Structure

Introduction.

The purpose of this text is not to convince anybody of anything. It is is simply to share a beautiful experience, and help me analyze the vast adventures I have taken part in - what they are, why they are as they are, and how they affect me. I am not looking for any sort or recognition beyond the point of reflexion upon these subjects, on your part. What I am doing is good enough for me, and I believe this is the most rewarding anything can ever be.

The experiment started out as total chaos - an experiment with structure in its purest form, both physical and psychological. Upon closer inspection, my conclusion is that structure is a wonderful thing to have in your life. It is also something that should never be perceived as limiting. I never could have put my thoughts on paper, were it not for some sort of structure. The extent of my words, and the extent of my experience, however, have in no way been limited by this of structure. Had they been so, I do not think I would have been able to perceive it's true beauty.

The mediums upon which I built this experience are the following: writing, photography, painting, psychedelic drugs (most importantly magic mushrooms), spiritual and/or religious knowledge, psychology, physics, chemistry, little philosophical knowledge, and technical efficiency.

I do not believe that my experience - or anybody's experience with anything - could ever be put into words. Words' structure is very limiting, in the sense that there can never exist a word truly expressing any sort of physical, emotional, or spiritual reality. But, for the time being, words are the closest thing we have to expression, so they will have to do. Do keep in mind that the meaning of the words I will be using is in no way exclusive, and should not be taken literally.

In order for you to truly take advantage of my experience, and perhaps allow yourself to be inspired by it, you must not receive my words with any sort of judging. I do not care about you judging me, as a person, but I do care about the limitations imposed upon yourself by blind evaluation.

I do not believe a person could be described or fully understood out of context, nor do I believe anyone can grasp anybody else's context. However, I will give you some background information about myself, as this will bring you into my world. You will come to know very little of this world, which is mine and can never be anybody else's, but the information I will provide will be enough for the purpose of sharing this particular experience.

You do not need to know my name. So think of me as V. Here is a very incomplete self-portrait.

I was born in 1989, Galati, Romania. My parents and I lived in Bucharest. I had some sort of intolerance when I was little - disorder which I never fully understood, nor did I ever really try to - so my full-time working parents had to hire nannies, at first, and then send me off to my grandparents', in an attempt to have someone keep an on my alimentation - specifics being very important to my recovery. I have missed them parents dearly during that period, from from the age of four to seven years old. For a real long time, I had trouble letting go of that pain - the pain of missing the only two people that were really present for me, at such a young age. My parents are very loving, understanding, and somewhat more liberal than the majority of people in their generation, so together we have learned to move forward from those events. My childhood was generally happy. I have beautiful memories of my parents and I going on road trips, listening to music, living a care-free life.

It was easy for me to make friends, which I have had lots of, growing up. This is not the case anymore. My childhood friend died when I was 9 years old. I didn't quite know what to make of it, at the time. I was confused. I cried. My sister, M, was born around the same time. I have always believed that some part of my friend's energy materialized into my newly born sister. I still believe that today. Since her death, I have often felt her near me. She visits me.

My sister came as a gift box. She was born on December 26th, and I've always taken her as a Christmas present - one of the most wonderful my parents could have given. We do not always get along, but this will pass, as she will mature and come to see the world as it is, instead of what she would like it to be.

My best school friend, A, always frightened me, in the sense that I have always had the feeling that she is up to greater, bigger, things than I could understand. This is still true today, although to a lesser extent. She has always been an inspiration to me, as have all the people that came - and left - my world.

Another notable source of inspiration has been my mother. For as long as I can remember, she has had various diseases - some of which real, some not so much - some of which I understand, some of which I do not seek to. The amazing thing about her, to me, is her ability to make peace with life, as it is for her. I have never felt very close to her part of the family, although they are part of me and they have my sincere respect and appreciation for what they are.

