The Big Nothing

If I could be free of familial obligation I feel that I would have the same sensation as someone who has mastered an addiction. If I could contentedly go through my life knowing that I would never bend to the will or whim of my parents, so much of my time and energy would be free that I would surely rise like a phoenix from the ashes.
Damn them for giving me life then exercising all of their energies towards the end of subverting that life to their own wishes and desires. Damn them for seeing me only as  an uncooperative place holder in the symbolic order. Category: daughter, type A, first born.
Damn them for assuming that my existence is about them. Example: If I am not there it is to make them sad, depressed. Damn them for making me responsible for their emotional state. If I were to have continued to do the same I would have been dead long ago, suicide note reading:
“I have tried my best. Nothing I can do is good enough for you. Why must love be contingent upon approval?”
I ran away once and got no further than Lakeland Village.
Later I got as far as San Francisco and it might as well have been Mars. I felt happy and free. More myself than I had ever been permitted to be. Love and Will were more important than material things and these in true form could never be subject to approval.
But several times a year I must be dragged back into the underworld, into the land of the dead. Because while they lacked the ability to think of my happiness before their own, I did not. I would go and try to give them the pretty picture. I would not say any of what I really thought to them. I would let their hurtful words and way of being wash over me and not struggle against it. My mantra was “I am a duck.” I had the promise of  leaving their presence to get me through these visits.
But each visit was as toxic as a nuclear blast. Before and after I was sick. During I would almost die.
And at last my connection to them was tenuous at the most. The stronger I became the less reason could be seen to consent to participate in their play. The only reason as always was, “to not hurt them.”
But these miserable people were endlessly hurting and always the blame would lie somewhere other than within their own disturbed psyches,  rooted somewhere other than in their many poor choices, somewhere other than in their own utter lack of illumination.
If I were to tell them the truth would it be kind or cruel?
Kind or cruel?
Kind or cruel?
That for me, the interaction is corrosive, futile, unnecessary and harmful to all that I strive for.
If they cared for me as an objective entity at all, they would leave me alone and seek their happiness elsewhere. They would not make me come back, they would not force me to take the communion of pain and eat of the flesh of  their woe and drink of the deep back blood of their despair.
They force it, but I could say no. I could make a clean break if I told them the brutal truth.
Kind or cruel?
I keep trying to give them what they say they want. I keep trying to be good for the BIG OTHER, the eye in the sky that is watching over my deeds.
And yet I want nothing more than to flip them all the bird, Ma. Pa, and Jesus too. I want to set the world on fire.
I keep turning the other cheek, good lamb, but within me a wolf is growling. The real in me begs to be freed of all the empty gestures that supply the emptiness the symbolic order demands, the emptiness my parents crave, the big nothing they have sown.

Fear In The Desert

There is water in the desert of despair, dirty mucky water, just enough of it to make leaving look harder than staying.
You see that water warming under the merciless sun and you tell yourself that one place is as good as another, that someday your dreams will come true, but until then you can rest here.
You may huddle under the shade of a Texas umbrella tree dropping poisonous gold berries into the powdery dust that covers its roots while you wait for your ship to come in.
Waiting, a broken robot that knows that it is damaged but can’t see that the damage prevents it from making the choices that might lead to repairs.
Your brokenness informs your decision to remain in the desert. It demands that you wait for a ship. A ship in the desert. You watch videos of rolling waves crashing upon distant shores and you wait for it to come in.
You are actually afraid of a positive outcome.
You are afraid that the world will not come crashing to an end within a year, that the government isn’t plotting against its citizens, that there are no sinister forces at work around you.
You are afraid of discovering a paradise beyond the desert, you are afraid of discovering that you could make repairs to your damaged operating system if you were willing to confront your self by acknowledging that you are the only one who can make the decision to leave the desert.
You fear the terrible responsibility.

Recognition

I saw your face again today for the very first time in a long while. Your eyes sparkled like diamonds.
When we looked at each other it was as if there were nothing separating us, we could see each other, and we each knew the other was seeing us back. It hasn’t been quite like that for a very long time. Not quite like that.
It reminded me of a night in a distant dream where you came and sat on the couch in my living room while my lover was out. You came and sat there on that maroon sued couch not far from a life size painting of Pan that my lover had commissioned months ago.
I saw you and I said:
“It’s over now.”
And you looked at me, perhaps coyly, smiling while the rest of your face and body seemed passive, immobile. You asked me what I meant.
“Seeing you sitting here. It’s like you’ve come to claim me. My life is over.”
You were pleased, because it was true. I was frightened, but you told me not to be afraid.
We left that dream together and entered another and here we have been.
This has happened many times between us, in many different dreams. You arrive and I go with you. Whatever dream I have been living, when you come, it is a pale mirage in comparison to your stark presence.
My lovers, my families, my hopes, my wishes, my plans, my hobbies, my friends, my accomplishments, my shortcomings, my possessions, I leave them and we go on.
You have led me out of the nightmare dimensions in this way, you are still leading me from them in this way. We are at this moment, in the darkest chamber of existence and in the brightest and in every place between, and in all of them, I am seeing you and you are seeing me and we each are aware of this rare experience of recognition.

Crown

One day I finally decided to do it, to actually do it.
I created an altar on the east wall of my room, the one wall with the least amount of junk scattered on the floor in front of it. On this altar I placed photographs of myself, a sequence of images progressing slowly from infancy to adulthood. At the center of the altar I placed a photograph of my father. I made something like a throne for this picture to rest on, some thick books covered by a piece of red cloth and a couple of small figurines to guard it. It was enough like a throne that I could see it as a throne and that was enough for me.
When the altar was ready, I lit candles and incense. The room got thick with smoke and strong scents from distant lands I had never visited. Then I sat in front of my altar to stare at what I had created. It would have been easy to overlook that step. But I didn’t. This was the time when I would finally do it. I couldn’t jump over any step.

Drip drop went the secretions of certain glands that helped me to modify my view of reality.
Drip drop.
REALITY.
The Real.
That is what we were searching for, isn’t it? Some of us, not all of us. Sometimes, not all the time.
It was important then to understand that not everyone wanted to discover the Real. Some did seek it out, but when they found it they recoiled in terror and sincerely hoped that they would never have to see it again. Some said that they wanted it but they really wanted other things, private pleasures that would never be disclosed in public. I had to understand this. I had to remember it.

In those days I had come to understand that I was a robot. (It may seem obvious to you now, but it was a great shock to me when I first saw it. Don’t forget how different things were back then. None of what we know now was so clear, it was all kind of fuzzy, like looking at a vast landscape through piece of cellophane wrapped around your head.)
I was some kind of bio mechanical doll. I was made of meat and not metal but I was still a robot. A sophisticated meat doll. That was all I was. Nothing more, nothing less.
All that I liked, all that I disliked, all that I believed and disbelieved, all that I wanted and all that I feared, these things were not ME, even if they seemed like it. They might have seemed to come from me, but they didn’t. They had all come from somewhere else.
These things were programs that I ran, within my wet circuitry of coils of bloody guts. Or rather I should say that these were programs that ran me. I was merely a strange unconscious puppet in their hands, an empty receptacle for their various microscopic products.
I had no hand in creating or choosing all these programs. It was strange circuitous process that occurred long before I knew what was happening, or that anything was happening at all. Most of it was quite accidental. Accidental programming. It just happened. In my case, it happened to me. You understand? So it seemed natural, eminently natural, so it seemed real, so it seemed normal, so it seemed as the way things should be. What else could they be? This was me and everything around me fit perfectly with me. Almost everything, I should say. Almost everything.

