What is this life I live now? So far from the days of excitedly reading psychedelic trip reports on Erowid, longing for a vision of life I always imagined and romanticized in my thoughts, a life of travel and adventure and freedom. What is this life, this 9-to-5 life, with this hypocritical society and all this buying and spending and saving up, and getting into debt just to pay it back until we’re old and almost lifeless? Why is debt necessary in order to advance? Must we be shackled forever? It’s terrifying, how fast the years pass. I grew up and my inspiration was Timothy Leary telling me to drop out. Terence McKenna told me to reject authority, to reject the system that attempts to force us into slavery, into serving the very institutions that enslave us. Bukowski said to drop out, because just like me, he hated work as well as the thought of trying to prove one’s worth for a job one isn’t even interested in. He also wondered how people could live in such a way, and why there was so much indifference and loneliness and misery in the world. Albert Camus wrote about the Rebel, and the conflict between the human being and the absurdity of life, about how ‘the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.’ This quote inspired my rap name, Rebel Eye. ‘On the Road’ and the psychedelic revolution made me want to be a beatnik like Kerouac, to meet people and have fun and be free and document my ideas and adventures for the hell of it. To be honest, all these philosophical ideas inspired me beyond belief, and since they resonated with me from the beginning, they all became parts of a whole philosophy I decided to live by. It truly filled me with a passion for life, to do something worthwhile and make a change in the world, but at the same time it filled me with a constant sense of anxiety and dread about how I can actually create a different life, or a different world. As the years passed and I started seeing the world as hopeless I only wondered how I could find a place to be at peace on my own, a life far away from all this madness. Between the daily highs, and the psychedelic journeys over the years, the albums and the books, the audiobooks, the meditations, the years passed, and now I wonder if there is any real benefit to being hyper-aware, to being more sensitive to your own emotions and to those of the whole planet and its chaos. Why does time have to go fast when we’re enjoying it? Why does it have to be this way? So many years lost in hazy thoughts of contemplation, in music, in the soothing sounds of instruments and voices and melodies and rhythms. Were they truly lost? Is there something else I’m actually supposed to be doing? Why? I’ve been happily escaping reality for so long, being bored and dissatisfied with the reality I once expected to blow my mind. I remember looking forward to growing up, but if we’re honest, that illusion can’t last long. Sooner or later we all grow up and realize that life is truly strange and unpredictable, and that it might just be impossible to recover the childlike wonder and excitement we once had.
I appreciate you reading.
rebel eye 