My father is the love of my life - as I think Freud put it very neatly. I am truly in awe of his integrity and appreciation of what is, although I do not believe all of it is conscious. My paternal grandparents are the ones that took care of me, during the young sick years, and they have come to be my second set of parents. Parents which I do not feel that I completely have, or am entitled to having. During the time I spent in their home, I have met my uncle, B. I have come to see him as my brother, although I had no real siblings at the time. I still think of him ever so dearly, and it saddens me that the distance between us makes it difficult for us to keep growing together. His daughter, my cousin, died at the age of 5. I still do not know what to make of that, and although my life has never been particularly dramatic, if I were to pin point one event of great loss, it would have to be her coming and leaving this world. She, too, visits me sometimes.

When I was eleven years old, my family and I, left out home country in hopes of finding a better tomorrow. We came to Montreal, Canada. It took me over eight years to fully accustom myself to this very similar, yet very different life. I was young when we immigrated, but not young enough to overlook the extent of change.

I have taken several art classes in the past, never experiencing true creation, but rather a mixture and repetition of the techniques I learnt.

I never excelled at school, my grades have always been average, and I believe this is, and always will be a disappointment to my parents - my mother in particular, who has always been an A student. In high school, I was part of an IBO program, also known as international education. This has been a great thing, as I believe it opened up my horizons beyond what I could have achieved on my own, had I followed regular education standards. I went on to college, where I studied pure science, at first, and then switched and graduated from social sciences. I got accepted into a competitive journalism program, at Concordia University, from which I have been expelled two years later. I plan on returning.

All throughout my teenage years, my parents have provided me with the opportunity to travel back to Romania, summer after summer - an adventure that gave me great freedom of thought and perspective upon myself and all around me.

I have had three important romantic relationships, and countless experimental ones. The first important relationship was at the age of 18, with a boy a year younger than me. It all took place on the Romanian seaside, during the month of July. It was a very short romance, its lack of longevity making it so much more intense and real. The following October I decided to go back, to see him, and spend some days with him. So I did. I left on a Thursday and came back the following Tuesday. I told my parents I was camping in the hereabouts of our city, and to this day I am not aware of how much they know or have known about this. I came back from my little trip, and got a tattoo - my first tattoo - in his honour. The relationship didn't last much longer after that. To this day, I hold him dearly in my heart and memory, and believe that some of the experiences I have had with him are close to the truest forms of living I have ever known.

My next important relationship was with a man that truly bored me. I had known him for a long time, close to a decade - a time period which at that time felt very imposing - and had even been in relationships with him before, but the most significant part of our lives together lasted two years. It all started when I was 18, only days, weeks, following the acknowledgment of the end of my passionate Romanian adventure. After the first year, we got engaged. I believe this was the result of my manipulating him - not with any sort of mean intention, but rather because I thought it was what I wanted. It turned out I was looking to live a fantasy instead of a true human life. A few months following our engagement, we went on a trip to France, where I realized - or better put understood - that he was not a person that I would spend much more time with. It took me six months to make a clean break, but I have done it peacefully and honestly.

The relationship that I am in right now, also came quite suddenly after the end of the previous one. We have now been together for 3 years, and I believe that it being my present relationship makes it also the most important one. He has wronged me on several occasions, and from different perspectives (my being expelled from university because - although I do not like to think of things happening because of anything in particular - of his lack of motivation towards any kind of work being one of those perspectives). Yet, I have always managed to make peace with it. This has made me love him more - love him as he is, for what he is and what he isn't. I could not put into words, or rather I do not think it is important for the purpose of this text to put into words everything he is to me. I believe he knows - perhaps not consciously - and it is perfectly enough this way. We grow together and/or off one another. We have a more mature love for one another, than either of us has has ever had in our previous relationships, yet it has become a much more rewarding and appreciative love.

This is a portrait of us together.

We have two cats together. We have developed a very communicative relationship with them, and they have grown to be independent entities in our lives.

I believe there would be much more to say about our past relationships, both yours and mine, but I do not think it is important to do so, as we should not define ourselves by any other person.

This rather extensive background info - which for me is but a mere introduction - is provided in hopes of your realization that my life is nothing more, nothing less than your life, and I am in no way special.