Strawberries were good, black licorice was bad. Men with facial hair made me wet, so wet that the juice ran down my thighs and made it hard for me to sit still. When the sun was shining, I was happy and because I was happy, I twisted my face into a kind of frozen grimace that I called a smile. Cats were better than dogs. It was never okay to steal. It was okay to lie sometimes but only in particular situations. Killing was okay but only when you were threatened. Christians were good and Muslims were bad. I had to sleep in a bed or I wouldn’t feel right in the morning. The bed had to have sheets and blankets, all of certain colors. I had to make a certain amount of money a year. I had to have a car to drive so I could go places, places where there were other people like me.
All of these things were arbitrary. I didn’t know it then but it was still true. None of these programs represented anything that was objectively true. It was just things that were said and they got repeated. Linguistic viruses that came into me when someone spoke too loud too close to me, when my senses were wide open and vulnerable. They were a kind of sonic self reproductive demons that inhabited my shivering temple of wet and tender walls, strange non physical half living creatures that swayed me to do this or that, pushed me to do things in a way that complied with their secret directives.

So I made a crown. I knew it couldn’t be too simple, it shouldn’t be. Some effort had to go into its construction. But I also couldn’t make it too elaborate. If I made it too difficult I would never finish it and it was of utmost importance that I should finish.
I knew it had to fit upon my head. That was most crucial. I made it out of twine and placed some leaves and flowers all along the perimeter. I was very pleased with my work.
I placed the crown and a robe on the simple little altar I had made earlier. I placed it all before my father’s throne. It seemed as if he was looking down at it but it was really just a photograph. Still, it really did seem like he was looking. Looking down. At me.
The robe was an old terrycloth bathrobe, light green in color, nothing that special really. Not until I made it special. And then it was. It truly was.

Everyone around me was the same. This took some time for me to recognize. For so long I had assumed that everyone else was different, that they actually knew what they were doing and why they were doing it. It took me a while to accept that they knew as much as I did, maybe a little less since they couldn’t look directly into their own robotic nature, since they still believed they made decisions on their own, since they still believed they were unique and capable of deciding their own course in life.
The fact was that we simply collided our way through an accidental obstacle course that we called existence. We bounced off of each other like bumper cars. It became clear that they were all the same, Hebrews, Romans, or Barbarians. In fact, I had lost track of what had once distinguished them from each other. Suddenly they all seemed the same to me. Not in a good way, either.
One genetic trait was not better than another. Some things made a particular genetic line of robots live longer. That in itself was not “good”. The entire perpetuation of the species was neither good nor bad. It was simply a thing to watch happening, like the firecrackers on the fourth of July or black birds flying in a flock over a calm lake in summertime.
Survival was all that mattered to them, to us. The survival of the meat bots. All the meat bots like me. We thought we were superior to every other thing that bopped around on this planet. We thought we were the best.
Somehow, what we thought to explain our own presence here, was what made us better. One thought justified another in a circle that we were never inclined to unwind or examine closely.
We were somehow better than dogs because when we fucked, we would do it within the bounds of holy matrimony and we would then produce children to please GOD. GOD, which was itself a construct of our bewildered and imaginative minds which we molded into our own image. GOD, mad scientist, creator of broken robots out of old discarded parts.
We were better because we could see the difference between right and wrong. And we got to decide what was right and wrong based on what was best for us. And we were told what was best for us before we even knew what was being said to us. So we decided nothing. Nothing at all.
An accidental obstacle course and nothing else. It was hard to see it back then. But you have to understand, we didn’t know hardly anything.

When everything was prepared and the scene was set, I bowed to the four directions and crossed my heart, just as I had learned so long ago, back when I had thought I knew so much.
I approached the altar carefully, almost with weariness. In a loud and clear voice, I said:
"I have come to bear the burden"
I said it two more times slowly and carefully. The sound of my voice echoed through the room and came back to me thicker and stronger than I would have imagined it.

We were machines run by programs created by unnamed authors, long lost biological hackers who had maybe succumbed to their own devious traps.
We were ruled by Accident, Chaos, Chance. Our main directive, our only real wish was to survive at any cost. Everything else was secondary. No matter what we said, no matter what we believed.
That is all we were, all we were, all we were. But we didn’t know it. We didn’t want to know it.
Now you understand, just like you do. It wasn’t easy to see through it, through the great charade, the great game. It wasn’t easy for me, it wasn’t easy for anyone. Nobody starts out with a taste for silence. It’s an acquired taste. Something to be developed.

I removed my father’s photograph from the throne and placed it face down on the carpet. I then replaced it with one of my own. My photograph up there on the throne looking down at me just like my father had been doing before. I put on the robe that I had chosen and I placed the crown upon my head. I placed it slowly, suddenly aware of what I was doing, suddenly curious, suddenly afraid.
I extended my arms to both sides palms facing upward. Then I brought them together over my heart in a prayer position, palms together, fingers pointing upwards.
I looked at myself on the throne. I looked at myself and my self looked back. I recognized myself. I recognized my self. There. On the throne. I had come to bear the burden. It was time to take my rightful place. It was time to leave the charade behind. It was time to know.

Thoughtfully, Beautifully

The problem is the music putting ideas into their heads, words not their own running in lines like trains along tracks, tracks all forged in the simple melodies of these songs. All of my thoughts have been cooked out of my head, my senses dulled by the sun blazing on and on. The people made in the music and baked in the sun lay around wondering vaguely how they came to be at the bottom of the valley. Dressing their dogs up and wearing the least possible amount of clothing themselves, these Southern Californians run on iced coffee and sex. These are the two lures that get them to race through the course like lanky long faced gray hounds after the rabbit. Is there a story in there somewhere? Or is it only a poem? A verse in the song that makes us, an incoherent stream of experience, one line of code, pure data in the form of color and sound. The sweet bitter taste of coffee and cinnamon, the scent of vanilla body wash rising from heated skin bronzing under the solar disc rolling overhead, Apollo driving his chariot over water and earth without compromise.
Why don’t we all sit together and make our own song? After all, we’ll all soon be bones or ash and it won’t matter where the broom was or who opened the window while the air conditioner was running. Such resentment because life hasn’t been made thoughtfully, beautifully, but has rather happened to us when we should have happened to it. A sword slicing through a piece of blue sky like a knife through lemon meringue pie, purposeful, unrelenting like the tap, tap, of a wood peckers bill into the trunk of a tree. Bit by bit, measure by measure, taken in careful steps laden with the intent to savor and cherish. That was the way to do it, but we schlepped through it, clinging to vague ideas, promises regarding tomorrow and other distant futures that could never arrive because the first steps would never be taken and someone else would be blamed for the inaction.
What is missing is not a something that can be held in sweaty hands. All we will ever need, the most glorious thing we could ever obtain is already here and we are closed to it, blind to the wealth that is real and irrevocable; this liberty that is mind, this river that is love and never ceases to flow.
The problem is the music putting ideas into their heads, words not their own, words that tell us what should be, what could be, but never what is. Where is the rejoicing? The explosion of self that is being all that I am in this moment with lungs and heart and brain pouring pure poetry and hands that can do. It is our hands that give us some unusual potential as makers. But what good are makers that take no action, that never make?
Creators that do not create are something else, listening to the lyric that someone else wrote as if it were absolute, this reality the only reality. These are consumers, the walking dead, with tiny dogs in purses and the urge to create subverted so that all they really need to get by is a jar of Vaseline and a stack of pornographic magazines, and ideally some one to stick it into or to take it from, words not their own running in lines like trains along tracks, senses dulled by the sun blazing on and on.
Whatever happened to the darkness, the womb where things are allowed to gestate and come to fruition? There is no room for creation in the endless prying light. All things skim by on the surface, racing towards the future on the tracks forged in the simple melodies of this popular song. When will we all meet in the darkness, within the depths below? Shall we really wait until there is nothing left of us but bone or ash? Is it then not too late to last and love? To persist and adore? Is it then not too late to sing our own song, to use our hands for something more challenging than instant gratification?
That song, the resentment in that voice, the sad helplessness of flesh trapped within the life unlived, sagging with age, the bitter threat to run away once again. Time runs out. All songs happen through time, all songs begin and end. It is the little flourishes in between that count the most.
Did we make it ours? Live up to our deepest nature as makers? Or did we let it rush by on those rails that were supplied by the manufacturer, let it rush by only to make bone and ash, bitter sweet taste of coffee and cinnamon, blue sky un-sliced?
It should have been made thoughtfully, beautifully, and without compromise. It should have been made in the dark. It should have been our own.

