http://www.evanbailyn.com/index.php/site/index/ en pegr.technical@gmail.com Copyright 2007 2007-10-14T02:46:00-05:00 http://www.evanbailyn.com/index.php/site/the_place_at_the_end_of_the_earth/ http://www.evanbailyn.com/index.php/site/the_place_at_the_end_of_the_earth/#When:02:46:00Z One night as I was lying in bed, I saw the place at the end of the earth.  It was a hill, blanketed in virgin snow, at twilight.  At the edge of my vision, the branches of a pine tree hung calmly, lending their aroma to the cool, comfortable air.  On top of the hill was a log cabin with a chimney from which wisps of smoke drifted out into the purple-grey sky. Beyond the hill was a slope that tapered off into the vast chasm of eternity.  Yet I was not afraid, because I knew that no one could ever fall into it against their will.  Inside the log cabin was a crackling fire and a cozy hearth, covered in a soft, round, red carpet.  And on that carpet, there I was, a child of four years old.  I had no expression on my face for I was in complete security, without fears, wrapped in the assurance that I was cared for and could never be hurt.  A force, not unlike the love of my parents, but stronger, coming from an ultimate life source, permeated my presence, granting me perfect serenity.  I felt all the blurry beauty of nostalgia, but it was real.  2007-10-14T02:46:00-05:00 http://www.evanbailyn.com/index.php/site/connecting_with_your_fantasy_world/ http://www.evanbailyn.com/index.php/site/connecting_with_your_fantasy_world/#When:01:38:00Z In a society where the vast majority of people act adultlike, it helps to have a fantasy world - a place that nobody can ever see or influence no matter what is happening in your physical environment.  Keeping such a place inside you, hidden away from everything else, can greatly counterbalance all the external events that are out of your control. However, even those who regularly use their imaginations to escape often do so in a passive way, minimizing the benefit of their mental hideaway. Maintaining an active relationship with your fantasy realm requires affirmative upkeep.  It means retreating to that mental hideaway often and engaging it willfully and boldly.  If you can accept the fact that you – an individual above the age of six – possess a private realm where anything can happen, then your escapes will be far more fruitful.  And if you do it often, always searching for new subject matter to play with, you will enter your own world more easily. It is also important to keep your cognitive channels open and clear of pollution. There will always be many outside events in your life, and your ability to filter these outside events has great consequences. If you allow doubts, stress and other negativity into your life, they can stop up your lines of communication with your internal world.  A fantasy world, when facilitated properly, is a tool with which to enjoy our lives. It makes up a large part of the sense of freedom we feel.  When we can fully utilize our gift of mental creation, we can revel in the ideas we love most, and ultimately, use those ideas to color our external world as well. 2007-09-03T01:38:00-05:00 http://www.evanbailyn.com/index.php/site/using_time_to_our_advantage/ http://www.evanbailyn.com/index.php/site/using_time_to_our_advantage/#When:16:54:01Z Time is one of the largest ideas we never truly understand.  It is a concept of the same magnitude as space and energy, but unlike them, it cannot be physically witnessed; time is simply something we believe in.  Time is, fundamentally, a change of events.  We recognize time to have passed only when something changes - a person takes a step, a gust of wind blows, our leg itches.  Even the least impactful event, such as the tremor of a hand, is considered a passing of time.  And, by definition, if no event occurs – if no water flows in a river, if no blood circulates in the body – then time has not passed.  But something always seems to happen, and thus time always passes.  Our society teaches us to group these micro-events into clusters, or macro-events, such as meetings, football games, and vacations.  Clock time is the most obvious example of aggregating micro-events into macro-events.  It is easier to say “I went to the mall for three hours” then “I walked 8,000 steps, my heart beat 10,800 times, my retina collected 48,616 visual stimuli,” and so forth.  Yet, although it is clear how convenient these macro-events are for communication, they have caused an adverse effect in our lives as well.  People are apt to make themselves busy, outwardly or inwardly, in order to distract themselves from the true issues they are concerned about.  Although they may not realize it, being busy is just the act of causing many events to occur, and thus causing one’s time to pass quicker. Once we realize that time is merely a succession of micro and macro-events, we can use it to our advantage.  Rather than making many events occur in order to speed up our perception of time, we can make fewer events occur - slowing down time - and giving us a better ability to reflect on and appreciate our lives.  