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I realize I never actually told you the The Biggest Idea I Ever Had.
Actually, it is quite difficult for me to put it all into words without coming off like a complete nutcase and I hardly know where to begin. I had a pretty good flowery intro written in one of my graph paper notebooks, but that notebook has gone walkabout and I have no idea where it is. No worries, that notebook has gone missing before and it came back to me when it was ready.
Since The Idea I have felt less and less like a participant in life and more and more like an observer. I already suffered from bouts of ethereal disassociation with third dimensional reality (undoubtedly fueled by my daily intake of a natural serotonin regulator), but The Idea gave form and structure to that disassociated mass of sensation we call the consciousness stream and now, when I gaze off into nothingness and my mind is free to wander, it has a place of real substance to go and my right brain, before left back on earth to wait until my return, can now traverse the field of mind with me, translating the topography of the landscape into consciousness as we go.
I’ll start with the very first thought. The original thought perhaps. The universe began or always was a pure expanse of consciousness.
That is the key: that consciousness is the precursor to the material universe,
not the other way around.
But nothing exists on its own. If everything is homogeneous then you’d have as much success witnessing a black pool in a pool of black. Without sadness you cannot know happiness, without dark you cannot know light; without contrast nothing can exist.
Knowing this, we can deduce the first thought of consciousness (one) upon its awakening.
The thought was: Two
“I’ll tell you what I’d do with a million dollars, man. Two chicks at the same time, man.”
“…..That’s it?”
- Office Space
Duality. Opposition. Substance and Immaterial. Frequency and Silence. Motion and Stillness.
Whatever — it all comes down to the concepts of one and not one: two.
You see, I started off trying to create a board game. The universe and third dimensional space of the earth would be represented by a foam core circle. It would be as if you turned the world inside out and man walked on the outside edge and the sun was in the center.
My game was going to be complicated and have loads of little pieces and incorporate a mix of apocalypse, car wars, fallout, cyberpunk, corporate espionage, government, economy, and Syndicate. I held fast to the idea of layers of gameplay and growth of perspective where you start as a wandering courier and eventually work yourself up to the point where you might own a company, acquiring multiple employees, and making decisions that affect much larger groups of men than the single cell you could affect before as a wandering loner. From there, it didn’t seem much of a leap to add a way to put those corporations under the banner of a government and have those governments be able to set laws to regulate the corporations. Now the player has area control over a section of the board and any corporation or man under that particular area was subject to those laws. As a cyberjockey the player would have access to a realm that did not depend upon physical limitations such as movement and time and they could alter gameplay elements from across the board, though they could not directly influence the actions of men.
As I struggled with the idea it was gaining more and more complexity to the point of insanity, but it amused me to take on this foreign perspective of being a ruler of the world instead of my daily role as powerless patron. By separating the world and our actions upon it into gameplay elements it was much simpler to see the tides of consequence pushing and pulling and the totality of all the decisions and reactions culminating into the state of the gameboard; what we would call reality or now. Conspiracy theorists would do well to acknowledge how immeasurably frustrating it must be to be an Illuminati-like fist grasping at the world and trying to get it to conform to your wishes. Every time you try and control something there is a backlash in some way or another and as entropy teaches us the battle for control over your environment is always a losing one… eventually.
I started thinking about the game along those lines, as a representation of our own world, and I took the perspective of the forces that work against us and keep us oppressed; trying to understand how they play the game. Rubbing your own hands together gleefully, you can play a card to dumb the education system down, but then you find yourself at the hands of an ignorant mob who are more willing to fight oppression than discuss it reasonably. Your technological prowess will collapse without a steady breed of intelligence to keep the fire stoked and without technology your systems of control erode. If you educate the entire public to the point of genius then they might be less likely to fight, but they will not be easily swayed by your manipulative practices; including the military or police force you hired to enforce your will upon the public. If, in order to lay the foundation for the idea that the public is powerless and needs outside help to survive, you create films where one protagonist fights all odds to save the day and you encourage this idea over and over; you will end up with real world protagonists who believed your propaganda and think they can rise up against you. If you are a greedy oil company, and in your deviousness you placate the public with a pro-environment, work together to save the earth, type of commercial — you have actually contributed to the acceptance of that idea in reality and ultimately you have manufactured your own defeat.
