An Introduction and Brief History

Hello. I'm Nicholas. Welcome to my little experiment.

Once upon a time I was more myself. By this I mean that while I had not really come into my own as a whole person, I was developing along the lines shown by my natural strengths and personality. As time went by, though, the world began to wear me down and cause me to mistrust myself and others. Mistakes led not to correcting the way I approach goals but rather to changing my goals to other things entirely - and those new goals were all too often not really what I should be about. I found myself increasingly frustrated with almost every aspect of my life, feeling betrayed by my own choices and too afraid of risk to correct them. Eventually I realized that while I could spiral into long-term misery, I could declare any given moment in time to be the nadir, and work toward reversing the trend.

That's very brief and very vague, but it does describe the downward arc my life has traced for a decade or more. You'll get more detail than you probably want as this journal progresses, but the main thing right now is that I recognize that things have to change, and not to do so is to risk far worse than the dangers of changing. I've become a student open to instruction, and several teachers, just as the old saying promises, have appeared.

The thing that woke me up was the realization that I was barely still myself. I had become this strange, cramped being, trying to shove my personality into a different form, favor strengths I don't have, and ignore my real strengths and passions. Is it any wonder that a continuous, grinding misery followed? I had been on this path for years by the time I realized it. Those teachers validated my hunch that what I was doing was not merely difficult but actually wrong.

I must apologize for the incoherent nature of this opening article. It's strange to talk about these things, and difficult to summarize a very complicated situation with enough detail to actually inform and enough brevity to avoid making it novel-length.

The next step here is to detail the sort of ideal or archetype that is natural to me (as though the blog's title didn't make that clear), and set out the specific goals… and why I refer to this as an experiment. Then I'll piece my way through the various teachings and observations, finding out what works, and which teacher's views are more correct when they disagree.

Here we go…