2007-08-29T16:54:01-05:00 http://www.evanbailyn.com/index.php/site/defining_what_is_right/ http://www.evanbailyn.com/index.php/site/defining_what_is_right/#When:02:48:01Z All of us are under some pressure to do what is right, whether from ourselves, our family, or society.  We do our best to stick to the right side of things because we feel immoral doing otherwise.  Yet most of the time, we accept this ambiguous word – “right” – simply because we haven’t really thought about it.  There will never be a shortage of people to opine on what the right behavior is, and yet very rarely do people admit to the subjectiveness of their beliefs.  For many, it only becomes clear that there is no correct point of view when two people they respect have completely opposite opinions.  Even then, one will usually relieve oneself of the discord of not knowing who to believe by taking a side.  All the while, it should be clear that neither side is right: each person is merely stating his own opinion, and the only way to figure out what is right is to ask yourself. 2007-08-09T02:48:01-05:00 http://www.evanbailyn.com/index.php/site/invisibility/ http://www.evanbailyn.com/index.php/site/invisibility/#When:04:01:00Z It is a small fantasy of mine to become invisible.  My desire to be unnoticed usually presents itself when the pressures of life bear down on me so much that I instinctually retreat into my subconscious.  When I feel the need to withdraw from reality, some aspect of the environment I am in becomes my secret hideaway.  If I am in the bathroom washing up, it is down in the shadows between the bottles of moisturizer, shaving cream, and hair gel.  If I am in the park, it is the recess between the roots of a large tree.  It is usually a place that is small, dark, and cozy.  There, I wish I were lying safe, where no one could find me.  My desire to not be found comes from a barely conscious longing to experience the sense of safety I had as a child - to regain the feeling of certain surroundings filling me with comfort and security, as a five year-old who climbs into his parents’ bed after a bad dream.  Somewhere in time we lost the inviolable security we had as children, and I often miss it, and resent that I must now take full care of myself. The inevitability of becoming a noticeable entity that is constantly at the whim of its environment is difficult to accept.  Invisibility tempts me with its promise to provide a complete respite from the worries and fears of the outside world.  While I do value my self-dependence, sometimes it would just feel good to wrap myself in the security of anonymity, and let everyone and everything go.  2007-04-16T04:01:00-05:00 http://www.evanbailyn.com/index.php/site/blocking_out_the_world/ http://www.evanbailyn.com/index.php/site/blocking_out_the_world/#When:04:25:00Z The world is filled with things we cannot control.  We put ourselves out there, aware of the risk that bad things might happen, just to give ourselves the opportunity for good things to happen. We hope for the best and try to avoid the undesirable vagaries of nature.  But when we depend on people, careers, or events in our lives, we are opening ourselves to possibilities we cannot foresee.  Although it is necessary to confront the randomness of the outside world most of the time in order to participate in socialized life, there are moments where we eliminate almost all chance of disappointment and wrap ourselves in the protection of our own mind. Sinking into your subconscious is the subject of one of my other writings; what I emphasize here is specifically facilitating a lack of connection with the outside world.  It requires active thinking to recognize thoughts that are tied to the outside world, since those thoughts are all classified as “normal:” I wonder if my mom is mad at me. I hope I got an ‘A’ on that test. It would be great if I met someone at tonight’s party.  But separating out thoughts that are bound to circumstances you can’t control can be crucial. When things are going well for a day, a week, or a moment, it doesn’t seem necessary to retreat from the outside world.  But when things are going poorly, all you want to do is get away from the source of the negativity.  It is important to know how to do that.  There are already things that are built into your life that are constant and very much under your control.  Use those things to comfort yourself.  Savor them. When I was taking midterms in college, I used to relish the few moments after I got under my bed covers but before I went to sleep.  I often found myself smiling involuntarily the moment my weight sank into the mattress.  Shuffling off the stress of the day and slipping into my own personal world felt incredible.  Even now, I sometimes think to myself how much I enjoy those last conscious moments, and how it’s too bad they’re so close to sleep as to render themselves blurry in my memory. Other ways I block out the world temporarily are through writing, video games, and music.  