These wars, famines, floods and quakes meet well-defined needs. Man wants chaos. In fact, he's gotta have it. Depression, strife, riots, murder, all this dread. We're irresistibly drawn to that almost orgiastic state created out of death and destruction. It's in all of us. We revel in it.
Sure, the media tries to put a sad face on these things, painting them up as great human tragedies. But we all know the function of the media has never been to eliminate the evils of the world, no. Their job is to persuade us to accept those evils and get used to living with them.
The powers that be want us to be passive observers. And they haven't given us any other options outside the occasional, purely symbolic, participatory act of voting. You want the puppet on the right or the puppet on the left?
I feel that the time has come to project my own inadequacies and dissatisfactions into the sociopolitical and scientific schemes, let my own lack of a voice be heard.
You know, they say that dreams are real only as long as they last. Couldn't you say the same thing about life? See, there's a lot of us that are out there that are mapping the mind-body relationship, of dreams. We're called the oneironauts. We're the explorers of the dream-world. Really, it's just about the two opposing states of consciousness which don't really oppose, at all.
See, in the waking world, the neural system inhibits the activation of the vividness of memories. And this makes evolutionary sense. See you'd be maladapted for the perceptual image of a predator to be mistaken for the memory of one, and vice-versa.
If the memory of a predator conjured up a perceptual image, we would be running off to the bathroom every time we had a scary thought. So you have these serotonic neurons that inhibit hallucinations that they themselves are inhibited during REM sleep. See this allows dreams to appear real, while preventing competition from other perceptual processes. This is why dreams are mistaken for reality. To the functional system of neural activity that creates our world, there is no difference between dreaming a perception and an action, and actually the waking perception and action.
If the world that we are forced to accept is false and nothing is true, then everything is possible. On the way to discovering what we love, we will find everything we hate, everything that blocks our path of what we desire. The comfort will never be comfortable for those who seek what is not on the market.
A systematic questioning of the idea of happiness. We'll cut the vocal chords of every empowered speaker. We'll yank the social symbols through the looking glass.
We'll devalue society's currency. To confront the familiar.
Society is a fraud so complete and venal that it demands to be destroyed beyond the power of memory to recall its existence. Where there is fire, we will carry gasoline.
To interrupt the continuum of everyday experience and all the normal expectations that go with it. To live as if something actually depended on one's actions. To rupture the spell of the ideology of the commodified consumer society so that our repressed desires of a more authentic nature can come forward.
To demonstrate the contrast between what life presently is and what it could be. To immerse ourselves in the oblivion of actions and know we're making it happen.
There will be an intensity never before known in everyday life to exchange love and hate, life and death, terror and redemption, repulsions and attractions. An affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified, that it amounts to a total denial of every kind of restraint and limitation. What was missing was felt irretrievable. The extreme uncertainties of subsisting without working made excesses necessary and breaks definitive.
To quote Stevenson: "Suicide carried off many. Drink and the devil took care of the rest."
Haven't seen too many around lately. Things have been tough lately for dreamers. They say dreaming's dead, that no one does it anymore. It's not dead, it's just been forgotten. Removed from our language. No one teaches it so no one knows it exists. The dreamer is banished to obscurity.
Well I'm trying to change all that, and I hope you are too. By dreaming every day. Dreaming with our hands and dreaming with our minds.
Our planet is facing the greatest problems it's ever faced. Ever.
So whatever you do, don't be bored. This is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive. And things are just starting.
I don't want to be an ant, you know? I mean, it's like we go through life with our antennas bouncing off one another, continuously on ant auto-pilot with nothing really human required of us. Stop. Go. Walk here. Drive there. All action basically for survival. All communication simply to keep this ant colony buzzing along in an efficient polite manner. "Here's your change." "Paper or plastic?" "Credit or debit?" "You want ketchup with that?" I don't want a straw, I want real human moments. I want to see you. I want you to see me. I don't want to give that up. I don't want to be an ant, you know?
And so many think because Then happened, Now isn't. But didn't I mention the ongoing "wow" is happening right now? We are all co-authors of this dancing exuberance where even our inabilities are having a roast. We are the authors of ourselves, co-authoring a gigantic Dostoevsky novel, starring clowns. This entire thing we're involved with called the world, is an opportunity to exhibit how exciting alienation can be. Life is a matter of a miracle that is collected over time by moments, flabbergasted to be in each other's presence.
The world is an exam to see if we can rise into direct experience. Our eyesight is here as a test to see if we can see beyond it. Matter is here as a test for our curiosity. Doubt is here as an exam for our vitality. Thomas Mann wrote that he would rather participate in life than write 100 stories. Giacometti was once run down by a car, and he recalled falling into a lucid faint, a sudden exhilaration, as he realized that at last something was happening to him. An assumption develops that you cannot understand life and live life simultaneously. I do not agree entirely. Which is to say I do not exactly disagree. I would say that life understood is life lived. But the paradoxes bug me, and I can learn to love and make love to the paradoxes that bug me.
And on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion. Before you drift off, don't forget. Which is to say, remember. Because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting. Lorca, in that same poem said that the iguana will bite those who do not dream. And as one realizes that one is a dream figure in another person's dream, that is self awareness.
A thousand years is but an instant. There's nothing new, nothing different. The same pattern over and over. The same clouds, the same music, the same insight I felt an hour or an eternity ago. There's nothing here for me now, nothing at all. Now I remember. This happened to me before. This is why I left. You have begun to find your answers. Although it will seem difficult, the rewards will be great. Exercise your human mind as fully as possible, knowing it is only an exercise. Build beautiful artifacts, solve problems, explore the secrets of the physical universe, savor the input from all the senses, feel the joy and sorrow, the laughter, the empathy, compassion and tote the emotional memory in your travel bag.
I remember where I came from and how I became a human, why I hung around, and now my final departure is scheduled. This way out. Escaping velocity. Not just eternity, but infinity.
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