you have to pass them off as beats you can see some famous rapper spitting over, because if you just post it as a chill beat of happy or emotional or hard rap beat, you simply won’t get many views. This is why YouTube is super saturated with so many ‘type beat’ channels, where the title includes the name of rapper who would rap on this type of beat, along with a picture of the rapper. This is basically what I’ve been doing daily for the past two weeks, posting a beat in this format on both YouTube and Beatstars, and now I have to start marketing. The problem is that, although I do like my beats, I really would rather not post them in this way, but if I think about it for too long it feels like I’m just going back to my problem from years ago. See, I have a huge folder in my hard drive full of beats from as far back as 2011 when I first started making beats, and even thought they’re old now a lot of them are really dope, but I never released these beats in any way because my idea was to rap on them myself, not to get random rappers to rap what they want on them. See, I’ve always approached music, even my own music, as art, and I don’t like the idea of art being sold off, I’ve always wanted to release my music on my own. Unfortunately I never wrote enough rhymes to keep up with the insane amount of beats I made, and I almost always used other producers’ beats for my own tracks instead of my own, not because I didn’t like my own beats, but because the beats that fit my rapping style and content best are chill, jazzy sampled rap beats, like the ones I rapped over on my Running Rebel mixtape, whereas the beats that I produced for most of my life making music sound modern and electronic. I’ve always enjoyed making melodies from scratch, selecting the instruments and drums, and it’s only recently that I’m getting seriously into sampling instead. So my beats just sat there on my hard drive for so many years. I just got to thinking this year, I guess because I’ve grown increasingly annoyed and depressed with 9-to-5 life, that it really is time to start making a living from my music somehow, and I figured selling beats would be the most realistic way, since my rapping is not what’s most popular these days, I try to make it philosophical and inspiring, and I’m not willing to compromise that. I’ve come to peace that I might not make it as a huge success in the rap industry, and that’s okay because I enjoy doing it and I’ll keep at it no matter what. If I make it then great, if not then at least I shared my raps with whoever was willing to listen. Rap is based off of images these days, and I feel like I have too many complex ideas in my mind to just dumb myself down to be an image. The beats, on the other hand, can be made by anyone, it’s usually not a big deal since the producer is more of a behind-the-scenes person. It’s less likely that I need to sell out in order to make money on the beats side, and I’ll still be doing something I enjoy, so if I can make money making beats and that gives me the necessary time to really focus on my rapping without the need to compromise the truth, then that would be more than good enough for me. In a small way, this is why I feel shitty about putting my beats up with these random rappers’ pictures. I don’t even listen to them or like their music, so the beats are probably not even actually type beats for the artist names I post, it’s just kind of random names I choose based on what’s popular these days. Yeah, it feels wack, but no views means no sales. Hopefully as I start gaining traction I won’t need to be uploading my beats with these ridiculous names. In the meantime, I continue improving. I’ve got my new Arturia Keylab 61 mapped perfectly to FL Studio, I’ve mastered my MPC One at this point, and I’m making dope beats every day. I’m also doing daily guitar lessons so that I can eventually record myself playing and incorporate the live guitar sounds into my beats. Shout out to Justin Guitar for the super informative and easy to follow online courses, not to mention free. I really love the sound of the acoustic guitar, and that’s a big reason why I decided to learn to play it. Some of my favorite albums are Nick Drake’s albums, especially Pink Moon, and Norah Jones’ “Come Away With Me”, really acoustic albums, and I can’t wait to be able to create my own chill melodies in the guitar. It’s all about consistency and never quitting. If I keep up my daily practice and put the effort in I know I can’t fail, and I’m applying the same to my beat business and every new project I take on from now on.

much love,

~ rebel eye

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DAY 25 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

These days it seems like mental health is being acknowledged and discussed more than ever before. It’s good in a way because we are getting more open to sharing our vulnerabilities, and we are becoming more open to understanding other people’s struggles. Is this because we are becoming more caring and understanding, or could it also be because more people than ever before are experiencing symptoms of mental afflictions? We are living in a time where people are isolating themselves in fear, fear of disease, fear of the government, fear of unprovoked evil. The world, in general, seems to be getting a lot more restless, and we are seeing hate and violence all around us, so it is natural for many people to retreat from life, in a way, to shut themselves in their minds, in their own little world with the people they love. Although mental health is being acknowledged, it is seen as something evil, even as a mental illness, when in reality this is not exactly the case. When we get physically hurt, the pain we feel is our body telling us that something is wrong, and according to Carl Jung, neurotic conditions such as anxiety and depression are also messages we are trying to convey to ourselves, messages not just from what’s hidden deep in our own minds, in our subconscious, but from what Jung called the collective unconscious. Jung’s famous idea of archetypes was something he arrived at by analyzing a lot of his patients’ dreams, as well as the different stories found in the books of the world’s different religions and mythologies. The main idea is that we all share a collective consciousness which is hidden from our day-to-day consciousness, much like our own subconscious is. Like the subconscious, the collective unconscious can also trigger strong impulses within us, the difference being that our own subconscious is made up of subliminal images and ideas that have stuck with us because of our own life experiences, whereas the collective unconscious holds images and ideas that are with us because we are part of a collective whole. According to Jung these ideas, or archetypes, come from the evolution of consciousness that mankind has lived through for who knows how many years. These strong values which have always been present in humanity don’t just disappear because we change the way in which outward society functions, they are still there within our psyche, influencing our personalities. These archetypes, such as building a good social structure or becoming mentally independent from our parents, are ingrained into us, and they make us feel as if there’s certain things in life that we absolutely must accomplish. Jung’s theory was that if we try to fight against these ingrained ideas, which can be referred to as the tasks of life which we all feel compelled to complete, then we will run into mental problems because we are choosing to live in a way which is contrary to what we are hardwired to become. It is true that we have free will, yet that doesn’t mean that all of our impulses will lead to our well-being. In this way of seeing neurotic disorders, we can perceive them as signs that we are not living correctly, that we are fighting against our true nature and our true calling. Often times this is because we are afraid of facing up to the tasks of life, and we try to deceive ourselves into thinking that we don’t need to achieve anything. We might convince ourselves of this by telling ourselves that the issues does not lie within us, that the issue is external, and therefore, since it can’t be fixed, we are doing the right thing by not getting involved. One of my favorite writers, Charles Bukowski, said “I don’t have any politics. I’m an observer.” In a way, I really liked it when I read that quote, because I’ve always felt this way myself. Bukowski was also an alcoholic, and analyzing that quote, along with his life, makes me wonder if he maybe had some demons of his own which he was too afraid to face. I can tell this is the case in my own life, when I analyze it through Jung’s theory. For years I’ve been getting stoned, simply because weed can make ideas a lot more interesting, it can make the inner world of my mind appear fresh and limitless, with everything the mind can conceive of and create. It also makes music and philosophy more interesting, my two favorite things to consume. I told myself that the world is fucked up, and that I didn’t need to complicate my life with it. I have my wife and I enjoy music and philosophy, so there’s not much else in the world for me other than possible trouble. Maybe I’ve really been hiding away from the world because of fear, fear of losing the foundation which I already have, or fear of unexpected trouble that could come my way in a world that’s growing increasingly turbulent. Carl Jung explains how, at the beginning of a neurotic disorder, the neurotic person might not feel too inconvenienced by avoiding life situations which may trigger anxiety, and in fact will feel some comfort in it, yet over time, as his or her life becomes routine, the person notices that something is wrong, because life has become restricted and closed off from the world. Because of the archetype which drives us to create social bonds and connections, the neurotic can’t help but feel distressed because, deep inside, from the collective unconscious, stems this feeling that they are not fulfilling something important which is imperative to their happiness as human beings. Being super interested in philosophy, psychology and spirituality, I’ve always known about and been a fan of Carl Jung, yet his body of work is so extensive and his ideas are so deep that they must be analyzed time and time again, and I had never really went too deep into what I’m discussing in this post today. However, as I research more into it, I have to admit that I do see myself in the image he paints of the neurotic person. This isn’t a reason to panic though, because again, anxiety is just a sign that change is needed, and that means there is hope for change.

DAY 24 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

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I love to learn many things, and throughout my life I’ve been inspired to learn from many experiences and circumstances. It’s because of my ideas and decisions that I find myself in the place where I stand today. People, in general, express themselves in different ways, depending on their own life experiences, but who can know for certain, to the point of being able to advise others, what the right way to live life is, who can know what is the right thing to choose at any given moment in life. It’s easy to look at others’ mistakes or faults, from the outside, but it might not be as easy for them to notice these issues themselves. For example, the other day I was walking with my wife and I noticed that a little leaf had ended up on her hair somehow. She had probably been walking with it on her head for a while now, but since it was on the opposite side of where I was walking I didn’t notice it at first. However, as soon as I turned for some reason and looked at her straight on I noticed it right away and removed it. Of course, it’s not a big deal, nothing would happen if she would have just kept walking with the leaf on her head, but that’s not the point. The point is that it made me think, it made me realize that perhaps there’s things that we don’t notice about ourselves, yet might be easy for others to notice. Your hear is on your head, so it’s impossible to see it, at least the part of it that doesn’t slide down your face. Of course, my hair is my hair, so I should be more familiar with it than anyone else, yet for some reason, precisely because it’s mine, I can’t see a good part of it, while others easily can. In fact, I can never look directly at my own face, I can only see a reflection of myself in the mirror. Everyone else can see my real face though, even though it’s my face. If I have something on my face or hair, someone who looks at me can remove it, but it’s difficult for me to see whatever’s on myself. You might be familiar with the Bible quote “First, remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother’s eye.” I love quotes like this, quotes that provide general wisdom on how to grow as human beings, because most of the time we make changes in our life depending on the situations we are facing, and even though we can’t know for sure what the right decision is at any given moment, if we are armed with real wisdom then we have less chance of making the wrong decision. We are always wondering what is the right way to navigate life, how can we become better? We often have doubts and insecurities that lead us to anxiety and indecision. That can be a problem, yes, but in reality, it comes down to how we look at things. Our indecision is a chance for us to analyze the situation further, maybe to seek advice from others who can relate to our situation. If someone has a suggestion for us, we should humbly listen. As long as we understand that we are in control of our lives, we have no reason to be afraid of any words that may come to us from anyone. On the contrary, we never know if a perfect stranger could be the messenger we needed in order to finally understand something we’ve been indecisive about for so long. We should humbly listen to advice, then analyze it to the best of our abilities, and finally make a decision. I’ve received lots of great pieces of advice throughout my life, some of which I have saved into the book of my memory, and some which I have unfortunately discarded and thrown into the trash. I probably could have saved myself some trouble if I had listened to some of those that I discarded, but changes can be both good and bad in the end, in the sense that, one can learn even from the worst mistakes, in the end it’s all up to you. Again, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I can not guarantee that any way of life is the right way, I can only share my own experiences, and I know that when things seem completely hopeless, usually that’s when we can dig deep into ourselves and find truth, find what we’re truly made of, we can reflect, we can get to truly know ourselves and grow, and eventually we can bounce back stronger than ever. The thing I wrote about how it’s easier to see someone else’s mistakes, and then the quote I posted about removing the beam from your own eye before removing it from others’ seem to be a bit contradictory, but so is life. We might be faced with a situation where we can easily remove someone’s obstacles for them, but is that always the right thing to do? Do we always know what’s best for others? Could we be doing them a disservice by preventing them from living their own lives and overcoming their own obstacles? Just as I said we should listen humbly to advice, we should also be as humble as we can when providing advice, we should not force others to follow in our footsteps, because even though we may have learned a specific lesson from our own life experience, we may not know everything that someone else has lived through, that has brought them to their own current experience, so we might not really be helping them as much as we think we are. Should we do all of our kids’ homework, for example, so that they will never learn anything? Should we shelter them from the evils of life, so that they will be paralyzed when shit finally does hit the fan? No, we should provide our humble advice, not in order to manipulate, just so that we can share what we know. From then on, it’s up to them, and if they’ve learned to listen to advice in a humble manner and then analyze it, rather than instantly rejecting anything that may contradict their beliefs, then maybe they might end up actually making a right decision, a right decision influenced by you, because you shared with love and not with force.

much love

~ rebel eye

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DAY 23 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

Kalvonix and I have been making music together since way back when I started rapping. Back in high school when I was first starting out I was just making my own music by myself, but when I heard of a school group about rapping I was interested to see what it was about. To be honest, as a young kid with a wild imagination I imagined a full recording studio with a recording booth and all the equipment needed, but that wasn’t the case. I’m not complaining, I just mention that because it’s funny how kids’ imaginations are. The group was Access Denied, and it was made up of a few different people, mainly Calvin, aka Kalvonix, and his cousins Ohwell and Nizzl. In those days he was called “the rapper of the school” since he loved showing everyone his passion for rapping. I guess at some point he and Mr. Begg, the school English teacher, had come to an agreement to work on a school rap group, and so Access Denied was born. I joined later, but we quickly made a few mixtapes together. We usually recorded right in the classroom, after school hours so no one would be there, and our music was educational and touched on lots of different subjects, without getting too serious about them, but just getting the main message across. Those were fun times for sure, and we even did a show for the Olympics here in Vancouver, and also ended up on the newspaper front cover. “Rapping for a reason” was the title of the newspaper story. They also did an interview with us which was on TV. Of course, all of this wasn’t because we were incredible rappers, it was mostly because it was a school project and we were rapping about positive things. I didn’t mind it at all because I was writing and rapping, which is what I loved doing, but outside of Access Denied I was always working on my own music as well, which wasn’t always the most positive, but it was real to me, since I wasn’t living through the most positive times in my life either. Kalvonix was also doing music on his own, of course, and after he graduated from high school a year before me, we kept meeting up at his house to record song remixes here and there. We eventually had an idea, to release a mixtape together, since we were starting to make more and more songs together. We titled this mixtape “The Come Up.” Back then we weren’t the most professional, we were young and we were really making music kind of in a rush, to be honest. We were having fun though, so we just wanted to move on to the next track and complete it. I spent a lot of nights at Calvin’s house, rapping all through the night up in his room. The good thing is his house was pretty big so I think his parents couldn’t really hear us rapping the night away. Since we were making so much music, we eventually made the Come Up 2, and at some point we decided to turn in into a recurring thing. By the time we recorded The Come Up 3, we had decided that we were getting better and we had to get our music out to more people. That’s when we decided to go around his neighborhood knocking door to door selling CDs of The Come Up 3. I definitely don’t regret it, but the music isn’t really as good as we thought it was in the moment. Over the years we recorded the Come Up 4, 5 and 6, before lots of things in my life changed and I ended up moving away to Honduras, my home country, and eventually meeting my wife Maria, then waiting three years for her residence papers to be approved, and eventually returning here to Canada in February 2020, right before the whole COVID pandemic really started getting crazy. During all of those years we didn’t really make more music together, and maybe we didn’t even think about it. Calvin had success with his own music, always being super active with it and showcasing it to the world, and in my case, I was way into living a spiritual life, to the point that I had decided not to pursue music anymore because I didn’t want fame, because of the possibility of it corrupting me and the beautiful family I had formed with Maria. I remember actually telling Calvin I was quitting music, and he was questioning whether I was sure of my decision. In that moment I was one hundred percent sure. I never wanted fame, but I have always wanted to share my music with people, and to share inspirational messages through it. Fast forward some more time, spirituality-wise my thoughts changed in a way, and I basically decided to start pursuing music as a career again as I grew increasingly frustrated with 9-to-5 life, which I believe is corrupt, soulless and exploitative. I told Calvin I was back into music, so we put together The Come Up 8 and 9, mostly from a few of the last songs we had recorded together, as well as some songs from his albums that I was featured on. As I started getting serious with music again, and Calvin was getting more professional than ever and constantly releasing music on streaming platforms, we decided to make The Come Up 10 an album, with no remixes, just original tracks we could post for streaming. Since life is a lot busier now for both of us, it took us about to years to finally complete this album, but I’m really proud of it, and it’s really symbolic in a way. We’ve come a long way from our early days recording the first Come Up. Our flows have improved a lot, our writing is more impactful and our sound is overall more professional. It’s also been maybe a little over ten years since we started, so the number 10 is kind of symbolic in a way as well. We released The Come Up 10 this year on August 12th, a few days before his Calvin’s birthday. Kalvonix has always been a big inspiration for me, not only because we share the same passion for music and rhyming, but also because he was born with cerebral palsy and faced a lot of struggles growing up, yet he never let that get in the way of his passion and his dream, and nowadays he’s found a decent amount of success, and I’m super happy for him. I’ve always been all over the place, lacking the dedication to make my music thing happen in the way he has, but life is a learning experience, and I can say that now I’m more focused than I’ve ever been, so I’m excited about what the future holds. I’m constantly working on new beats and songs, and Kalvonix and I don’t plan on stopping our work together either, so The Come Up 11 is already in the works. For now though, give The Come Up 10 a listen, I’ve embedded the Spotify link below so you can listen right on here if interested. I appreciate anyone who takes the time to listen, since we put a lot of effort into this album.

much love

~ rebel eye

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DAY 22 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

Communication is the key to life. It’s only through proper communication that we can form connections and bonds with others, that we can accurately express ourselves and allow others to express themselves to us. Too often we are so caught up in our own ideas and beliefs, we close ourselves off from listening to others, therefore we can’t grow. These days, we have so many different ways of communicating, we don’t even need to see or hear each other. We have phone calls and text messages so we can communicate instantaneously, so we could say that communication has evolved and become more efficient, but has it really improved overall? Are we really more connected these days than we were back in the day when we didn’t have such devices to ease communication? I don’t really know, so it’s just a question to put out there, an idea. Yes, things like text can have us communicating with each other faster, but emotions that go along with our words can’t be transmitted properly in such a way. Sarcasm might be taken as serious and vice versa. We can type whatever we want these days and face no accountability. Would we say the same things in real life to people’s faces? Friends meet up every once in a while yet they might be constantly checking their phones, communicating with others at the same time. Family members in the same house contact each other through text rather than walking to each other’s rooms. Convenience seems to be the greatest thing we can achieve, but are we keeping track of everything we’re losing as we merge with technology more and more each day? Too often we’re so caught up in the emotions that come along with novelty, we don’t notice what we’ve lost until so much time has passed, until maybe generations later. With every good comes some evil, it’s just the dual nature of this world we live in, so again, I can’t say whether all this convenience is ultimately good or bad. I mean, it’s definitely important to be able to call a doctor when we’re in a medical emergency, to be able to call 911 if we’re in danger, it’s great to be able to keep in touch with our family members and friends who are scattered across the globe. Would we be able to live without these things? How did people deal with life before this? It would be pretty rough for us to return to such a state, so I’m not saying that we need to do away with modern technology, it’s just that everything in life requires balance, and unfortunately, we are becoming unbalanced. We have merged with technology to the point that we can connect with anyone, anywhere, but what about the connection that has been with us all along, the invisible connection between human beings, the light that shines within us all? If we stay inside, if we stay connected to our computers, to the internet, if we stop going out into the world and actually interacting with people, then that light will surely die. Technology is amazing to have, but we don’t need to be using it 24/7. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people are just super comfortable with technology, more so than they are with people. The possibilities of what we can do with technology seem endless, and it’s easy to distract ourselves with it. Communication is key in every aspect of life, in relationships, in business, in showing the world who we truly are and finding the experiences that were meant for us. We don’t know how much we’re missing out on because we fail to properly communicate our deepest desires, our fears and our dreams. We are afraid to be vulnerable, and understandably so, but closing ourselves off from others is not the answer either. Technology allows us to hide behind a screen, whether it’s a phone or TV or a computer, we are either consuming some fantasy reality, or we are creating a new reality, maybe a video or a song, or writing a story or a blog post such as this. Yes, I’m trying to get a message across, I’m communicating with whoever will read this, but are we likely to ever meet each other? Would we even want to? It’s easy to agree with the ideas of strangers on the internet, or to argue against their ideas, but in life it can often be very different. As we get to know other people more, without even realizing it we begin projecting images onto them, images than can distort the meaning of what we’re trying to get across. This is why communicating on the internet is easier, or at least more comfortable. I truly believe that we as a species are losing our abilities of communicating properly, since these days, a lot of people can’t handle any sort of confrontation, even peaceful debate, and if anyone even brings up an idea of something that sounds like it might go against their own ideas, even if it’s just brought up as a subject of debate and not explicitly confirmed, they quickly start working to silence that person, to cancel them even. How can communication not degrade between human beings if we can’t even express ourselves without fear of being silenced? We really need to reflect on this, and we need to be more open to people’s ideas without fear. Lies will always be exposed in the end, and the truth will eventually triumph, so we don’t need to try to defend it by silencing others. If you are that afraid of someone else’s ideas then maybe there’s something you’re trying to hold on to without really thinking critically about. So many people find comfort in their ideas and beliefs, so having them challenged leads to an existential crisis, wondering who they even are. They have turned their beliefs into their identity, so they cease to even act as rational, free-thinking human beings, becoming defenders of ideas, ready to attack real breathing, living, thinking, feeling people in order to defend their ideas.