This text is a narration of my one particular experience on magic mushrooms. To better grasp it as it is, you need to know a little about my drug history. I cannot stress enough that my experience has not been because of any kind of drug. I have experienced high realms of consciousness without drugs - through meditation and art - and I believe that you should not seek to go anywhere where you are not ready to be on your own.

The first time I got drunk from alcohol was when I was about 14. I have abused it a few times, but it has never struck me as an interesting thing to do. I do not seek alcohol, as I believe it blurs my realm of consciousness, and draws me away from my personal goal, that of being truly present and conscious in my life. The first time I tried smoking cigarettes, I was 15. I have not liked it, and didn't try it again before the age of 20. Coinciding with the start of my actual relationship, I started smoking regularly. Some people say it is because of my boyfriend, who has been a long-time smoker. I do not believe so. If I wouldn't have liked some part of it, at the time, I would not have done it - I wouldn't have gone out and bought my own pack, I wouldn't have admitted to my parents - both non-smokers - this addiction, and I wouldn?t have assumed myself as a smoker. Since I did all these things, I think that some aspects of smoking the cigarette are appealing to me. Do not get me wrong, there are countless things I dislike about nicotine, and although I have been planning on quitting from the very beginning, I have not come around to it just yet. The first time I smoked marijuana was at the age of 18. I liked the high it gave me, but since my boyfriend of the time was not a big fan of the drug, I didn't experience with it much. My current boyfriend, which I have not named until now, A, was, however, a weed consumer before we met. So I started consuming with him, partly because I still liked the high, and partly because we had some great conversations as a result of our consumption. For little less than two years I consumed it on a regular basis, which was almost daily. I have gotten tired of it, our conversations tend to be much more critical and conflictual nowadays when we are high, and I feel just overly bored with it - going to bed with the exact same thoughts in my head doesn't do much for my creativity. I have tried LSD once, at the age of 22. I didn't think much of it. I have taken magic mushrooms two times, one of these experiences being the subject of this text. The first experience was just as beautiful, but it somehow felt so much bigger than me that I have had trouble structuring it into words.

Magic mushrooms have been used as a hallucinogen drug, with a complexity that cannot be easily understood - partly because of its longevity in human history, and partly because it is, and becomes, a different thing for all. The mushroom-derived hallucinogen, called psilocybin, is known to trigger transformative spiritual states. I suggest you do extensive research before consuming any sort of drug.

The drug has not been the only aspect upon which I built for this experiment. Other aspects include, but are not exclusive to: a trip back to Romania - after having spent five years away (you see it differently from such distance), ?A New Earth: Awakening to your life purpose?, by Eckhart Tolle - a narration which I strongly recommend to all who are interested in the different realms of consciousness accessible to us mere humans; different dramas that I have lived and grown out of; conversations with various members of my extended family; past experiences with lucid dreaming and hypnosis; countless documentaries about the physical and psychological universes of human beings; different medium experiences as part of artistic productions.

The last thing I will tell you before we proceed, is that this is not art - or perhaps I simply don't like the pretentious word. Art is used to describe everything we are unable to grasp and understand. In fact, it is everything, and yet it is nothing, just like we are part of the universe as much as the universe is part of us - a duality without which nothing would come to be as is. So really, art doesn't clearly define anything. My experiment is in no way more artistic than what any of you can do. We all have life in us. With a little curiosity, and perhaps some guiding, we are all able of creating what was not before, in the sole purpose of it existing. My mother has been my guide. As she has had her own guide at another time, I believe you can find yours, perhaps in the places of which you would think last. Be aware.


July 29th - 30th, 2012.

It is just past 10PM, and we get home from A's parents'. We have spent a nice moment together at the pool, and are now eager to eat something. He starts preparing the barbeque. We had planned on taking mushrooms for about two weeks prior, so I felt more enthusiastic about the spiritual experience we were about to have, than the food. Food was needed, however, so we set out on working the kitchen. We didn't eat all of it, and decided to the remains for a later time during the evening. We ingested the mushrooms (about 2g each) right after the meal, and started watching a documentary called ?Manifesting the Mind? - a resource that I strongly recommend.

