A year in the life of the Sui Generis

Disclaimer: well this ended up a pretty hefty piece of writing… I hope you can appreciate my raw writing style and my lack of editing……… I am new to the whole writing game and these are the first sizable things I have written in 6 years I’ve split it up into two parts, you can start at the second part if you want to skip the personal background stuff about me

As I write this post it has been almost exactly 1 year since I started living with Songs. How fortunate we were to only be living 2 hours drive away from one another. This post will be about my experience living the lifestyle.

First up a bit of background about me. I was born and raised in Brisbane, Australia. Living in the same house for 23 years of my life. Two parents that should have separated years and years ago but stayed together ‘for the kids’. One younger brother. I look at the environment that I grew up in now and am kind of disillusioned: I did not grow up in the ‘real’ world, I grew up in a world of smoke and mirrors. A world hugely cut off from anything natural- pure man made artificiality.

I was a hugely sensitive kid and unfortunately my environment didn’t really support or comprehend ‘energy’. Any natural energetic awareness I had was quickly shut off in order to cope. For the large part of my life, spirituality and energy did not exist. I would have ridiculed anyone who ‘believed’ in that stuff.

Growing up in a world where all my peers- and I- watched television, it’s crazy for me to look at what my inner belief systems were. I had never even taken the time to think about them. A series of half baked notions, dis-empowerment and ‘lab coat’ type facts. My thought patterns cycled around nothing but superficial crap constantly. When you rarely spend time in a natural environment, removed from that signal/frequency, it seems easier for the ‘programming’ to impact upon you. To appear ‘real’.

Though I lost much of my sensitivity I never really lost my perceptiveness. I put this down, largely, to being deaf in one ear, forcing me to pay more attention to body language in communication. I enjoyed watching how people worked. Social interactions. I started to become increasingly distressed at what I saw the older I got. Increasing levels of homogeny. Mental and emotional manipulative games. Hierarchy and cruelty.

This appeared to be just the way the world was to me. I couldn’t see anything that showed me otherwise- none of my mentors were outside of it and I could pick apart their hypocrisy easily. I began to turn all this anger and distress inward. There was something wrong with me. The sheer weight of external proof I could find to justify this meant I could really smash myself at times. Yet to start acting like those around me felt like I was killing my soul, losing any sense of uniqueness. All these painful emotions swirling about and nothing to do with them.

I never really took the time to explore what it was that I was observing. I had no language to express it. It was largely coming from my depth of perception coupled with a strong sense of intuition. This fire inside me. There were so few external expressions that resonated.

My method of dealing with it? Dissociation and keeping myself externally focused. Keeping my mind occupied. I stayed inside playing computer games any spare moment I had. Watching TV. I found resonance in punk and hardcore music, constantly streaming them. Helping transform my depression into the outlet of rage. Giving me loads of justifications for being angry, it felt good. It was a release I could pour all this emotion that I didn’t know what to do with into. My base emotional operating platform become one of rage: if I could hold on to the sense of justification that came with the rage, I could dismiss the sheer distress that it was masking. I could continue to function. Unfortunately rage requires a whole shitload of external focus for fuel.

I survived school and decided to become a carpenter. I had always enjoyed making things. It was such a massive transition. Going from sitting in air conditioned classrooms barely lifting a finger to working 40 hours a week hard labour for $6.95 an hour. Sheer ignorance getting me through. Working amidst a bunch of seasoned ‘men’. Any innocence and sensitivity I had still operating was quickly suppressed. ‘Hardening the fuck up’. Surrounded by shit brained conversation on a daily basis. Taking the piss from one another constantly, I developed some excellent defence mechanisms. I could play the game as good as any by the end,  alcoholism, drugs and sex being the focus. Suppressing the stress that working so hard generates and going for the big release and numbing out every weekend. Balancing out the internal state. Unfortunately the more you deal with it this way, the more you need to do it, the less effective it becomes. By the time I had finished my apprenticeship I could no longer suppress the emotions any longer. Chain smoking at work, smoking weed all weekend and getting wasted on a Friday or Saturday night. Lost in this miasm of wanting the things that those around me wanted. Lost in the roundabout fucked up way of attempting to get these things I thought I wanted.

This was enough to crack through my ego, I needed to change. I started reading. I read 60 non-fiction books in a year. I was fortunate enough to have plenty of spare time having finished my apprenticeship, earning good money and only needing to work part time. I spent months scouring the internet all day for information. Reading internet forums, others opinions, integrating. Finding groups of people talking about their experience in a way that deeply resonated with my own. In ways that did not contain the rage that I had. So much light was cast onto my experience. So much release. This sense of self empowerment. Constrictions dissolving before my very eyes.