much love

~ rebel eye

DAY 21 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

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It’s a shame to see people dumbing themselves down because they are not confident in themselves. Whenever we allow insecurities to stop us from moving forward with life we are robbing ourselves of the precious gift which was granted to us since birth, to feel the magic of being unique, of being an essential and integral part of the whole of life. No one is bigger or smaller in the plan of life, since we are all emanated Light from the oneness of the universe, we are all direct descendants of God, created in the Divine image. Whenever we give up on our dearest dreams due to doubt and fear, whenever we compromise our values in order to please ungrateful people, whenever we choose to do nothing and waste our potential rather than to face some adversity, some ridicule and jealousy, what we are doing is refusing the wonderful blessings which are inherently ours. We must all be grateful for advice from our elders, from parents and wise teachers, from gurus or well-meaning friends and relatives, but we must also use discrimination in every situation in order to discern what, out of the message which has been imparted to us by whoever it may be, actually serves us and what will hinder us if we apply it into our lives. That is what we must preserve, and the rest we can dispose of for the moment after minor analyzation. See, we all think we know what is best for each other. What we often don’t see is that there may be many factors which influence our opinion on what is best for everyone. What one individual believes he has realized without a doubt from direct experience of his own life, by dissecting the events of his life and interpreting the minutest detail, can be the complete opposite idea of another individual’s entire philosophy of life. Both believe that their belief is justified because of what they have been through, both are convinced beyond a shadow of doubt that they are correct in their analysis of life. But both are taking into account only limited data. A person who is much older may have more experience living life than someone who is younger, but do they have more experience being young in the present era? Being young now is not the same as being young was one hundred years ago, or even fifty or twenty years ago. Parents believe they always know what is best for their children, and most times they do (when it comes to certain things), but it is not always the case. Even if a parent is conscious of the fact that life consists of both pain and pleasure, and that their child might become a better person if they suffered through some pain of their own, they will still do anything in their power not to allow their child to experience pain. Such parents believe they are doing the right thing by not allowing their children to live through the conditions they lived through. However, balance is the key to everything in life. A child who grows up completely sheltered from society, locked in his home, and brought up by parents who directly or indirectly instill in him the notion that everyone is untrustworthy is bound to grow up to believe that everyone is a threat that should be treated with suspicion, that everyone is untrustworthy and that the world is a hostile place that is best avoided. Even if this hateful concept of trusting no one is not embedded in the child, he may still be forever shy and terrified of expressing his opinions in a social setting even if he wishes to do so. A sheltered lifestyle has rendered the child socially awkward, a problem that could be solved but is instead worsened since his anxiety levels just keep on rising with every interaction. Insecurities are prison bars to keep us locked in our minds. They are often deliberately placed in our minds by abusive people and by media programming. Girls who are of perfectly good size are made to feel like twigs when they look at magazine models, normal adolescents are made to feel powerless and petty when they watch rap music videos glamorizing promiscuous sex, dangerous drugs and flaunting material possessions like cars, liquor bottles and dollar bills. It is a socially acceptable stereotype that women need to spend hours on makeup every morning before they are free to go anywhere. Is anyone locking them inside so that they can’t go out and interact in the world? Yes, of course, they are prevented from escaping by the prison bars of insecurity in their mind. Some hate themselves and are unable to forgive or let go of a distant past, and so they drown their insecurities in alcohol or heavy doses of hard drugs. A beginning alcoholic has just figured out that he needs to get wasted at every party in order to even talk to people. Having no greater goal in life, he feels satisfied and thus, a life of addiction begins. If he ever puts the bottle down many years later he will come to realize that he has wasted many years of his life, as well as much of his health and money, on petty pleasures with people who don’t actually give a damn. He might notice that some are now dead from an overdose or collision, some are in jail, and some are still living the party lifestyle as if everything was fine, aging, refusing commitment to anything worthwhile, wasting away their potential to thrive, to do something more than just surviving and wasting space. Insecurity is the root of all this. We waste our lives away because of insecurity. We would rather live mediocre lives of transient thrills, than to face the hard knocks of life, to face rejection and ridicule, with the faith that one day we will finally taste sweet victory. Don’t let the world bring you down, learn from your life and those of others, but don’t let all of the information that’s out there overwhelm you and prevent you from trusting yourself and offering the world whatever you have been blessed with.

much love

~ rebel eye

DAY 20 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

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Life. I feel like whenever I sit down and start to write, whenever I want to get something important written down, not anything specific but just something important and deep, the word “life” always pops into my mind first. I guess it’s because I’m always contemplating life in general, and it’s cool but scary how all aspects of life connect, they’re all intertwined to form one never-ending thing. Life is that one thing, and not only are all of my thoughts and actions interwoven to make up my life, they’re also interconnected with all of your thoughts and actions, as well as everyone else’s, to make up life in general. Ideas come from many sources, and if many people have the same idea or come to the same conclusion about the same thing, then a set of beliefs is usually agreed upon in order to make up a system of thought, whether it’s a philosophy of life, a religion, or a political party. These ideas, along with the feeling of being part of a community, drive these people to act in certain ways, which affect everyone around them, for better or for worse. Think about how the world has been drastically changed because of the ideas even of one person. There’s so much more to everything than meets the eye, simply because we can’t even begin to imagine the effects of all of our actions and thoughts. Every big project or movement has been born from a single idea in the mind of one person, but how likely is it that they knew this thought would lead to such a big thing? They were just having a thought, just like we do every second of the day. Too often we let negativity get the best of us, and we wallow in self-pity, not realizing that these thoughts are opening doors for more negativity to enter our life. We underestimate the power of thoughts because we don’t consider them real in the same way that we do objects. In reality, I always like to say that the realest of things are those which are invisible. Is love visible? Loyalty? Respect? Trust? Joy? These things are invisible, but they are real as can be. The same goes for the air we breathe, without which we couldn’t even live. So, these are some of the invisible things we are aware of atleast. Does that mean that they’re the only invisible things that impact our lives? How do we know that our energy isn’t transmitted to other people around us? How do we know that our thoughts don’t affect our bodies? These are all just random ideas, but it’s still within the scope of what I started writing about, since I simply started writing about life. All of this is life, everything we can think of is life. When something bad happens, we say “Oh well, that’s life.” We recognize that life is a mix of good and bad, and that these things balance each other out. So is life ultimately good or bad? Life is just life, and we make of it what we want. We all have the power to influence the world, and it all starts from within, by working on ourselves. We underestimate how much good can come from just getting our own minds in order, from learning how to let go of attachments to things that no longer serve us, to negative patterns of thinking and behaving. It all starts in the mind; as within, so without. Although I write this and recognize it as truth, I know it’s easier said than done. Life is complicated, and human beings are just as complex as life itself. We all have our own life experiences, our own thoughts, our own likes and dislikes, our own genetic makeup which influences our minds and bodies. We are all unique, and I think this mirrors life itself in a way. There’s so many different things in life, and this shows us how many possibilities are available to us. We should never give up on life, or on ourselves, because we have infinite potential, and the more we realize and believe that the more we can tap into it. I don’t claim to have all the answers to life. In fact, life for me is at times difficult to make sense of, and it seems cold and cruel. I’ve struggled to fight these thoughts for a while, but I know I have to fight them, because I know that the cruelty is not life’s fault. It is the world we have created, a world centered on material wealth, which is contributing to our hearts growing cold. This is not evidence that life itself is cold or evil though, neither does it show that humans are like that. It’s a shame that so many of us focus all of our energy on material wealth, on money and status, when we could make really important changes in the world if we only focused on things that really matter. We have created a society where it’s easy to fall behind if we are not constantly grinding, and even though we might start off just working to pay the bills, soon we find that we have no time for anything else, and since our life barely has any meaning outside of working and saving money, thinking about and spending money, well, we might as well make as much of it as we can, isn’t that right? Maybe we’ll have enough by the time we’re old and have barely any time left to really love. Maybe even then we won’t have enough. How much is enough? Think about that. Don’t fall into the trap, think for yourself, look within yourself for the best of what you are, and find a way to manifest that into reality. Can a single person change the world? Well, if nobody believes so, then nobody will try, so the world will not change. If I try to change myself then I can inspire others, and maybe there’s someone out there who’s on the same vibe, inspiring others to strive towards higher goals than money. Maybe the people I inspire could some day encounter the people you inspire, and maybe they’ll inspire countless more. Everything works in this way, and there are people who realize their infinite potential, yet they choose to use it for evil and for their own material gain. If we stop working for the good of the world by refusing to work on ourselves, we can be sure that evil will not stop working for its destruction.

much love

~ rebel eye

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DAY 19 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

I’m sort of rushing this because I have a half an hour left until midnight. I know I can make it happen though, so here I am. I’m also rendering the YouTube video for my daily beat, as well as setting up my new Arturia Keylab 61 to work with FL Studio. I basically got carried away and left everything for the last minute, since I was having so much fun just playing on my keyboard. It’s funny because it’s supposed to be the main thing producers work with, yet for so many years I was just making beats by simply clicking notes into FL’s piano roll. Anyway, since I just got it I’ve been having fun setting it up to go with my workflow, seeing how I can integrate it with FL Studio as well as my MPC. I guess I was just having so much fun that I didn’t really feel the time going by. Time really flies, and if things aren’t organized properly it can easily slip away from us. If we really want to have goals and set deadlines for ourselves we should focus on that first and then do other things we want to do. It can be tempting, for sure, to do what we really want to do in the moment, but over time we’ll probably regret not doing the goals we had set for ourselves, so we might as well do them. I guess what I’m trying to say is that long-term satisfaction is worth more than satisfaction in the moment. If we have a clear goal that we know we want to keep going then we should stick to that, rather than assuming that we’ll have time to do it later. I was just so excited finding the right set up for my gear that I decided to leave my goals until the end. Now I’m literally racing against time to write down enough words. Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s not a life or death matter, but you all know just how shitty it feels when you’ve been succeeding at a goal consistently for quite a while, only to fuck it all up really quick and have to start all over again. It can get exhausting. So again, the wise decision is to take care of our long-term goals first. Amazing things require consistency in order to be carried out. Without consistency, everything falls apart before it can even come to life. This is why we must use our time wisely, we need to plan things according to importance, because if we develop a habit of procrastinating it can be extremely hard to break. Not to make excuses but I’ve also had a weird sensation in my chest since the morning, and I’m a bit worried since anxiety always makes me question every small sensation in my body, so for a while in the morning I was doing all sorts of things in order to feel better, so I wasn’t really in the most productive state of mind. Either way it doesn’t matter, because I did have a some extra time I could have used to work on my goals. Goals can only be reached with discipline, the discipline needed to put in the necessary time and effort into our work. Once you have a discipline going then it is easier to follow the road that’ll get you where you want to go. A lot of times we look for excuses because it’s easies to justify ourselves than it is to own up to the fact that we should be getting more serious about our goals, our dreams. I know we all live very different lives, and we all have different things that make us happy as well as things we suffer from. I remember being a kid, it felt good to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, living life in the exact way I wanted to without regrets. Everything changed when I grew up a bit more though, because I started to realize that life is an interconnected web, and that there’s a lot more to it than just fulfilling our own desires. There’s things that require our attention, we need to constantly work on ourselves as well as on our relationships. With everything we have to focus on as adults, it can be extremely difficult to find the time, consistently, to set goals and to make them happen without failing. I admit, sometimes I’m overwhelmed by how little time there is to do so much. Then I remember that time is just a construct, and that I don’t need to stress out about everything in life. I just have to prioritize, to do whatever’s most important first, then move on to something else, and so on. What gets done is the most important, and if there’s no time to do everything, then maybe those things that were left out weren’t meant to be done just yet. If we do something while thinking about the next thing we have to do, then we’re less likely to do whatever we’re doing well, because our focus is split between two activities, between the present and the future. We might already be planning in our heads just how we’ll execute that next task, visualizing it and perhaps getting excited about it. Excitement is good when it comes to our goals and projects, but we should be aware of too much excitement as well. Sometimes what is needed in order for us to make dreams happen is for us to balance them out with a bit of reality. Rather than working with the fruits of labor in mind, it would be wiser to just do what we’re doing as best as we can, and to later do the same thing when we do the next thing on our list. It’s good to dream and to be optimistic about the future, but be alert! Always be aware of everything you can do to make sure you succeed, and make sure to be actively working on these things so that you have the highest chance possible of making your dreams come true.

much love

~ rebel eye

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DAY 18 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

The whole of life is evidently all energy; hence we are all emanations of this energy. We have fair basis to believe that we are not separate from anything, as the whole of matter is energy as well. Energy is effort, a never-ending effort to elevate, the driver of all evolution. Energy is the source of time and space in this reality, but sadly time is often misused due to it being disregarded as if it’s no big deal. We love to say that time is an illusion and it’s all in the mind, that the clocks were all created by men, and that we live life on our own schedule. Although I agree wholeheartedly, and I acknowledge our innate desire and need to be free and to never feel bound by time, what good does it really do me to realize this if it still won’t set me free from my chains? What good comes from being aware of being a slave if I am, in the end, still a slave to schedules, to the chains of captivity, if I can’t escape my worst afflictions no matter what? Isn’t the person who realizes the problem, yet does nothing to stop it, ultimately in a worse position than the one who was never aware of the problem in the first place? Merely realizing that time is an illusion doesn’t free us from it if we can’t apply what we’ve learned to our real lives. As we go on living, we are all blessed with an endless amount of energy which we can use as we please. Everything we think and do becomes the cause to an effect, and it itself was an effect of a previous cause. This energy has existed for eternity and shall keep on existing, yet it manifests itself in this moment in time and space in your birth or mine, our lives themselves probably being effects of previous causes unknown to us. We must take a moment to see that for as long as we live in this physical world we will be bound by time and space, experiencing life in a seemingly linear fashion, and whether or not it is an illusion in the grand scheme of things matters little to the clock and to our day to day responsibilities, all of which revolve around seconds, minutes, and hours. So, what can we do to be truly free? It is not an option for us to bury our heads in the sand, and we cannot lie in bed all day enjoying the soft touch of blissful ignorance either. We need to use our time wisely, by reflecting on the seemingly random events which are taking place in our lives and in the world as a whole. Everything is simply saturated with meaning, but the question now is how to perceive it. We can begin to perceive all the significance in our lives by training our mind so that we can have it only focus on what matters. A distracted mind is easily led astray from its real goal by forces that wish to prevent it from reaching it. When we learn to pay attention to the things that really matter to us is when we start to free ourselves. We can now use our time wisely in order to progress in our goals instead of wasting it on meaningless fun. Not that there’s anything wrong with fun. The key word in the previous sentence is ‘meaningless’. We can all have fun with meaning, we can all enjoy life. After all we are all powered, so to speak, from the same source, the same source of all that has meaning. The energy which maintains our bodies, our minds, is the same energy that gives life to the plants and to the animals. Energy is transmitted back and forth by all living beings through action, through thought, through speech, through feeling. We forget that things do not have to be visible in order to be real. We forget that we can smell and that we can hear, yet that neither the odors we smell or the sounds we hear are visible to us. We forget that we can feel the air, and in fact rely on it, yet we can’t see it. We forget that, although we feel the light hitting our skin on a bright sunny day at the beach, we can’t see the rays extending down from the sun and hitting us. In much the same way, we emit subtle vibrations everywhere we go, and even when we don’t go anywhere. Every thought is a thing, and every feeling is a thing too, but the problem is that too often our thoughts and feelings seem to manifest on their own, without being called upon by us. That’s because, in fact, they weren’t called upon by us, but by the learned habits and preconceptions of the mind. Evil thoughts arise in a person’s mind, apparently out of the blue, because he or she has allowed it to consume too much garbage, too much negativity, and now it is seeing the world based on rotten thoughts, it is creating its own thoughts based on what it misinterprets. Sadly, thoughts which are completely perverse are sometimes seen as flashes of intuition, just as sometimes someone might attack or kill someone else and later claim that God told them to do so. People who experience such strong feelings often believe they are being called upon by their intuition, but they don’t realize what it really going on. Instinct is something different from intuition. Intuition arises from the divine wisdom which we know to be correct even beyond our desires and ambitions. Instinct arises from something we have consciously or subconsciously learned over time which has become deeply embedded in our mind. Something happens which reminds us of an old incident and we react in the same automatic way. This is a learned reaction, a habit. This is instinct, repetition, mindless action. Mindless action is also energy, but it is energy which has no purpose, no value. In order for this energy to become valuable to its beholder, he or she must learn how to control this energy. This person must learn to control what they pay attention to consciously as well as subconsciously or unconsciously in dreams. This person must learn not to fall prey to selfish desires or passions, they should not do anything which will harm others in any way, they must live with integrity. This will strengthen character, and it is a daily practice of divine intuition, the spark of God that dwells within us all. This is the conscious part of who we are, and the more we practice connecting with it, the more conscious we will be at all times. We will become aware of our passing thoughts, of our moods, of our reactions to petty situations as well as disasters. This sort of introspection will allow us to modify our reactions, to create new habits and to drop old ones, to spend time more wisely. In other words, connecting with this higher state within ourselves, the state of our true being and consciousness, allows us to control where our attention goes. Just as in meditation, focus is placed on the lack of sensory input and thought, but most importantly on consciousness, on awareness, on the energy of being simply being alive. The most important point to remember is that awareness of sensory input is not sensory input, and being conscious of thought doesn’t mean that one is thinking. Whether one is being conscious of breath or of thought or of sensory input, none of them require any action on our part. Breathing and thinking are automatic processes, and sensory input is external, coming from outside ourselves. So, as we relinquish control and we stop trying to think or to feel or to do anything, we come to a state of simply being, the state which is truly us, and which is constantly aware that we are thinking, feeling, doing what’s right, doing what’s wrong. It is often ignored, and when we ignore this consciousness within ourselves, we become unconscious to everything, and we engage in simple mindless action, purposeless action. This leads to people being unable to get along with each other because there is no value of energy, energy is wasted, as if we were to live forever on this physical plane. The obvious result of this waste is that, as we all remain unconscious of our waste of energy and time, and of our feelings and emotions and how they affect us collectively as a species and as a planet, the world gradually sinks into separation, into division, and therefore into further and further devastation and destruction, the product of all the evil energy circulating in our atmosphere.

much love

~ rebel eye

DAY 17 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

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It’s time to take control of your life and be who you were meant to be. It’s time to let go of old attachments, to let go of all insecurities and doubts; life is simply too short to spend it crying over spilled milk. What’s done is done, it is what it is. I have to remind myself of that every so often, even if I did rap that song back in 2012, ten years ago now. The time is now, there is no other time. The past has gone and it’ll never return. It exists only in our minds, only for us to learn from it, so we can outgrow it. Every day the memory becomes more blurry though, our own stories slowly start fading away as we fill our minds with so many other things, whether we like it or not, all kinds of things we really don’t need. Does the mind have a limit? Does it start deleting files as new ones are saved into it? I’m sure science has some kind of answer for that, or thinks it does, yet I won’t be bothered to look it up right now. I steered away from my original train of thought, so let me get back on track. What I was about to say was that, every day our memories become blurrier, we forget little details about the past, about ourselves. Therefore, it seems to me like the longer we spend analyzing the past, the more likely it is for us to look at it in error, since all the small details are blurred out. We might even start adding in details that weren’t even there. We can’t learn correctly from a distorted image of the past, so it’s just not worth analyzing for too long. At some point we need to accept the lesson we’ve learned and continue moving forward. It can be difficult because, if we don’t accept the lesson, we keep trying to think our way around it to find something else, and we never move past that. Living in the past is a recipe for depression. Consumed by the could haves, the would and should haves, we regret everything that we’ve done, as well as everything we haven’t done. We fail to see that it was all meant to be, for it all shaped who we are today. Whether we’re good or bad today, just that lesson in itself is powerful enough, because it lets us see that, we can take control of our lives once again, we can start manifesting a better life into existence at this exact moment, by visualizing what we want, putting the work in and staying consistent. There’s no use in holding on to past mistakes as if they should prevent us from succeeding today. There’s no use in holding on to shame and guilt, to fear and hate, because we are what we think. As above, so below, as within so without. The true essence of what is within us manifests into our outer reality, so if we’re always thinking about negative things from the past because we can’t break free, then we’ll keep on running into the same scenarios. A simple example is that if we’re in a bad mood, we’re more likely to have people treat us badly. If we’re in a happy, cheerful mood then most others will reciprocate that energy as well. I know this from many years of call center experience… Unfortunately one can’t always be super cheerful sounding, but I do try to at least be polite and try to help as much as possible, exactly because of this, because energy is contagious. We never know how much a bit of positive energy might influence someone else’s life, therefore impacting whoever they interact with in their own lives. It’s a snowball effect, and I’m not claiming I’m perfect in the least, because sometimes I do fail at transmitting the exact energy I wish I always could, so for sure it’s easier said than done, but at least I’m aware of it and of the things that prevent me from being the best I can be, so that I can get to work on those things. Knowledge of self is the key, and the fact is that if we want to make a change in the world we need to start with changing ourselves. Even the best of us have things we need to work on, to improve on. Life is a constant learning experience, and as soon as we think we have it all figured out something happens to make us aware that we don’t. So again, it’s time to take control of your life and do what needs to be done. No more time for hesitating or procrastinating, it’s time to act. This is basically a letter to myself, to be honest, but I share it with the world because I know that the same applies to all of us. We all hold infinite potential within, to better ourselves as well as the world we live in, we just need to realize that, then to make a plan and to act on it, to stay consistent. This will also keep us from dwelling on the past, since we simply won’t have time. We’ll be more productive and likely to accomplish something, instead of spending time reliving the past in our minds, overanalyzing all kinds of situations. Presence is a skill everyone should practice. After all, we are not our thoughts, but rather the consciousness that thinks them, just as we are not our feelings or emotions either. If we can control our awareness and prevent it from becoming distracted with whatever new thing that comes up, that’s how we know we’re truly in control of ourselves, and of our lives. Having a set goal as well as discipline and consistency goes a long way in helping us achieve this. I haven’t always been great at this, but that’s exactly why I know how important it is to be present. It’s definitely something I’m trying to practice in daily life as much as I can, because I know how much stress I can save myself if I stick it out, and because I know it’s the right thing in the end.

