Cloudscape

After another look at the showcase, I came in. Glancing at the pale golden words "Life Shop" painted on the door, I reminisced on when I first saw them - I was too little then to know what they meant, let alone what secrets I'd find beyond that door. I dared to come in, and since then I'd come back every day for more. I got addicted to its merchandise, so much so that I felt it'd kill me if I didn't get any more for even a single day. There were all sorts of things, and I'm quite sure that even if I'd live to be a hundred years I could never try everything there was.
The shopkeeper was a little strange, though. I'd never actually seen him. And since he never showed himself in the shop, and everything was for free anyway, I do wonder if one could call him the shopkeeper at all. It's just what I call him since, well, I wouldn't know what else I should call him.
"Ah, Eligio!" said a voice from nowhere. "Same as always, El, you know the drill."
"Right. Self-service." I looked around. My eyes skimmed over the thousands of potions in the room. Every potion had another effect. There was joy and hope and fear and love and sadness… I looked longingly at happiness, a potion which was tantalizingly outside my reach on one of the higher shelves: it was too high. Every time I made this objection Eligio laughed and said: "Why, there's ladders!"
I then replied that I was afraid of heights. This made his laugh even more merrily, and he said, "Well, you can remain down here all your life if you want to, but that's not going to get you anywhere. You've been in here often enough to know all the more interesting things are up there."
He pointed and looked up, and I followed suit. It was, indeed, a long, long way up. The strange shop was actually so high that he could not see the roof, and he wondered if there actually was any at all, even though at the outside the shop seemed small. An endless series of ledges and ledges and stairs led up.
Oh, he'd been up there, and actually far higher than most people here cared to go. Every level actually had the same potions, but they were somehow different. At least, they were given the same name. But the "happiness" you could drink at level five was nothing compared to the happiness down at the ground level: richer, warmer, and strangely more complicated. In fact, once I'd drunk the happiness in the higher levels I was quite tired of the happiness at the ground level: it tasted cloying in comparison.
Yes, it's true that I've often fallen down when I climbed higher, and it did make me more cautious about how high I'd go. When he'd find I'd broken nothing, Theo, the shopkeeper, would merely laugh and say that if I fell, it was my own doing. This would make me so angry that I'd fly into a rage. My doing? Couldn't the bastard at least build a safer shop for his customers? To my irritation, as usual he would just laugh at this, and say that this was just a quicker way down for people who wanted it. He'd then ask me how it happened that I'd fallen, and with extreme vexation I'd admit that as usual I'd looked down. He'd told me not to look down, but it wasn't easy when you knew there the only thing that kept you from falling down hundreds of feet were a few inches of floor at your side. Yet I'd found that I would fall only when I did look down. I'd feel my body being sucked into those vertiginous depths as soon as the fear of falling down came over me.
I'd be convinced I'd broken every bone in my body even when I'd go home, but to my surprise, I'd never broken anything at all, at least, except for some vials and potions in the shop.
Strange to say it often felt safer in the dark cellar, and when I'd fall from the higher levels the first thing I'd do would be too rush down into them. There, at least there were safe balusters, and if you'd go down at least you knew you could get up again, at least if you wouldn't get lost in the dark.
And when his accursed shop had just been responsible for another of my falls, there was no way I wanted to hear or see that freak Theo then - or that's how I thought of him then, even though he could be a nice guy, at least, in his own ways. Strange to say, I had never even actually seen him, which had made me make the joke to ask if he wasn't just some kind of cassette player - it was meant as a joke then, but I'd actually wondered for some time if it wasn't close to the truth.
Either how, when he'd just been responsible for another of my frequent falls I liked not to see him for a while, and besides, well, if I may whisper something in your ear, there are actually many, well, noteworthy potions in the cellar, too. But don't tell that to anyone, because most people will think we a psycho to say that. And yet, people keep coming down here and drinking the potions in the racks here. I wonder why. But when I ask why they do it, they just say that they are meant to be here.
But somehow, I find the potions here have something strangely, and perhaps deceptively addictive - like the songs of the Lorelei. Once you'd get down here, you were almost sure to come back someday. Strangely, the potions here were almost always bitter or acrid, or ice-cold or very hot. Sometimes, they would burn in your throat or in your stomach, and more than once I've actually vomited from them. I'd then try to get back up as fast as possible, but then I sometimes realized that wasn't always easy, finding your way back. And there were always those horribly tempting smells of those strange potions. Why ever the shopkeeper held these potions here, I don't know. I asked him, but all he'd say was that there were very many tastes, and he wanted to satisfy everyone's.
It was very dreary here. But above, when you'd look straight up in the shop you'd look into a blinding light like that of the sun. Some supposed there just had to be a very bright lamp there, and others thought it was a window to the sun, and wondered what it would be like on the roof. But I thought there was no roof, and there was no window up there either: I believe the shop was so high that it went all the way up to the sun.
Indeed, once when I'd gone up to the nine-hundred seventy-sixth floor, when I came down, panting all the way, I asked Theo: "Where is the roof of this thing?"
"You know there is no roof, El," he'd say with his usual laugh, "What do you take me for, an ordinary junk shopper? This is a real place, y'know: it goes up into infinity."