Run As Fast As You Can

As fast as you can, run. Feet pounding against hard dry earth, then the sound of brittle dry grass and wild oats and wheat folding under foot. A frantic rustling sound, like the tearing of sheets of paper, run. The trees conspiring to make shade in a place accustomed to the tortures of the sun…slender young things, rebels in a desert. The white church with its friendly face and the weirdness tucked tight within, worshipers down on their hands and knees, new initiates stripped to their undergarments to be absolved of sin before their brethren’s eyes. Stripped of sin, of the mortal sin all begun with a bite into a crisp apple, sin originating from a resounding “crunch". See it in the jagged yellow action bubble.
Suddenly Eve beholds her nakedness. So now they take off their clothes in the basement of the church. But you don’t have to, you don’t have to go there. You can run. Run away from your parents and your teachers and the preacher and the neighbors. You can get away with strong young legs, but it’s not the strength of the body that they have restricted. It is the strength of the will. You are their slave. A sad host for their disease.
The trailers, the custom homes sprawled like mansions in a no man’s land, rest side by side, crowning hills and nestling within valleys. The woman with the high heels is coming, asking again if we’ll come help her with some work at her house. Smart gray knee length skirt and jacket, red lipstick, mahogany locks shining in the sun.
Everything looks just right. A fine outstanding citizen. We go, because we can no longer refuse and be considered polite, good neighbors, fine young people. Later, we can’t remember what happened at her house. We’re not even sure that we went.
Run, as fast as you can, run. The face of the house white as the church, charming green trim and the stairway around back that leads to another basement…
Smooth sun tanned arms and legs and freckled cheeks, walking through the fields, resting under the little trees. Scent of hot asphalt when we cross the only paved street in town for ice cream or magazines and bubble gum. Clouds of dust stirred up by our discolored sneakers as we race home along the dirt roads. Bigger clouds made by the tires of pick up trucks rattling along.
When we were younger we waved. Now sometimes we hear them coming and dive into the seas of tall grass. A refuge from all of their expectations. Lady bugs crawling up long stalks and other insects we haven’t named, pale green and yellow or black and red, also down here hiding.
The woman with the high heels smiling at us again in front of the white church. Won’t we come again? She always asks when others are present, ashen adults who admire her color, her charm. If we refuse they will frown at us. We are encouraged to go.
No!
We scream silently, hearts thundering, adrenaline rushing. Not even we know why, but we feel it from head to toe, a throbbing urge to run, as fast as we can. But with their eyes on us we can’t. We can only submit and walk back to her house, to the place we can only half remember. Back to the green sofa and tumblers of ice tea, the part we’re allowed to remember, the part that comes before the concrete steps and the cool darkness of the basement.
It comes bubbling up only in flashes, half remembered scenes that step beyond reason. Discordant images quickly pushed back into the depths, too incongruent with the shiny platitude of the surface. It is too late to act on the impulse to flee, but we do it anyway, with our minds, because it is too late for our bodies. As fast as you can, run, skimming over the top like flat stones over a pond’s mirror finish.

The Three Directives

There are three directives which move a human being into action. These are “need”, “desire”, and “will”.
Need is the most basic and primordial mover. The human machine needs food, needs water, needs warmth, needs affection, needs to excrete waste. Once a need has been met there is a sense of concrete satisfaction that sets in until the need arises again according to the physical cycles of the human machine. Needs can be met.
Desires are a trickier monster. They arise when needs have been transformed through the symbolic structure. For example, thirst is a real need for the human machine so an advertisement for a clothing line might depict a well dressed man and a woman drinking from glasses. A human machine that sees the ad will unwittingly transform the need to drink into a desire for a dress or pair of slacks. The trouble is, that while drinking a glass of water will quench thirst, buying a pair of slacks will not. Satisfaction will be denied.
Desires can never lead to satisfaction because they are born of the symbolic realm and not of the real. This is true of any desire, it is what distinguishes desire from need. It is an endless circle, a wheel fit for a hamster. The pursuit of desires can never yield fulfillment. This is not because there is something fundamentally evil about desire. It is because desire is a need that has been disfigured by language and made abstract. You cannot eat, drink, or hug an abstract.
A young gorilla needs something to love in order for its life to continue. This need can be met by a kitten or a doll or a fury blanket tied to a post, as long as the gorilla can touch it, the need is met. The same is true of human animals. You don’t need a porn star to hug. You could give a squeeze to a warty old hag to meet the need. You desire a porn star, a picture from a magazine, but even if you meet a live porn model, she will never be exactly the same as the picture from the magazine. She may meet some of your needs, but she can never quench your desires, those will go ungratified into eternity.
Will stands in a category all of its own. It does not arise from the machinations of the human, physical or linguistic. It is neither a need nor a desire. It comes from elsewhere. It is infinitely more difficult to act on will than it is to respond to a need or a desire. Will often conflicts with the needs and desires of the human biological machine.
With both needs and desires occupying the attention and energy of the machine, it can be almost impossible to heed the strange call of the will. Desires are particularly an obstacle. While the human machine has a limited number of needs which have to be met repeatedly, the ghostly world of desire is as unlimited as it is insatiable. The desires will breed more desires and will come to occupy all the space of the mind, demanding that one thing or another be pursued until the will is nearly buried in an avalanche of desires.
Desires will propagate on their own without any effort being made on the part of the human machine, but the true will, if it is denied attention and left unused, will wither like an atrophied limb. Efforts must be made to invoke and support the will, efforts which may seem most unpleasant to the machine because those efforts will be of no direct benefit to it.

Exchange

The banks take your money. They really take it, they don’t just hold it for you, they help themselves; $20 dollars here and another 20 dollars there and a dollar fifty here and here and here. Not so much, but it adds up over time. And what do you get? You get to feel human, like an outstanding citizen. You get to have little pieces of paper with your name on them to shuffle around and around and you can use a highlighter pen in electric yellow to circle random sums. You get more little pieces of paper to exchange as legal tender, you get green paper and paper in a fancy book and you can have pictures of Garfield or Mickey Mouse or dolphins copulating printed in the background while in the foreground it says PAY TO THE ORDER OF_________ You get plastic too. Mmmmmm…plastic. That means shoes and lipstick and hot donuts and shiny cars and fancy electronic gadgets that can play movies or music or accept a collect call from your mother. FANTASTIC! You can borrow money from the bank. The bank will gladly loan you money and then collect interest, which is perfectly fair. Sometimes though, when it comes to plastic, they will slowly charge you more and more interest on the amount you owe, and if you haven’t been shuffling through your papers you may not realize this is happening, and soon your card is over the limit in bank fees, Eeee Gads! It might have been better to wait until next month to pay for that pair of shoes with cash, hard cold green papers, the ones you get after a day of sweaty labor. You don’t labor? Oh, I see, you work in an office and never even see cash. Your pay is electronically deposited into your bank account and then you get by swiping your debit card, here, there, everywhere! They have made life so easy, haven’t they? The power that passes from your employer to you to your favorite pizzeria is all transferred in the form of numbers, data exchanged digitally. You function like a straw. You toil for one corporation that transfers numbers to you and a myriad of other corporations siphons those numbers away so that you never have to handle any cold hard cash. The bank handles your vital resources for you and skims a little off the top for itself. That is only fair. They should know. They made it that way.