much love

~ rebel eye

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DAY 16 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt) – Dream Journal

My wife Maria and I went to sleep about an hour ago, at about 130am. I woke up just now because of a dream I had. It was really vivid and It kind of shook me, to be honest, although it wasn’t anything extremely crazy like a gruesome nightmare or anything like that. If you’ve read my daily post from yesterday you might know that it was a post about my MPC One. Guilty of having left my daily writing for the last hour and a half of the day, I decided to quickly write about the MPC, since I’d been having so much fun just messing around with it the most of the day, and since I usually spend my free moments on it anyway. So this short dream revolves around my MPC One also. Basically I was sitting on my desk, in my room with Maria, although she was sitting on the edge of the bed right beside me. The desk is right beside the bed. I look down at my MPC and hit the button on the back to turn it on. It doesn’t turn on though. I press it like crazy a few times, worried that it’s died out on me, and suddenly a keyboard that I have below the MPC flashes as if it’s turning on. I wonder how in the hell the power button on my MPC just turned on the keyboard instead! Now, the set for this dream was all very common, not super weird like other dreams, I mean the setting was literally what I was doing while I was awake just an hour or two ago, with Maria sitting almost in that same exact position on the bed, the room looked exactly as it would in real life. I really thought this was real life and couldn’t figure out what was going on, so I told Maria but was surprised to find that she barely seemed to care and just barely mumbled something while looking down at the Plants vs. Zombies game on the iPad. It seemed so weird, and I kept frantically explaining to her that the MPC is fucked up, trying to get her to understand the seriousness of it, all while pressing the power button on the thing non-stop. It finally turns on but the icons and letters on the touch screen are big and distorted so I try to shut it down and turn it back on. It usually takes a few seconds for the MPC to power on when I press the power button, so right when I press it I turn my head around for a second to tell Maria what I’m gonna try. When I turn my head around again to look down at the MPC though, I see that the drum pads on it are missing! Not all of them, it was as if someone had just yanked out like three of the drum pads. I felt a chill and I started crazily looking around for the drum pads, not so much to put them back in, but more to see if I could even find them or if they had vanished into thin air. Sure enough, they were nowhere to be found. My mind was racing since I was sure I had done nothing treat could have accidentally removed the pads from the MPC. Some weird shit was going on, I was sure, some supernatural shit. I was getting super creeped out and was about to tell Maria about it, when I woke up feeling really disturbed, but after a moment really happy that it was all a dream and that my MPC is safe from harm. I decided to write this dream for a few reasons. One is that I’ve always been super interested in lucid dreaming and astral projection, but have only been able to lucid dream a few times, involuntarily. I know that one of the things that can help out a lot with lucid dreaming is to keep a dream journal. Unfortunately, since I’ve been a huge stoner for years I don’t have dreams very often, or I should probably say I do but I don’t remember them. It’s common knowledge that one of the symptoms of weed “withdrawal” are really vivid dreams, and I can definitely confirm this. Now that I’m finally cutting down on bud I’m getting more dreams, or at least remembering more of them, and they feel very very vivid and real life-like, just like tonight’s dream. Dreams can be scary but I always appreciate them. At the end of the day they’re trippy experiences for me, that I like looking back and reflecting on, sort of like psychedelic trips or meditation sessions. I think this is one more motivating factor for me to continue my goals of cutting downMy wife Maria and I went to sleep about an hour ago, at about 130am. I woke up just now because of a dream I had. It was really vivid and It kind of shook me, to be honest, although it wasn’t anything extremely crazy like q gruesome nightmare or anything like that. If you’ve read my daily post from yesterday you might know that it was a post about my MPC One. Guilty of having left my daily writing for the last hour and a half of the day, I decided to quickly write about the MPC, since I’d been having so much fun just messing around with it the most of the day, and since I usually spend my free moments on it anyway. So this short dream revolves around my MPC One also. Basically I was sitting on my desk, in my room with Maria, although she was sitting on the edge of the bed right beside me. The desk is right beside the bed. I look down at my MPC and hit the button on the back to turn it on. It doesn’t turn on though. I press it like crazy a few times, worried that it’s died out on me, and suddenly a keyboard that I have below the MPC flashes as if it’s turning on. I wonder how in the hell the power button on my MPC just turned on the keyboard instead! Now, the set for this dream was all very common, not super weird like other dreams, I mean the setting was literally what I was doing while I was awake just an hour or two ago, with Maria sitting almost in that same exact position on the bed, the room looked exactly as it would in real life. I really thought this was real life and couldn’t figure out what was going on, so I told Maria but was surprised to find that she barely seemed to care and just barely mumbled something while looking down at the Plants vs. Zombies game on the iPad. It seemed so weird, and I kept frantically explaining to her that the MPC is fucked up, trying to get her to understand the seriousness of it, all while pressing the power button on the thing non-stop. It finally turns on but the icons and letters on the touch screen are big and distorted so I try to shut it down and turn it back on. It usually takes a few seconds for the MPC to power on when I press the power button, so right when I press it I turn my head around for a second to tell Maria what I’m gonna try. When I turn my head around again to look down at the MPC though, I see that the drum pads on it are missing! Not all of them, it was as if someone had just yanked out like three of the drum pads. I felt a chill and I started crazily looking around for the drum pads, not so much to put them back in, but more to see if I could even find them or if they had vanished into thin air. Sure enough, they were nowhere to be found. My mind was racing since I was sure I had done nothing treat could have accidentally removed the pads from the MPC. Some weird shit was going on, I was sure, some supernatural shit. I was getting super creeped out and was about to tell Maria about it, when I woke up feeling really disturbed, but after a moment really happy that it was all a dream and that my MPC is safe from harm. I decided to write this dream for a few reasons. One is that I’ve always been super interested in lucid dreaming and astral projection, but have only been able to lucid dream a few times, involuntarily. I know that one of the things that can help out a lot with lucid dreaming is to keep a dream journal. Unfortunately, since I’ve been a huge stoner for years I don’t have dreams very often, or I should probably say I do but I don’t remember them. It’s common knowledge that one of the symptoms of weed “withdrawal” are really vivid dreams, and I can definitely confirm this. Now that I’m finally cutting down on bud I’m getting more dreams, or at least remembering more of them, and they feel very very vivid and real life-like, just like tonight’s dream. Dreams can be confusing and scary, even terrifying, for sure, but I appreciate most dreams, if not all. They’re trippy experiences for me, experiences I like looking back on, analyzing and reflecting on, just like psychedelic trips or meditation sessions. Who knows where dreams come from, I’ve always been fascinated by them, and just being able to remember more of my dreams is even one more reason to continue with my goals of cutting down on bud. So, I’ve killed two birds with one stone, I got my daily blog post in for the day, and I got to write down one of dreams, and a really trippy or at least vivid one at that. It’s good that I work at 1pm tomorrow, if I worked earlier in the morning I probably would have been too lazy to stay up for an hour or so to write and post this, and maybe that dream would have been forgotten. Anyway, time to go back to sleep and hopefully once again into dream land with some pleasant dreams this time.

~ much love

rebel eye

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DAY 15 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

My favorite way of making music is on the MPC One. When I first started my music journey at eleven or twelve years old I started with FL Studio, since I was just a kid with a laptop and not a lot of money saved up that I could spend on gear. I had fun making beats for sure, focusing on old school beats, then experimenting with trip-hop and ambient music a lot, even trap beats, but I was never as into it as I am nowadays. Over time I stopped producing so many beats, making a beat only once in a while in FL Studio, using other plugins such as Nexus, but I was never really super into it, for the most part I just wanted to rap. I realize now that that’s mostly because of the way of making beats that involves using a mouse and keyboard. Once I got my hands on the MPC One I was hooked, and I haven’t stopped making beats ever since. The hands-on approach to making music is a lot more fun, and it feels like an instrument I’ve been learning and I never stop learning. Basically the MPC is a DAW (digital audio workstation) in a box. There’s lots of different kinds of MPCs, but I went with the One because of it’s compact size, and based off of everything I had read online. It truly does not disappoint in a way, and even know that I’m pretty comfortable with it and feel that I know it really well, I realize that there are still a lot of ways I could get even deeper into it, that’s how powerful this thing is. Of course, everything the MPC One can do can be done in a DAW, including FL Studio, which I still use, but it’s just a lot more fun using the MPC. Another thing I’ve been getting into a lot more because of the MPC is sampling. I used to sample beats in FL Studio, but everything seemed so complicated and I ended up just cutting loops that I liked from old jazzy tracks, or even reggae and classic rock, and adding my own drums and instruments to the beat within FL Studio. Those beats were not necessarily bad, but they were just very simple. The melodies were, for the most part, unchanged, although new instrument and drums were added over them. On the MPC, however, I’m chopping melodies into the pads and playing them that way, modifying them in all kinds of crazy ways, making all kinds of different patterns, and it’s just so much fun. Ironically, getting into the MPC also got me back into FL Studio and into learning how to do a lot of things in there that I had previously neglected learning about. It sort of just goes hand in hand with everything I’ve learned since getting the MPC, for example, mixing and mastering techniques in MPC One vs. mixing and mastering techniques in FL Studio. Of course, FL Studio, being a classic DAW, offers more possibilities, since you can even load third party plugins, for example. The MPC is limited to a few plugins that come with it, although those plugins have vast instrument libraries so there’s a lot to work with, apart from expansion packs and just classic sampling. With a specific cable which I have connected into the inputs of the MPC I can sample audio from any device with a normal headphone or earphone connection, so I can sample from YouTube or Spotify if I run the cable from my audio interface headphone output, or I can sample from my phone or iPad or iPod classic, or from music device really. It’s just impressive for what it is, there’s so many ways to create music within the MPC, and just for that I would recommend it to anyone who’s into making music or beats. A lot of the MPC sounds are really electronic so I make a lot of techno or house music on there, and also hip hop beats of course. Although the MPC One is definitely a beast in standalone mode, my favorite way to use it these days is to incorporate it into FL Studio. This is an interesting workflow because it allows me to make ideas on the MPC, with my hands rather than with the mouse, and then to pass on and polish those ideas within FL Studio, or just add more sounds on top of them or structure them better into a beat. The MPC One has song mode, which allows you to put different sequences, basically patterns of sounds, together to create a full song. For example, sequence two might follow sequence one, sequences can be repeated as many times as necessary, and so on. However, it’s definitely a lot simpler and faster to arrange the structure of a beat in FL Studio, looking at everything laid out across a big computer screen rather than the small MPC One screen. Don’t get me wrong, the touch-screen on the MPC One is amazing for the size of the MPC, it works perfectly and you can even access grid mode on it, basically a step sequences like in FL Studio. It’s just a lot faster to arrange the final beat in FL Studio and master it as well, to get the final product sounding loud, punchy and clear. It’s not a hassle to transfer things either. Basically, my MPC is on my desk so it’s always connected to my PC anyways. It’s not in controller mode though so I can use it in standalone even though it’s plugged in. The MPC has a software, basically Akai’s own DAW, MPC Beats, which can also be opened up as a VST plugin within other DAWs, so what I do when I select the controller mode option on my MPC is just open the MPC Beats plugin within FL Studio. The plugin recognizes the MPC and then I can load up whatever project I was working on while in standalone mode, and just drag the individual tracks from my MPC sequences into FL Studio, either as audio or MIDI files. The audio file is just the recorded audio itself, while the MIDI file is the actual notes you played, so you can even change the sound of the melody to be one of the sounds in FL Studio, or even Nexus or Omnisphere or any other third party plugin. I could go on and on about how cool the MPC One is, but I’ll leave it at that for now and maybe talk about it a bit more another time. If you’re into making music or just getting into it and are thinking about buying and MPC One though, trust me, it’s a lot of fun and you most likely won’t regret it.

much love

~ rebel eye

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DAY 14 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

Day 14 of writing a thousand words. I’m enjoying this exercise for sure, and it’s getting kind of easier to get my words done once I start, I feel like I flow through the post more naturally. Before I used to feel as if I had to come up with something super profound in order to inspire the reader, but over time I’ve come to realize that people may find inspiration in the most trivial things. We never know the extent to which any of our ideas or experiences might inspire others, no matter how small or insignificant we may think those ideas are. For today I thought of just writing a bit about some of my favorite songs of all time, songs that I could listen to forever and never get tired of. Some of these songs give me goosebumps when I listen, and others just transport me to a dreamy, sleepy state of mind which is super relaxing and even meditative. One of those songs, and maybe my favorite of them all, is Bob Marley’s “Is This Love.” Yeah, I know, I know, big surprise, a huge stoner’s favorite songs is a Bob Marley one! Who would’ve thought it? But Bob Marley music is special, for lack of a better word to describe it, whether one is stoned or sober. Bob Marley and the Wailers had an amazing way to mix the classic relaxing reggae rhythm with powerful vocals and equally powerful, philosophical, uplifting lyrics that really make you think and feel. I know Is This Love, although popular, isn’t Bob Marley’s most popular songs, others such as Three Little Birds or One Love being more well-known, but to me Is This Love is such a beautiful song, super chill and reminds of a beautiful love, like the one I feel for my wife Maria. In fact, we danced to this song on our wedding night since I put it at the top of our wedding playlist. Whenever I’m stressed I know I can probably put this song on and just forget about the worries of life for a moment. Number 2, my second favorite song ever is probably Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.” I saw a recent post that Gilmour’s guitar solo on that song was just voted as the number one guitar solo ever, and I completely agree, I was even telling my wife the same thing a few years ago! Second place, for me, goes to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” which is also one of my favorite songs, the way it progresses from an eerie, slow ballad into an insanely powerful, complete rock classic, complete with the crazy, energetic screaming of the lyrics at the end, is just amazing. The lyrics are really thought-provoking as well and they evoke powerful images in my mind. I like to listen to Stairway to Heaven when I trip, although sometimes it gets way too intense, due to the crazy energy it gives off. I think I didn’t write enough about Comfortably Numb though. It’s hard to find such a beautiful and spacey song, and the guitar feels like some sort of victory, like a triumphant vibe. That reads kind of weird, but it’s the best word I could think of to describe this amazing song, or at least the instrumental side of it. Another song which I really love is Eminem’s “Sing For the Moment.” I love the way Aerosmith’s track was sampled, and Eminem’s lyrics, especially about the reason why he raps, for kids who are inspired by the lyrics, who might not have much else in life to relate to or to just vibe with. Whether listening to Eminem or most other rappers’ lyrics is something healthy or constructive for most of the youth is another topic entirely, one that I can’t ever come to a concrete decision on. I know there’s a lot of negativity in rap music, even in the “good” rappers’ songs, but I’ve never really been able to stop listening to rap. When it’s done correctly it can be such an inspiration, and powerful messages can be delivered way more powerfully and efficiently than with any other genre of music. A perfect example of this is 2Pac. I love so many of his songs, as you can tell that he was a person who was trying to figure life out, trying to inspire others, and to express himself through poetry and music. I’m not saying he was perfect by any means, but his lyrics are definitely inspirational. Out of so many great 2Pac songs my favorite one has to be “Better Dayz” from his posthumous album of the same name. The lyrics touch upon such real things, about the stresses of an unplanned pregnancy amid a shitty financial situation, for example, or about the death of his homies and seeing his family after them and giving them the simple message “to keep the faith, and pray for better days.” We can’t expect musicians to be perfect, but I certainly appreciate it when artists try to incorporate a powerful message into their music. At the end of the day, music is amazing and beautiful, but making a positive difference in the world is ultimately the best thing one can do with one’s time on earth, and if your passion is to write, whether it’s music or anything else, it’s really inspirational to me to see people using their talents to try to put these positive ideas into the world. I honestly can’t be bothered to listen to any of the new rap that’s out nowadays. It’s all commercialized garbage created to keep listeners ignorant and chasing a shallow lifestyle they’ll probably die or end up in jail trying to live. We need more rappers like Pac, but I honestly think hip-hop is unfortunately beyond saving. There’s too much money to be made by promoting a lavish lifestyle, selling what the people want, illusions of money and power, of financial success. Anyway, I definitely went off on a bit of a rant there, but I have to draw the comparison in order for you to understand why I love songs like “Better Dayz” or “Changes” or “Thugz Mansion” so much. There’s a few more songs which are at the top with these ones, but for now I’m at a thousand words, so I’ll just leave it here. Hopefully I can get some people who haven’t heard these songs to check them out, or even to get some people who haven’t listened in a while to revisit these musical masterpieces. I’m jamming to them myself at the moment.

much love

~ rebel eye

IS THIS LOVE, IS THIS LOVE, IS THIS LOVE THAT I’M FEELINNN!
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DAY 13 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

Day 13 of a thousand words. I figured I would write about one of my favorite songs of mine, It Is What It Is. This is a song I wrote and recorded way back in 2012. It was released on my February 2012 mixtape Running Rebel. To this day, I consider this mixtape to be my masterpiece. I was trying to make a project with a unique sound, but more specifically, with the jazzy, old-school type of sound that I love so much, the sound that inspired me to get into hip-hop in the first place. This track was the most popular off the tape. In my lyrics I reminisce on old times, which even though were filled with problems, still represent the good old days for me. In 2012 I was only 18 years old, but I really felt like I had grown up and matured. I know what you might think, that at that age there’s not much that I could possibly be looking back at. That’s not the case for me though, since the craziest times of my life actually started when I was about twelve or thirteen, and although I had a lot of fun, I also got into a lot of problems. Thankfully, these problems didn’t escalate as much as they could have. I feel like I’ve always been blessed with good common sense, even when I was acting up I was never completely like a lot of my friends. I always knew there was something deeper to life, and I guess I was trying to find exactly that in the countless experiences I was having, but never finding anything. By the age of 18 I had realized that this life was not what I wanted any longer, so I wrote this song, It Is What It Is. The last part of the hook says “But we all gotta grow, yo, it is what it is,” and I feel like that sums up my mindset at the time, I was done with my old type of life and was sad to let it go, as I did have a lot of fun, but I realized that it was time to move on, to grow into a new phase in my life. There’s a lot of details in the song, about old times, old moments I lived through with close friends, some of which are no longer here with us. Overall, it’s just such a nostalgic song for me, and the amazing chill beat by Dela definitely went along with my lyrics to emphasize the nostalgic aspect of the track. I also like how he incorporated a sample into the beginning of the beat, from one of my favorite rap songs “Moment of Truth” by Gang Starr, where Guru raps “Sometimes you gotta dig deep, when problems come near, don’t fear, things get severe for everybody everywhere.” At the time I felt like I was really thinking deeply, I was finally making a decision about my life and the direction I wanted to take it. Unfortunately, it did take me a few more years to completely let go of my troubled past, so throughout 2013 to 2014 I was back into making gangsta rap songs with RRG. It took me a few years to completely free myself of who I used to be and the toxic lifestyle I was living for so long, and over that time I also quit smoking cigarettes completely, quit drinking for the most part, and quit doing all the drugs I was doing. By 2017 I released my Musical Alchemy mixtape, where I incorporated a lot of what I had learned into my lyrics, from the 7 Hermetic Principles to the Four Noble Truths, from Bible verses to quotes by great philosophers. I wanted to creative something philosophically inspiring, but I feel like I ended up being a bit all over the place on that album. I hope to be able to make an album as good as my 2012 Running Rebel album some day, but I just don’t know if I’m even the same person these days. Even if I never do though, I’m glad to have created a classic, and even though my album barely got more than a thousand downloads, since I’m still basically unknown, I’m glad to have made something I can enjoy, and which documents my growth in life. Unfortunately, now that I’ve started posting my music on streaming services, I haven’t been able to post any of the songs from my Running Rebel mixtape, since the beats I used were just picked from different websites and YouTube videos, in order to match the sound I was trying to achieve. To anyone who might be reading this blog and who is already familiar with my music, I truly appreciate you! And if you’re reading my blog and are not familiar with my music then give this track a listen, I know you will enjoy it. To be honest, I think a lot of what has prevented me from “making it” as a musician has been my own fault, I’ve never been great at promoting myself, it’s never been something I enjoy doing. It feels like I’m trying to show off or something, so I’ve always preferred to have people find my music organically rather than sharing it to everyone. However, I’m now at the point where I realize that this just doesn’t work like that. As a creative person it’s imperative to be able to market oneself. You might be super dope at what you do, but if no one knows it then it isn’t gonna do much for you, so let the world know! There’s way too much wack music about nothing out there these days, so I shouldn’t feel any shame for promoting my own music when I know that it’s dope, and that people would appreciate it if only more people got to hear it. I appreciate everyone reading, as always, and I’ll leave a link to my song, It Is What It Is, in case you’re interested in listening.