If you take everything, everyone dies and you have nothing. If you take nothing, you cannot live. If you focus entirely on the soul, you will be nothing but soul. If you focus entirely on the physical realm, you will be empty of soul. If you try to live in ultimate balance, Buddha’s “middle way” to the extreme, then you cannot step in the field for you might kill an insect, you cannot inhale because you are taking oxygen away from those that might need it, you cannot stand before the sun for you will block its rays from hitting the blades of grass below your feet, and you cannot be because you are taking space. Simply by existing we are out of balance. But so too is the grass, for it takes to survive. So too is the insect. And so too does the planet, for it disrupts the pure balance of space and greedily sends out gravitational waves to sweep up other matter out of balance. We can attempt an equilibrium, which is stagnation, but we can never have true balance in this plane of existence. We must find balance through the constant movement of thought and body; surfing the surreal and the material.
It seemed that anything you did to establish control eventually worked the other way. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Anything out of balance will return to balance. The pendulum will always return to center. And so it is for us “good guys”, light workers, who fight the invisible enemy in the system, try and “wake the people up”, and battle the ignorance of the masses to no avail. We too will return to center. We too are often out of balance and the opposing energy keeps our fantastical and impractical ideals in check. Our cynicism becomes greedy and snaps up one conspiracy theory too many, rendering our judgment naive and gullible when it is proven false. Always we are being taught the lessons of humilty. Always we are being taught the lessons of duality. Always we are being taught the lessons of balance.
So what if I could design my game to do just that? To be a far more generic representation of the real universe in a way that could teach the same lessons of the world, but in a more controllable format where we were not isolated by our solitary perspectives. The players could see and understand “the big picture” and how their actions affected other people. We could set up a system of reincarnation whereby the center would be full of small round chips (Puerto Rico’s colonists) called souls which are required for creating men. The more actions one attributed to men and the more complicated each man’s behavior got, the more soul would be required to sustain each. (Just as insects require less soul than tree sloths. And tree sloths less soul than man.) Perhaps the traits of some men could be decided by the rotation of a 12-part astrological star chart that rotates in one of the middle rings each time the sun has made a full revolution; this way the sign they were born under would force us to deal with characters of sloth, greed, envy, violent natures, and traits not of our choosing.
So now we have tossed out the concept of the circle representing three dimensional space. We aren’t little men walking around the outside anymore. Now the circle represents the fourth dimensional idea of possession (i.e. houses, food, men.) Like your gameboard in Puerto Rico, it doesn’t matter where you place your plantation in that 2-dimensional space, it only matters that it is on your gameboard to indicate that you possess it. We could set up this new game so that you begin as one man, you then can choose to exert control over others and as the picture below demonstrates, each rung higher and higher represents your greater control over more and more men, objects, houses, area, or whatever. One cell to control three cells. Those cells control five cells. Always a pyramid of control.
As a single man, a player can only affect himself or his neighbor on his turn. If a player chooses to control (or is given control by other men) and create a leader, he can designate an action which affects the futures of all three men below, instead of just one. The same turn is now doubly effective for the leader than for the individual.
The center would represent the man who could control all men — the one world leader. Or perhaps that space is not reserved for men. Perhaps only a spiritually realized god is worthy of that spot, and if we required that it would take all players to grant that godhood, we would ensure that only the noblest of intentions could wield that much power (referee).
It is then that it occurs to me that I could represent every single action of man as a verb and a noun. The nouns would be cards with basic objects on them: man, soul, food, house. There would only need to be two verbs: GIVE or CONTROL (take/destroy).
If I CONTROL your HEALTH; I am using violence.
If I GIVE you HEALTH; I am applying medicine.
If I CONTROL your POSSESSIONS; I am stealing.
If I GIVE POSSESSIONS and you GIVE POSSESSIONS; we are trading.