Intelligence

It is hysterical to me that conversations about intelligence can be had with a straight face. There is an abyss there, a place that exist beyond our own human-centric notions and needs, and somehow we are completely blind to it. We run around on a plateau with our eyes shut. One day we will drop over the edge and that will be that. That is what comes of running around blindfolded on a plateau, it’s like a game of Russian roulette, you can be okay for a maximum of five rounds before oblivion snakes its hand around your ankles and pulls you into the darkness. We are only just barely beginning to understand the workings of the human mind, and even in these studies, there is little hope of finding an objective truth. The assumptions that are made at the beginning of any undertaking have direct bearing on the results that such an undertaking will yield. The beginning is also the end.
Where we start determines where we will end. And we as human beings begin all undertakings from the point of view of a human being: can we eat it, can we wear it, can we fuck it, will it cause us to experience emotional well being, or a more comfortable material existence? Will it perpetuate the species, or advance our treasured ideals? We are only interested in ourselves. We assume that we are the crown of creation, the best direction that evolution could have taken.
And what if this is not the only world in which life thrives? What if this is just one direction that evolution may take when restrained within a certain set of conditions? Not the best, or the most unique, or the most special, just one of many?
So much of what we think is colored by the idea that there was a supreme maker and that we were the best that he could do. Let’s suppose that we accept that our ideas about a supreme maker are all egotistical fancies, stories that any schizophrenic would tell themselves, or any available listener, to justify that alluring suspicion that they are special. We want to be special. We have created a mythos or two to give credence to our specialness.
Each individual human wants to be the best, the most adored, and these desires that color our most personal impressions of the world around us also worm their way into the expressions of the collective. The village, the state, the nation, the race, the species….mine must be the best. My existence is justified by my righteousness, my righteousness is justified by the existence of a creator whose existence is implied by my own. Everything that I come up with that originates from my humanity ends with my humanity. It is an endless feedback loop.
It is hell.
It is life as a human animal.
We may ask: what is intelligence?
In the case of humans, Intelligence is a process of evaluating information based on currency and relevance to the human intelligence rather than on detail or accuracy. Our intelligence is self centered, self serving. Our intelligence is the ability to comprehend; to understand and profit from experience. We are all about profiting ourselves.
But suppose that we are just one direction that evolution may take under certain conditions. Suppose that different conditions dictate different forms of intelligent life. The values that arise from that other evolutionary process would be different from our own. What is important and useful in material, and intellectual and even emotional terms, to one system is not shared by all systems.
Sometimes the interaction between a pair of intelligent systems is profitable for both systems. Sometimes it can profit only one and not the other, and at other times it may be neither harmful nor beneficial to either system. Not in any obvious way. Given that situation, how then would we measure intelligence? How would we define it?

I Can See Clearly Now

I can see it now very clearly. Something inside me has shifted around making this view possible, and now it would be very difficult to reverse this particular perception. (Or would it?)
I look at the posters spread over the tile walls of the noisy cafeteria, gaze outward at the careful arrangement of certain products at the registers of the department store. My eyes take in the moving reminders of an impending holiday, blue rabbits in orange helicopters to remind me that I need to buy jelly beans, lots of multicolored jelly beans and little plastic eggs in neon colors to stuff them in. It all enters my system, impulses transmitted by my retina to my central nervous system to be processed by my brain with lightening speed and alarming simplicity of purpose.
I see all of the things that they want me to see. I want all of the things that they want me to want, but I can see them too, the master puppeteers behind the artificial need. The shelves of gum and three dollar toys and lip gloss and tissue and gift cards, all take on a sinister hue.
I recall a video preserved in the Prelinger Archives entitled Why We Respect The Law. It teaches that respect for the law is the foundation of democracy and freedom. That movie, like these carefully arranged dangling posters, are made to mold us into an obedient and easy to manipulate shape.
I can see THEM hunched around smoky tables, grinning through sharpened teeth, THEY make the laws, not for themselves, but for us. The laws are there so that they can break them and take whatever they want from us while we behave as we’ve been trained to behave. They pour a dose of “respect the law” and “be a good neighbor” and “upright citizen” down our throats so that they can take advantage of that conditioned response which they have cultivated in the consumer, in the good human being.
Everything that I am is as artificial as my beverage. The particular arrangement of the many programs my system runs may be slightly unique, as unique as the results of various tie died experiments, but despite the arrangement, the programs, the basic colors that make me, were made by others, inadvertently, others very intentionally.
So I sit and I sip and I know that everything that attracts me, everything that repels me, does so for superficial reasons. There are so many different “me's" forming unions and corporations to compete for dominance over my apparent form, and no one of these identities or coalitions of identities can claim that it is the one true “me”. Right and wrong, good and bad, what I want, what makes me happy, what I hate, what I love, these notions are all nothing, sawdust in the mouth, a sign that I am a marionette.
I see this and I ask, which one is the one that I want to make the center? Which “me” should be the ring leader, and how is it any less superficial than all the others? It is just another choice over which various impulses will negotiate and the most skillful negotiator will win.
Then I will say that there is a reason that I am what I am and do what I do, but all of these things are determined in the same way that it is determined which dog at the foot of the table will get the bone, and some nights one dog is hungrier and quicker than the rest and on other nights it’s a different dog. I see it and I finish my sweet syrupy beverage and go out into the cold windy afternoon, beyond the glass doors and theft detecting sensors and security guards dressed in authoritative navy blue.

Language 5: The Law
Cargado por sev2005

Run Mousey Run

How dare they? How dare they take the magick away, to steal it from us like cats stealing the breath from babies? Dark thieves that come to us and civilize us, closing doors, choosing for us, severing us from the magickal kingdom, the vibrant corridors. I know there are doors. I know they are there, even if they have been hidden from my view, blinded as I am by the words for things, the words that decide which things are and which thing aren’t, which experiences are real, which are imagined. How dare they to tell me how I should be. How dare they to cripple me, stripping from me true sight with the way of the word.
They do it because it was done to them and it was done to those who did it to them, and so they perpetuate it. They make the human being a prison, a dark cell cut off from the magick and wonder of the universe. The word is the dark magick that holds us spellbound within our cold bleak cell. How dare they to be such cowards, accessories to the crime if not the perpetuators of the great lie.
I could cry sun black tears leaving purple stains on my cheeks. I am filled with rage and sorrow that I have been taken into their ranks, into the ranks of the dark army. They recruit us when we are children. Now I have been both recruit and recruiter, and my sorrow is all the deeper for that fact.
The things that we have done without knowing what we were doing. Because it was tradition, because it was part of our culture. It was our parents’ way, and their parents before them. Because we come from a long line of slaves. So when will we stand up and break the chains that bind us up and hold us as separate from the strange leaky wet universe without.
We are holed up in here because we are afraid of what lies without. We are afraid of what lies beyond those doors which we have been trained not to see. Like rats running through a maze, we run for the reward, for the cheese, and the cheese makes us want more cheese, and we grow tamer and more and more accustomed to the usual route, so that we do not even notice the passages that lead in other directions, passages that do not lead to the cheese which we are accustomed to, passages that lead away from the familiar, the known.
Run, run on those little legs, run away from the great snake winding its away around the pedestal upon which the world is founded. Run little mouse lest ye be swallowed by the serpent. Let the white coats poke you with their needles, cage you in your cell, and set you in your maze to run for the cheese.
The cheese is good. The cheese is the best thing that you have in this world. And you do not know what the worlds beyond this one would be like. Perhaps there is nothing better than the cheese. Perhaps the other worlds are worse than this. Perhaps. Or perhaps you have been domesticated. Your likes, your dislikes, they have been cultivated in the lab. Wild things don’t like cheese. They run through dark corridors that lead out into the wild wood where the wind blows and the winter comes and the fox and the snake and the peregrine look for you.
Something else happens to the wild, something that cannot be told. Something that can never be understood by or communicated to domestic animals. The wild are possessed by a dark strange something that makes them tingle. The wild are alive, and the domestic are dead, and the domestic fear the life that courses through the wild.
I am domestic and I am wild and the two make war within me, one host of voices screaming for freedom, the other host begging for safety and me in the middle, scarcely able to move in a consistent direction, torn as I am between the many, many voices that cry out in every moment.
But the fact remains. There are doors. There is one right now, waiting for you to acknowledge it, to extend your hand and turn its key and step into the beyond, if only for a moment you can master your habit of running, of running for the cheese and from the wild wood.
Yes, everything that you think you are, you think with the mind they made for you, made for you with the shape of their maze, with their rewards and their punishments. Your parents, your teachers, your politicians and preachers, your friends, your siblings, your neighbors, your lovers, your reporters, your doctors, your favorite movies, TV, and radio shows; the white coats with their needles. Everything that you think is founded on the omission of certain subtle realities. Everything you strive for is a quest suggested to you by the appropriate stimulus.
What are you mousey? Are you a mousey at all? Or are you a string of chemical instructions? Are you a body of habits?
A body of habits.
A body of habits.
A collection of conditioned responses. The bell rings. I am hungry. I am hungry and I run and you run and we run blind down the dark alleys of the world, and the white coats are there, but we do not see them either. We do not see them or the doors. We see nothing and we hope only for cheese. As if filling ourselves with it would somehow make us feel better. But there is no way to feel better when you are dead. No way to pursue true happiness when you are domestic. Why do you pursue those things that the others are doing, that the others have always done, falling in line with tradition? Why preserve their culture, the culture of death? The culture of cowardice and gluttony?
There will never be enough cheese to fill you and you will meet the hunter one day. Maybe not in the shape of a serpent, but in some shape you two will meet.
So why run? Why run at all?
Why not open a door, step out, feel the wind ruffle your fur and meet that other with it’s gleaming yellow eye. How good can cheese be if you are its slave, the slave of the maze and its makers?