much love

~ rebel eye

DAY 12 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

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Day 12. Sober day. Right now I’m only doing 2 sober days per week. I know it’s not a lot but it’s definitely a challenge for me, coming from smoking every day for so many years. It’s been a couple weeks now and I’ve stayed consistent with this goal, so I’m definitely happy with my progress. I started with one sober day, for 2 weeks, then on the third week started doing 2 days. This is the end of the fifth week, and now I’m gonna do four weeks of three sober days. I can really see how the time I’m spending sober is beneficial for me already, I have a clearer head and I’m really starting to get consistent with my creative outlets. I’ve been making beats for more than ten years now, as well as rapping, but it’s always been something I do just for fun. I’ve never been big into staying up to date with social media trends, so I can’t say I’ve done much on the promotion or networking side of things. I don’t mean to say that I never wanted to make it in the music industry, it’s just that I never got serious enough to promote or to do any serious networking, it’s always been about the music itself for me and I’ve never felt like I had time to do anything beyond that. Now though, I’ve realized that I need to do it, whether I feel like it or not. So many people are creating music nowadays, so it’s not enough to just be good, one has to actively promote one’s music just as if it were any other business. As a young rapper coming up I never really spent much time thinking about this. Yeah, I know I was pretty immature, but at least now I’ve gotten to learn from my past mistakes so that I can do things differently from now on. I’m still young but not as young as I was ten years ago, so although I still have some time to make this happen, it’s not like I have a whole lot of time either. It’s stressful because I know that this is the last chance I’ll ever get, and if I don’t make it happen I just might be stuck in the shitty nine-to-five life forever. However, I feel like this stress is a blessing, the stress is what’s really motivating me to finally do things the right way. Nothing will stop me this time around, which is why, after so many years, I’m slowly but surely rearranging my time and my decisions in order to live with more order, in order to live more deliberately. The sober days feel boring, since my brain has been used to being high most of the time for so many years, but this boredom pushes me to spend time doing things that I wouldn’t do if I was high, things that absolutely need to get done. Anyway, I know I’ve written a bit about all of these things in my recent blog posts, but it’s just because I’m extremely excited to see where life will take me. It feels like I’m finally moving on to the next level of life, like I’m finally taking responsibility for my life and taking matters into my own hands in order to make things happen, God willing. For a while, life was feeling dead, as if nothing new was happening, as if I had settled in life and there would never be any new excitement. In a way I was okay with this realization, because I’d rather not deal with all the problems I brought upon myself when I was living my old, “exciting” life. I see now that I was wrong though, life is starting to get exciting again, and this time it’s for positive reasons, I feel excited about positive long-term changes in my life, rather than searching for excitement in highs and cheap thrills all the time. Life is deep, and sometimes we can shut ourselves off from the experiencing the depth of everything. Sometimes cutting ourselves off from it might be very satisfying, we might feel very comfortable, since we experience only what we know, or what we think we know. We try to take the easy route, to do what’s most comfortable and pleasurable, without stopping to think that maybe, at the other end of a completed challenge, we might just find something deeper, some new inspiration about life, rather than something familiar, something we are extremely comfortable in. It’s common knowledge that no good can come from staying in one’s comfort zone, but I realize that that’s exactly what I’ve been doing all these years. I’ve decided that the world out there is too crazy to deal with, and I’ve immersed myself in things which inspire me, such as powerful music or books, things that transport me away from real life. I didn’t think this was ever a problem because I never realized that this is what I was doing, in my mind I was simply enjoying something I liked. I get high and listen to an album, and it’s magical! No problem. Except that tomorrow I want to make some music, and it’s much better when I’m high. Okay, I’ve been working on music for a while now, it’s time to spend some time with my wife. Okay, let’s watch a movie, but yeah, movies are much more immersive when stoned, so here I go! You see what I mean? One moment after another, life goes by. In a way this is what I’ve always liked about weed, that it can make you more present, it can help one enjoy the mundane moments of life a lot more. I always saw this as something positive, but now I’m thinking that maybe we need to feel the absolute boredom and dissatisfaction of life if we ever want to evolve to the next level of our lives. If we can make any moment comfortable then why would we ever try to push ourselves further?

much love

~ rebel eye

DAY 11 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

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I can’t think of much to write tonight, to be honest. I sit here and stare at the screen for a few minutes though, and then I just start writing about how I don’t know what to start writing about. I know I have to start writing, there’s only an hour left and I can’t fail my daily goal. If I just start writing I know I can go from there, something will come to me. Wow, look at that! I’m half a paragraph in, although it seems like I already wrote about this recently… about what, exactly? Am I writing about writing again? Well, I am writing about how I don’t know what to write. That’s okay though because I’ve been thinking about how I need to be more spontaneous. Yeah, it’s good to have an order in life, but in between posting this daily message, posting my daily beat for sale, and working my nine to five, it starts to seem like too much of a routine. Now, this is not to say that I want to stop, no way! I’m only getting started and I’m excited to see where consistency will take me this time around, now that I’m finally taking it, and myself, seriously. I do, however, wish that life was more exciting and spontaneous at times. I’ve finally realized that I need to start with myself, otherwise nothing different will ever happen. Then again, maybe life staying the way it is isn’t so bad after all, I’m happy with my wife, I’m healthy, I love making music and writing, and apart from working at a call center from home I don’t have to deal with too many crazy situations since I barely go outside other than to buy things or once in a while to meet up with a friend, which is not too often. Things weren’t always like this, I used to have many “friends” and used to go out and party every week, maybe multiple times a week, and get drunk and all sorts of fucked up, but that all changed after I moved to Honduras and stayed there for three years, where I met Maria who later became my wife. It’s crazy how in life you can’t have it all at once. I love my wife and wouldn’t trade our relaxed life together for anything in the world, but I still wish we went out to hang out with friends every once in a while or something. Then I see what’s going on with a lot of people in the world and it makes me not wanna deal with any of it. Why ruin what we have? And I don’t mean in the sense of me cheating on her or anything crazy like that, I’m just thinking like, what do I have to look for out in the world other than problems? I have my wife here and there’s no need to go anywhere or complicate our life. I know it’s probably not the healthiest way of life but I gotta be honest. I hate to sound pessimistic about the world or about people, but sometimes I really feel just like Bukowski said “I don’t hate people …I just feel better when they’re not around.” I actually do care about people and I’ve always hated injustice with a passion, but it seems to me like most people are not looking to engage in meaningful conversation with others, but rather promote an idea, whether political or religious, or some idea of morality or about the right way to live life. Everyone has all the answers figured out, except for the answer to the question of how to get along with each other. So much trouble over racism, over sexism and homophobia, over politics, over ideologies. As soon as you say one thing you get labelled or cancelled, so no one can have an honest debate. It’s crazy to me how a lot of people don’t see this, they don’t see the classic manipulation that’s purposely put in place in order to divide us and have us fighting against each other so that we can’t focus on being free. It’s scary to think about how well engineered all the propaganda is nowadays, how interwoven everything is, how Facebook and Google knowing everything about us, and how our access to basic services can be cut off at any time, and it’s becoming easier and easier as things become more electronic. Again, we can’t have everything in life. We have newer technology, but along with it comes a new, perhaps invisible, danger. Along with technology may come disease, but then we create medicine to cure disease. Is everything ultimately good or ultimately bad? I don’t have the answers at all, but I think I just might have close to a thousand words, after having just taken you all on this crazy train of thought along with me. Just copied and pasted this post onto Word and saw I have like 800 words. Not bad, my estimate was pretty close. See, I love writing because of this, I can write and just have fun as I document a random moment in my mind, a moment that is forever gone in time and I’ll never recover. Maybe I will though, if I read this blog post sometime in the future. Random ideas… why did God or the universe will it for these ideas to get documented? Why not the ideas I had this morning? Why didn’t I have other ideas right now, for this post? Where do ideas even come from? Well, I like Paracelsus’ thoughts on the matter, but it’s not for sure. It’s something I’ve written about in another post, and maybe might explore in another post in the future. I appreciate anyone who’s reading, blessings to you and yours.

much love

damn, 977, I was sure I had a thousand! Don’t forget to show the ones you love you appreciate them! Time is not unlimited, and we never know how long is left, so let’s make every moment count! Thought I’d end it on a super positive note with a message that can’t hurt anybody!

again, much love

~ rebel eye (1031 words without counting my name!)

What I was listening to as I wrote this.

DAY 10 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

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DAY 10, nice! Only have to do ten days nine more times to get to a hundred. My record right now is 81 days straight, if I’m not mistaken. This time I don’t only plan to beat that, I plan to go for as long as I can, until the end of my days if possible. Consistency is the key to improvement, and when paired with a constant flow of new knowledge it can really make things happen. It’s always a struggle, trying to find a way of keeping myself constantly reminded of this, even during days when I’m the most tired or just not feeling up to much, I’d love to have a way of just snapping back into the right mindset to get back to work, to get back into the flow of things. Usually if I miss a day of something I’ve decided to do daily, it completely kills my motivation to do it, because I know I have to get back to that point again, if I’ve done it before I can do it again but it’s gonna take me a while to get there so I may as well not even start. It’s a stupid logic, I know, and it’s the main reason why I didn’t post on here at all for 2 years after my Day 81 post in August of 2019. I mentioned all of this in a recent post, but it’s cool for me to recap since today is day 10 so it definitely feels like an important milestone. A lot is going on apart from the resurrection of my blog, mainly with my music! Music is perhaps my biggest passion, and today I posted my first beat for sale on Beatstars, something I should probably have done years ago. I always had the idea of eventually rapping on my own beats, but it’s clear that I can’t come up with enough rhymes fast enough to fill up all the beats I produce. Ultimately my goal is to live off my music, or off of any of my creative pursuits, but preferably music, so it doesn’t matter in the end whether I make money as a rapper or as a producer. I can even rap just for fun for the small group of people who do listen to me, and it won’t matter too much because I’ll be having fun making beats and making money that way. This is what I’ve recently decided, so I’ll be uploading daily beats on Beatstars, as well as accompanying videos for each beat on YouTube and Instagram, and just like this daily blog post session, I hope to be posting consecutive beats for as long as God blesses me with life. One of the biggest obstacles in my life has been that of the nine-to-five lifestyle, working soul-sucking jobs that don’t interest me in the least as a creative person, doing the bare minimum since I know a sincere and honest work ethic is not necessarily valued, but rather exploited most times, and the overall depression that comes along with this type of life, having little to no time to do what I love. Recently, during the past few years, I’ve been making my own time for myself, but not to slack off like back in the days. Sometimes I’m filled with anxiety these days even, because I feel like I absolutely have to make it with this music thing, or with some other creative pursuit, maybe like writing, if I want to be free of this lifestyle. I don’t mean to complain, I’m honestly grateful for all of my life experiences, and this type of life has taught me the importance of chasing my dreams, that the power to make anything happen is in my hands. I pray to God to help me find the right way to keep motivated and to keep putting the work in consistently. I also have to start reaching out to artists and trying to network, but this is good since it’ll sharpen up my sales skills which I haven’t really used since back when I had some other nine to five jobs.

So yeah, I’m super excited to be getting into this new chapter of my life, where I’m trying to move forward with my passion first and leaving partying and wasting time behind. To be honest I haven’t even been partying for many years now, having realized the pointlessness and stupidity of the constant party lifestyle, but I can’t say I haven’t been wasting time. A lot of it has been due to indecision, and as you may know if you’ve read some of my other recent posts, I think it may have something to do with me being constantly stoned, so I’m starting a really serious goal to stop getting baked as much, and it’s definitely allowing me to see things in a much clearer way to allow me to do what needs to be done to start marketing my business ideas. Yeah, it’s true that bud helps me get creative ideas flowing, there’s no debating that, but sometimes with so many ideas comes indecision, when what we might need at the moment is extreme focus on one specific idea, in order to get started with the execution of that idea. Everything in life has its right time, and I feel like things are starting to align in my life. Only time will tell if I stay motivated enough to constantly continue with my ideas, such as this daily blog post of a thousand words, or the daily beat I’ll be posting, but I really think I will. I really feel like this time is different than ever before, and I truly can’t wait to be writing to you all soon confirming that to be the case. To anyone who struggles with indecision, my advice is to simply get started. Start putting your ideas together, and once you do start putting them out into the world. If you have good content, and you are constantly learning and improving, and constantly showcasing that improvement, then you are applying the formula for success and it is highly unlikely for you to fail. Once again, consistency is key. Knowledge is power. Practice makes perfect. Learn as much as possible about what you do, nowadays there’s so many resources out there. Keep on learning, keep on applying your knowledge in order to practice, showcase your practice and your progress to inspire others!

much love

~ rebel eye

DAY 9 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

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One day away from day 10, nice! In a way I’d say it feels a bit therapeutic even, writing these thousand words daily, I really think more people ought to try it, at least once in a while if daily’s too much. To be honest I think daily might even be too much for me, but I love the challenge and I’m glad to be taking it on, since I feel like there’s too much shit on my mind, feel like I need to declutter my mental space. It’s nice living life as an observer, and writing down my thoughts and ideas helps me keep organized and on track about what I’m doing. If you’re reading I also appreciate you, it definitely adds another dimension to my mission, it feels like I’ll grow my audience depending on how real I can keep it, how much raw reality I can express in my words, how much of my message I’m truly able to convey. Writing is simple, yet it’s a skill one can always improve on, there are no limits to imagination and creativity, to the combinations of words one can form, and the meanings different people derive from those groups of words, which we might call phrases or sentences. Maybe I can inspire someone to write what’s on their mind as well, and whatever they write could inspire someone else, sparking a chain reaction of inspiration. It’s the invisible things life these which inspire me to write, things I might never notice. So many things have inspired me, things I’ve read I mean, without the author knowing I’ve been inspired. We can’t know whether everything we write is correct in every sense, but if our heart is in the right place then we should have nothing to worry about. Expressing our honest opinions on certain topics can maybe open up the door for much-needed conversation about it, sometimes problems can’t be solved just because there’s simply no dialogue to come to an agreement, so hatred and violence continue to grow. Communication is the key to moving forwards as human beings. Assuming we understand when we really know nothing about something is bound to lead to problems if we ever interact with others who truly do understand. This is the reason why nowadays I spend most of my time watching tutorials, learning the ins and outs of the craft I’ve decided to pursue, now that I finally decided that’s what I want to do for sure. I’ve realized that there’s nothing quite like being prepared, and knowing even more than the necessary just for doing what needs to be done. Things that stand out have to be done with passion, yes, but they also need to be done in the right way, and a lot of times being too passionate at the beginning might result in us starting to soon, and starting off wrong. There’s no such thing as starting too soon, as long as we are prepared, but if we started off wrong then maybe we may as well not have started off at all! So the best scenario is to start off early but to be prepared, and if you didn’t start off as early as you wish you had, don’t get desperate – take the time to learn properly and then get started, now that you have a clear vision of what it is you intend to do, which is what you lacked back then, and the reason why you never got around to doing it earlier. Leaning is the key to life, and to every aspect of it. Hands-on learning is extremely effective, but usually this goes along with learning from someone else, someone who is already very skilled at whatever we are learning, and who is willing to pass that knowledge on to us. We learn by receiving ideas from others, who communicate these ideas from us. Every word I’m using in this post is an idea in itself, and when paired with the words around it, can convey a very different idea than it would on its own. That’s not always the case, but it’s a possibility. Over time, figures of speech become accepted as things everyone says and understands, and as our ideas shape our language over time, so does our language eventually shape our ideas. It’s all a cycle; art – or literature – imitates life, and life imitates art, one reflects the other, back and forth, back and forth. There’s not even a need to specify, to differentiate between art and literature, since great literature could possibly be the highest form of art, effectively transmitting powerful ideas to another, or transmitting powerful emotions through the stories of the character. One Piece is a show that does this in an amazing fashion. I’m not really a huge anime fan, since most animes just don’t have what One Piece has, but One Piece has been my favorite show since I was a little kid in the third grade, I’d wake up at 3:30 am to watch it when it came on at 4am on 4Kids, Sanji’s cigarette was replaced by a lollipop. The point is, I got up super early to watch it because I was intrigued by the story and the characters, by their emotions and the dilemmas they faced. They were emotional and complex yet realistic, or at least relatable. I’d recommend this show to anyone, I’ve even got my mom into it! If I ever complete a novel or any work of fiction, something which I’m actually already working on by the way, that’s what I aspire for, for it to be as moving as One Piece, for it to evoke feelings in the viewer in that exact way. That’s ultimately what I hope to do with the lyrics for my songs as well, I despise mainstream rap because the lyrics are fake and uninspiring, promoting materialism and stupidity. The type of hip-hop that moves me is songs like 2Pac’s “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” a story about a young girl who dies to soon after becoming trapped in the lifestyle of a sex worker, or Flipsyde’s emotional “Happy Birthday,” a track he raps about a child who was aborted because they were not ready to be a family, and the emotions that go along with such a situation. We need more inspiration, people are drowning in worthless pleasure, numbing themselves from an inner feeling that something is wrong, because there’ simply no inspiration. Speak up if you think you have something to say, you never know who you might inspire, and just what might come of it.

much love

~ rebel eye

DAY 8 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

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Time flies, and I’m often torn apart by indecision, since everything is a possibility, yet there’s not enough time for everything to be done correctly, or even at all. A person might struggle along one specific path throughout an entire lifetime, but does he or she finally know whether they’ve succeeded, once the moment of death arrives? Can we ever know for certain that we have lived in the right way? If there is really a right way to live, then it’s terrifying to think that we might convince ourselves into living a certain lifestyle, only to find out once it’s too late that that wasn’t really what we should have done with our lives. Would this regret even be valid though? It’s easy to wish we had done something different, once time has passed and we didn’t do it. Another story is whether we would really do it if given the chance, if we could somehow magically go back to that moment. The past is the past, and we didn’t know back then what we know now, so perhaps we would have done the exact same thing we already did, if we were ever given the chance to go back and relive, or redo, certain moments of our lives. It’s crazy to think that we might never really know whether we’re living correctly or not, we just have to trust our decisions and stick with them. There’s no trial period for the consequences of our actions and beliefs, or our lack of actions or beliefs. Certain things need to be done for other things to happen, certain sacrifices need to be made for certain doors to open. Certain beliefs lead us to act in certain ways, or to refrain from behaving in certain ways, but how can we be sure that our beliefs are the right ones when almost absolutely everyone seems to be one hundred percent positive of their own beliefs? If our beliefs are wrong then doesn’t that mean that all of our actions will be wrong from the very start, that all our dreams are doomed to failure? The scariest thing is that, to succeed at most endeavors we have to spend years and years perfecting our skills, learning, practicing, networking, diving deeper into whatever we are pursuing, whether we’re talking about personal or business endeavors. Who’s to say that, after so many years of working hard at something, we won’t be unfulfilled and left wishing we would have done something different? Maybe we’ll only realize that because of the life experience we’ve gained from whatever it is we ventured into, which we are now thinking was a mistake. But was it really a mistake? How could you have learned this lesson if you hadn’t lived your life in the specific way you have up until now? But then again, what’s the point of this lesson now when it would have helped me out much more so many years ago, when I actually had the time and energy to invest into whatever it is that I now consider what should have been my actual pursuit? Mind games, leading to regret and dissatisfaction. Buddhism would emphasize the need to live in the present, to minimize attachment to what would have or could have been, and to just be happy in the moment, to be present and not to wish for anything to have been different. Sure, this could definitely be the healthiest and most practical approach to life, maybe even the correct approach to life (again, could be, but not sure, just like any other approach to life), but that doesn’t really mean that it isn’t valid to say that maybe we would have been more successful or happier if we had done something else, if we had turned our lives into something different. The point though, as I see it, is that whatever we have gone through was our own experience, it is specifically ours so that we may grow from it by relating to it in our own specific ways, dependent on everything else we’ve experience during our lives. Maybe everything really is meant to be in such a way, and then again, maybe nothing is meant to be, which would mean that all of our experiences, all of our pain and our struggles, our joy, the love we feel our friends and family, would all be random and trivial in the grand scheme of things. It’s true that I’m not a hundred percent sure about anything at the end of the day, if I can be completely honest, but I sincerely doubt that idea, that everything we experience is trivial and that there is no deeper meaning to any of it. As we learn if we study Hermeticism, “As above, so below; as within, so without.” Everything goes way deeper than we could ever know, all of our decisions and experiences, all of our thoughts, our feelings and emotions all stem from farther away, from deeper than we could ever imagine. Well, again, that’s just kind of what I feel to be the truth, no guarantees! I know that someone has the best chance of succeeding if they focus all of their time and energy, or at least as much of them as possible, into one thing and one thing only. Unfortunately I’ve never been able to settle for one thing. I love making music because so much music inspires me, and I love writing because so many great books have inspired me as well. I love rapping because that’s what I started with, that’s what I’m best at when it comes to music, but I hate so much of what makes up hip-hop culture these days. It’s never been the healthiest culture, understandably, but I think any fan of hip-hop knows what I’m talking about when I say that things are much worse now, and it’s gone downhill in a really sad way. Another path for me could be beats, since I love producing beats as well, and I’m getting into it just now like never before, taking my beat game up to the next level, so we’ll see where this takes me with time, I pray to God I make the right decisions, and I have to work at keeping my mind clear and free from stress and distractions.

much love

~ rebel eye

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DAY 7 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

