Mr. Big

I feel like all women should be subjected to a male version of Sex in the City. It would the story of a supposedly urbane and sophisticated man, who dedicates his life to writing about his shallow and superficial relationships with cartoon caricatures of women, to which he has ascribed appellations like "Ms. Bigtits" and "Hippy Girl". Women would get to hear his endless musings and questioning of how he relates to their "personalities", whilst also seeing the same women on the screen, horrified and tortured introverts desperately squeezing themselves into the cartoon caricature personalities, never able to really express themselves lest they eclipse the banal self obsessed rantings of the main character. Of course there would also his friends: Charles, who dates a woman we are told is "ugly" because she is tall and a little portly, but self-righteously goes beyond his superficial condemnation of her as ugly by announcing that "ugly sex is hot" Also, an older man who devotes himself to sex with younger women viewing them only as objects, and a supposedly smart red headed nerd who leaves the mother of his children to have sex with Tai women.

Why am I writing this? I don't know, I'm drinking wine and I feel like some kind of a male Carrie Bradshaw... Whatever this thing is that I am, I must write it all down. I must write it down for some untold future purpose even though its garbage. Who am I writing it down to? I construct this blog ever with the idea of avoiding keywords that might attract viewers. This is not fluff, this is not to convince anybody I'm important. My name isn't even on this blog. This blog is about something which happens 100 or 1000 years from now, where some child mankind has created needs it, not as the great secret or the key, but like larvae needing the next grain of sugar in the ant-hill, and hear I am, 100 or 1000 years in the past providing it. Is that the way the way John the Revelator felt?

So what is it that's important to write down? Its important to write down how REAL all of this is. That's the message I've heard that effects me, that's the message is not heard enough: This is so REAL folks. What is so real? This.

How do I feel? Like there is this sort of desperate search for Truth going on. This need to distill the underlying principles, to seize the realness of it. The fundamental search for reality in a situation that is partially unreal.

As I speak, my words are branching out like a tree. Which we to go? Is it a graph, can I take any path and get to where I am going? Bill O has said repeatedly of late: Perception is reality. That's a military saying. It has roots in mid 20th century propaganda, and mystical tie ins, that extend long before the "Men who Stare at Goats" times. But stepping back and looking aesthetically, its lacking. Milarepa was a powerful magician, but in remorse he sat in a cave practicing the dharma. Why? To escape. From what? His own power. I went to a hell once, and its called the all-powerful magician's hell. It was the thought that I was God, completely alone, alone in a universe of nothing. To escape this hell I divided my consciousness up into many forms, and provided for my self the most convincing illusion that I was a mortal man in a world of many mortal men, limited in power and knowledge. But once I was there I sought only to escape the hell of limitation of human existence, and grew in power and knowledge until I could know everything, and bend the will of every person and write every law of nature, until reality itself was just my own lucid dream, a dream from which I could awaken not from, for the awakeness was just the awareness of myself as the only thing that exists, alone in the void, creating illusary universe after universe to escape my horrible aloneness as God, the only thing that exists. Perception is reality indeed. How much power DO you want, really?

The all-powerful magician is NOT the Buddha. The way to become the Buddha is not through power. What one seeks to become is humble, the dust beneath the feet. The high achievement is through the reduction of oneself to blissful nothingness. Does this illusion matter? Maybe very much indeed. Maybe the limitation and mortality is the frame of eternity, the context through which it is interpreted... Maybe the dark magicians hell and the Buddhist's heaven are the exact same place, maybe this is what the Christian tradition is getting at with its heaven and hell.

I heard a story from a preacher or somebody when I was a little kid. He said the worst thing in hell looked like the best thing, it was a tour bus that goes to heaven. People in hell would get on the bus, and go to heaven, no strings attached. But when they got to heaven, the very nature of it was painful; the light hurt their eyes, the grass cut their feet. Why? Because it was all to REAL. The pure REALITY of heaven would send them all of them back onto the bus, yearning for the comparatively mild tortures of hell, which was structured on non-realities, on lies.

"This is so REAL folks."

But what exactly IS reality? Phil k Dick has give the best definition: "Reality is that which does not go away when you stop believing in it". Notice how this implies a limitation of will, a separation of what you perceive to be true from What IS true. Reality is that which is beyond yourself.

But what exactly IS your SELF? Its quite a nebulous concept. We live in the year 2011, a strange dream like time when many things are possible. I read recently about some scientists who controlled the minds of worms through light, making them do this and that. They named it ColBeRt or something, hoping to get on the comedy show. The mechanisms of neural control are universal, and their work could, in time, be applied to humans...One of many such projects (In fact we live in a time where technology originating with Tesla is being released by MIT researchers as new and exciting, so its difficult to tell when the first time any technology has been development. The advent of the bomb really ended science as a public endeavor.) I also came across some research talking about implanting thoughts in humans, and the big deal was the humans identified the implanted thoughts as being their own: So the impulses were sent to pick up a ball in the room, and the humans followed, but when interviewed they all said that it was their own thought to pick up the ball in the room. This latter research was real, and shows the difficult nature of 'self' as a defining concept: An implanted thought to do something was viewed as an act of free will by the person it was implanted in, even though it came from another person. In this sense, the will of the researcher and the subject were one, their egos were not differentiable in the context of that action. the self of the subject was an extension of the self of the researcher implanting the thought - they were for a moment the same entity.

Many paths lead to the same outcome, I will keep talking, choosing some random path.

Mind control is a big deal. Its real. This is SO real folks. And its a bigger deal than atomic proliferation. From any classical perspective, its checkmate for humanity once somebody gets it and makes it go viral, there is no crawling out of the fallout shelter and rebuilding. I would be tempted to say anybody working on it should be shot, but that could just be the implanted thought from the person who already has it, and is trying to wipe out the competition. So I think a non-classical perspective is in order.

This here is the burden of my argument, what I have to say, what really matters tonight: The key is in looking at concepts of ego. We have established that a person under mind control identifies the implanted actions as being their own, their ego is the same as the controller for that moment in time. But that ego itself remains undefined. What does the reality of the supreme mind controller look like, he who makes people do things believing that they willed it themselves. Is it new? Is it powerful? Remember the words of Tao te Ching: "The great ruler is but a shadowy presence to his people, and when his work is done, the people say it happened naturally"And also the words of of the Bible:

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.

This is all is "New Skin for Old Ceremony" as Cohen put it, the ego of the ruler has always been able to be dissolved to into unity with those of the people, so that the wills of both become the same for a time. Modern technology is merely old magic in a new form.

So the people will do what they do, blissfully unaware of any controller, but it is the mind controllers soul with which we should be concerned. Give him power Lord! Show him what I myself have seen! Give him a world where nothing goes away that he does not believe in! Show him my hell of the all powerful magician! (Or in his case the hell of a world where all are nothing but robots who's behavior is dictated by physical law).

Let him have his reality. Let him show only to himself that all people are soulless robots, looking at his dark aloneness in a mechanical crying out in agony: "This is SO REAL!" And let him be aware that his place is another voice, that of the Buddha, crying out in ecstasy: "This is So REAL!" Both sitting in the same place, but the former being tortured by its reality, the latter being raptured by it. Heaven and Hell in an instant.

Many paths lead to the same place, but it matters which choices and paths you take.