[click image]...
I think people need to look even more deeply into it than this, and you will probably agree this fellow is getting down to the nitty gritty, but look out across your mindscape, can you? Does it stretch out with no boundaries or is it full of constructs implanted by precisely the people who gave you this quality enslavement? Is it choked with pot smoke and thunderheads and millions of square miles of brambles through which you navigate gingerly with a flickering torch?
Do you find you like hanging at blogs and forums full of people who discuss cogently matters of finance and politics and science and history and technology? Is that so? What qualifies as cogent discussion there? The stuff that seems to fit with what you already think you know? The stuff the dumber downers have been at pains to inculcate in THE most rigorously intellectual ways, never failing to cite acres of authorities across the vast and exalted institutions of dumbing down? Harvard? Princeton? Yale? Bullets? Bombs? And banks?
How many really smart people have you encountered who have been duped by Arnie Gundersen? How many REAL authorities are out in the cold because they dared open their mouths about stuff the power structure doesn't want rousing us from our befuddled and superstitious grazing? The KEY is always to realize more than They Are Bad Guys. It is PAINFUL and DIFFICULT to realize that MEANS you are hypnotized. Yes, yes, now you're a hypnotized person who gets that The Bad Guys are hypnotizing people. Not good enough.
Do they still have that annoying little paper clip clown on PCs that pops up to teach you things about the software? You have to load one of those little fuckers in your brain, so vigilant to catch all the synaptic schemas constantly trying to slide you back into your well worn grooves that you end up so angry with yourself every time you turn around that you will be literally heaving with remorse in a puddle on the floor regularly. This can last only a short while, or it can last for decades, depending on your dedication to whipping your rabid ego into line, BUT you can never imprint your true intent on the world until you do it.
You have to learn to love finding out that you have been wrong. And it IS a lovable thing. Yes. Yes, it damn is! The only way to stop being wrong is to recognize it, with or without help, and evolve, do better, confess if needs must, and while yer training yerseff it's best to effusively confess until you can just be very relaxed about the discovery of former wrongtude and have it be former instanter. This is MUCH harder for smart people. Smart people learn from a VERY early age to talk their way out of any situation where they might be found wrong or lacking in information or lacking in some other way. They learn to cover their innate shame by use of dazzling turns of mind—often also known as excuses—finding quickly precisely the right english to use on it in any given situation.
Just two examples of how I harmed myself thus: [1] skated through school without studying at all because I could ace any multiple choice test with reasoning and ace any essay test with page after page of discussion of how I felt about the question; and [2] controlled every person in my vicinity with the one two three four punch of babetude, daffiness, dazzling argument on any point and the emotional blackmail of my bottomless love for my fellows. None of these attributes are bad in and of themselves, it's the use to which they were put. As much of a hassle as it might have been for others, it really harmed me beyond describing adequately. I made my first real attempts to throw that stuff down at age thirty.
Except, when I stopped controlling everyone they quickly ceased acting right! That hurt and hurt and hurt. I could NOT do The Real World if I did not control the people with whom I had to spend time. It drove me off into solitary modes of making a living, and eventually drove me to spend all my time on the one thing that had always sung to me. Zen. The ancients. The great masters of the science of freedom and the art of seeing and hearing.
I realized early on that citing deluded people, no matter how lofty, was not a lucid way to proceed. Everybody does it, but when everyone thinks good is good, this is not good and when you come right down to it it's really just the hyper-insecurity known as "vanity" that drives people to start spouting off famous names to further their stuff. And now it is apparent even to people who never even heard of a Zen master that we've got liars everywhere we turn... deluders... deluded deluders to whom everything depends on your continued credulity, EVEN if yer bright enough to call them on their lies. You're NOT bright enough to call your whole life full of personality quirks, coping mechanisms, ego problems, fears and memorized falsehoods and incomplete concepts—only CALLED complete—lies as well. So there is this relentless cognitive dissonance also known as getting out of bed each day stretching out before you.
Is that okay with you?
Are you SURE?
.