Delirious Couture

Do try not to be any trouble, won’t you. The night dresses at Juicy Couture advise that good girls like to sleep, and so they shall, swaddled in their sweat shop fashioned cotton couture lying atop a mountain of soft fluffy pink sheep (also fabricated for a nickel a piece in some god awful plant in the People’s Republic of China). Across the street from the Juicy Couture you can shop for silverware in a place called Christ Awful, well actually I believe it is spelled Christophel, however the pronunciation is almost the same, and anyway, if you weren’t born with a silver spoon sticking out of your mouth you can do what a good citizen should do and take the train downtown, or walk or ride a Vespa and use a MasterCard to buy your own Christ Awful silver spoon so that you can mimic the monarchy like a good little ape.
Please note that I have not compared you to a monkey, as monkeys have long curly tales and you most probably do not have a long curly tale and are therefore an ape rather than a cute squirrelly little monkey with a pointy toothed grin and an overwhelming desire to bedevil all less agile creatures which cross your path. No, you are an ape, which is content if the keeper puts a diaper on you so that you wont crap on the concrete, and provides you with a shiny red trike to ride around on, and maybe once in a while dresses you up in a tutu, bonnet, and make up and has you wait in the window of a burning prop building so that a clown can rush up a ladder to rescue you while a man with hairy elbows, done up like a woman in grease paint, a wig, and a sequined gown, points to you and shrieks: "My baby! Help! Somebody save my baby!" and if you are cooperative you get all the bananas you should like later, and maybe a mug of cheap yellow ale while the clowns all sit around in their stained undershirts playing poker and smoking smelly cigars.
That most definitely describes you. So be a good pet and dress up like a grown up human and toddle off to an office building and fake your way through the day so that you get paid, and then go and purchase things which are way beyond your means so that you look even more grown up and sophisticated and successful. If you can’t manage an office because you lack a degree which signifies the degree of humiliation you are willing to suffer in order to get to a truffle or a wedge of cheese, then you can always work at the Seven Eleven or a fast food restaurant, or do some hard labor and you can at least shop at one of the low level department stores which offers things which are similar to those things which can be bought over by Union Square, only there are certain differences which have been purposefully made apparent so that the good truffle sniffers and ass kissers can show of their meritous conformity via fashion, as if their shoes, handbags and jackets were brownie buttons commemorating their ideal citizenship.
If you are a complete fuck up in the areas of ass kissing and truffle sniffing there are several options available to you. You could become addicted to drugs, sex, or alcohol or any combination of the three. As far as the system is concerned, it might be better if you choose drugs which will inhibit your ability to perform sexually considering you are not likely to produce any offspring which will be no more socially adapted than yourself and will therefore also fail to join the workforce and become perfected consumers, I mean, citizens of our fair nation.
Another option is to become a skilled criminal, which means that you break the law continually as a way of life. Addicts often succumb to criminal activities out of need, so that they can get more booze, coke or whatever floats their boat, and of course we must not forget that most of the best substances to abuse are illegal to obtain or keep in ones possession, so it is assumed that those that take option A are also already criminals, hence the word "skilled" is employed to give distinction to those who choose option B. That word, "skilled", has been selected to imply that criminality is a craft which may be honed, and if you are already ill equipped to thrive as a model citizen, this may be a good life choice for you, because in its own way it does help the system. Police officers need bank robbers, counterfeiters, con artists, petty thieves and gangsters to chase after. (Politicians, embezzlers, and preachers fill a more specific niche within this category, but really such a career should only be selected as a last option if you find that you are nearly completely inept and suffer from serious mental and emotional aberrations.)
Option C is, of course, suicide, though it really is a pity that option C comes after option B because the world would probably be better off without Politicians and Preachers. C is the most respectable of all options and if there is any way that you can find it in your heart to boldly and completely self-destruct before you breath up one more ounce of the scarce supply of oxygen being sputtered out into the atmosphere by the few trees to have escaped the fate of being converted into housing projects or papers to push around on polycarbon desks, then I hope that you will go through with it.
The very last option, option D, is open only to those who are beneath even death and who are completely certifiably insane but who have managed out of a sense of self preservation and desperation to escape the notice of professionals in the field of mental health. If you have by some great cosmic error discovered that death offers no respite and are either so misfit and maladjusted to the popular culture, or so disdainful of it that to eat one more banana will cause you to drive a plane into the tallest circus tent that you can find at the heart of the great empire of apes, then for you there is a fourth way, an option D. The D may stand for Doom, Destiny, Deconstruction, or Delirium or all of the above. This option is for bad girls who will not sleep on mountains of pink sheep, and worse boys who will be outfitted in the dehydrated couture of the reversed current, who sit together in darkness and play life back-words, reciting the tenant of Hassan the Assasin, "Nothing is true, all is permissible."