If I GIVE HAPPINESS; I am entertaining, or loving, or charming.
If I CONTROL HAPPINESS; I am manipulating.
If I CONTROL your SOUL I take your ACTIONS and HAPPINESS or even your LIFE.
If I GIVE SOUL; I create life; Birth.
Control by force is that of an emporer.
An appeal to worship, whereby men are controlled voluntarily, is like that of a pope.
Neither of these seems optimal. The true way to CONTROL is giving, genteel, helpful. A kind mother. The loving hand of discipline. Giving change with your best intentions at heart:
The balance of temperance. It seemed to me like there was a primary color wheel of action all derived from CONTROL and GIVING. (Giving being another form of control. Giving being the control of self, taking being the control of others.):
GIVE // TAKE // CONTROL // CREATE // DESTROY
Every action was a by-product of these. Just like every color in the rainbow is a part of the spectrum and a combination of the purest frequencies that we call colors. Just like the universe is a fractal and all parts are like a hologram – each part contains the whole – you can go deeper and deeper and every slice mirrors the whole as it is all derived from the same calculation, the same input and output:
I know I’m losing the flow here. You should see me talk about it in real life — I’m all over the place.
I do not have the words to describe it. The closest words I can gather together are metaphor because metaphor is the fourth dimensional shape of an idea rather than a singular reference pointer, like a word. A metaphor is the closest thing we have to telepathy because it contains within it a series of conceptual ideas and their interaction/proximity to each other that are all transmitted at once. A (mental) picture is indeed worth a thousand words.
In the third dimension DOG is the cute furry creature with four legs. In the fourth dimensional idea-land, lets imagine that DOG is a mind-map with little word bubbles coming out of it representing all of the other ideas that DOG connects to. This is the idea of DOG and the topography of the fourth dimension. It reaches out with many pointers to third dimensional instances of the DOG blueprint, but the DOG idea is repeated and hosted by each of us as individuals. Yours might contain: fluffy, panting, roll over, sit, beg, loyal, frightening, bark, chase, play, kind, love and mine might all contain those things as well. In fact, the generally accepted concept of DOG in society is where we all accept that these ideas all overlap and the word itself is just a third dimensional audio representation which references the fourth dimensional location of DOG. (Just like we have all agreed that the frequency of light that reflects off of water we shall call the color BLUE.) Your version of DOG will have your own hyperlinks to third dimensional reality such as your boyfriend’s dog Ruffers, your mom’s dog Sally, your first dog TIN TIN, the movie Benji, the book Old Yeller, etc. With concept like VIETNAM: a geographer may be referencing a place, a man may be referencing his home, a soldier may be referencing a traumatic battle, and a genX-er may only have a fuzzy concept and a few clips from Forest Gump to go by.
I held the BIGGEST IDEA I EVER HAD when it occurred to me that words are NOT representations of three dimensional objects. That ideas are NOT representations of three dimensional objects. The idea is the PRIMARY COLOR – in that circle of mine the idea is in the center and the complexity of ideas radiates outward, and the complex world of objects that we see and hear and touch are the places where the holographic idea forms overlay into this thing we have designated as third dimensional reality.
The idea of A, B, and C, AB, AC, and BC, are the foundations for the physical object ABC, be it created by a man who dreamed of A B and C together or be it created by the natural forces of the universe that embrace A B and C. Either way, through metaphor or reference, the idea we call ABC contains A B and C.
For instance, A could be the concept of using force for creation, B could be the concept of an idea which can be driven through two other ideas to bind them together (a nail), and C could be the concept of a singular idea which is not complex enough to solve the issue at hand by itself. The man who holds these ideas can then manifest ABC into reality and create said object in the material universe: a hammer. And within it are the idea forms that we have long forgotten but subconsciously reference on a whim just by picturing the object. And within them are all the lessons and ideas of balance and unity and duality that the universe injects into EVERYTHING in a manner far too complex and far too heady to be controlled at the material level; from the outside in. You see? You only need to change the top level — the idea — the godhead — the consciousness — the outwardly radiating voice at the center — to make the entire universe sway to find a new balance; a new equilibrium; and for the blindingly complex material universe to acquiesce.