The last is probably the most common way people temporarily secede from the world.  And in a way, all art is a form of escape – an escape that is so fundamental to human living that every culture from every time period has participated in it.  It is important to vivify your mental alone-time, to recognize and seize upon it.  The respite you’ll receive from blocking out the world once in a while could sweeten your life experience. 2007-03-20T04:25:00-05:00 http://www.evanbailyn.com/index.php/site/the_paradox_of_writing/ http://www.evanbailyn.com/index.php/site/the_paradox_of_writing/#When:02:30:01Z I write for you.  With every sentence I type, I pass my words through a filter of how I think you’ll react.  If your opinion didn’t matter, I wouldn’t be distributing my writing; I would keep to journals, in which I could scribble and dabble and review every few years to see how my identity had evolved.  Or, I wouldn’t write at all.  Yet there is an excitement which I believe all writers feel in the prospect of creating something that translates an emotion so well that it can reach the quick of another person. Still, the very foundation of writing is honesty.  If I were to write solely for other people’s benefit, my work would be inauthentic, noticeably lacking in that glimmer of originality that gives a piece its impact. Therein lies the paradox of writing – remaining true to your feelings within the boundaries of your audience’s tastes.  In life, too, we adapt our behavior to the people and situations we encounter, which is why writing often tells us so much about who we are. Thoughts On Life 2007-01-21T02:30:01-05:00 http://www.evanbailyn.com/index.php/site/narcissism_and_peter_pan_syndrome/ http://www.evanbailyn.com/index.php/site/narcissism_and_peter_pan_syndrome/#When:02:04:00Z A classic characteristic of Peter Pan Syndrome is narcissism.  The truth about Peter Pans is that they are self-absorbed, but not in the negative, uncaring way that narcissism connotes.  They simply feel a dreamy, imaginative comfort inside of their own minds – an attraction to introspection that is positive and well-meaning.  Everyone has some level of self-involvement.  After all, life is constantly impacting us and is impossible to ignore.  We experience emotions, sensations, desires, and the sense of our own mortality.  Although other people play a crucial role in our lives, we cannot possibly relate to them as well as we can to ourselves.  Their feelings cannot resonate in our nerve centers in the same way our feelings can.  Thus, we must dwell on ourselves from time to time.  Peter Pans accept this reality but enjoy it more than most.  They live vicariously through their own lives as if they were the protagonist of a story.  Their relationship with themselves is like a reader’s relationship with a sympathetic narrator.  Yet “narcissisism” with all of its unpleasant connotations continues to be the word of choice for describing Peter Pan Syndrome.  It makes sense that the same people that consider childlike characteristics a “syndrome” would err in their characterization of Peter Pans.  Many of the people who disseminate knowledge in our society - especially psychologists, journalists, and religious leaders - are set on standardizing people’s lives and minds. They have lost touch with the unbridled imaginational freedom of childhood; the very concept that life’s possibilities may be endless stands in stark contrast to their work.  Ultimately, most people do succumb to the prescribed order of things, forgetting what they knew as an idealistic child.  But that is why it is so important to have a subset of people who draw from their own raw, creative energy to remind us of how colorful life really is. Narcissism translated as inspired self-immersion, as it is with Peter Pans, is not only positive, but necessary to our world.  When life seems to have lost its original purpose amongst societal responsibilities, a connection with the vast and limitless mindscape of childhood may be the only antidote. 2006-10-30T02:04:00-05:00 http://www.evanbailyn.com/index.php/site/living_life_consciously/ http://www.evanbailyn.com/index.php/site/living_life_consciously/#When:23:50:00Z Forty years from now, you will nostalgize about today.  You will think back to the present moment, recalling how youth was full of choices and hopefulness.  You will marvel at how blissfully uninformed you were about what the future held in store for you.  The life you live right now will be a distant, golden memory.  Knowing how much you will value these days when you are older, how can you allow yourself to hurry through life?  How can you not realize that every shred of your short existence is valuable?  Each time you notice your days disappearing into an anonymous past, it should become more evident that you need to be living life as consciously as possible.  We all wonder sometimes about the purpose of life; often, we do so because we are searching for a way to justify death.  And yet, the only way to understand death is to fully experience our everyday lives.  