Puppets Made of Flesh

So it goes that I sympathize with the most unhappy and with those who harbor a bleak outlook on the situations born of civilization, of the great con of man, of life as we know life to be, and I don’t just mean human lifestyles, but the condition of organic life with its maddeningly pointless design. For a moment or two, knowing that somewhere out there in the big black jungle made of frowning faces and the legs of dark gray pantsuits that reach up sky high where they give way to a canopy of industrial smoke, there are a few others who can see what I see, or at least something akin to it. Eventually however, I find that hearing of their own oppressive loneliness makes my empathetic heart tremble.
Sure, we are brave ones, we who see what we see and then go further to say what we can say, paint pictures, sculpt sculptures, make collages, write plays, anything that we can do to transform shit into exotic blooms, as part of one last desperate attempt to make something of our ridiculous woes, but it makes me sad anyhow.
Usually I can turn all this hysteria into a joyful performance. I will laugh, joke, sing, and dance. I will do what I can to make the other smile. Then nature catches up with me, (because I don’t always manage to outrun it) and then tears are just tears and not jokes or crystal ants or anything at all. Just salt water squeezed from little ducts set in the innermost corners of my eyes because the world is loveless and dead and it is infecting me while I am failing to infect it. Affection passes itself off as love around here, and you will be rewarded with affection only when you are not taking something that somebody else wants or when you are giving somebody something that they want, but if you should fail to appease, then the affection stops and you don’t even have the emptied out representation of love.
Here and there maybe, you might find a mad hatter through whom love flows no matter what. Usually not though, because when those crackpots come to the attention of the general public it is generally agreed upon that the best thing to do is have that nut case nailed up to a cross so that the buzzards can pick out his (or her) eyes. As you can imagine, anyone like that is either dead or making themselves as inconspicuous as possible. Meanwhile some other clown is passing himself off as a fountain of loving salvation from which comforting answers spring forth like popcorn from an air popper so that you may paste them over your hollowed out heart like little hello kitty band aids over a 35 caliber gunshot wound, and that in exchange for a little bit of the green, if you know what I mean, or sometimes they’ll swap for sex or just attention, power, and glory, or all of the above.
Anywhere you go on this bumpy globe there is someone waiting with a pair of shears in hand, ready to fleece you, pat you on the head and send you back out into the cold Siberian winter so that icicles will crystallize on your eyelashes and your breath will freeze in your mouth so that you choke to death on a maw sized ice cube when you attempt to bleat for help. There are plenty of perky folks running in circles after their tails, glad to be doing so if the other option is to look over their shoulders and notice the master, and then the master’s master, and so on until they realize that it’s Emperor Palpatine holding the end of a long string of leashes, and seeing how low you are in the pecking order, it can mean only one of two things: you are either a clone, or worse (and most likely) an android. Of course the key to keeping androids happy is to never point out that they are androids and to additionally conceal the fact that they are working for the Empire.
The saddest part is that androids, like you and me, as eager as Pinocchio to be real boys and girls, are happy to swallow the lie. We live out our mechanical lives insisting that we are the real deal, that we are in control of ourselves, never really wanting to find out that all of our likes and dislikes were programmed into us by Geppetto back on the Death Star and that, even now, he’s streaming new programs into our highly sophisticated systems through television and radio transmissions. He probably works for some low level General who also likes to forget about the Emperor and fancies himself to be the real deal, the ultimate power. Once you’ve pulled back the green curtain and caught a glimpse of the icky sticky lonesome chaotic truth, it’s hard to push that image out of your mind, and even if you do manage it with lots of bon bons and day time tv, or prescription drugs and booze, or even illegal drugs and underage sex, you find that the uneasy sensation that something is very wrong will not be to far off.
And if you do look it in the face then even your own moments of happiness will seem sickeningly superficial. Your own mechanical arm bringing a cherry ice cream cone closer to your own mechanical mouth and the fleeting sensation of gratification and pleasure that follows will become a horror to you. Then I am told, that you will need to either go back to uneasy sleep or finish waking up so that the horror of it becomes a delight and you yourself are one of those secret mad hatters, cruising the world without worrying about the crosses they are manufacturing down at the saw mill, doing your best to infect the Empire with the strange radiation leaking from your bursting heart, laughing at the crystal ants marching down your cheeks.

I AM NOT

What I found in the cracks between those yellow tiles installed in the late 1950’s is a mystery. The sight of it made me weep diamonds. They trickled down my cheeks like tiny crystal ants, their antennae twitching observantly as they made their way over the dunes of my cheek bones and crawled around behind my earlobes to march in a line down the nape of my neck, moistening the forgotten curls of hair hidden there.
I will never tell you what I saw. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. They say that it’s possible that the ancient Greeks couldn’t perceive color in the way that we do. This theory is based on certain curious passages in the Iliad which suggest that the sight of the author was somewhat different from the sight of the modern man, used to sitting upon his sofa watching Spike TV on a high definition plasma screen television, his Bermuda shorts catching the survivors after he crams greasy handfuls of brittle potato shavings into his open mouth, pupils dilated attentively as crimson arcs of blood splash across the screen before him.
When Homer looked out at the arid cliffs of the Mediterranean, he saw something more akin to black and white, only we haven’t got the words to accurately describe what he actually saw, and at this point we have even less imagination than words, so you see, ours is a desperate situation. We will never actually uncover the secrets captured in the blink of a Greek eye.
For that same reason I cannot tell you about the landscapes that I have visited in the lines of grout near the kitchen sink, nor about the craters around the abysmal mouth of the drain. I look at the mouths of the humans nearest to me and watch them move in complicated contortions of tongue, lip and teeth, and in the end all that I can hear is my own whispered interpretations, like a gentle Zephyr blowing through my mind, bringing back to me notions tied to my earliest perceptions. Sensations tangled in my fathers beard and the sunlight glinting off the window frames to shimmer on the gossamer web of a green spider.
These things outside trigger a little pop fizz inside, a torrent of psychic and physical sensations. The muscles in my own face jerk and contort correspondingly as part of this miniature animal dance. The flicker of an eye lid, the slow rise of brows, mouth curled up at the corners, a flash of teeth.
No, I have no idea what any of it really means. It transpires automatically. I like it better when I put the scene on mute so that nonsense is the only sense left to me. I cut the line between the outside and the inside. What I see on the screen of the mind will not make me jump and dance. I will dance when I say "Dance!" All of this human twitching and confusion is draining, a waste of the liquid fire running in figure eight from prow to stern of the biological space ship I inhabit.
With this vessel, which as far as I can actually tell, despite the appearance of others that would seem to be of like kind, is the only one in existence, or at least the only one I can influence directly, I voyage into an arena of color and sound that combines to create a chaotic roar, (we call this noise) and when the anarchy reaches critical mass it becomes silence. It is like turning the television on to watch the snow and hear the static as you meditate in a straight back chair, a mechanism for blotting out the more distinct noises of your neighbors talking through the paper thin walls and car horns bleating outside the window. All of those very distinct sounds which call me into human existence, I drown them out with the hiss and roar.
I do this to lessen the great shock that I will no doubt experience when I die and discover that I was never human at all. Why insist that I am human now? Oh it’s true, I am in a human spaceship now, but that does not mean that I am a human space ship.
I am not.
I am.
I am NOT.
When they see me in those places that I cannot describe to you, they, the indescribable others, say, "Welcome back Not! We’re so glad to have you!" Then all of us Nots crash together and howl, bouncing one off of another, creating a din that can only be appreciated by the initiated Maenad, who standing barefoot on the forest floor goes stock still, eyes widening as she feels us crashing in through the open portal in her chest, mud smeared upon her bare arms, twigs lodged in her hair, crystal ants crashing down to shatter upon her naked breast.

The Sleeping King

There we go, you needn’t look down to see how it is that you are moving. No, no, don’t look down, for if you should happen to catch a glimpse of what is carrying you, you may become paralyzed with horror and fall clean off the edge of the world. That scurry, scatter, pitter, patter is the sound of the busy feet of many little demons, and you, their great lord, sit atop the rigshaw being pulled along by their whim and urge, their fevered desires, their insistent directives.
They are good little demons, helpful little demons, demons that assist you in the act of passing yourself off within the society of human kind as something exactly the same as your neighbor. They move you through the big fierce world, smile for you when it is appropriate to smile, turn red in the face and storm off when it is appropriate. They pay compliments to the beautiful and readily available members of that gender opposite to your own, or even to that gender the same as your own. Whatever program it is they have learned, they execute it with lightning speed and precision so that you, oh mighty emperor, can lay back and enjoy the ride in a soft blue haze of apathy and delight.
Isn’t that ,after all, the way things have come to be all throughout this opium dream? Doesn’t the master ride like a bloated invalid upon the backs of his servants with out glancing below to see what is happening down there in the dark places below the mist enshrouded castle?
Long gone are those days when the Emperor commanded his people, and likewise suffered for his people, taking responsibility for them. We have come into the bleak and black valley of this dream in time. There are few masters worthy of their charge. Those little demons, like hordes of tiny yapping dogs drag their ward up and down the road so that they may piss on this hydrant, hump that other king’s Chihuahua, or nip this ankle over here. The great king has become a slave shackled to a wriggling animal mass doing what it does best.
The fault, you see, is all yours, you who are drowsy, and perhaps even well meaning in your hands off approach to their care. You must exercise your power, command the demons rather than leave them running the show so that you can catch a few z’s. You may well think that you are just going to settle down for a little catnap, leaving things on auto pilot, entrusted to their eager little hands. Suddenly you will find that you have snoozed away an entire life time and in your absence the kingdom has fallen to ruin. You will not be a king anymore, no, indeed you will be a vagabond, living down in the gutter, the only empire you can manage.
Don’t look down until you are ready to face the frightful truth, that you have been a complacent passenger, that much of what you have considered to be you, is in fact, your dark carnival entourage. They are like pets, like little children that have been left with all of the responsibility, they have chewed the blinds, crapped in the corner behind the sofa, jumped onto the table and eaten the chocolate cake, all in your name. There is no sense in blaming them, nor any sense in trying to cover up their wrong doings in order to hide your own negligence. When you are ready just look down and begin to give them the loving guidance they need to be truly helpful little demons.
Buckminster Fuller, of course, has said that there is no up or down in this universe, only in or out, in which case, when you are quite prepared, look inside and see what they have been doing while you were smoking in the back bed room. Of course you will have a hard time recognizing them all to begin with. Don’t worry, you’ve been asleep for a long time, as the lethargy wears off you will come to know them each. You will be able to assign them names and call them out to perform their tricks when you will it.
There may be an appropriate time to smile, and they will execute this action with your approval or they will abort the mission if you give the sign. There will be no smile, however socially appropriate it would have been, unless the emperor has nodded, likewise no red faced storming, compliment paying, nor nose picking.
If you wish to see your kingdom restored, then rouse yourself from the dreams of what was or what will be and see what is REALLY happening in there, carrying you along until death.
Awaken Oh King. Awaken and rule your people while there is still time.