About 20 minutes into the documentary, our bodies started manifesting. Mushrooms are, physically, nothing more than normal food poisoning. Our body temperatures started rising, and our feet seemed to liquify. A had a very strong physical reaction, that lasted about 20 minutes, but which I do not feel entitled to describe - as this is his story, not mine. After a smoke, we started listening to Pink Floyd. When trying to detach from my actual state of consciousness, when trying to go higher than it is physically possible, I like to watch a Visualizer - a software that translates music into images. It is repetitive, colourful, and extremely energetic. I see it as a kind of hypnosis - a realm where my senses are not directly touching upon my presence.

About 45 minutes later, we decided to lay in our bed, and just be - listening to music, breathing, and letting our minds travel without restraint. At that point, I experienced a colour blast. The colours that my eyes had perceived on the Visualizer had remained with me and were now part of my trip. I felt an overwhelming urge to colour.

I started out on a canvas - a 16x20 canvas. I soon realized a canvas is too limiting, and would not be enough for my inspiration surge. So, I decided to paint our bedroom wall. I had painted a small part of another wall before, and I had put up several visuals in our apartment, so I was thinking what wrong could one full wall do? So, I took out my acrylic paint, my graffiti tubes and my coloured ink. I started splashing the wall with colour. My movements were completely random. I soon realized the colours had spilled beyond that wall (floor, furniture, linen, adjacent door/wall/window).

I went for a smoke, not too sure what to make of it. Should I feel bad? I liked the feeling of happy colours floating around our home. Since paint had already spilled on the floor and some furniture, I started questioning why I couldn't make it happen in the whole apartment - all the walls, doors, floors, furniture, windows and other surfaces. I saw no reason not to, so I did. At first, it was just a line of colour on the dinning room wall. And then, once that was out of the way, it was everywhere! I just sprayed and splashed colour everywhere. I had no regard for product conservation, other than its sole purpose - notably it being used. I did not care about the aesthetic embellishment - or structures - we like to place ourselves in. For about an hour and a half all I did was colouring. I was starting to run out of materials. The acrylic painting I was planing on using for the experiment was running out. I could not continue using the graffiti, as the odour and gases became almost unbearable. My purpose was not to endanger either one of our, or our cats', healths. So I ceased their usage. But still, the problem remained: I was running out of what I had planned to use. So I decided to use all my materials: from glitter to nail polish to cat vomit, to artificial feather, to the remaining of my acrylic paints.

At this point, I took off all my clothes, as the mere representation of a bodily cover did not seem important anymore. About half an hour later, when all of that was done, I took a break. I needed to work these things out in my head. Why had I done that? How am I feeling about it? I was feeling empty, because I knew I had no more playing materials, but at the same time so complete, because my conscience had been materialized into physical existence. I felt life running through my veins, my body and my entire mind. No yesterday. No tomorrow. That was all there was to it, and it was absolutely magnificent.

But I still wanted to experiment some more. So I took out my camera, which was full of paint. Its lens had been protected, as I wanted to ensure that all practical objects remain practical after the experiment. So, with camera in hand, I started shooting pictures - of nothing, really, but of all there was. I decided to take some of the yellow paint from the wall and put it on the lens filter, as to see how that would turn out. It was nice.

I played some more with the colours that were already on the wall, and then I remembered my mother had previously given me four light sticks. So I took them out, unpacked them and activated them. I closed the lights and started playing with the lights in my hands. I took some pictures of the light movements, and then, by mistake, one of the sticks broke. Liquid starting pouring out of it, and just as I had done splashing the paint, I decided to splash the fluid everywhere. A didn't take part in the whole experiment, but he was more than willing to help me create a universe of glowing stars. So we set out on splashing it all around. A few minutes after, our entire apartment was sparkling with intense green stars. Green stars everywhere! It felt like we were living in a fantasy world, where fairies would soon start dancing around us. By then it was about 3AM, and everything around us was totally and utterly asleep.

