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Jason Weihl Jan 2017
There is something awry

I can feel it
as I step into
the thick and tense
stifling and sinister,
suffocating ether.

I have a peripheral sense
of an occluded slumber,
a disturbance.
Begotten by me?
I can only hope not.

Haunted by something unknown,
unseen but not unheard.
A sound, a whisper, a chill
Ghastly squall
The rush suspends my breath,
captivates my thoughts,
hurries my pulse;
throbbing and pounding,
in my dizzy and cluttered head.

The door has closed.

Impulse and instinct
drive my body
but it is dark,
         never-ending,
    surrounding
Me.

Perturbation reaches up
And grips my very being;
strangling my conscious,
operational will.
Numbing all perception short of
foreboding and dread.

My entranced, mortal corpse
stumbling over my own hastened direction
that it already knows.
Scrutinizing and bellowing
an audible, unmistakable
laugh
which freezes me again
with crippling petrification.

There is no escape.

Now face to face
as I turn to confront it,
stare to glare.
Menacing and perilous
it consumes me.
      Devours me.
Immortally imprisoned by
              It.
Emma Hill Jan 2017
Burn sage
          Pineapple sage
Read books on massage, potpourri and herbs
And never forget to
        help   one another
        On dishes, on dreams, thoughts in a stream-
ing consciousness consciously
         love   one another
And never forget
Why he came
Emma Hill Jan 2017
Telltale signs of paranoia ***** at the hackles that run from head
(to heart)
down the spine
        drown the mind
Psychotic neurotic autistic artistic
Imagination whirls like wind through the pines and
The hair along my spine
        Is standing
Paul Butters Dec 2016
Yesterday morning I woke at 4AM again
And once more my mind got churning.
I juggled with some words in my head,
Composing free verse on how I write my poems.

I wondered whether I should grab a pad
And write.
Or even get on my laptop.
But I made myself go back to sleep,
Forgetting it all.

So here I am,
A day later at 10.30AM,
Pouring out these verses:
A sort of Stream of Consciousness.

No thought of structure
Or metre
Or rhyme.
Just emphasising certain words and phrases
By giving them separate verses
Of their own.

Something I learnt once
When reading a book in Pudsey Library
About how to teach kids to write poetry
An easy way.

Unfettered by considerations of metre or form,
You can express yourself freely,
As deep as you wish.

Just let your emotion
Or Philosophy
Run free.
Let your words cascade
Over those shiny pebbles.
Babbling along through winding willows,
To crash over waterfalls
In a crescendo of sound.

A stream that sparkles in the light
Of sun or moon (and stars),
Wafted by scents of abundant flowers
And sappy cut grass.
God's Grandeur radiating all around.
Enjoy.

Paul Butters
As it says on the "tin"......
Mosh Microbiomes Dec 2016
Couldn't reach for the horizon today
Conscious but in a deep slumber
Jabbed by my mistakes refusing to fray
Calmed the chaos down to eery silence

I woke again with the loudest chaos
And the now demonic deafening silence
Gnaws at me from far far across
Consuming my horizon in defiance
Lauren R Nov 2016
You open your jaws, wide as bone allows.
From the spaces between your teeth
people fall like blood-heavy snowflakes.
Grandmother, brother, mother, daughter,
all made up of paper-mache.
Everyone in front of you sways,
backs arched, lips curled,
curdled like milk in the summer’s heat.
They protect the fragility flying over them.
Wishing cracked and broken things whole.
They fold and tear like origami. Your
brain illuminates itself, paper lantern.
Brightening the thin walls before you.
The weightless, the worldly and the writhing.
They breathe easy.
They peer into our lungs, divulging our restlessness,
our dreaming. Only their synapses
remain, blood slick;
they bind and unbind to yours.
Consciousness ends and consciousness begins.
Consciousness ends and blood begins.
We are unholy Goddesses.
We are unholy goodness.
We are unholy and unbroken and good and God.
This is the only form of song, the pitch from our neurons,
the blood beneath our fingernails, the swaying, the swaying,
these minds and minds
and the never-ending
mindfulness. These crawling, floating,
grieving, forgiving minds.
This is old
traces of being Nov 2016
indifferent to unplanned pathways  
destiny knows not enslaving bounds
pathways crisscross at befallen crossroads
knowing all roads lead to all roads