We can get so busy at times that we forget to make time for those we love. Life sometimes demands so much from us, and it seems impossible to win if we don’t spend every waking moment planning out our next move. We think we’re doing our duty since it feels like we simply must provide for our families at all costs, we must protect them. We can get so caught up in creating the life we dream of, that we forget to live life in the present, to appreciate those who are unconditionally there for us. By the time we turn that dream we’re chasing into a reality it might not be exactly what we expected after all, yet they might no longer be there. We change along with life. Change is actually the only constant in life, the most common of things, for good or for bad. We don’t know what’s ahead, so we should always be grateful for the present, we should embrace it and live it to the fullest, just be alive in it. We shouldn’t brush it off as if it didn’t matter, as secondary to our future projects, or even worse, as something from which we wish to escape at the earliest possible chance we may get. We need to embrace the present, and the people who surround us at the moment. Sometimes the people who love us might be the exact people we wish to avoid, and perhaps it’s because we know that they’re willing to call us out on our mistakes while other so-called friends won’t. We might convince ourselves that they’re wrong, that they’re getting too involved in our decisions and that we have everything under control. We might even start to resenting us, but there is no reason to, since friends should always try to build each other up, to help each other grow. Sometimes we can hold grudges and allow resentment to gradually separate us from those who love us, but this will only lead to loneliness and regret in the end. No amount of money or success is worth more than true love, than enjoying life alongside family and friends. I can’t say I’ve never been guilty of this myself, I’ve let the pressure of trying my best to succeed get in the way of me maintaining healthy relationships. Thankfully I still get along with my family, who never gave up on me no matter what kind of crazy shit I was going through, but I can’t say the same for a lot of my so-called friends. A lot of people have walked out of my life for one reason or another, both voluntarily and not. I’ve lost some good friends along the way, a lot just went their own ways and we drifted apart as the years passed, as I travelled through Brazil and Honduras, wanting to fulfill my fantasy of backpacking and seeing the world as a hippie, yet never getting started. Let’s just say things didn’t go exactly how I had planned for them to go, but I’m not complaining and regret nothing in the end. The thing is that I was hoping to make crazy friendships overseas, to immerse myself in different cultures, which are actually my own cultures, since I was born in Honduras and my father’s side of the family is Brazilian, while I failed to realize that I was neglecting a lot of my friendships back in Canada. Some people I purposely wished to cut contact with, a lot of people were only there for the good times, when there was a party going on and lots of booze and bud, but never for anything else. People are complex, and we are all searching for something. I know because I’m complicated as hell, sometimes my ideas might be all over the place, sometimes I might have extreme focus on something that captivates me and catches my interest at the time. Despite the complex nature of human beings, despite the possibility for misunderstanding and issues that may arise from it, it’s still worth it to make connections with others, to keep in touch with old friends just to see how they’re doing, to let our closest friends and family how much we love and appreciate them. You never know when someone might appreciate a conversation, you never know what others might be going through. It’s great to chase our dreams, to work hard, to save money, but we shouldn’t let our relationships suffer in the process. We might become completely oblivious to the basic things the ones we love require from us, we might lose our temper and lash out at them, under pressure by the demands of the grind. What is the point of working hard to provide financial stability to a family, yet provide no emotional stability, to fight and even to hurt one’s partner, to set a harmful example for children, to become bitter from stress and worry? Life is tough, that’s true, yet it is meant to be enjoyed. We shouldn’t spend every moment trying to get ahead, life is not a race after all. Every breath is just as important as the next, they all keep us alive. Every moment is significant, all the moments of our lives add up to create us in our entirety, our ideas and our present thoughts, our preferences and decisions, they all stem from everything we’ve ever been through, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of any time of our lives. I think a lot of us need to take a moment to slow down and appreciate what we have, especially the people we have in our lives, people we might just be taking for granted, not realizing what an amazing influence they’ve been in our lives. Moving forward I think I’ll try spending more time with my parents, and it would be pretty cool to talk more and even hang out with my brother Uriel, although he lives in the States for now so that’s not something for right now necessarily.

much love

~ rebel eye

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DAY 6: Cutting down on weed after more than a decade (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

Day 6, I hope everyone who reads this is having an amazing day! Today is a sober day for me. I’ve been trying to cut down on weed for quite a while now, trying different methods, but haven’t had much success. I’m not blaming cannabis itself in any way, the issue is personal. I’ve been blazing since I was like twelve or thirteen, and even though at the beginning I smoked with my friends and just talked and laughed about random things, as time went on I started feeling less and less interested in hanging out and smoking with friends. I started mostly blazing alone, and eventually decided it was something I enjoyed enough to indulge in every day. Music was better, and since I always loved listening to music this was a big deal for me. I could blaze and listen to some beautiful music, some Bob Marley or Pink Floyd, and just look out at the sunrays shining through the leaves of the trees, and that in itself was just such a beautiful moment. I would walk around the streets and listen to music and just feel alive, as if there was this whole world out there, and I was just an observer, observing and taking it all in from the comfort of my own little world within. The people on the street didn’t know I was high. They didn’t know what music I was listening to, and they didn’t know that the combination of these two things was creating a whole landscape of ideas in my mind. Sometimes these moments would inspire me to write, whether ideas or possible lyrics for future songs, so I always kept a pen and notebook handy as well. I’ve always been super interested in spiritual or mystical experiences, and I believe these experiences were definitely mystical for me, they made me see life in a way I never had before and allowed me to just enjoy the moment. Unfortunately, as many stoners can probably relate, over time the magic faded, and it became just something to do to feel chill, eventually just to feel normal. I knew this wasn’t the right way to consume weed, but honestly I didn’t really mind, because I still enjoyed life a lot more while stoned, and I could still function pretty well, was still making music, still going to school and work and doing everything I was supposed to do. I feel like, in a way, this is where weed can get tricky. For example, an alcoholic or a heroin addict might feel the need to quit more intensely than a stoner, precisely because of the fact that the damage being caused in the alcoholic or the heroin addict’s life is obvious and hard to ignore, often they lose their families, their health, everything they have in life, to satisfy these vices, until maybe one day they feel absolutely compelled to quit. I haven’t ever gotten to that extreme, but at a certain point in my life, when I was feeling really negative and cynical, I was drinking heavily for long periods of time, and it quickly started to spiral out of control. So far I’ve gone this whole year without drinking even a beer, and I intend to finish the year in this way, and might even keep it up after the year is over. Alcohol just makes life a mess, no matter how fun it might be when you’re drunk. Weed, on the other hand, seems harmless, in the sense that we feel as if it doesn’t interfere with our ability to live life, maybe it even enhances life. It also doesn’t make us act in violent ways like alcohol does, and it doesn’t create a physical dependency either. What’s the problem with adding some extra spice to life then? Well, weed can definitely bring some things out which might not be expressed if one just goes through life sober forever, for example sometimes I’m more creative in the moment, it’s easier to focus on something which I really like, like making a beat and just jamming until it’s perfect, I know the effects of weed can be beneficial in many different settings. However, when I’m high I neglect other aspects of things, such as the marketing and promoting aspects of the music business. After all, no matter how much I may hate it, it’s still a business just like everything else in this world is. The boring stuff I never want to do just never gets done when I’m stoned. Why would I want to get stoned and try to reach out and market to people, to plan out marketing strategies and budgets, to look into this and that? I wanna get stoned and make music, or learn more about making even more kinds of music! Or draw or something. When I’m not doing anything creative I can also just get stoned and read some philosophic or spiritual books and my mind just travels to faraway places, my curiosity and imagination make it fun for me to just sit there and think. Without weed that just isn’t the same. What I’ve come to realize is something super basic – just like everything in life, balance is the key. As I mentioned, weed can be beneficial, it can help you bring creative ideas to life, to provide a different perspective on things, to stimulate the imagination, and it’s good for many other things. However, at least for me, it doesn’t make me wanna go out into the world and network, and make things happen. Instead, I tend to enjoy doing things alone when I’m stoned, or just hanging out with my wife at home. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, of course, but it all depends on what you want out of life. Personally, I’ve realized it’s time to step out of the comfortable bubble I’ve been living in for over a decade. I know that if I continue in the same way I’ve been living up until now, my dreams run the risk of never coming to fruition, and that’s too high a price to pay for just getting stoned. Don’t get me wrong though, my intention is not to quit completely, by any means. Weed has become a big part of my life, for better or for worse, and nowadays I mainly just eat edibles rather than smoking. Yeah they get me higher for longer, which I really enjoy, but the main reason I switched to edibles is because of my lung health. I know it’s not cancerous like cigarettes or whatever, but no smoke can be healthy for our lungs at the end of the day. I still smoke a joint occasionally, and I find that’s much more enjoyable than smoking every day, multiple times a day. Anyway, it’s tough for me to write about this, I feel like an addict coming clean to you all about my addiction, and I guess that’s really what this is. Anyway, I hope this can maybe help some of you who might be in the same situation. Analyze your goals, think deeply about what you want out of life, and balance your weed use so that it doesn’t interfere with what you really want to achieve!

Much love

~ rebel eye

DAY 5: Eternal Words (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

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Day 5 of writing a thousand words from my mind. I’m glad I’m sticking with this goal so far, it’s only been five days but I’m feeling really motivated to keep this going this time. The second time I attempted to do this daily I got up to Day 81, then when I failed it I basically didn’t post anything else on here for like two years. That was from August 2019 to now. I can say I’m finally getting back into writing, and it feels good. Writing is weird in a way. It’s such a simple thing but it can get really complex. How do we know when it’s good or bad writing that we’re reading? It’s all subjective isn’t it? When is a piece of writing finished? Couldn’t we always find another fancier word to convey our message? Writing a novel is complex, every little word matters, every choice makes a different to the overall story. Writing can be complicated in such a way, or it can be simple. Free writing is basically just thinking, but writing down what we’re thinking, or as much of what we’re thinking as we can before our mind is invaded by the next thought. So what exactly is it about writing thoughts down that makes them special? Wouldn’t the same ideas be just as brilliant if they hadn’t been written down? Ah, but that’s the thing, how would we have ever encountered these ideas in the first place, had they not been written down? Often times I feel really inspired by something I read in a book because it deeply resonates with a thought or emotion of my own, maybe one that I hold deep inside and would struggle to put into words if I tried, so I just don’t try. It’s cool to find that someone else has thought about the same thing as you and agrees with you, even if most of the planet might not necessarily see things in that way. Some of the ideas in my mind can get so complex and confusing, and sometimes it feels like I’ve been going over an idea for quite a while without reaching any conclusion. Suddenly something I read shines a light on that whole subject and shows me that I can look at the situation in a completely different way from anything I’d even considered. Whether it’s reinforcing an idea that I already have, or providing a new perspective for me to consider, it’s crazy to me how powerful written words can be, how the correct combination of words used to transmit an idea from someone’s mind can resonate so much with another person, even thousands of years after the writer has passed away. As Marcus Aurelius stated “What we do in life echoes in eternity.” What we do means everything we do, including whatever we write. It’s insane to think that his famous book Meditations, was never even meant for others to read. It was basically like a journal of sorts for him, he just wanted to write some ideas down, and here we are, reading them and listening to them thousands of years later. What if he had chosen to simply think these thoughts, but didn’t ever think to write them down? All religions have their holy books, which are presumably thousands of years old. What would religion be without those words? Now, I won’t get into a date on whether life would be better or worse without things such as religion, but if there was no religion because there was no writing, then you can be sure that there would be a lot more missing in the world, like music and art, even basic education. What would we be? We would be nothing like what we are today. That’s why, as a writer and a musician, it can be hard for me to write sometimes. For any generic radio rapper the task might be really easy, it’s common knowledge that sex, drugs and violence are mostly what sell. It doesn’t take much effort two write a few half-assed bars about how much money you have and how many women you’re having sex with. Yeah, these rappers are what society would call “successful” and who can argue? They have big mansions and luxury cars, every high school boy wants to be them, to be as successful with women as they are, to have everyone look up to you. Are they properly calculating the cost of that success though? Everything has a price, and everything requires some sacrifice. If you essentially sell your talent and allow the industry to tell you what to make music about, yeah, you will get the financial reward, the peace of mind of not having to worry about money anymore, but what about your impact on the planet and on those who are listening to you? What will come to you as a result of all of this? What are trying to promote with your words, positivity or negativity? Hope, or anger and resentment? Do you want the world of the future to be more focused on humanity, on empathy, on how to move forward and help one another to grow? Or would you rather have the young men of tomorrow measure their success by how many cars they own or how many women they can sleep with? Doesn’t this also imply that women are no more than sexual objects, possessions to be acquired? I don’t think any of this is right, but sadly this is where we’re headed as a society, every day we are falling more in love with materialism, and forgetting how to love and uplift one another. So what can you do? What can I do? Well, some of us are fortunate enough to be able to provide help to others who are not in the best situations. If you have no money though, what’s stopping you from writing? I’m simply writing my thoughts here, just like Marcus Aurelius decided to do when he wrote what would later become Meditations. I don’t know what you’ll take from this post, what anyone who reads it will take from it, but I am sure you will get more out of it than if the ideas were just left to float around in my head. I appreciate anyone who’s reading this, I believe that we were meant to connect in this way. Remember, put your heart and soul into all that you do, and if your intentions are pure, most likely you’ll be influencing the world in a positive way.

Much love

~ rebel eye

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DAY 4: Getting My YouTube channel started (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

Day 4, 1000 words once again! Lately I’ve been super busy working on different things, and I also can’t slack off on my daily blog post! The main thing I’ve been focusing on lately though has been my YouTube channels. I have two YouTube channels. One of them is my original one, which has just a little over two thousand subscribers. The other one is brand new, and only has five subscribers. I would have kept working on my main YouTube channel forever if I had the chance, but I lost the option to ever monetize that channel because pretty much all the tracks I posted when I was first starting out were over random beats that I liked, so they’ve all received copyright claims. They can still play but all revenue goes to the beat owner. The project I’m super into now is starting this new YouTube channel which will mainly focus on music tutorials. It’s also the main channel when all my official releases get posted from DistroKid and SoundCloud Repost Network whenever I distribute music through either one of them, so all of my music on there will be original. I intend to upload my beats on this new YouTube channel as well, after having distributed them through streaming and opted them in for YouTube content ID. That way I avoid having any of my beats stolen, which is something I’ve always been somewhat paranoid about, and I can also make money off any tracks that might be recorded over my beats and posted on YouTube, just like there’s copyright claims on my tracks now because of the beats I used. I can also upload the beats on my old YouTube channel which has a bit more subscribers, and since I can’t monetize that channel, I’ll just get the money content ID instead, due to the copyright claims which will be placed on those videos. It’s good that DistroKid and Repost Network both have whitelist functions so that I can add the link to the video from my new channel on there in order to avoid copyright claims from myself, so that I can eventually monetize this new channel, unlike the old one. Over the past month or two I’ve been putting together the basic equipment that I need in order to start making videos for my YouTube channel, now I just need to organize my ideas and make sure everything looks like a professional presentation. One thing I’ve been thinking about is dividing my videos between my two channels. The new channel would be the really professional one, where I’ll post my super polished tutorial videos, and on the other one I can just make videos showing the myself making beats, detailing my process, maybe making beats of different genres within different set time limits. I’m almost at the point of making a final decision on all this, and as a matter of fact I rendered my first video today. It was the second kind of video, I basically strapped my GoPro up to a shelf on the left of me, showing me making a rap beat on my MPC One in front of me. I also recorded the screen of my computer using OBS Streamlabs. I did this because I was using my MPC One in controller mode, so I wanted to showcase how what I was doing on the MPC was reflecting onto the MPC Beats software running as a VST within FL Studio. All of the audio was recorded as professionally as I could, I didn’t use the audio from the GoPro. Instead, the audio from my MPC is being recorded into another instance of FL Studio, where I also have a recording coming in for my voice, which is being recorded on the Rode NT1 microphone into the Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 audio interface. This way I can edit the sound of my voice and of the MPC audio separately, having the GoPro audio completely muted. This allows me to record my voice in great quality with the NT1, and my MPC audio is recorded right in FL Studio through the Focusrite Loopback system, so basically it’s recording whatever audio is coming from my computer. This includes my voice so it’s not really the isolated MPC audio, but I can just add my voice audio on top of that one to make my voice louder, which is usually what is needed. I also add some EQ and compressor to my voice after, just to make the audio as clear as possible. Since I have the MPC audio being recorded in this way it’s much clearer than if I was playing it off my speakers and using the GoPro audio of that. Hopefully whoever watches recognizes the work that was put into my videos because of the quality and wants to subscribe because of it. Overall, I just hope to be successful with this YouTube thing because it’s definitely what I’ve been the most focused on lately, other than just making music and learning about music in general. Every day I’m watching tutorials about everything from MPC and FL Studio, to Ableton, to guitar, to music theory, to midi and all sorts of connections, I feel like there’s no end to it! I don’t mind though, I’m enjoying all the learning to be honest, and it’s cool because it’s something I really see myself getting deeper into, I’ve even been learning about the world of modular synthesis, basically playing with voltage to create synth sounds and all kinds of trippy variations of those sounds. Music is just magical, how sounds can evoke feelings within us, without words, just with melody and rhythm. Even single notes evoke some feeling within us. Music is a universal language, and I guess I’m just trying to get as fluent as I can in it, speaking as honestly as I can. I can’t wait to see where this journey takes me over time, and I pray God will bless my endeavors, with this YouTube thing and beyond. I hope we all succeed, and I hope we all have the courage to start chasing our dreams. I know I’ve waited too long, and I hope it’s not too late. I’ll make sure it’s not too late.

DAY 3 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

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Writing 1000 words, day 3. Free flow. It’s late, only an hour and a half left until 12am. Throw on a relaxing 432Hz mix by OneMindUniverse, a mix I’m super familiar with, to help me concentrate on my writing. I’m trying to allow whatever needs to come out of me to flow onto this blog post. I got so many things on my mind at any given time, it can’t be that I have nothing to write. Something that’s weighing heavy on my mind lately is a deep sadness surrounding the violence and injustice, the crazy amounts of cruelty that go on in this world of ours, which is especially targeted towards those who clearly have no way to defend themselves. My wife’s good friend was recently murdered in Honduras, my native country. I just got back here from a long stay there two years ago, as a matter of fact, when my wife and I were married there. The news reports about our friend’s murder state that she was killed by a Canadian who was in Honduras, and who she was working for, providing translation services. The coincidence is trippy because, although I was originally born in Honduras, my parents moved here to Canada when I was ten, so of course I came along. It wasn’t until much later, when I returned to Honduras, that I would meet my amazing wife Maria, who is also from Honduras, and we would fall madly in love! I couldn’t imagine ever hurting her, something happening to her is probably my worst nightmare, so hearing about this similar yet completely different situation completely breaks my heart. What I mean is, a Canadian visitor meeting a girl in Honduras. Of course, maybe the situation was different, maybe they didn’t take time to get to know each other like we did, otherwise maybe she would have noticed some red flags about this guy. There’s no turning back time though. Maria’s friend Rixy was a hardworking woman, and she will leave behind three orphan children. My wife is a very sentimental and emphatic person and she is devastated by these news, and we are planning to help her children out in whatever ways we can moving forward. The strange thing about everything is that, although the initial police and news report mentioned that her body was found at this Canadian visitor’s house and had signs of blows to the body and head, the forensic officer later stated there were no signs of violence present. This is all super fishy, and in a country such as Honduras, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if there was some kind of corruption going on. Foreign money is worth a lot more there, and police and government can easily be bought, it’s just something everyone knows, sort of like a joke. Anyway, I guess one can only leave it all up to God at this point, which I intend to do, and I truly I hope that justice will be served. It’s extremely really sad how little some people value human life. It was crazy seeing videos of loads of people marching through the streets of the small village of Trujillo to protest her death, to demand justice. She will be missed by a lot of people. I wasn’t exactly very close to her, but from the few times we met she always seemed like a great person, super friendly and humble, a hard worker doing her best to move along with her small children, even in a country such as Honduras where resources are severely lacking. On top of everything a woman in a country like that has to worry about, here comes a man who isn’t even from there, and all of a sudden just beats her to death and takes her life away at only thirty years old, leaving her poor children all alone growing up in a third world country where no one gives a crap. Well, in reality no one gives a crap anywhere, but in an underdeveloped country there is truly no help to find anywhere, there’s nowhere to even look. It’s even common knowledge that the police can’t be trusted at all, and the government and politicians are the worst. It’s so sad to me how evil people can be, how little regard for another human’s life some people can have, how some men can beat women up, knowing they’re stronger than them, knowing they’re supposed to protect them in any way they can, not hurt them and abuse them. Some cultures even glorify this kind of behavior, look at people like super loser Andrew Tate for example. Materialistic people who think that money can buy respect. People who know what life is truly about have no respect for these kinds of people, no matter how much money they might have, no matter what kind of fancy lifestyle they may showcase for the world to see. Hopefully when I truly make it with this music, or YouTube or writing or whatever it may be, I’ll finally have the chance to help a lot of people back home who are desperately in need, like the kids who used to come up to me as I walked down the street, asking for a lempira (5 cents of a dollar) or a bit of food. I can’t wait to be able to help Maria’s family as well as my own, the ones who are still back home, so they don’t have to live in such a dangerous place anymore, so they can have more opportunities, since I know them and I know they’re hard working people who excel at whatever they do. One quickly finds there’s no better way to carry oneself back in Honduras, you have to do what you have to do to get by, and crime isn’t a reasonable option because gang life is truly nothing to play with over there, once you’re in there’s no getting out alive. One time my buddy Danny, who’s from the States, and I were almost killed back in Honduras just because of our tattoos, because everything has a meaning over there, and we forgot we weren’t back in the States or Canada. We were kind of forgetful since we had done a bit of smoking and drinking, so we were being loud and stupid. We were saved since some of our tatties were in English, and we were speaking English to them to prove our innocence. What I’m trying to say is it’s a jungle out there fam, and although I love my birthplace to death, I’m grateful to God, and to my parents who brought me here when I was a kid, for the opportunity to be sitting in this room right now, working on my writing and on my music in Surrey, BC, Canada. Yeah, yeah, Surrey gets a bad rep, and there’s definitely safer places in Canada, even in BC, but there’s just no comparison between here and Central America.

Stay tuned for Day 4 of 1000 words from my mind.