Living life consciously involves thoughtful observation – not just of the outside world, but of our inner life.  We should be taking note of our sense of identity at a particular time – our level of confidence, our anxieties, our far-flung wishes.  If we have some record of our state of being at a given point in time, we can observe our personal evolution and ultimately gain some insight into our patterns and purpose.  And yet, as arduous as it may seem to keep track of all of our internal and external events, the feat can be achieved easily if we simply relax our definition of time.  If we can view time as an invention of humans – and therefore not as linear and infinitely-accumulating as it seems in the abstract – we realize that life, and memory, are our collage to paste together however we wish.  All the clues we need to figure out life’s meaning come from examining the collage as a whole and finding patterns of passion, compulsion, and purpose.  Therefore, experience the present vividly as it unfolds.  In an ecstatic moment, allow the chemicals in your brain to percolate.  Taste the pleasure as it pours out.  In a bitter moment, allow the pins of pain to push through you.  Fight the urge to close your eyes.  Imbibe and absorb your emotions as if you were a child experiencing them for the first time.  It is only through active involvement in your life, however exciting or mundane, that you can start to draw conclusions about why you are here.  In the end, this kind of conscious existence will give you far more solace than even the most successful unexamined life.  For only those who have a clear vision of living can accept their passage into the next expanse.  2006-10-08T23:50:00-05:00 http://www.evanbailyn.com/index.php/site/the_problem_with_having_too_many_responsibilities/ http://www.evanbailyn.com/index.php/site/the_problem_with_having_too_many_responsibilities/#When:04:59:01Z Adults lives seem to go by very quickly because of all the chores that distract them from their inner life.  Adults pay taxes, apply for mortgages, climb corporate ladders, and attend superficial social functions.  Their lives are structured, so much so that even their vacations follow a schedule.  And yet, even though taking on responsibilities appears undesirable, adults become dependent on them.  How many working mothers, for instance, embody the cliché of the harried modern parent, simultaneously preparing breakfast for their kids, scheduling a doctor’s appointment, and checking their makeup in the mirror before leaving for work?  Even if they were to rid themselves of all their responsibilities for a day, they would still be unable to relax because of their need to be “busy.” “Busy” itself has become a fashionable word, indicating a dedication to the external world and a loss of touch, at least temporarily, with one’s self.  Because our society can demand a lot from us, and because executives and dedicated working parents have been glorified in the media, it is easy to embrace the stereotype of the “busy person.” Yet more often than not, this persona is a cover-up for a discomfort with self-reflection.  It has become very difficult to be alone with yourself; hence the popularity of mind-dulling drugs.  I cannot excuse this state of affairs as inevitable, saying passive things like “Well, what can you do?  Life happens.” That’s precisely the point: life does happen and it is a sacred thing – it deserves to be remembered.  If you overcommit yourself, the days of your life will fly by you, unexamined and unrecognizable.  It is a basic human instinct to contemplate existence, to dream, and to fantasize.  Yet we are stuck distracting ourselves.  People would be far more content if they devoted more time to self-reflection.  I feel that there are four basic ways to spend time: goal-oriented time spending (work, school, sports, games), emotional immersion (friendship, love), sensory gratification (sex, eating, drugs), and philosophical contemplation.  The last is the rarest, and one of the most valuable ways to occupy yourself, for it centers you around your existence and gets you closer to your connection with birth, life, and the energy that envelopes everything.  I, like everyone else, am in love with the external life – the one that is filled with subjective judgments and fashions, where people win and lose at competitions, where social rituals can lead to ecstasy or extreme disappointment.  Yet I realize its transience.  Those who cannot confront the larger meaning of life are avoiding an essential realization – one that can be frightening if it is avoided for years, and, once recognized, can be a calming and satisfying act in all its wonder and complexity.  So do not overburden yourself, take time to think and be, and realize that getting a lot done won’t necessarily make you feel more content.  The external world is filled with uncertainties – but the internal world, the one that can only be accessed when the mind is quiet, is the only place where you can truly feel at peace. 2006-09-11T04:59:01-05:00