After walking around for a few minutes, admiring and taking in the beautiful scenery, we started shooting some more. These were studies of the movement of the human body, all random movements answering to the musical sounds in the background. The light was still glowing, and we just lay on the bed, thinking about the wonderful things around us - what we had done so far, and why. As the lights were slowly fading, A kept laying on the bed, contemplating the beautiful places the night had taken him.

My never ending love of experimenting pushed me towards the camera again. This time, I did a study of the body at rest: A's foot, hands, nose, penis, a cup he was holding and his contracted muscles around it. Then I played with focus and lack of, and natural night light.

Throughout it all, I had the feeling that everything was real. Everything was pure. No organization, no plan, no structure. This is it - this is all of it. At this point, the apartment looked completely vandalized, and I felt like I had nothing more to work with.

So I thought I would continue my experiment, but this time with the human mind. A was half asleep, half awake at this point, and he didn't feel much like talking. So, I went outside and started looking for light in any of our neighbours' windows. I was willing to knock on anybody's door, and offer him/her the opportunity of re-analyzing what he/she takes for granted. Luckily, I found a light. It was S. I had never spoken to her before, although I had crossed her on the hallway countless times. She is our neighbour's girlfriend, and she's often here. So I knocked on the door, not sure of who - if anybody - would answer the door. I knew my neighbour was working, so it would be either the girlfriend or the roommate. It was her. I was only wearing my panties and a tank top. I had paint on my clothes, body, and hair. I did not know what she was thinking of me, standing almost naked in front of her door at 4AM, but somehow I did not care. I introduced myself and asked her if she would mind assisting me with some painting. She seemed bored at home, so she eagerly followed me into my apartment. I gave her the little paint I had left. She splashed it on the walls for about 20 minutes, time during which we talked, about nothing in particular. I asked a lot of questions, all whose intentions were to make her re-question her opinion - an opinion which we all have the tendency to take for granted. For the following three hours, we just sat on the couch, questioning everything about ourselves and our convictions. She was very critical of life in general, how it should or shouldn't be, but seemed less so at the end of our time together. Her boyfriend came to pick her up at about 7h30AM, and they left soon after I encouraged him to indulge in some splashing. He didn't seem to enjoy it too much, partly because he didn't understand where it was all coming from and why he was doing it, but by that time I had too little energy left to push him toward the dismemberment of his structures. So they left, I brushed my teeth and went to bed.

I woke up three hours later, still tired, but very much alive. I decided to wash the floors - the paint on the floors had mixed too much and now it was all just brownish/black. It was too dark-coloured and I thought it wasn't at all representative of my experiences of the previous couple of hours. I started washing, but did not quite finish yet. As of now, 9PM the following night, I have a headache because of the dark colours, the dark atmosphere in the house, and my mind is set on completely cleaning the floors by tomorrow night. Everything on the walls will remain intact, until it won't be anymore.


Conclusion.

I started out on these experiments without knowing where they would end up. I had no purpose, but I was very curious about the emotions I would feel once I gave myself to my impulses. The important thing was that i knew what I was experiencing with, and I think this is an important guideline for anyone interested in playing with anything. I knew several painting and photography techniques without which this experiment could not have materialized. This is the thing about school. It can only teach you so much. What you make of it is completely up to it.

As the night unfolded, my purpose became clearer and clearer: I was remodelling structure within a structure. The general feeling behind it all was one of greater awareness. When truly aware of the present moment, one starts questioning its limits (Why? Why not?). I decided to dismember all structures, lose all barriers - both physical and psychological, only to build them up again, in a new, different, perspective.