restlessly searching through the ache writhing within,
the voice of my soul speaks crystalline
through the hidden portal of my heart

beckoning the wounded healer within
be at home in the silent darkness of suffering
to perceive the gems of awakening light;

embrace the lessons where the wounding leads us
to bring forth a healing reincarnation,
intimately feeling the collective pulse of humanity echo
a wholeness in a deeper level our being

the only spark to rekindle a flame blown out
a soul’s assent to the labyrinth through the wound
note:
snippets from a conscious ramble;
a shameless attempt at understanding a potentially higher conscious  self
written to advocate for, to support all wounded healers
that often experience the potential gifts of a wounded heart

if this is "too deep" i'll just keep trying
to find my way through the dark maze on my own

all apologies ... wild is the wind

all in all is all we are ♡
The birth-throes of adulthood is alteration unto its/our own state, the formation and growth of neural connections straining our minds, the brain adapting to phenomena in space and time, deeming it experience. It is this process I reckon to be consciousness.

It was only after adolescence I could begin to understand qualia. During this period my brain was busy going through the teenage 'motions of neurochemical upheaval. My mind was far too young to understand what it intuitively grasped. Something was memorable, meaningless, its qualities stuck in mind. This was how I began to understand qualia, meaningless memories which I treasured beyond measure without knowing why, the essence of nostalgia.

During this time emotion was a mysterious thing I could only feel as coming from my own experiencing ego, not as something occurring between two animals which one alone can never understand (though the narcissist might dispute that). Take love, an attachment, certainly an altered-state, a modifier of behavior, the serotonergic system implicit in its proper function (and if we're lucky, some oxytocin).

We'll hold this for further discussion.
Now for something mildly intresting.

My introduction and use of psychoactives was typical if quite comprehensive (and of course it felt 'special', I still feel this). Fascinated by what substances could do to elicit qualia (though no doubt unable to elucidate this) I lost myself thoroughly, great attracted to the culture around them. This accompanying ethos I could not hope to comprehend took me in its stride. At first I had no reservations as to indulgence, which taught me a few hard lessons. Later I would catch a rare glimpse of this ethos in its motions, gleaming it on occasion.

These times gave rise to specific feeling, recreation followed by reading into the neuroscience brought about a knowledge of some sort. The neurochemicals represented what my experiences were founded upon but not what they were.
I knew them in theory and from practice upon my consciousness,
This knowledge stayed with me long after my 'research' had finished. I would recognise familiar mental sensations in occasional sober interactions, minor alterations in mind brought on by certain foodstuffs (or lack thereof).

What does this answer in relation to qualia?
It tells us that moments are qualitatively conditioned by the given physical constraints.
What power mind and/or brain have over each other remains to be seen, as does the will's constituents and how it comes into being. Does it boil down to binary, exponential subject-object distinctions giving rise to abstract properties? Answers to the question of meta-consciousness continue to elude us.

We hypothesize that the given conditioning can evoke
a certain magnitude of qualia. We assert that qualia exist
to the extent that belief does (and is) but that they are ascribed
to experience by presentation rather than representation.
Belief and desire are propositional whereas qualia are proponents thereof which feedback into behavior, belief and desire.

Tentatively, we suggest that qualia might be measured in term analogous to wave patterns and spectral density while individual quale might be respective to individual neuronal constructs within the neuroplastic structure of the brain.

In this way a given pathway corresponds to a certain experience/memory.
Tyler Stoner Oct 2016
What lies beneath the surface of consciousness,
is a wonderful world of thought and darkness
which we cannot control.

The waters churn
in the background of our minds,
leaving us unaware of our secret
and fascinatingly buoyant imaginations.

When the sea warms
from the convection currents
of our experiences,
to the surface rise
the bubbles that we call
Thoughts.
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