I began to see the potential. To find fascination in the workings of the mind. To learn how to use this to increasingly empower myself. To transform. I was building my own operating system, listening to my own feelings again, guiding me. Synthesising bits and pieces from this philosophy and that, this area of information and that. Creating a system that made sense to me, that worked for me. The more I really explored this, the more I started to feel that most of the other packages of thought (religions, spiritual practices, philosophies, science) were lacking in some way shape or form. It was interesting for me to observe the similarities between all these areas while seeing the huge amounts of dissonance that arose between them towards each other. So many of them seemingly hitting the ceiling in their possibility for evolution. Too many constrictions/rules. Dogmas outside of the actual personal experience of those individuals adhering to the dogmas. Systems that do not place emphasis on the individual EXPERIENCE. Systems that require the individual to meditate in isolation for hours on end in order to experience anything. I felt this ever increasing desire to build a system, one package to rule them all muahahah.

At one point, in my brief exploration with magic (sigil magick: using the manifestation power of the sub-concious, writing out a desire, crossing out all the consonants, crossing out the repeated vowels and drawing a picture using the remaining vowels. Putting in in a place where we see it regularly in the peripherals) the desire that I had expressed was to write a ‘paradigm changing speech’. A speech with such clarity it was capable of bringing profound transformation to all who heard it.

Unfortunately it’s almost next to impossible to do this kind of work when you are still heavily limited and constricted in certain areas yourself. I began delivering massive speeches to all my friends whenever they would listen, compiling what I felt were key pieces of information from all fields. Despite my enthusiasm and energy, very little changed. I hadn’t really changed. My baseline rage still running, still smoking and drinking. I would attempt to leave old habits behind only to be sucked back in to the instant gratification whenever around my friends, social groups of that variety being largely used for self-referencing justifications. It didn’t take much. Part of me still wanted to hide, hiding was easy. I was like a pendulum, hitting the wall of being able to hide by smoking and drinking and the internal dissonance rising, swinging towards quitting everything and being super focused on my evolution.

I can still feel the potential in me to swing to this day. There was no way I could continue to hang around my old circles and pursue the path that the heart really wanted. There was no way that I could become myself around those people. Bonds created largely out of mutual emotional based addiction patterns. Addiction patterns that some would quite happily have all their life. Not me.

The only problem… I had no idea of where to go. My brief experiences being around ‘spiritual’ people was that these practices were too ‘watered down’ for a being like me. I have always been kind of intense, very aware of this raging flame inside me despite circumstance. Nothing seemed to encapsulate was felt ‘right’ for me. I felt trapped, the rage in me started to amp big time.

I found Songs and the Sui Generis work just in time. Lurking the project avalon forums at the precise timing she decided to launch her work for a test run. I found her method of expression fascinating. Her way of looking at things. Her depth of exploration into meaning and language, showing me things that I had never even considered before. Calling for me to observe more closely how I was ‘framing’ my thoughts, words and actions. Clearly demonstrating the pitfalls of expressing external authority in any way. It’s fairly self-evident isn’t it? It gave me a frame of reference for self analysis that I hadn’t had.

Initially I was horrified at how much heteronomy was embedded into my character and ego self that I had created/taken on through the environmental culture. The degree of assumptions about others I was making based on MY OWN experience challenging me to look at the motivations behind my actions. Seeing how much of myself was geared towards impressing others, how much I had tried to mould myself in order to achieve this. How much doing this had fucked me up, directing all my energy externally. How could I ever be self empowered when my environment had more of a say about who I was than I did? I had to begin to observe and empower my own experience. To really listen to my intuition and feelings once again.

To me, this is the real spirituality. Consciously building our relation with all the elements in our environment. Letting them show us who they are, learning how to get outside of our own projections so that we never run the risk of becoming enlightened, ‘knowing it all’. The risk of becoming a closed loop where no evolution can be had and stagnation occurs. To think that there is some point we can hit where we suddenly know it all would mean that the multiverse is not continually expanding and exploring new things. It’s ALL in the approach. The beauty of the Sui Generis is that ANYONE of ANY degree of intelligence can begin to work with it. The questions that it causes the individual to ask themselves are the fertile soil for growth to be had. It does not require the individual to accept any new beliefs; instead, it allows them to experiment and explore themselves, for themselves. ‘Keeping it real’ and pertinent to the individual. Personal experience = embodiment, or a way higher probability for embodiment anyways.