The circle is the essence of the universe, all is one, the planets, natural order. How do I make a snowball? I roll a clump of snow until the diameter is the same in all directions. To make a square out of snow I would need to build the snow up into flats on each side, I need precision, measurement, tools. A square is an object of creation. A square represents the ideas of STRAIGHT, FIXED, CONSTRUCTION, CORNER, 90 DEGREES, CONTROL OVER MATTER. Too many to mention. Do you see the higher idea forms hiding behind square? And things built of squares have that idea form in them and then more upon that — a house is a cacophony of idea forms manifested into reality.
The same is in our language, in our words. AUM is the void, the sound of the universe, the sound many people make when they meditate to resonate with the center. Listen to the words that contain that sound: ROUND, SOUND, FOUND, MOUND, HOUND, BOUND. They are all conceptual and ethereal. You can hear the idea form behind them. The word SOUND would not be the same if we had called it DICKSLAP. That word is too harsh, too staccato; it doesn’t contain the right essence to convey the thought idea. (It is harsh enough to be utilized as a curse word, however. How many other curse words contain a staccato that transmits violence or harshness?) Yes, our words carry back to Latin, and before that there was possibly a mother language that all tongues shared. I can guarantee that the fourth dimensional ideas inherent in other culture’s word-sounds are consistent to their culture’s concepts surrounding those sounds. Because the sounds are only vocalizations of the idea-form.
How can our brains reference all of these things at once? Because the right brain focuses the laser of perception and transmits the fourth dimensional files needed for the left brain to perform the far slower, material process of conscious analysis. This is why individual memory locations cannot be targeted in the brain.
This is how irony is so beautiful and works so well. This is how coincidence teaches us over and over again. This is how EVERYTHING that happens in your LIFE or that your life bears witness to contains A LESSON. EVERYTHING. I hope when we die we can re-experience the world from the perspective of everyone around us, before us, and after us as it all contributes to the tapestry of our lives. (A man passed me in the store wearing a Redskins shirt and unbeknownst to him I thought – how odd he is wearing that and sending out a broadcast regarding his support for the team when they are not currently engaged in tournament. 2 days later I wore my own Redskins shirt. He may never know that he transmitted information to me or altered my life. We affect everyone all the time.)
I can’t type anymore. I feel like I’ve lost you in detail.
And I failed to mention how when you enter a party I see your confidence as a bubble that extends outward from you like the portal that breaches his chest in Donnie Darko. If your confidence can drive it outward and your bubble engulfs other people they may absorb your presence or reject it, but the expression “put yourself out there” is not without reason. If you are shy you draw it inward, even smaller than your physical presence. You try not to be noticed, but the gulf of your absence is noticeable.
I forgot to mention how it is that the I-Ching or Dao De Jing can work, or that almost any interaction between inanimate object and man can be turned into some type of life lesson, why almost anything that happens to you can be turned into a life lesson, why dreams are metaphors or can teach lessons for reality but sometimes are just dreams, or why guys named Wally are almost always Wallys, or why the cafeteria lady’s face looks like her inner persona, or why onomatopoeia works for almost all words not just nonsense ones, or why the silly attempt to make a boardgame that encompasses everything can lead to a true understanding of the nature of the universe — or at least, a lunatic understanding of the nature of the universe that, whether true or not, benefits the believer by acting as if it is true and absorbing understanding from nearly everything around him/her.
Please follow this list of life’s moral lessons below. Many contradict each other. That is the nature of this paradox that we live in; this world, by its very nature, existing out of balance.
I tried to do searches for ‘moral lessons’ on the web and came up with squat. ‘Life Lessons’ came up with some lists, but not what I was going for. So I made my own to see if I can read the pattern behind it.
Can you hear a consistent voice throughout them all? The teacher is the string that binds them. Please add to this list if you can think of any. I am studying.
You lost me.