Most barriers are similar for all of us. Mine were: the clothes I felt constrained to wearing, the limiting aspects of artificial home lighting, the aesthetic aspects of our home, our physical world really - and the standardized idea of what it should or should not look like, the psychological aspect of fear, the socially acceptable behaviour around people, the institutionalized conviction against anything truly random, the misconception that the creation I was part of happened because of the particular drug I had ingested, the limited artistic experiences I had had so far - none of true creation really, the indoctrinated idea that the moment of now should only be lived according to yesterday and tomorrow, the physical conscience in which we are taught to live, and the common belief that the universe is intangible to us. The ultimate goal of the restructuring was to test and experiment something closer to our true human potential. Beautiful things came out of this restructuring, both physical and psychological, for me.

Although a whole essay - or perhaps manuscript - could be presented arguing in favour of remodelling our personal structures, I will only express my summarized conclusions:

At the beginning of the experiment, I was fully clothed. By the end, I was completely naked. At some point during the night, I realized that the clothes we are given when we are little, and those we choose for ourselves as we grow up, are nothing more than a cloth behind which we hide our bodies. Why should we hide the body? Isn't the naked body the most natural and pure physical possession of ours? Why hide it? I decided the clothes were completely unnecessary. My body is what it is, no worse, no better than exactly how it is. I saw no reason in hiding it.

The artificial light created by our house lamps is very restrictive in the sense that it only reveals one perspective of our homes, at night. Why should we only see it one way? I decided to change that lighting, and the new perspective I gained was truly one of the amazing views I had ever encountered.

We are taught, at first by our parents, then by our teachers, and ultimately by ourselves to fear the modification of any physical possession. We do not care so much about the neighbour's car being vandalized, but we would be deeply troubled if it were our car. Why is that? Is the need of inanimate objects motivated by anything else other than their ultimate usage? Do I really need a clean car, or do I just need a car? Should I identify with the luxury of aesthetics? Our apartment had already been slightly vandalized before this experiment, because this isn't the first time I struggled with the idea of what it should or shouldn't look like. The painting that is all over the wall, floor, furniture and utilities now gives it a completely different look. Why shouldn't it have a different look? Why should I obey the rules of tidiness, as long as the entire apartment, and everything in it, remains usable? I concluded it really doesn't matter what it looks like.

One of the most important barriers for me, and probably the hardest to break down was the psychological aspect of fear. I was afraid to act outside the box. I was afraid to be different. I was afraid to colour my walls, because I was afraid of what my boyfriend, parents, friends and landlord would think or say. Why was I so afraid? What happens when you let go of fear? Nothing more than total freedom over your own actions. So I let go. The moment I decided I didn't care how other people would react when faced with my impulses, the world became a whole new place. No judging or unconscious criticizing could touch me anymore. I was doing the only thing I thought I should be doing at that point in time, and no amount of fear would have been able to restrain me.

At 4AM, I did something that is socially unacceptable: although it was not an emergency, I knocked on a neighbour's door, wearing very little clothes, asking her to help me with some painting. What is a ?normal? reaction to that? Refusal and unconscious criticism. By that point, however, it did not matter anymore what she might or might not say or do. I believed that I was not giving her any sort of direct pain - not that I believe pain and sufferance should be avoided altogether on a personal level. I was a mere human, trying to connect and share my life with another human, regardless of time and space. It turned out to be an amazing thing, as I got to truly understand a person to whom I had never spoken before.

Our society is repetitive, both physically and psychologically. We do the same things, time and time again. We wake up at the same time, all of us, and each of us on our own, we drive the same kind of cars, we walk in exactly the same way on the same kind of pavement, and the list goes on and on. We are taught to think a certain way, act a certain way, and then, we are expected to re-enact those teachings in all situations. We are not taught to think outside the box. We are not taught to be random, to be truly natural. Nature, despite its very organized structure presents many aspects of randomness. These acts of randomness are, in my opinion, the greatest aspects of our world. Why not allow randomization into my life, into my experiences? As soon as my acts, my movements, and my thoughts became random, the greatest creation came out of my body. This is when I started realizing that structure, as opposed to randomness, is necessary in our day to day lives, but should not, under any circumstance be limiting.