NOVO

For years I had been near it, but that boundary between us had never been crossed. At the end of the small street where my grandmother lived, from the time when the house itself was built when I was only 4 years old, there had been a small hotel, the "Novo". I came to visit my grandmother many times, week after week, month after month and year after year. Eventually, I lived there for a couple of years. I walked back and forth from the gates to the main street and back, and the sign "Novo" was always on the periphery of my vision without fully catching my attention. I knew there was a hotel there and that small bit of simple information was all that was necessary for me. My reality tunnel was clearly etched in the sidewalk, through my grandmother’s black gate and to her big house at the top of the long cement driveway. And the hotel was very distinctly outside of that tunnel.
A few years ago, when I was back in El Salvador with my companion on the path and the world had taken on a strange dream-like quality that we could both clearly perceive like a translucent liquid all around us, I walked into the hotel. This hidden chamber was very different from the one that I had imagined. First and foremost, it was full of detail where my imagination had been only a faint outline without depth or mood. There were walls of red brick, little lawns in the middle of short pathways, a small swimming pool and a bar next to it with European reporters drinking beer and sharing stories, laughing and arguing late into the night. In their interaction amongst themselves and with the waitresses that brought them their drinks and food, I could sense a history, not only made of individuals but of adventure, connections between worlds and life changing discoveries. Upon experiencing this rush of new information, which removed inside of me many years of false assumptions and simplified imagination, I felt the kernel of a greater truth. Here was this place, complex and open and mysterious and full of color, and it had been sitting next to me for decades, it had existed falsely in my mind as a simulacrum, a mental place holder that separated me from what was Real and right there, only a few steps away.
Today I look around me and I can faintly perceive the many narrow reality tunnels that surround us. Faced with an infinity of choices, our machine has responded with limitation, extreme and uncontrolled. The reality tunnels that surround us, our habitual sequences of motion and attention, our steps that have settled into a steady rhythm and refuse to change, these can seem insurmountable, like giant black walls that prevent our escape. Faced with a city full of wonder, my machine will walk in the same directions, turn on the same streets, look at the same places, point out the same sights, park in the same streets. Faced with a land full of life, my machine will reach for the same fruits, stop at the same places, rest on the same benches, stand underneath the same tree, look at the same two rocks, the same that I saw before, the same that I will see many years from now.
How truly difficult is it to move away from these predetermined steps? Would it take only a momentary decision to allow me to step away from life as I knew it and onto a completely unexplored path? What would be the price? How much will the unknown charge for admission into its dark caverns?
When the machine finds itself awake, momentarily devoid of these habits, it may be unable to decide what to do, it may find itself frozen by the new and vast universe of possibilities that suddenly opens before its eyes. If no new conscious habits have been developed, the machine may then return to the habits it knows well and, in the process, fall into a deep sleep again. Each moment of freedom then becomes a golden opportunity to push a step further into the vast unexplored territory of the infinite Labyrinth.
Even in the midst of deep machine sleep, where there may appear to be no hope of flight and our tenuous attention fades away like a dying ember, may we find a way to strive to step away from the Paths of Death that are made of stone and dust and, through our sincere and persistent efforts, create new paths that flow freely on ever changing waves of Light.

Setting the Alarm

At night, as you lay down on your bed, ready to rest, there is a very smooth transition that occurs between your "waking" consciousness and the land of dreams. One moment you are thinking of the day, of things that happened and should have happened and could have happened and suddenly… you are not there anymore. The world is strange, things follow other each in non-logical patterns and strange visual associations. Every once in a while, your regular consciousness may pop back up, as you rearrange yourself on the bed, as you hold your partner, as you scratch your arm… then back down you go into the raw world of the subconscious.
In the morning, you may be able to wake up naturally, with the light of the sun in your eyes and the sound of roosters at dawn. But you may also encounter trouble. Your "sleeping self" might want to continue its slumber, the bed just feels too good, and your regular "I" might have trouble taking control enough to get you up. In that case, an alarm clock is very useful. A loud ring at a certain time will be sure to snap you back to your own self. It will not only remind you of who you are, where you are and what time it is. It will also remind you of the "you" that set the alarm and why it did it.
Practically every word and sentence in the previous paragraph applies to our work with awakening the machine. You may find yourself in spaces of light awakening, where you are able to study the ideas, work with yourself or with a group, perform magickal actions, create… but when you least expect it, precisely when you are not looking (inwards), your machine will fall right back into sleep.
And once it falls, it may take weeks, months or even years before you will manage to wake it up again. The same resistance will be there. Sleep is comfortable. It feels good for the machine to be asleep. It can indulge in all kinds of recurring habits. It can allow itself the burning pleasure of physical, emotional and intellectual catharsis. It can drift away the hours without a care. Or it can shake itself into raging frenzies about any little concern. It can forget its deep responsibility and wallow in its simulacrum of Life.
The Work can be painful, very uncomfortable, even hurtful to the machine. So it has no reason at all to want it. It may have imagined that doing the Work would make it more desirable, more powerful, more comfortable, but once the real Work begins, it will soon realize that there is a lot of hardship involved and it will seek its former sleeping state as quickly as possible and for as long as possible. At that point, the machine will create strategies to pull you away from any kind of Work, some of them based on ingrained habits and some of them stratagems that will mask themselves as a kind of false work. All of this will make it harder and harder to pull the machine out of its sleeping state.
One strategy that we can implement to counteract the multiple strategies of the machine is to set alarm clocks. You can set yourself up for something to happen in the future, an event or a specific action. This event will not only push the machine towards wakefulness but, even more importantly, it will remind you ("you" as Being) of why you wanted to wake up in the first place. Once reminded, you will have a lot more energy and momentum to accomplish the process of pulling the machine out of its slumber.
Approach the work with the machine as you would approach teaching a little child about music or art. You have to be consistent and disciplined, but you can’t be too harsh or demanding or you might actually kill the machine’s spirit. You have to find a way to be gently disciplined. Give little rewards when the machine works with you, little harmless things that will keep it happy but not hurt its ability to function. Give it a little time to breathe. But set a clear reminder so that you can snap back to attention when needed.
One alarm clock is not enough. After a while, the machine will figure out what you are doing and devise a way to subvert it. Each time you find yourself in a slightly awakened space, set new alarm clocks for yourself. Be very creative. Don’t make them too challenging, but make sure you put something in them that will act as a clear reminder. Let them be a call from the Other that is the real You to the Me that is just Imagination. Like little grains of rice, if you leave them behind you in the forest, they will lead you back home.