I am still wondering. And I wonder if ever in my life I will find answers. I know that there are no certainties and that most of the things we believe to know are just guesses, and with guesses we'll have to do. Am I to guess, then, that consciousness arose from matter or matter from consciousness, or both? Is this a dream or reality, or both?

I can't make sense of this puzzle. But it still seems to me like the only explanation is that, as everything is just how we perceive it to be, everything will also be as we perceive it will be. If there are an infinity of identical universes which each have a different fate, just what determines in which universe we are?

The law of attraction does not seem to make much sense at first: things too often go wrong for us. But the mind is a strange, strange thing. Our subconscious is always stronger than our conscious, as is shown when we try to stop smoking, for instance. Maybe, while our conscious decides one thing, our subconscious has thought of something altogether different. Perhaps it is our subconscious which is the God in each of us, which decides how our lives will be from moment to moment.

Perhaps, deep down inside of each of us there is a writer of our own lives. And writers can give their characters a tough time. Why? After all, people read a book to experience in the place of the characters -- why would they want to go through a tough time in their place?

The answer is, of course, simple. Because that's just part of what makes their adventures appealing. Perhaps if we are in suffering that means we just need suffering.

And perhaps part of us doesn't want to believe that we are the masters in our own game, and thus leave part of what happens in our lives to coincidence. We want things to make sense. It would be very frightening if we could cause reality itself to break down simply with our thoughts.

But it is complicated. And the inner writer within us is hard to understand. Because it understands things we do not. Unlike us, it knows what it is doing, and looks at our own lives from a distance.

See depression as a tunnel: usually it is healed by going back out of the tunnel the way one came in - but one may also heal by going all the way through it. The former may be the case when the person does not fully lose, the latter when he or she has lost all hope. The strange thing is that depression may heal itself: the chronic stress of depression causes a process of desensitization which eventually may cause it to destroy itself.

Depression usually starts with fear or stress. Fear is often still prominent through later stages, but it is usually worse in the beginning. Later, the chronic stress of this fear causes a desensitization, and the person becomes resigned to his situation. At this point fear turns into despair. Despair is actually less distressing than fear, so that the person will often try to remain in despair, leading to unreasonable negativism. This negativism is a subconscious method of the person to blunt his own emotionality further and further, as it makes them stop caring: they give up.
Eventually, if their depression lasts long enough, the person's affect will become even more blunted so that the person feels empty. Emptiness may in itself be quite distressing: it may be compared to feeling as if one can't breathe. If this distress is severe enough, the person may become totally numb so that even the distress about "not feeling anything" (except for feeling that one doesn't feel anything) falls away.
Here the person comes to a crossroads. If his condition is severe enough and he has a diathesis for it, the chronic stress he has suffered may cause the person to become schizoid. However, this is rare; there is a second possibility.
Because the person at this point no longer feels any distress, it may have made place for positive emotions, just as the ice in spring makes place for flowers to grow. At this point the person may heal, and the numbness then turns into a kind of peace: the person is relieved to no longer feel anything, and becomes content with it.

We study the small to control the large.

Yang mostly protects one from negative feelings, Yin mostly increases one positive feelings.