Much love fam

~ rebel eye (eli)

REST IN PEACE RIXY

DAY 2: 1000 WORDS (3rd attempt)

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Day 2, 1000 words, let’s go! The main topic I wrote about yesterday was my music and how I’m slowly but surely becoming a much more professional musician, and what I’ve been doing to make that happen. I mentioned a few things such as mastering making beats on the MPC One, apart from FL Studio, which has always been my go-to program for beats, and leaving days off from getting stoned so that I have a much clearer head, which might not always be necessary for coming up with funky rhythms while in the zone, but is definitely needed at this point in order to try to promote my brand effectively. One thing I didn’t mention on my first post though, was that I’ve also started learning to play the guitar. When I was in high school my mom signed my brother and I up for guitar classes at the recreation center since she knew I was into music. I bought an acoustic guitar and we went to a few classes, but it didn’t materialize into anything. I just didn’t have the discipline back in those days, my mind was on a bunch of other crazy shit. I kept the guitar though, it’s just been sitting there in a storage room for all these years, so recently I had the idea of picking it back up and just finally getting down to business and learning to play it. After having watched tutorial after tutorial in order to learn the ins and outs of the MPC, which is basically a DAW inside of a groovebox, and eventually becoming quite comfortable with it, feeling like I’ve mastered it, I’ve become amazed at how much I enjoy learning about music, and how easy it is for me to learn as long as I enjoy what I’m learning. For so long, my idea of myself as a musician was that of a rapper, and a producer on the side, although I’ve always been able to pump out a lot more beats than songs. I’ve made trip-hop beats, techno beats, but never really released them, or even most of my hip-hop beats, since I just always preferred to promote the image of myself as a rapper. I never really look into things like mixing and mastering, or into getting the best quality equipment I could, I just stuck with what I knew, my laptop and USB mic, and FL Studio for beats. As long as I could rap good and it sounds good that’s good enough, right? That’s not necessarily the case. There’s a joy in learning and improving, and even though my music might be already good, there’s no telling how much better, cleaner or fuller it could sound with different effects and sounds, and with more experience with music in general. Music is a never-ending learning journey, just like life is, and I’m really excited to be immersing myself into it fully, like I should have done years ago. These days I no longer care about promoting myself exclusively as a rapper, as a producer, or as any other specific label. I’ve come to realize that I just love music, all kinds of music, and want to create as many different styles of it as I can! I’m a musician, a writer, and an artist, not just a rapper or producer. Recently I’m completed two instrumental albums which are basically ready for release now, just playing with some new mixing and mastering tricks I’ve been learning and they should be ready to go within a month or two. One is a techno/trance album which will be titled “life in color”, and the other is a chill, trip-hop type of album, titled “dawn of a new day.” I’m slowly releasing singles from both of them and they should drop around the same time, within a few months. I’ve also got my own solo rap album on the way, Rebel Spirit, and, having recently released our newest joint mixtape together, The Come Up 10, Kalvonix and I are already hard at work on our next project, The Come Up 11, with no signs of stopping anytime soon. Stress has always been a big part of my life, unfortunately, but it’s great to get back into doing things I love, to discover a newly refreshed love for music in all its forms. These days I usually make a beat or two, maybe one in FL Studio and one in the MPC, or I might even connect the MPC to my PC on controller mode and open up the MPC Beats program inside FL Studio, which allows me to combine sounds from my MPC and my computer to create a complex instrumental. I might be writing some rhymes to some of my beats, or practicing guitar, or watching tutorials on gear I don’t have (yet), preparing for my future in music. With God’s blessings and with all the positive energy I can possibly pour into this endeavor, I hope to go far now that I’m finally taking this seriously. A final message to anyone out there, it’s never too late as long as you’re willing to put in the work and get yourself back on your feet and back on track! Today I was experimenting with different possible setups for filming my YouTube tutorial videos. I need a camera facing me and a camera facing down at the MPC screen, since I’ll start the channel off with MPC tutorials. Unfortunately, the GoPro mount that I bought and just received today wasn’t long enough to film properly above the MPC screen without obstructing the way for me to play the pads, so I thought of using my phone to record the MPC from above, and to use the GoPro with the mount to film myself from the side. All of the audio, both from the MPC and from the Rode NT1 microphone, are going into the Scarlett 4i4 audio interface and being routed into FL Studio, so I only need to figure out the video side of things now and I should be good to go. I’m excited about this new venture, my YouTube channel, since it seems a bit more realistic than blowing up as a musician might be. Not saying I won’t make it in music, but if YouTube is an open door then there’s no point in not taking the risk, and hopefully it drives some viewers to my music as well, whether it’s on Spotify or Bandcamp, or even right on YouTube.

To be continued tomorrow on Day 3 of 1000 Words.

Much love

rebel eye

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DAY 1 (1000 WORDS: 3rd attempt)

1000 Words, Day 1 once again. My last post of the 1000 Words a Day series was Day 81, back in August of 2019, so it’s been three years! Wow, time sure flies by. I hope I can stay on track and keep on writing for a much, much longer consecutive period of time this time around. I also plan to write in a bit of a more stream-of-consciousness fashion, just to get more ideas out of my head and onto the blog. I feel like I have a lot of cool or important thoughts floating around in my mind, some of them for quite a while now, that maybe I just don’t know how to adequately express, so I just kind of avoid writing about them, and I feel that if I don’t stop to think so much anymore about having everything all organized and about the exact structure of a post and about where everything should be written or if it’ll all make sense, that I might be able to let more of these ideas out into the light. I have to keep resisting the temptation to read back on what I’ve written so far, and just keep on writing! Before I get into today’s main topic I just want to quickly apologize to anyone who may have been following this series of mine a few years ago and then I suddenly stopped writing. I know it’s probably not many people if any at all, but I just thought I should mention that just in case. So the main thing I want to let you guys know about today is what I’ve been up to for these past three years, since it all comes down to something I’m currently super excited about and hope to share with the world. I’ve always loved music, I have some music reviews on this blog, and I especially love creating music, since I was about 10 or 11. I started with rapping because I liked the flow and the beats and everything about it, and also because I felt really inspired by some of the lyrics, mainly 2Pac lyrics. I started making beats on FL Studio early on as well, just to have my own beats to go along with my rhymes. I have a bunch of my music out everywhere, but to be honest, I never took it as seriously as I should. I mean, I thought I was taking it seriously, but recently I’ve realized that I wasn’t. I was always partying too much back in the day, and even when I completely stopped partying because I started getting into philosophy and spirituality, I was still not doing all that I could for my music. I’ve sure learned a lot throughout the years because I’ve kept making beats and rapping, but other than making a lot of music, I really should have promoted myself a lot more and got my music out there, plus I’m not making as many songs as I used to back then, at least on the rapping side. I’m still relatively young, but I know I definitely would have had an advantage if I went hard twelve years ago when I first started actually recording music at fifteen. Some of my favorite raps of mine are even from back in those days. Anyway, that’s just to provide some history, not to whine about the past. What I’m excited about now is that I finally decided to change that. Nothing is getting in my way this time, I’m no longer constantly immersed in a weed high, I’m setting goals not to get baked a couple days a week, and I’m not partying or drinking at all, or even hanging out with anyone at all, really, other than my amazing wife. I know it’s not necessarily the healthiest, not to hang out with any friends, but at this point I feel like I really just need to make this happen while I still have a bit of time. For a while I was actively avoiding even promoting myself, because I felt like, and I still feel like, fame is not necessarily the best thing that can happen to someone, especially if you have a lot of personal problems to solve or demons to face. My mind changed simply because I’d rather spend a lifetime doing what I love, which is creating music, writing, sharing ideas, than to be stuck at a 9-to-5 job forever, so I absolutely have to make it happen. On a deeper level though, I’ve been feeling like it’s important to put positive ideas out into the world, that if I have positive things to say I shouldn’t keep quite, I should say what’s on my mind, even if it might interfere with my peaceful happy life. So lately I’ve been writing rhymes, but not quickly like before, I’m trying to write inspirational rhymes, taking my time so that what I write and record is something memorable and motivational, not just another rap about all the trash most modern rappers are always yapping about. I’ve also learned the MPC workflow on my MPC One pretty well so far so now I’m creating my own beats in FL Studio and on the MPC. I put time into learning the basics of studio equipment to make sure I’ve got a clear sound, and I upgraded my gear and I’m finally recording on and audio interface with studio monitors and everything, rather than a laptop and USB mic like back in the day. If you believe in yourself you have to invest in yourself. The main thing I’m excited about though, is that with all this learning I’ve been doing, I’ve come up with the idea of making tutorials to show others how to set their equipment up and even how to make beats also, so I’ve got this whole idea for a YouTube channel unfolding. So yeah, big things are on the way! I’ve also recently started making music with my bro Kalvonix again, now that I’m back in Canada, and we recently released a mixtape together on all streaming platforms, The Come Up 10! It’s a continuation of our old mixtape series The Come Up, which we started about 11 years ago when we first met in high school. I’ll be going into everything in more detail as I keep on writing, and I appreciate anyone reading, I hope you’re as excited as I am! Much love fam.

~ rebel eye

“Instrumental Inspiration” Volume 1

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I’ve been making beats for basically as long as I’ve been rapping, about 10 years now, and one of my favorite things to do to create chill jazzy beats at times is to sample old records. Back in 2012 I released a few mixtapes where I was rapping over those chill, jazzy kind of beats, and honestly it’s some of my favorite music of mine up until today, and I feel like those beats brought the best out of me as a writer, and even as a rapper, since I flow more naturally on those beats anyway.

I’ve always wanted to rap over my own instrumentals but most of my best ones are electronic, synth-heavy beats, and I’ve always preferred rapping over smooth, soulful sampled rap beats, which I never really felt like I perfected… maybe until recently. The beats on this beat tape, Instrumental Inspiration Volume 1, are some of my earliest sampling experiments, from way back in 2012, so right at the start of my music career. I never rapped over these beats, and they’re much simpler in structure and sound than the chopped-up, multilayered sampled beats I’m creating nowadays on my MPC. These are usually just repeating a loop that I liked off a track, and adding some drums and other sounds on them.

I feel as if I finally might have what it takes to create some kinds of those beats for myself, those chill kinds of beats which I feel at home on. I’ll be releasing all my sampled beats under the Instrumental Inspiration series from now on, and the first few volumes will consist of my older beats, like these ones, and then I’ll be moving on to the newer ones. I still felt like these beats needed to be released. They’re chill, and also dope in their own simplistic kind of way. They’re also nostalgic to me of the time when I mainly made beats in FL Studio, nowadays I feel like I’m having much more fun on the MPC, and it’s a whole different feeling, creative-wise. Anyway, here’s the collection of my 11 earliest sampled beats. A lot them are remakes of some iconic rap beats, like Many Men, Dead Presidents, Juicy, etc.

Stream or download the full beat tape here:

https://rebeleyemusic.bandcamp.com/album/instrumental-inspiration-vol-1

LISTEN TO MY MUSIC:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/561X5APMrh7xWyWrLgKbhq

Hyperfollow: https://hyperfollow.com/RebelEyeMusic

Apple: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/rebel-eye/1620644399

Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/rebeleyemusic

Bandcamp: https://rebeleyemusic.bandcamp.com/

YouTube (Main): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKyA8zKq1i8_061HyejFFVw

YouTube (Mixtapes & Remixes): https://www.youtube.com/user/YoungRicoMusic

FOLLOW ME & CONTACT ME:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RebelEyeMusic/

IG: https://www.instagram.com/officialrebelrico/

Blog: https://www.ejsade.com

e-mail: officialrebelspirit@gmail.com

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We’re All Weird… and We’re Not

There’s an entire universe within us. We are connected to mysterious forces which we can’t perceive or understand, but which control the way we behave, the way we live our lives. Where do our thoughts come from? What is the origin of the ideas that catch our attention, sometimes even become obsessions? Where do our deepest dreams and desires arise from? So many questions to ask, so many mysteries to ponder. All we can do is live and learn. Life is weird, in every sense of the word. It’s so hard to make sense of, yet it feels like there’s some meaning behind it all, some reason to move forward despite, or even because of, all the suffering and pain. We all feel like the main character in a movie that is our life, and just like in the movies, we have to accept that life will have its conflicts. These are obstacles in the way of our dreams because life is a duality. These obstacles are ours to own, to face and to deal with, to overcome and to learn from. When we successfully rise above the challenges life throws at us is when we truly grow as human beings. So how can we properly face the challenges of everyday life? What if we fail to properly face these problems? We can’t face them if we don’t know who we are, if we are not at peace with ourselves, if we are trying to run from the truth. So the first step in our journey is to get to know ourselves, and to come to terms with whatever we find to be true about ourselves.

Just like life is weird, we are all weird. We are all different, special in our own unique ways, just like we all have different challenges to face. Often times we have exactly what we need within us to overcome the challenges life has placed in our way, yet we fail to realize this. We fail because we can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, we see only misery and injustice, we wonder why we struggle, why us, why not someone else. We wonder how we can move forward with our deepest dreams if we are stuck in these everyday struggles, if we seem to be paralyzed by the smallest of inconveniences. We wish we could be rid of all challenges, and then everything would be perfect, we would be free to make our vision a reality. We see all sorts of people living seemingly happy lives, and we wonder why that can’t be us. We fail to realize that our life is our own life, our struggles are our own, we have the solutions to our own problems within us, and we will find our own peace once we have done what we need to do, once we have understood the truth about why we are suffering, once we have accepted ourselves with all our flaws and imperfections, all the mistakes we’ve made in the past, and all that we wish we already were but still haven’t become. We still have time to grow, but only if we learn from our mistakes, if we accept and forgive all that we are and have been; only then can we truly move forward in peace, to find real growth at the other end.

If we don’t accept ourselves as we are, if we don’t fully forgive ourselves for our past mistakes, then we lose the power we would otherwise have over the challenges we face. We start trying to copy others, to look at what others are doing in order to try to find some relief, some sense of belonging, of understanding and satisfaction, of feeling like we’re part of a bigger whole. What we really need to be doing is owning our challenges and our struggles, and looking within, with the conviction that we are sure to find the tools we need in order to overcome the current challenge as well as any other that life may throw at us. We need to understand that we are enough, that the power of life is flowing in our veins, in our breath, all of this keeps that us alive; it is not our decision to be alive at this moment, it is a gift, and it isn’t forever, as we all know. So let’s fully own our lives and see what comes of it. Just like we love to celebrate when things go right, we need to learn how to learn from our mistakes, how to learn from the pain and sorrow that may come from those mistakes, and how to learn from life even when our pain isn’t justified. We need to learn how to not grow bitter and cold when life doesn’t go our way. Life can be crazy and cruel, I know, and for a long time I was complaining about life’s injustices all the time, about the system, to everyone around me, until I realized that it does nothing more than create more negative energy. Negative energy messes with the complainer as well as with all those around them, not to mention how everything is energy, even the words we speak never die, whether positive or negative. We are what we focus on.

So focus on you. Focus on truly being yourself, to the best of your ability, on being all you can be, on shining a light of positivity however small you may feel it is. Embrace your weirdness, if you wanna call it that, and shine your light in whatever way you can. At the end of the day, we’re all weird, and at the same time we’re not. See, being weird would imply different from the rest, different than normal. What really is normal though? We’re all weird to someone (and they’re probably weird to us), to whole groups of people even, so in truth we’re all weird. Although, if we’re all weird then it isn’t so weird to be weird after all, I guess.

Reviving My Blog!

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WOW!!! I can’t believe it’s been almost 3 years since I last posted something on here. And to think I had set the goal of writing a thousand words a day! Hah! Well, I can’t be so tough on myself, I made it up to at least like 80 consecutive days at one point. What can I say? Life happens. Although there is some truth to that, the real truth is that I let my laziness and procrastination, my indecision, get the best of me, and for that reason I’ve let this blog, and my artistic pursuits in general, fall behind. I apologize to everyone who’s followed me on here up to this point, but I want you all to know I’m going to revive this page and make it better than ever! A lot of things have happened since I last wrote on here, and I’ve realized that I absolutely need to write, to create, to try to inspire through some sort of creative output, it’s a necessity in my life. I’ve gotten back into making music, back into the feeling of it, the feeling I thought I’d lost for a good while.

Not everything can always be perfect. Lately anxiety seems to be higher than ever, lots of things happening in life, lots of thoughts that can’t be simply blazed away running through my mind. Obstacles are opportunities though, at the end of the day, and every lesson is a blessing. Anyway, I’ve been contacting some of the producers who made the lots of the beats I used back in my old tapes, all the way from back in 2011, trying to get their permission to upload those tracks on Spotify/streaming platforms, etc. One of those tracks, “Puttin’ In Work” is me rapping over an instrumental by producer Rotes, who uses heavy samples in his beats, true to the old school gritty yet jazzy sound of old school rap that I love so much. This track is from my R.A.P. mixtape from November 2011. Another is “Trip to the Back of My Mind”, this one rapped over a smoother, happier and overall livelier beat produced by David Bocuse, reminiscing about family and friends, and great times from back in the day. This track is from my 2017 mixtape “Musical Alchemy.” It feels good to finally have some music up on streaming platforms, and I’m starting to organize all of my pages online because so far it’s all a mess, from years of creating a bunch of e-mails and pages, it’s time to finally get myself organized and take myself seriously! it’s time to stop playing games is what I’m trying to say.

I’m now releasing music under the name Rebel Eye, in case anyone reading my blog is interested in checking out my music on Spotify, and from now on I’ll try to keep the blog tied to my music, but also keep it personal and continue writing about interesting topics that are on my mind, about spirituality, philosophy and everything else that interests and inspires me. Yes, I’m a rapper and mainly a rap producer, but I also love working on chill instrumental music, even techno/trance beats, trip-hop, etc., and I’ve decided I won’t go through the trouble of dealing with multiple social media accounts for multiple artist monikers, so for that reason everything will be released under Rebel Eye. I hope that having more genres will help me gain a wider audience, we’ll see.

I’m excited to write again, both music and on this blog. At the end of the day, writing is a really interesting thing, just randomly writing. We are always thinking, and when we write we decide to let some of our thoughts escape our minds, to live outside of our mental prison, our tangled-up web of images and thoughts, ideas, fears and dreams. Writing is a really powerful creative output, a way to let some of the stress of life out, to free it and let it be, to free yourself of it almost. Life is deep, and when you can’t make sense of it what else is there to do but to document it? There’s a life out there to document, and a whole world within to write about as well. Maybe what we think, what we share, might inspire others, I know I’ve been inspired by so many of my favorite books. It feels as if these authors from millennia ago were speaking to me, as if they shared some of my thoughts, it feels almost strange to see what someone wrote so long ago, and see how it is so similar to an idea that you’ve always had, a truth you’ve always perceived, for example, that nobody else around you wants to see, yet here is some proof that this idea has been alive for a while, that some of the greatest minds in history have considered it and contemplated it. We can’t live only off of that inspiration alone, of course, we need to verify and find the truth for ourselves, but often times we refuse to embark on the great quest for truth if we are not provoked to reflect upon it by external forces or influences.

I’ll try to keep writing on here as much as I can, and below you can find links to the singles of mine I mentioned above. Much love Fam!

Young Rico - R.A.P. - Rhythm And Poetry [2011] [OFFICIAL ALBUM COVER] “PUTTIN’ IN WORK” from my 2011 mixtape “R.A.P.”

Album: R.A.P. (Rhythm And Poetry)

Original Release Date: November 20, 2011

I went by Young Rico when I recorded this tape, it was so early I hadn’t even added to Rebel in yet!

REBEL EYE - TRIP TO THE BACK OF MY MIND (SINGLE 2022)“TRIP TO THE BACK OF MY MIND” from my 2017 mixtape “MUSICAL ALCHEMY”

Album: Musical Alchemy

Original Release Date: December 30, 2017

From my 2017 Musical Amchemy mixtape, I went by Rebel Spirit at that point.

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1,000 WORDS (2nd attempt): DAY 81: Listening to Musicians’ Full Discographies.