I ingested 2g of magic mushrooms. During my previous experience with the drug, last night and even today, the subject came up in a conversation with my boyfriend - about his personal experience - as to whether he could have gone higher had he consumed quantitatively more. We are programmed to believe that the more usage we make of something, bigger the effect or consequence. Why is that? Do I think that more mushrooms would have taken me somewhere else? Yes. Do I believe that somewhere else would have been consciously higher than where I already was? No. A common belief is that hallucinogenic drugs bring you closer to God - however you choose to define that (to me, God is pure creation). The drug, however, is but a catalyst. It precipitates the movement towards God. This becomes dangerous when the consumer is not ready to be closer to any form of God. However, I had already experienced this close link with God before, not by my own creations, but rather by my own presence. I knew where I was going to be, and I was not afraid to go there - rather, I was enthusiastic about it. But the important point to this is that if, when sober, you don't already feel that you are one with God, no amount of drugs will ever take you there. So I realized that the determinant factor is actually your God beliefs before the drug consumption. I do not think quantity has anything to do with that.

Another very limiting aspect of my experience was the fact that I had never felt true creation come out of mself. I had always been artistic, I had always painted, drawn, photographed and dance, but never had it come totally and purely from somewhere so deep. Rather it was a re-enactment of all the techniques I disposed of, a combination of others' inspirational creations. My art was always repetitive, which also made it very stagnant. I felt that I knew all the techniques I needed to know, yet somehow I wasn't moving forward with them. Divine creation did come out of my body, in many forms (lights, paint, photography, dance, philosophy), but since I had never experienced it before that moment in time, I wasn't exactly prepared to open my horizons to the extents to which I later did.

We are taught to believe that the present moment should only be lived in accordance with yesterday and tomorrow. We are taught to think and act according to a universal time schedule - and I do not mean the actual hours on a clock, but rather the notion that we are completely dependent upon time. We are programmed to think that there would be no tomorrow without today. And so, we spend our todays worrying about tomorrow, therefore eclipsing the presence and importance of now. All we have is the present moment. While it is true that tomorrow will not come without today, it is just as true that tomorrow will come regardless of today. So, time spent worrying about tomorrow is really just an avoidance of what really is. Why live like that? Do we not think that our time in the physical world is precious, and therefore should be lived to the fullest? Why waste it worrying? What will come will come - a little differently in accordance with our present moment - regardless of our worries. I see no point in worrying about tomorrow, when all I really have is today. So I started letting go of my worries of what people would say or do the following morning. This, too, was very liberating.

We are taught to believe, and this is not because other people know about it and don't want to tell us - but rather because very few people know about it, and we are not always open to their sharing of this knowledge, that there is nothing more to life than the our physical presence, our Earthly existence. It is a difficult thing to imply otherwise, because people hold beliefs strongly rigidified within themselves. So, please know that I do not intend on offending any system of beliefs different than mine. I believe there is a greater conscience, accessible to all, behind our Earthly existence. But travelling to that level of consciousness is never an easy thing for me - mainly because I have not met many people sharing these beliefs, and I have had no guidance, other than some few guidelines from my mother - guidelines that I didn't properly understand at the time. So I know I want to, and am going to, go there, but I'm never sure what there looks like. Consciously deciding to accept whatever is, deciding to stop all resistance I have to a higher conscience, leaves you open to any possibility.

My last barrier was that the universe is something intangible to me. This is not true. When I lighted up the room, when I splashed fluorescent stars in the apartment, I was seeing the entire universe all around me. Moreover, I was physically part of it. The universe is in me, and all around me, always. It is not something that I do not have access to, nor is it something that I should be unable to conceptualize. The universe is all there is, I am all there is, and all is everywhere around and in me.

Everything that we put pure passion into materializes creation into the physical world. And this the most wonderful thing we can offer in this universe. It must not be colour, photography or light. It can be anything, anything that appeals to your inner self.

Some of these things, I was aware of before - so this experience only helped me materialize them intro something more concrete, a new set of values and priorities. Some things are completely new, things that I had never thought possible - or perhaps I had just never thought about, and these will now need their own time to sink in.

View my project at:  http://www.behance.net/gallery/Structure/4687653