Hello all, my name is Brian, I am a 24 yo CH sufferer of 5 years, member of this board for several months, and I am going through a time of personal reflection, and what I am interested in sharing with you is something of an outlook, a philosophy, what I hope can be a bit of an expose of who I am.  I do not intend to impose my opinions on you, but rather I would like you to get a glimpse through my eyes, that something in my experience may ring true in yours.  I feel that some of you have opened yourself in that way to me (I have read disproportionately more than I have written), so perhaps you may consider it returning a favor.

My commitment to step up to the plate and really deal with my headaches has accompanied (or been accompanied by) a personal revitalization that has given my life new vigor, generally.  This revitalization can be summarized in a phrase, although somewhat cliche: Nobody's going to help you until you first help yourself.  It occurs to me that a true muse, a great friend and guide does not so much show you where to go, as help you get a glimpse of that place inside yourself where you know what you want and you know how to get there.

When I am in touch with that knowledge I am invincible.  Oftentimes love opens that door, and certainly sometimes it is a delusion, but other times love truly does help make you the best you, the you that you want to be (at least a much greater percentage of the time than hate does).  I would guess that many people would quickly conjure a person (or the person) we love as someone who has an uncanny ability to make us feel at home in our selves.

And I think feeling at home in our selves in the greatest mission we humans have, any one of us has before us.  We all wish the best for our family, our friends, our brothers and sisters and church mates and countrymen, but ultimately we are not happy unless we are happy with ourselves.

At least this is the way I feel.  I could spend my life in social work and still not be happy with who I was.  I could love myself on the outside (I am HOT) and still hate my self on the inside.

Mother Theresa was known to have, at times, seriously doubted her faith.  The anxiety that she felt over that of being unsure of the very truth, the very purpose, of her being.  For you Abrahamics out there (Abraham, Jesus, Mohammed), YHVH is this truth, and your prophets have dictated that purpose.

Those who are faithful stay with me, I am respectful and understanding of your views, but for me, the external orientation, the fixed and other-worldly model into which to mold yourself is stifling and uninsightful.  True insight, I believe, comes from within, even if the catalyst for finding and developing that insight may come from without (as muse, prophet, or lover).

By extension, and I hope you will take this leap with me, I believe that the creative force finds its power within.  We are witnessing a time in history when humans have flown to the moon, harnessed the wild power of nuclear energy, and expanded their population hundreds of times over in just a few generations. 

The technology which has allowed for all this is the direct product of human creativity.  Language, religion, mechanics, are all creative applications by humans of the resources afforded them by biology and the organic development of the earth.  The discovery by our early ancestors that two object rubbed together produces heat, and that woods and grasses, when induced to produced enough of that heat, would turn to flame, was surely the result of a long chain of insights, which collected over a probably vast period of time amounted to a man-made creative technological revolution akin to God's own creative process.

Of course, man has not discovered how to create matter out of non-matter.  But nonetheless there is something magical about the discovery of a new riff, or the creation of a poem that seems to me to say something I already knew, but had never heard, in a way I would have never thought of.

When I create, spontaneously, without regard to fitting some external ideal, I know that I am expressing my own true, organic insight.  This is how experiential therapies (art, music, expressive) work.  I know that the light and the truth is within my very self, expressed exclusively through my personal creative expression of my insight (I like writing best).

When I realized that I was the creative force in my life, I discovered that I am my own best friend, my own motivator and my own savior.  My spiritual belief is that true insight, expressed through creative force, runs the same through each and every conscious being, stronger in some than in others, and even remedial but developing in inanimate things.  This I suppose does leave room for a possible "higher power" a being or perhaps race of beings omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, all powerful in one or many respects.

The path of human creativity, the precise manner in which up until now we have manipulated the external world I do not believe was in any way organically predetermined.  Certainly there are many more ways to manipulate matter here on earth, like with alternative energy sources, etc., utilizing technologies not yet fully developed or event manufactured or tested.

The point being, we are Creators.  The social and technological realities in which we lived have been generated through our utilization of insights, of which I assure you there are many, many more to be made, and thus, many, many more realities to be explored.

See next installments for full circle