I have a few different methods for listening to music which I use at different times in order to have different experiences. I really do love to listen to all kinds of music, or at least most, so what I do is try to listen the the greatest artists from each genre, in order to save everything into one library which I usually play on shuffle. The result is that it delivers a diversity of unique sounds of all kinds, always switching and bringing me something unpredictable. I usually blaze a nice joint which is sure to last for a while when I let my library go on shuffle. This way, I get to randomly listen through some of my favorite songs, as well as listen to songs which I might have only heard once and liked and saved onto my library, which helps to become more familiar with these songs, to turn them into new favorite songs as time passes. I used to just listen to the classic albums of each genre, but having already finished listening to pretty much all of them quite a while back, I decided to listen to some of my favorite artists’ full discographies. One of the first hip-hop discographies I listened through fully was none other than Nasty Nas’. He’s always been one of my top three favorite rappers, without a doubt, all the way from his debut classic ‘Illmatic’ all the way to the recent ‘Life Is Good’ or ‘Nasir.’ What I like most about Nas’ music is that he never fails to drop some knowledge or even wisdom in his lyrics, and always mentions certain experiences or ideas in a truthful light, without looking to glamorize a certain lifestyle. I have a one-eyed pyramid tattoo on my left arm with a Nas quote under it: “In the land of the blind the man with one eye is king.” I think that in a sad way it accurately describes society. Moving on to a different genre, one of the longest discographies I’ve completed to date has been that of Van the Man, or Van Morrison. I listened to something like forty studio albums during the course of a few months, finishing yesterday with ‘You’re Driving Me Crazy’ and ‘The Prophet Speaks.’ The jazzy saxophone vibes and smooth vocals, especially on the latter, really went great with the good kush I was blazing with my buddy Danny. Van always delivered something new with each album, a new style and sound, but always fresh. What I do is that, I have maybe about four or five artists whose discography I’m listening to at any given time, and whenever one is completed its spot is replaced with a band that has a somewhat similar style or sound, and which I’ve probably been wanting to check out for quite a while. Since I heard the last two Morrison albums yesterday, I started with Bob Dylan’s first two today, along with the Stones’ ’12 x 5.’ I just started listening to the Rolling Stones’ discography about a week ago, after a long Grateful Dead binge that lasted a long time, maybe as long or even longer than Van Morrison did. On the newer side of rap I’ve heard Drake’s full discography, seeing as he’s so popular he’s gotta be doing something right. He’s definitely got an original sound, and although it’s not my main style of rap I can’t say I didn’t enjoy most of his albums. I’ve also heard Eminem completely. He’s always been one of my top three rappers along with Nas and Pac, but his last few albums don’t even come close to his old albums in any way. I can’t blame him, knowing how complicated his life has been, but we can’t deny the facts, it’s just not the same intensity or genius at all. I had already listened to all of Slim’s discography, of course, but I re-listened to every album again, and extremely enjoyed the old classics as always. When it came time to finally hear his new latest albums, which were the only ones I hadn’t heard yet, I was a bit disappointed, although there were some great songs still. If I remember correctly, the first ones I started with were Nas and Eminem, as well as Pink Floyd and The Beatles, my two favorite bands. Just like with Eminem’ music, I had pretty much listened to both of these amazing bands’ music, but I went through the discographies in chronological order once again, enjoying every second for sure. From Floyd and The Beatles I moved on to Led Zeppelin and was blown away. I was familiar with about two or three of their albums, but i discovered that I had been sleeping on some other amazing records for so long. I loved all of their albums if I’m not mistaken. Led Zeppelin IV has always been one of my favorite albums, both ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and ‘Going to California’ being two of my favorite songs. Led Zeppelin led to The Grateful Dead, as I mentioned. I can’t believe I hadn’t listened through their albums before, especially being so into psychedelics and the whole culture surrounding them. I have no clue why I hadn’t checked out the Dead before, but now a song by them is sure to come on whenever I shuffle my library, even though the list is a few thousand songs long. I enjoyed all of their albums, and listened to the main live ones along with the studio ones. My favorite of all was probably Skull and Roses, and I love its skeleton cover art. I know I haven’t mentioned many, or any, women up to this point, but I do love some food female singing for sure. My favorites are Sade, Norah Jones and Lana Del Rey, and I’ve heard all their albums so far. I’m hooked on the chill sound that they all incorporate into their music, but I have to find a new female musician’s albums to listen to now, I’m just not sure who it could be.

To be continued tomorrow, on Day 81.

~ Rebel Spirit

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1,000 WORDS (2nd attempt): DAY 80: Do We Really Believe in Equality?

Do we sincerely and honestly believe in equality, as more than a fantasy, as something that could one day actually be? Excuse me for asking, it’s just not easy to see. So many people have oppressed the rest throughout history, so they can feel above the rest, exterminate those who they didn’t regard equally, as the rest, as those considered to be pure, to be the best race, sex or nation, could be any kind of corrupt motivation. They say the apple don’t fall too far from the tree. So are we doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past generations, who condoned hatred to the point of total separation? Or can we learn from our mistakes and do better at last? Is it a real possibility to let the pain pass? Can we now keep calm and be patient for a better day, to resolve these tensions in a better way? Truthfully, as we teach the seeds so shall they grow to be, and by setting a good example then they’re sure to follow willingly, instead of wishing they would memorize and live by every word we say. For every decision made in life and every action taken there’s a price to pay. But each person must decide, to live life on either side, of the fence, only you can truly know what your life represents. Do we believe in every single person’s chance to be free? Or am I programmed to be controlled, electronically? Am I determined to make everybody like me? So that they can copy me and try to be like me? Is life some kind of popularity contest? Or a constant battle between nations, endless wars and conquest? Conflict, we can’t arrive at peace so we bomb shit. Then teach the children that killing is some wrong shit, and that violence ain’t the answer. The state of the system we live in has me feeling sick as cancer. It’s too bad that a lot of times this sick feeling just isn’t too strong, at least not strong enough to make us change when we’re in the wrong. We’ve become accustomed to the way things are, and we wish they would stay the same forever, but the fact is that the times change faster than the weather, and tomorrow we could be a much different person than we currently are. We all try to see things as we’d like them to be, but we can’t ’cause we all sing along to a different song, a different beat. We all have our own struggles, all have to stay strong, but in different ways, periods of pain can last long, when we feel the heat, can’t stand up from the hot seat. We can grow desperate and tired, we might try to manipulate others to fulfill our selfish desires. But why should they follow my rules? Why should we live by their laws? Who gets a say about what our kids learn in the schools? Who is eager to answer when death calls? Yet we all must die, we must die as others have passed. Are we just trying to stay alive? What’s the point of doing only that? Are we building a society that’s truly built to last? Or one which will crumble to ashes in a great rumble, or a World War. Are we raising kids who are way too interested in being stars? Do you know if you’re ready to ruin your life for fame? Is it a noble aim which will fulfill your soul when it’s finally attained? Will it take away the pain and the guilt and shame? Or would it be a way to feed your ego, to feel better about yourself, a way to finally put those insecurities up on the shelf? Will it ruin your family, will you still be able to discern your real from fake friends? Will it throw you in the pit of loneliness and cause you agony? You never know, but for the recognition you’re ready to blow. You’re ready to let your old life go, to be better than the rest, to be know as a celebrity, something to be celebrated, adored and elevated. If we are all equal then why are such people venerated? Why do we praise money and status and nice attire? When within ourselves we have all of the value we require? Our body and mind may grow old but our Spirit will never retire. That Spirit which is equal within us all, that living eternal fire, that conscience that strikes the liar, and the thief, the same that they ignore, which is the cause of their future grief. Ignorance, the cause of suffering. Aversion and attachment. Attachment to an image of our fragile body, which causes us to act in such ways that we feel will take us higher than we are, will elevate us to a new plateau. We wish to go beyond ourselves, beyond this worthless creature we seem to loathe, but which we still take care of, day by day, as if life was nothing more than a worthless and repetitive game we play. We don’t like equality as much as we claim. We want to be exalted beyond our petty personal name. We want to be the richest, the smartest or the wisest. In that desire to be what we’re not, that’s exactly where our demise is. Each of us is what he or she needs to be. All of us are where we are supposed to be as well. The thoughts we choose to cultivate can make this life a heaven or a hell. So see the world as your brothers and sisters, not as others, but as extensions of your own soul, there will be sacrifices you will have to make if true equality and selflessness unfold, within your heart and soul, and as they begin to branch out everyone will know that you are beginning to shine, like the most precious gold that could ever be found, a beautiful sight to behold.

To be continued tomorrow, on Day 81.

~ Rebel Spirit

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1,000 WORDS (2nd attempt): DAY 79: Placing Motivation in the Right Direction.

Motivation is essential if we wish to succeed at any task, without a doubt. However, if our motivation is applied towards the wrong things then we are doing nothing but wasting time of our precious lives, and exerting energy which we should be using for other more important things. Sometimes we wish to do something so badly that we fail to take the time we actually need in order to actually do it properly, or we fail to realize that we have no business doing it at all, which can end up much, much worse. We often get excited and we act on impulse because we have no self-control. We want things to work out now, without putting in the necessary work! We don’t want to even think about all that hard work, all the dedication and perseverance we’ll have to put in over a long period of time if we’re really serious about whatever our goal is. Sometimes when we’re in a desperate situation, we might have an idea which seems to shine so bright in our mind, which seems to be the answer to all our problems. It can be tempting to get started right away in order to escape as soon as possible from our current situation, but often in our excitement we overlook a lot of important details. Whether it’s a brilliant idea that just pops into your mind out of the blue, or a concept you’ve been wanting to explore for quite a while, self-control is absolutely necessary at all times, along with discernment. The mindset that we begin to cultivate when we constantly practice these two qualities, self-control and discernment, prevents us from taking action without thinking things through, before we’re fully ready to start the journey we plan to eventually embark on. Even if you have done everything correctly and at its proper time up to this point though, you can still fail if you are not careful to remain alert. Some things seem so tempting that we can forget about self-control in a second, even after working on strengthening it for a long period of time. Desire can blind a person in the blink of an eye. Don’t become overconfident in your ability to wait patiently. If we don’t remain aware at all times of why we do what we do when we do it, then we are bound to make countless mistakes until we finally learn, if we ever do. We will do things at the wrong time, or we will partner up with the wrong people or promote ourselves at the wrong places. We need to know what our motives are for why we do what we do, and then we have to reflect on the different possibilities which are available to us which can help us to achieve these motives. This is how motivation is applied in the right direction, each move carefully calculated. The word motive is the root of the word motivation. Sometimes we think we know what our motives are for everything we do, that we know what truly motivates us, when in reality we couldn’t be more mistaken. Asking ourselves what our motives are, and answering sincerely without holding back from ourselves, is the key to understanding how we can use our motivation effectively by placing it in the right direction. It can be devastating to find out that, after years of promoting a belief or an idea, or a product or brand, it was not really worth spending so much time and energy on after all. This can be avoided if we take the time to know ourselves and our true motives before we start planning any new project. Many people have various paths they could pursue in life, yet they can’t find the time to do all these things at once plus go to work on top of that. Desperation can arise in such cases if the we can’t find a way to connect our different motives, to synchronize them in order to create a lifestyle which includes them all, and which aims at fulfilling all our short-term and long-term goals. We need to examine our motives and the things we believe we want to achieve in life. Sometimes we might feel really motivated to become rich, or to become extremely popular. Such a person might think that they are interested in fashion or expensive jewelry because they simply like it, and they might make it their life mission to work with these things. Upon further examination of this motivation however, this person might find that their initial desire to be cooler, richer, more popular or more attractive, arose from their insecurity, from their need to feel better about themselves, to stop feeling inferior or uncool. If this person could let go of these emotions of inferiority, they might not even be interested in fancy designer clothes or jewelry anymore, since they will probably no longer feel the need to impress people everywhere they go. Obviously, I am not saying that everyone who is into fashion or bling is like this person, it is only an example is true of some people in real life. We have to examine our motives, our ambitions, our aspirations. We have to ask ourselves why we wish to accomplish such things. Is it so we can feel better about ourselves? If it is, then we know for sure that there is no need to feel motivated to do such a thing any longer. We don’t need to do anything in order to feel better about ourselves. We can only feel as good as we are. If we want to feel better about life then we just have to live life better. It’s as simple as that. There is nothing wrong with setting goals for ourselves, and celebrating when we achieve these goals. There is nothing wrong with being happy with the progress we’ve made at any specific goal, but we should only dedicate significant time and energy to the things which truly matter the most of us in life, not to things which we are only doing to impress others, or even to impress ourselves. In conclusion, motivation can be a great ally on our path to success, but only if it’s carefully handled and properly directed, and this can only be achieved if we work on getting to know ourselves and our true motives for living the way we wish to.

To be continued tomorrow, on Day 80.

~ Rebel Spirit

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1,000 WORDS (2nd attempt): DAY 78: Getting Checked.

Yesterday I posted about the random chest pain I started having last night, and also about the mental struggle that followed: In the face of pain and uncertainty, of fear of the unknown, I was hit by a severe lack of motivation to complete my daily goals. I also wrote about how I eventually found the motivation to persevere, and to finally succeed at completing my goals even though I was feeling terrible, and was extremely anxious about the possible cause of the pain. Once I regained my motivation by remembering that we must remain grounded in God in all situations, both good or bad, that everything is part of life and is meant to be, I did my goals and then started researching as much as I could about my symptoms. After researching a bit, I felt like I was able to rule out heart issues or some kind of cancer, since I’d probably have other more debilitating symptoms if either of these were the case. Most of my anxiety came from these terrifying possibilities, but from all the websites I read yesterday and today about my symptoms it seems like the issue might just be a torn muscle near the chest area, which is not too serious. This calmed me down quite a bit. Maria and I prayed together last night, and I also called my mom on Whatsapp video chat, since she studied medicine. We ended up speaking for hours, and she further confirmed that I probably don’t have a heart issue. My mom is back in Canada, so it’s been a while since we talked like that. It was nice. Even though I gained some understanding of my symptoms and was beginning to feel less anxious about the cause, I still couldn’t be too sure. Both my wife and I couldn’t stand the uncertainty any longer, so we decided to come to the clinic to do some check-ups. I’m currently sitting in the waiting room, waiting to hear my name get called out. I hate getting medical tests done, getting blood drawn and all of that, but it’s definitely necessary. I really can’t wait for the moment when they confirm the good news, that I just have a torn muscle and that it should fully heal in a few days or weeks. Anything will be alright just as long as it’s not a serious condition. I’m really praying to get some good news, and I feel really nervous about the outcome. At least they have free wi-fi here to keep me busy. Even though I’m writing about this exact issue, the act of writing in itself is an effective distraction from my nervousness. I just want to kill as much time as possible so that it won’t feel like I’m waiting for an eternity. It’s also great to have Maria by my side, always supporting me and simply being there for me. She is watching One Piece on her brother’s phone while I do my writing. Every few minutes she turns to me and gives me a kiss, telling me not to worry. I don’t know what I would do without her.

Second half of today’s post. In the end, I didn’t even need to take any tests. The doctor just checked on my breathing and chest and concluded that it’s not related to any heart or lung issue. What a relief that was. He said it’s most likely a muscle problem, as I suspected, and they gave me a muscle relaxant shot and some pain pills to take for the next few days. I also don’t have to go to work tomorrow, so I can get some extra rest in order to heal quicker. Everything turned out great and I feel as if a big weight has been lifted off my shoulders. After such great news I unfortunately have some bad ones. As I was working on today’s post on my phone while at the clinic, I noticed that somehow, my post for Day 77, which was yesterday, reverted back to an old draft version I had saved on my phone. I have no idea how this happened, and now I don’t see the post in my list of posts. It really sucks since I felt that it was a very well-written one, not to mention one of the most liked ones. However, everything happens for a reason. I don’t know what the reason is but, although I lost some of my words which I worked so hard to put together while suffering from anxiety and fear, I can’t do anything about it other than move forward and keep on writing even better words, better posts. I can’t possibly be in a bad mood about this now that I know I don’t have some horrible, serious disease. I thank God for today;s outcome, and for everyone who helped me out at the clinic. It was a really easy process and everyone was really friendly. On our way back home we stopped to eat some baleadas and we all had a good time, a little celebration in a way. 

Everything worked out great, and I now see that I shouldn’t have worried so much. We always worry too much about all the bad things that can happen, and in reality it doesn’t help. Instead it makes matters worse, as anxiety and fear cloud our judgment and prevent us from being free to make good decisions. I will be taking better care of my health from now on, after yesterday’s scare, and I hope I can keep my commitment to the various lifestyle changes I’m looking to make. I feel like what happened last night was meant to scare me into making some changes I’ve been wanting to make for a long time now. Maybe that was the only way for me to feel really motivated to do what I have to do. God bless you all and may you live happy and healthy lives, free from worry and anxiety.

To be continued tomorrow, on Day 79.

~ Rebel Spirit

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1,000 WORDS (2nd attempt): DAY 76: Mistakes Are For Us to Learn From.

Life is the opposite of death, yet it includes it. The nighttime forms part of the day’s 24 hours, yet is the opposite of daytime. The best feeling of satisfaction contains the experience of all the suffering which preceded it, of all the past longing for it, without which it wouldn’t be half as profound or fulfilling. Every wonderful transformation would be impossible if the person who decided to change had never realized they had to, if they had never hit rock bottom before. Perhaps they finally arrived at that realization after enduring much trouble, after walking a very problematic road for a very long time. Every lesson ever learned was learned from a mistake, whether our own or another’s. We must look at our mistakes and understand their seriousness, yet we must not become disheartened, and discouraged from moving on. We must never beat ourselves up or become desperate for change. Complete change cannot happen just now, but it will surely happen at the right time, if we start to live differently now. If we are desperate, if we are feeling down about ourselves because we haven’t been able to change, then it will be more likely that we will slip into old patterns of behavior, into vices and addictions, or that we will search for constant distractions from our lack of self-esteem, from our regret for what we’ve done. There is no need for desperation for someone who understands that there is a reason for everything, and that everything passes, that everything can change for the better or for the worse, depending on how we live. We must keep calm, even when the times are tough, especially when times are tough, and we must understand, without a doubt, that the hardships of life are necessary so that we may change. We all make mistakes, not excluding a single person, and the mistakes we make affect not only us, but others as well. We think this is unfair, since the only way it would be fair is if we were all one person, paying for our own mistakes. What we don’t realize is that this is actually the case, that we are all one being, in essence. We should never feel like we are paying for other’s mistakes, or that life is ultimately unfair just because the evil actions of others have caused us harm. What is the use of spirituality, of a belief in a spiritual reality that transcends this physical one, of God within, if we become desperately preoccupied and anxious when things don’t go as we planned them, or if we are willing to hurt others in order to preserve our own well-being during desperate times of chaos? Don’t stress or worry, because everything comes at its time, to help us learn what we need to learn in this exact moment, and so the truth is that nothing can really harm us in the grand scheme of things. If we are suffering now then it is because we must suffer at this time. Is this unfair? Doesn’t everyone suffer or experience loss at some point during their lifetime? Don’t be angry at the transgressor, at the one who has wronged you, since he is God’s messenger to you. Thank him, be thankful for your problems, forgive him. Look within yourself, and ask yourself what you can learn from this new situation you find yourself in now. We may not like the learning process, but it is indeed necessary. Some would say that this philosophy is evil, that it places the blame on people who are born poor or disadvantaged, or sick, but is it better to assume that they were born into such a life simply for no reason at all, just because life is indifferent to them, or because some evil creator decided they should be born into pain? This is hardly a better view of life. None of us know why life exists, and we don’t know why we have free will, but the best attitude we can have is one of humility, one of being students, constantly learning from life, observing and seeking to understand without judgment, without thinking that life in itself is wrong. Is it likely that life was created by a sadistic spirit for the sole purpose of watching us suffer and kill each other just for fun? If our lives are nothing more than a cruel joke, entertainment for some cosmic terrorist somewhere out there, then what would be the point of even going on living? If life was completely random and evil, then how can there be such things as true, unconditional love? How can there be the love of a mother for her child, the willingness to sacrifice oneself for another? How can there be so much laughter and pleasure in this world if it is all evil? It cannot be evil, it simply cannot be all for nothing. Life is a constant war between good and evil, the world itself is flawed, but for some reason fate has dictated that we must live in this planet, at this time during which we are alive. Fate? Didn’t I say we have free will? Our free will is God’s command, it is intertwined with destiny and fate. This is why it is so important that we live righteous lives, because we will all suffer from our ignorant and evil actions. We cannot judge something we cannot understand, such as the universe, or God. I heard a Nina Simone song today, it came on while I listened to my Spotify library on shuffle, and it reminded me that there’s a time for everything under the sun. There’s a time to laugh and a time to mourn. Just because we don’t understand, because we don’t see the purpose in something, maybe in something like suffering, doesn’t mean there is none. Such a thing as a meaningless moment or an insignificant second is impossible. Everything is meant to be, there’s nothing that comes about as a mistake. We wish things were not as they are, we hope and we pray, but things are as they are. It is in the nature of everything to be as it is, and the more we wish things weren’t what they are, the more separated we become from them. If instead we practice gratitude, if we can remain calm in the face of adversity, this is a sign of true faith, this is sure to set us free from bondage, by showing us the true union which connects us to all that exists. What is there to fear if we see everything as part of God’s plan? Nowadays this is not a popular idea. How can evil be God’s plan? We all have free will, so let’s stop blaming God. Let’s assume responsibility for the life we have been given, and positive change is sure to come, both in our individual lives and in the world as a whole. 

To be continued tomorrow, on Day 77.

~ Rebel Spirit

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1,000 WORDS (2nd attempt): DAY 75: Energy, Instinct and Intuition.