Experiment: Eleven Eleven

This is an experiment to be carried out for the duration of one week.Each day at either 11:11 a.m. or 11:11 p.m. remember to look at the palm of your dominant hand. Set an alarm that will go off at this time to remind you.Gaze at your palm with the full force of your attention for at least one whole minute. Observe every minute detail; the lines and creases, the size, the shape, and color of it.As you look upon it, feel as if it is an entity all of its own, that it has its own life. Imagine that your hand has come alive and it is observing you. It has been waiting for you to notice it. Caress your hand with your gaze employing the same attention you would bestow upon the face of your immortal beloved.At 11:12 return to whatever activities engaged you prior to this one.Attempt to remember to do this each day for seven days. Keep track of any days upon which you forget to conduct the experiment

The Negative Emotions

When we first got interested in these ideas, it may have begun with an intellectual action. Maybe you read a book or a page on the Internet, maybe you heard about this from someone else, maybe you saw a movie… something came in, a "poisoned" impression that set the wheels of your intellect turning. Maybe your Being responded from deep within (sensing the presence of the Other calling you to the Waking State) but the manifestation of it was probably mostly intellectual.
Very often, what begins as intellectual may stay as intellectual and never move from there. You may read about this now, think about it, think that there is some truth in it, think about doing something, talk to others about it, think some more… years later you may still be thinking that it would be a good idea to do something and maybe you should think about what to do. At that point, maybe you will find another book to read, someone else to talk to or another movie to watch.
If you get past that stage, you may actually make a move. You may go to a place where these ideas are taught, you may start to try some exercises, you may learn some Yoga, you may learn to twirl. At that point a new center has entered the picture: your moving center, the part of you which actually makes the body function, shift from place to place, dance, curl up in a little ball and so on. When you shift from the intellectual center to the moving center, something crucial has happened. The weight of your relationship to these ideas has become manifested in the physical world and, through this manifestation, it can start to function. This stage may last a long time as well.
At some point, through your work on the Attention and Presence and your conscious efforts of self remembering, the weight of your work will transfer to the Emotional Center. It is at this point that the Real Work begins. Everything else that came before is a preparation. Once you start to work directly with your emotions, the Work has become Real and, with that, come more responsibilities and more danger.
One of our primary forms of energetic waste is through the manifestation of negative emotions. Here we will define "negative" not as "bad" or "immoral" but as flowing outwards into direction-less dispersal, without any conscious purpose. Any emotion that disperses energy involuntarily would then be "negative" whether it masks itself as happiness, excitement, anger, envy, sadness or humor. Our entire machine constantly twitches with negative emotions: we are not happy about the weather and we complain about it, someone looks at us in the wrong way and we replay it in our minds for hours, somebody cuts us off while driving and we spill out curses into the wind.
It has been said that in a sleeping machine negative emotions are the only emotions that can occur. Only in the Waking State can we feel true Love or Compassion. In the sleeping state, we can only twitch helplessly in an endless manic dance of negative complaints and explosions. And these involuntary dispersals occur with extreme frequency. Our initial work will be to be able to observe this state of things without trying to change it. Simply watch, record and examine, without judgement or remorse.
In the Western world, it has been thought traditionally that our nervous system, and specifically our brain, is the fastest form of communication within our bodies. In these ideas (and recent scientific discoveries confirm this) we know that the Emotional center is actually much faster. That means that the habitual reactions in the Emotional center, the negative emotions, will move so quickly that you cannot catch them with either your Intellectual or your Physical center. In the first stages of your Work, it will be impossible to try to stop these, but you can observe them as they move through you and you can record their passing. Develop a constant habit of noting your explosions of negative emotions. Give your different negative characters names and personas. Call them your "little demons" that trade you back and forth like a basketball. Describe them and get to know them very well. If you can draw, make pictures of them. If you have someone to help you, take photographs of the different manifestations or shoot some video and examine it carefully. Again, watch without judgement and, at first, don’t try to change anything at all, no matter how harmful.
As your Work progresses, you will eventually try to gain control over these negative manifestations. As has been stated before, you have to start small. You have developed these negative emotional habits over an entire lifetime. You cannot stop them overnight, or in a month or even a year. It will take a long time of constant work to even begin to get a handle on them. Start with several months of simply observing. When you feel that you are ready, start trying to contain the more simple ones, the ones that are the least harmful and which hold the least power. (For example, don’t try to stop your bouts of anger or resentment towards your family members. That is too deeply engrained and too heavy to lift. Start with your complaints about the weather or about the cancellation of your favorite sitcom. Hopefully that will be more within reach.)
The Work with the Emotions is dangerous and tricky. Ideally someone will be with you, a guide that passed through this terrain a bit ahead of you. As much as you may love this person, it will be difficult to remember that they are trying to help you when the Real Work with the Emotions begins. This is indeed a maze of deadly traps through which only the bravest and most persistent will manage to pass.

Parting the Seas

Imagine your torso as a body of water. Visualize it, feel it. Realize that ordinarily when you throw a stone into the water, it will create ripples. If a stone should come hurtling at you it would disturb your waters, the impact would reverberate throughout the body.
Now imagine something that has recently disturbed you, an event or interaction that troubled you emotionally. Perceive that interaction or event as a stone that is being thrown at you. As it approaches, you will part the seas. Maintain the sensation and visualization of the area from your chest to your navel as a body of water. Imagine that the water is parting, making way so that the stone will land in the sea bed without creating ripples.
Hold this image and breathe deeply, inhaling and exhaling to the count of six. Begin to make a small movement with part of your body. As you do so mentally describe the motion to yourself (as you have done before in working with energizing the machine). For example, while moving your right index finger in small clockwise circles say to yourself mentally, "I am moving my right index finger in a small clockwise rotation."
After doing this for a few minutes allow the waters to close over the stone where it has settled.
Practice this experiment for ten minutes daily for one week. In ten minutes you should be able to run through the whole sequence approximately four times. In addition, as you go through your day and find that something is eliciting an emotional response from you, apply the experiment to that "emotional stone" in the moment.

Experiment: Observing the Machine

Pay attention to your physical mannerisms for 3 days.
Notice the way that you carry your body, any special gestures you use when speaking, your facial expressions, etc. For example you might realize that you have a habit of pushing your hair behind your ear when you are feeling anxious, or that you raise your eyebrows when you are feeling skeptical. You will find that you do these things automatically, without thinking about it.
They are habits so ingrained in your machine that you may never have noticed them before.
Make a list of your habits as you become aware of them.
To help you to observe yourself, imagine that someone is making a movie about your life. Imagine that your favorite actor or actress will play your part and that you’re compiling a list of the mannerisms most characteristic of you. It may be hard to pin point anything at first. Look into every thing that you physically do and pay attention to the little flourishes.
How do you drink a glass of water? Do your cheeks puff out while you are drinking? Do you slurp? Do you chug it all down?
When you are reading a book to yourself do your lips move? Do you twirl your hair or bite your lip? Do you wiggle your feet? What do you do?
Take any activity as an opportunity for observation. Enjoy it, and don’t be judgmental. If you realize that you pick your nose while you read your email, be honest and write it down. Avoid being critical of yourself and don’t try to change anything.
Just notice the embellishments that make your machine unique and list them.
You may also make drawings when words don't fully describe the particular habit. It is of utmost important that these notes be very clear to you, even if the would be completely incomprehensible to anyone else. Make sure that each habit is described as fully and as carefully as possible.

Experiment: Sexual Cycle

Obtain a pill box with a compartment for every day of the week. You will also need a bag of sunflower seeds and a package of raisins. You may decorate the pill box with paint, glue, sequins or anything else that will give it purposeful significance.
For the next week you will keep track of every time you become sexually aroused by placing a sunflower seed in the compartment which corresponds with the present day of the week. If you experience arousal three times on Monday, there should be three seeds in the compartment reserved for Monday. Every time you achieve orgasm you will place a raisin in the appropriate compartment. If you were aroused three times on Monday, and had an orgasm after becoming aroused each time, you will have three seeds and three raisins in the compartment designated for Monday.
If you were aroused in the morning but got up and dressed for the day without having an orgasm, then at lunch caught site of a lingerie billboard that excited you but returned to work without having had an orgasm and finally came home and saw something on TV that got you all heated up once more and you masturbated or engaged in sexual congress with another resulting in an orgasm, then you will have three sunflower seeds and one raisin in the compartment for that day.
Be honest and accurate. At the end of the week examine the contents of each compartment and compare the ratio of seeds to shriveled fruits for each day.