The whole of life is evidently all energy; hence we are all emanations of this energy. We have fair basis to believe that we are not separate from anything, as the whole of matter is energy as well. Energy is effort, a never-ending effort to elevate, the driver of all evolution. Energy is the source of time and space in this reality, but sadly time is often misused due to it being disregarded as if it’s no big deal. We love to say that time is an illusion and it’s all in the mind, that the clocks were all created by men, and that we live life on our own schedule. Although I agree wholeheartedly, and I acknowledge our innate desire and need to be free and to never feel bound by time, what good does it really do me to realize this if it still won’t set me free from my chains? What good comes from being aware of being a slave if I am, in the end, still a slave to schedules, to the chains of captivity, if I can’t escape my worst afflictions no matter what? Isn’t the person who realizes the problem, yet does nothing to stop it, ultimately in a worse position than the one who was never aware of the problem in the first place? Merely realizing that time is an illusion doesn’t free us from it if we can’t apply what we’ve learned to our real lives. As we go on living, we are all blessed with an endless amount of energy which we can use as we please. Everything we think and do becomes the cause to an effect, and it itself was an effect of a previous cause. This energy has existed for eternity and shall keep on existing, yet it manifests itself in this moment in time and space in your birth or mine, our lives themselves probably being effects of previous causes unknown to us. We must take a moment to see that for as long as we live in this physical world we will be bound by time and space, experiencing life in a seemingly linear fashion, and whether or not it is an illusion in the grand scheme of things matters little to the clock and to our day to day responsibilities, all of which revolve around seconds, minutes, and hours. So, what can we do to be truly free? It is not an option for us to bury our heads in the sand, and we cannot lie in bed all day enjoying the soft touch of blissful ignorance either. We need to use our time wisely, by reflecting on the seemingly random events which are taking place in our lives and in the world as a whole. Everything is simply saturated with meaning, but the question now is how to perceive it. We can begin to perceive all the significance in our lives by training our mind so that we can have it only focus on what matters. A distracted mind is easily led astray from its real goal by forces that wish to prevent it from reaching it. When we learn to pay attention to the things that really matter to us is when we start to free ourselves. We can now use our time wisely in order to progress in our goals instead of wasting it on meaningless fun. Not that there’s anything wrong with fun. The key word in the previous sentence is ‘meaningless’. We can all have fun with meaning, we can all enjoy life. After all we are all powered, so to speak, from the same source, the same source of all that has meaning. The energy which maintains our bodies, our minds, is the same energy that gives life to the plants and to the animals. Energy is transmitted back and forth by all living beings through action, through thought, through speech, through feeling. We forget that things do not have to be visible in order to be real. We forget that we can smell and that we can hear, yet that neither the odors we smell or the sounds we hear are visible to us. We forget that we can feel the air, and in fact rely on it, yet we can’t see it. We forget that, although we feel the light hitting our skin on a bright sunny day at the beach, we can’t see the rays extending down from the sun and hitting us. In much the same way, we emit subtle vibrations everywhere we go, and even when we don’t go anywhere. Every thought is a thing, and every feeling is a thing too, but the problem is that too often our thoughts and feelings seem to manifest on their own, without being called upon by us. That’s because, in fact, they weren’t called upon by us, but by the learned habits and preconceptions of the mind. Evil thoughts arise in a person’s mind, apparently out of the blue, because he or she has allowed it to consume too much garbage, too much negativity, and now it is seeing the world based on rotten thoughts, it is creating its own thoughts based on what it misinterprets. Sadly, thoughts which are completely perverse are sometimes seen as flashes of intuition, just as sometimes someone might attack or kill someone else and later claim that God told them to do so. People who experience such strong feelings often believe they are being called upon by their intuition, but they don’t realize what it really going on. Instinct is something different from intuition. Intuition arises from the divine wisdom which we know to be correct even beyond our desires and ambitions. Instinct arises from something we have consciously or subconsciously learned over time which has become deeply embedded in our mind. Something happens which reminds us of an old incident and we react in the same automatic way. This is a learned reaction, a habit. This is instinct, repetition, mindless action. Mindless action is also energy, but it is energy which has no purpose, no value. In order for this energy to become valuable to its beholder, he or she must learn how to control this energy. This person must learn to control what they pay attention to consciously as well as subconsciously or unconsciously in dreams. This person must learn not to fall prey to selfish desires or passions, they should not do anything which will harm others in any way, they must live with integrity. This will strengthen character, and it is a daily practice of divine intuition, the spark of God that dwells within us all. This is the conscious part of who we are, and the more we practice connecting with it, the more conscious we will be at all times. We will become aware of our passing thoughts, of our moods, of our reactions to petty situations as well as disasters. This sort of introspection will allow us to modify our reactions, to create new habits and to drop old ones, to spend time more wisely. In other words, connecting with this higher state within ourselves, the state of our true being and consciousness, allows us to control where our attention goes. Just as in meditation, focus is placed on the lack of sensory input and thought, but most importantly on consciousness, on awareness., on the energy of being simply being alive. The most important point to remember is that awareness of sensory input is not sensory input, and being conscious of thought doesn’t mean that one is thinking. Whether one is being conscious of breath or of thought or of sensory input, none of them require any action on our part. Breathing and thinking are automatic processes, and sensory input is external, coming from outside ourselves. So, as we relinquish control and we stop trying to think or to feel or to do anything, we come to a state of simply being, the state which is truly us, and which is constantly aware that we are thinking, feeling, doing what’s right, doing what’s wrong. It is often ignored, and when we ignore this consciousness within ourselves, we become unconscious to everything, and we engage in simple mindless action, purposeless action. This leads to people being unable to get along with each other because there is no value of energy, energy is wasted, as if we were to live forever on this physical plane. The obvious result of this waste is that, as we all remain unconscious of our waste of energy and time, and of our feelings and emotions and how they affect us collectively as a species and as a planet, the world gradually sinks into separation, into division, and therefore into further and further devastation and destruction, the product of all the evil energy circulating in our atmosphere.

To be continued tomorrow, on Day 75. 

~ Rebel Spirit

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1,000 WORDS (2nd attempt): DAY 74: “The Trouble Is You Think You Have Time.”

Jack Kornfield said that “the trouble is you think you have time.” We all think we have enough time. We know that there are important things which have never been said up to this point, things which probably should have been done a long time ago. We know that we have to set things straight when it comes to a certain person or situation, that we have to confess the truth to them, but we are sure that doing so will result in a loss of pleasure to us, so we choose to hold on to a comfortable lie instead. Often times when we hurt others, we immediately realize, we come to know that we are in the wrong, yet we create the dumbest excuse to go on feeling offended and entitled, instead of owning up to our mistakes and apologizing. We are too scared to be vulnerable, too afraid of our own feelings to ever be able to analyze them properly, let alone those of others. We cannot apologize sincerely since we see it as a sign of weakness, of admitting that we are wrong, and therefore inferior somehow to the other person. Too many of us have killed our own inner child. We are afraid to live because we are scared to death of being less, being seen as less, of being seen as weak in this hostile world, of opening up to others and forming true connections. We have become so immersed in one thing or one kind of lifestyle, on our numerous distractions from our problems, that we fail to see the blessings all around us, and we fail to take action when it comes to things we know we should do or not do, things which we ignore for a while hoping they will go away. Soon enough we realize this approach just doesn’t work. Nothing ever goes away, we simply cannot run from ourselves, from the things that still haunt us, from the inner issues we need to resolve, as well as all the external ones. Owning up to his or her own mistakes is really a nightmare to someone who has adopted a victim mentality towards life and who has created the habit of complaining about the smallest misfortune, but to one who is connected to the deeper truths of life and what it means to be alive, this shouldn’t be a problem. When we are honest with ourselves and others, but especially with ourselves, about where we are going wrong, where we are doing the right thing and where we’re not, then we are truly starting our journey into self-developing. Nevertheless, it is only the start. Sometimes we can be brutally honest with ourselves about our shortcomings and errors, but due to our negative perspective which is so attached to physical reality we cannot make the necessary changes in order to truly resolve these issues. We let them linger on in our lives, affecting every new relationship or project, affecting all the thoughts that run through our minds every single day. We do not know how to tackle them, but since we think we have time, we do not even try, we just look the other way, we look for all kinds of distractions, hoping that we will eventually forget about the deepest truths of our lives. We cannot live in this way, fueled by ignorance and fear. We must understand and live by the fact that everything is cyclical and recurring, that there are patterns woven throughout the webs of history which connect the dots of human interaction in the most magical ways, completely unknown to our limited perceptions, and that the time to act is now, that we were born where and when we born to do things, to make our lives worth living and to fill them with meaning. We understand that all pain and pleasure will pass, and this is a constant reminder to us not to fall into desperation. Better days are ahead, but for now, there is simply no time to waste when it comes to the truly important things. Tell your mom and dad you love them today, make plans to spend more time with your siblings or with your friends you haven’t seen in a while. Get outside and meet new people, experience new cultures, don’t just spend the day looking at the same old screen inside the same stuffy room. Live! Get up and live! Lively yourself up, or “lively up yourself!” As the man Bob Marley would say. The world is devoid of honesty nowadays. We have all become addicted to our way of living and are afraid to give it up. We have adopted mainstream society’s shallow values, and if we haven’t, then at least we have learned how to pretend that we have. We have hardened our hearts and become cold to the love which is present within us all and which connects us on a spiritual level, on the deepest level of connection, if we would only choose to stop for a moment and pay attention to the now. Stop seeing others as separate from yourself and simply say what needs to be said. Stop seeing the future as a separate reality in which you will play a part. Your life could end at any second. Understand that the time to do what must be done is now. Do what you must do, and you will feel much better after! You will feel more confident for having spoken your mind, you will feel like a more open person, you will receive more respect and will be able to communicate clearly with the world. You will feel accomplished, and will be ready to take on an even more challenging task. You will be building your stamina and strength, your self-control and willpower. Don’t waste time. Don’t think that you will be able to do something only after you have done something else or become someone better. The time to take action is now. There will never be another time, since every moment is really Now. Tomorrow might never come and we might not wake from our dreams tonight. Life is uncertain, and things seem to happen randomly, but everything has deep significance. Have you thought about where you stand in this wonderful world, in the grand scheme of things, about who you are in this life? If not, then the time to start pondering these questions is now!

To be continued tomorrow, on Day 75.

~ Rebel Spirit

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1,000 WORDS (2nd attempt): DAY 73: Use Your Talents to Shine A Light.

Life’s about sacrifice, you gotta put in work because people’s hearts have grown cold as ice. No one is obligated to lend a helping hand, so don’t expect anyone to understand. But the trick is to not grow bitter and cold, even as we constantly witness the wicked ways in which life in this world unfolds. The point is to take a true hold of your own soul, to put the mind under the Spirit’s authority. We have all been blessed with skills and talents, with intelligence and wisdom, which we can use to bless, others as well as ourselves, to exert the will to progress, but too many of us have our gifts sitting on the shelves. We all have the ability to think and then to express, creatively, whether in poetry, lyrics, music, art, spoken word, to be true to who we were meant to be, and nothing less. Speak your mind and stand for what’s right, though it might shake up your whole world, possibly overnight. Stand by your word. Be who and what you claim to be, always take the high road, up high as a kite, fly forever free. Have the courage to follow the highest vision you see, to create what you conceive. Be a beautiful light, shining bright for what you believe, the brightest star shining on this blessed summer night. It is said that those who wish to give light must first burn. Take up your cross and sacrifice your physical self on it. Kill your attachments to earthly pleasures, especially those which harm others and cause suffering in the world. The right thing won’t always be the easiest one, or the most pleasant one, but we can’t possibly ignore what’s right and expect a good outcome. Recognize the wrong way and turn around to run. I thank those who paved the way for me, and I hope to do the same for generations to follow me, for years, for decades and centuries on, the legacy of everything we do lives on, we live forever even after we’re gone. So know that this is not the end, this misery nor this joy. There is more significance in every second of every day than we care to realize. I don’t know which is the right religion, but I do know that all of us are battling a spiritual war, so we were born with a mission. We all are meant to be, essentially, an example of righteous living, of unconditional care, of charity and selfless giving. Stop all the hate, leave the past behind and recreate, forgive and forget, leave behind every grudge as well as every regret, love for love’s sake. Be thankful for every friend, and even every enemy you’ve ever met. There are no enemies, have no fear for real or fake. Life has placed these people on our path, so that we may come to know what it’s like, to experience hate, pain, separation, rage, wrath. We had to know these things to come to know that they are not us. We are the consciousness on which these emotions, these thoughts and feelings appear, quickly fading away like dust, remain calm and watch them disappear. Let your mind rest, feel at ease, peace of mind is like a soothing breeze, close your eyes and meditate, elevate, feel the unity between you and everything that’s ever been, yet know that the source of you is something so great, that the angels are your kin. How were you conceived and born? How can you speak and connect with others, how can you understand concepts such as love and mutual respect? Life is filled of meaning, but it’s up to us to detect. So leave behind any notions of insecurity, of not being or having enough, stand proud and erect, if you woke up today there’s no excuse to feel like a wreck. Whatever you did, leave it behind and give yourself a chance. Life is in constant movement, so we have to jump in and dance. Roll with the rhythm, with discernment, don’t worry about the past or the future, everything will pass, everything is temporary, and everything is just as necessary. Be humble, understand that God dwells within your brother, within all others, and we all will one day decompose in a cemetery. The heavenly and material aspects of our nature each go their own way once death arrives, each from where it came, each continuing in changing, in transforming, after having gone back to the source, ascending and descending, coming down after they rise. Therefore there is no death, be free of guilt, and understand you have a new birth, a new chance at life, with every breath. Ignorance is the problem, none of us know this. We desperately run around trying to get ahead, we think there will be nothing left of us once we’re dead. Worldly success means everything, we can’t wait to get a taste of the satisfaction the money and the fame will bring. And what if the dream doesn’t  true? It doesn’t happen for so many others so why should it work out for you? Will you cry and complain, will you wish you were never born, will you speak curses upon yourself, upon your life, or life in general, screaming in pain? Identify with the real inside of you. Be the Spirit, don’t rely on anything on this planet. Analyze the nature of things, understand and plan it. Whatever you’re doing, sacrifice what holds you back. You know what it is, and if you haven’t let it go yet, it’s because you’re hooked on it like crack. The real You needs nothing to survive, spiritually, it only needs to be aware in order to be alive. Adversity is nothing to the real Self, it thrives off of challenges, your talents are your tools, use them for the glory of what’s good, don’t follow the crowd like a fool. Life is a process of constant learning, but one day we’re all sure to graduate, just like from any other school.

To be continued tomorrow, on Day 74.

~ Rebel Spirit

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1,000 WORDS (2nd attempt): DAY 72: A Positive Attitude When Facing Trouble.

All we can do is try our best, to have the most positive attitude we can have when faced with whatever obstacle life throws our way. When this becomes a habit, we start to feel that life has much more meaning, we start to see the dots connect, we start to really sense the significance in every word and deed. When we understand and feel that life has intrinsic meaning, it becomes easier for us to make the right choices, whereas someone who is bitter towards life, believing that it is just an insignificant, random thing, and that the suffering it includes makes it not worth living, is sure to make more selfish choices, even if they negatively affect others or themselves. When we understand that everything we say and do has powerful consequences, that every action has a reaction, we will think twice before saying things that are unnecessary or harmful to others. We will also feel more inspired to say or do the right thing whenever a situation arises. This is easier said than done, since saying and doing the right thing often require much courage. When we shy away from perceiving life as the deeply significant phenomenon that it is, it is easy for us to slip into tedious routines, into bad habits which are quick to turn into comfortable addictions. Just because someone addicted to heroin or prescription pills suffers more than we do from our own addictions, that doesn’t mean that we aren’t addicted to TV, or to money or clothes or even Facebook likes. If we are not living a life of purpose then we are only wasting the days away, we are only going from one temporary pleasure to the next, and we are sure to become desperate if these things are taken away from us. Our constant need for pleasure and comfort have made it so that we can never dedicate ourselves to anything worthwhile, anything that requires time and effort. How can we do such a thing if our minds are constantly focused on feeling the next pleasure, on finding the next thrill? Our addictions are sure to interrupt us, and since we are anticipating that future pleasure, we don’t do as well in whatever we are currently engaged in, since our mind just isn’t in the moment. Our mind is elsewhere, in the future, trying to conjure up memories of what that wonderful feeling is like, impatiently waiting for that moment when we’ll feel it again. We were born into this world with nothing, all naked and with no possessions. So why do we need so many things now? Do we really need them or have we simply convinced ourselves that we need these things, that we need to feel certain feelings in order to be happy? We all have to do things which aren’t very interesting at some point in our lives, or which are completely uncomfortable for us. We all have to make sacrifices, starting from the day we set foot in school so that we may learn basic things like reading and writing. So why do we complain whenever an uncomfortable situation arises, whenever we have to really focus and work at something which perhaps isn’t our favorite activity? If we acknowledge that life isn’t all about doing everything we want one hundred percent of the time, and that doing some things which we don’t want is actually beneficial and even necessary for us, then there should be no need for us to complain about anything. Each and every situation we find ourselves in is the exact situation where we need to be at that moment. If we feel that we shouldn’t be where we are, then it is only because we have certain expectations about how life should be, and we feel that if life isn’t up to our expectations then we can just make a different life, often with no reflection into why we might be going through whatever we’re going through in the first place, why it could be essential to our life. Most of the time we only realize these things in retrospect, as we look back at past tribulations, we recognize the specific ways in which we have learned since then, due to those exact situations.  We need to be humble, we need to seek to understand, to listen more than we speak, to observe and to wonder, but no matter what, we always have to try our best, we always have to have the right attitude, to do what needs to be done. We all know what needs to be done in our individual lives. It all depends on what is going on in each person’s life, but we all know what we need to do. We all know where we are fucking up, as well as where we are succeeding. It is a dangerous thing to lie to ourselves even once, since we might repeat it, and then we might develop such a habit of lying to ourselves that we don’t even know that we’re lying anymore, and this is when it gets really hard to make the right decisions in life. As long as we don’t allow negativity to corrupt us, as long as we can do good and be good in this world, no matter what we may see others doing, then we will be well equipped to make the right decisions, even when we are facing the hardest of struggles. No matter how things may seem to be going for you right now, if you feel depressed or discouraged, if you feel that you aren’t where you would like to be in life, just remember that it’s all a process. Be thankful for what you’re facing, acknowledge that bad things happen to everybody, that it’s all part of life, for a deeper purpose which we can’t understand. Don’t become frustrated at this, but accept it. Accept life as it is, accept your current situation, and from this day forward, make it a habit to always be completely focused on doing your best, on giving your best no matter what. Watch life change as your mentality changes. It might take some time, but change is guaranteed in life. It is up to us if it will be positive or negative.

To be continued tomorrow, on Day 73.

~ Rebel Spirit

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1,000 WORDS (2nd attempt): DAY 71: Humility and Balance in Life and Spirituality.

What is addiction and what is recreation? Where is the line between harmless fun and reckless behavior? Are some addictions worse than others, and if one doesn’t mind being addicted, then is it a problem? Life is about balance, as I’m sure we’ve all heard or perhaps realized for ourselves, and Buddha suggested we follow the Middle Way. But what is too much of a good thing? Is there such a thing? What is not enough evil? Wouldn’t we all be free to finally feel at peace if all evil were eradicated? Would we though? Is duality necessary? If it is, why should it be so? Unfortunately I don’t have all the answers, but I am willing to ask them, and I’m sure some good has to come of it. Some say we must have faith, and I agree, but faith in who or what? If evil is a part of life then, is this God’s perfect plan? Is there something wrong with it, or is it just that we are not at a level from which we can see what it all means, why it’s all necessary? Is life all a game, or is it extremely serious? At times we feel one way, at times we feel another. How can we find a balance between the two, and should we even attempt it? Some might blame God for having created such an evil world, but they don’t realize that their own use of their ability to express themselves is only possible because of their existence in the world. Evil is within us, just as it is outside of us, and we all have the potential to treat others in horrible ways in which we would never want to be treated ourselves. Should we despise our own existence and kill ourselves because we were born imperfect? Doesn’t it make more sense to try to understand why we were born this way? There must be some reason for it. Isn’t there any inspiration to be found in our lifelong struggle against our own evil, in persevering towards achieving a goal, towards setting our life straight, or a certain area of our life, and coming out successful in the end? What if there is a much deeper meaning to life than just seeking pleasure? Could this be the reason why some of the most damaging things in life, for human beings, are also the most pleasurable? Maybe the bitter aftertaste that follows certain forms of pleasure is there to help us, to guide us so that we may search for the truth, so that we don’t spend a lifetime chasing after alcohol, or drugs, or sex, or money. Some things are not evil in themselves. Sex is holy if it is treated with respect and used in its proper context, but it has been degraded to such an extent, that it is now one of the easiest ways to get lost in the petty search for pleasure. What turns good into evil, holy into blasphemous? A lack of balance does. Now, regarding the doubt as to whether this is God’s plan, whether he meant, if he did create the universe, to have evil be a part of life, I can’t say that I know, or that I’ve looked deeply into the subject. However, in the Bible, Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate from the forbidden fruit before the snake had even appeared to them. If the forbidden fruit was what made them be aware of good and evil, being the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, then how could they have committed evil deeds, such as disobeying God, before having eaten from the tree? Eating from the tree was an act of disobedience, but if they were created perfect, then why did they fall for the snake’s dirty trick? And where did the evil snake even come from anyway? If God made everything good, then how could an evil snake, a lying snake, come to speak to Adam and Eve, to tempt them into doing something wrong? Perhaps God meant for there to be temptation in this physical world, maybe so that we might learn to overcome it. Would there be any meaning in an action movie without a bad guy for the hero to take on? If there isn’t a bad guy then there’s some sort of conflict to resolve. I’m not saying that life is a Hollywood film, but life is sort of like a movie except that there is no guaranteed happy ending. Life depends on our choices, and even if some think that our fate is sealed, that history is already written and set in stone, it sure doesn’t feel that way. If we can’t feel like it is that way, then at least we should try to make our lives meaningful, even if it’s just for us. Take a second to sit back, relax, meditate, leave the stress behind just for a moment. Analyze every aspect of your life, and you are sure to find much meaning. Some you have always been aware of, some you have neglected for a long time and left to the side, and some might come in the form of a sudden, new realization, a surprising epiphany. Once you think about what is important in your life, about what is meaningful, you will see that, in order to progress in each and every one of these things, you will need to work at being much more balanced, and at having more self-control in general. This practice of cultivating self-control is actually the first step into a spiritual way of living. Self-control means that the real Self, the only Self, is controlling the illusory self, the physical and mental self, the physical and mental projections which are perceived by my mind in order to create an identity of who I am, along with the name given to me by my parents at birth. The more self-control we practice, the more we will live a balanced and healthy life, and the clearer we will think. We can’t have all the answers in life, but we shouldn’t become cynical because of the world’s apparently hostile nature. We should be humble, and we should seek to understand, for we are very small beings in a much, much greater universe, more meaningful than any of us could ever imagine.

To be continued tomorrow, on Day 72.

~ Rebel Spirit