Sitting in the coffee shop which is one of the few things
one can do in the middle of the winter here in the upper midwest, I hear people
around me talking too loudly almost every minute of the day, talking with spoiled
valley-girl-sorts of voices, espousing beliefs. Sometimes they just say their
beliefs outright, and sometimes they back up one space and say, I believe that
so on and so forth which is at least one remove from fusing their beliefs with
what is really so.
As if!
Everybody knows or should know that when they complete the
picture in the frame, it is already in the past, and inasmuch as more
information is arriving in what they call “the present,” it cannot possibly
correspond even in a symbolic way to what is “out there,” so to speak. (Of
course, “out there” and “in here” are a Janus-faced game that humans play with
themselves, and where the two faces meet, it is always blurred.) At any rate,
the degree of confidence with which they speak of their beliefs is humorous, if
one is outside their frame, because they can not possibly know what they think
they know. But that is of no concern to humans, I am thinking, after listening
in the coffee shop. All they really want
is to feel good and they call “the truth” that which achieves that goal. Any
conflicting notions must be sanded down until they fit smoothly into the other
pieces that, beliefs snapping into beliefs like beads into the big toy in their
mind, the modular pieces of which build the “cognitive artifacts” if you will
with which they play and see as if they are “out there.”
Anyway, this is what I am thinking this cold morning. The
sunglare on the icy windowpane which faces east is blindingly bright in the
middle of the morning, so I had to ask them – again - to lower the dark shade,
please, as if they need to be asked every day. The young girl with the metal in
her face grudgingly leaves the safety of her counter and comes to pull down the
shade. She is not a barista, she takes orders and sends data over the network
in the clear, using an off-the-shelf router from Best Buy, as does the deli
shop next door and the Wok Wok Wok, piggybacking all, and all in the clear.
Point-of-sale data, understand. All in the clear.
Don Coyote my hacker neighbor and his sidekick Pancho
Sanchez would bust their guts laughing at that. I saw them once in here
harvesting numbers, just because they could.
What I noticed sadly about the wannabe barista is true of
many, but not all, of the humans I am observing. When I ask her a question, she
tells me every time, “I don’t know.” And I say, trying to be helpful, then is
it not your job now to ask someone who knows, and then if someone else asks the
same question, the answer will be ready at hand? She stares at me as if I am from
another planet (making me laugh) and never does as I suggest, so she never
knows, and her cycle of ignorance repeats. Given that the only advantage a
human has over other animals is knowing stuff, and knowing how to use it, that
seems more than stupid to me (“as dumb as a box of rocks,” that woman said of a
colleague, in another time and another space), a self-defeating habit. But
then, that’s humans for you.
The bright icy light makes me blink, not like the funny
blinking eyes in the film, and it was gills, anyway, not eyelids, as J I think
it was said, and I close my eyes and wait for the shade to come down and
comfort me with its muted glowing half-light. If I hold that pose for a few
moments, making my point about the glare, I slip inadvertently into a listening
mode, and sometimes the signal slices through the noise precisely because I am
not trying, and then I know, and remember vaguely in a human way, and smile
inside at the recollection that the stream of information coming from the
center of the galaxy is available everywhere and always to any sentient being –
who has, that is, the folds and lobes to resolve it. Even with my tiny human
brain, I can hear it clearly in such moments, but if I try to step it up, and
really understand, that is, “have an idea” as humans call it, nada zippo zilch.
If I want to understand, for example, how multiple dimensions interlace and
determine energies that on this planet do not yet have language names. My human
brain cannot do it. It bumps its head as it were against a glass ceiling. The
representations of energies expand in non-human maths when multiple folds and
lobes enhance the abilities of sentient creatures, a thousand fold for some.
The big eyed- big-headed what-they-call grays, for example. The bigger the head,
the bigger the brain, and the bigger the brain, under the right conditions, the
more it is possible first to snatch information on the fly and then to fold it
into the process of creating artifacts of cognition using icons, glyphs,
symbols, runes. Then the more one can do tricks, like magic it seems to humans,
that visitors do to display themselves and train human brains to begin to have
a clue and become a little more ready to step up.
But that is for another day. Today this is what I am
thinking, after listening to them for a while, I am thinking that if they could
only release themselves from beliefs, there would be much more clarity, much
more light, in the human project. If Jews let go of their beliefs, and
Christians let go of their beliefs, and Moslems let go of their beliefs, if all
humans simply let go of their beliefs, they would find themselves unburdened in
a glade in the forest, a clearing into which translucent light is streaming,
they would experience brightness and a lightness of spirit and be able to open
their eyes and … see what is there.
Instead of seeing the insides of their minds plastered
inside their circle of seeing like circus posters on a wall.
Nothing contributes more misery to the human project than
believing in beliefs. Nothing has
resulted in more slaughter and wailing and gnashing of teeth than religious
beliefs. That is ironic, yes? And makes “Letters from the Earth” a better
commentary on all that crap than the thousands of footnotes in, for example, a
treatise on Ephesians. Of course, yes, beliefs are a useful first step when you
are coming up out of the swamp, your stubby little fins letting you move over
the reeds, as humans did so recently, humans have moved one rung up the ladder
inside consciousness dawning within, thanks to our most excellent engineers
over what to humans are eons but to us are a blink or a wink, and humans are as
it were still wet behind the ears, even as they bootstrap themselves into the
first glimmer of self-conscious awareness of who and what and wow, look
around..
I understand all that. Beliefs like music evolved to bind
the tribe which, once bound, saw the other as The Other, justifying slaughter.
They had to draw the circle at first around a tiny group. Instead, as I did
recently, and miss the ability to do so much! as we did I should say, around
all sentient life in the multiverse and more. Around
Ourselves/Myself/Ourselves.
Isn’t it time for humans to move out of pre-school and
Sesame Street songs and using crayolas and colored paper of which they make
triangles and squares which they then glue with white paste onto the same
paper? Isn’t it time to admit what humans ought to know by now, that stewing in
their beliefs, every one of which claims to be exclusive, and correct, but all
of which contradict the others, so if one is right, the rest are wrong, but all
cling nevertheless to beliefs that fashion an identity which apparently humans
still need to feel secure as they navigate the world, so they can imagine, I am
this or I am that, as if that delusion provides a platform on which to stand …
humans I am concluding would rather be stewing in that crockpot and simmering
with rage … let’s face it, humans. You are certifiably insane. Insanity is
believing in delusional constructions made of images and words, is it not? The
ones inside your head that make up all your useful lies? And are not your
beliefs delusions, as I said? And so would sanity not be a welcome deliverance
that ironically fills your cowardly hearts with terror at the thought, the
thought of freedom from your chains, a safe passage through the zone of
annihilation which calls into question all that you thought you were or knew,
arriving at last into the clear light of knowing, including and transcending
all that came before, and knowing at the same time that all you think is
provisional, a momentary construction of symbolic representations good enough
for now so it is insane to cling to them, so hold them lightly, children,
lightly! it is insane, I am saying, to believe too much in your beliefs.
Beliefs want to be believed, I understand that, it is their
nature. But not too much.
“We want you to believe in us, but not too much.” If you
want a clue to our project, there it is, out in the open.
Oh,. humans! you could join hands and leap together into the
light. But the evidence for you choosing to do that is not so good. I am
growing more and more cynical, the longer I am here, and I still cannot keep
up. Thanks, Jane.
You choose the shadows on the cave wall to the light to which
I am pointing with my words, pointing to the moon, but not the moon itself.
Thanks, P, and thanks, my many Zennish friends in the coffee shop who say
things like that all the damned time.
But no one is listening. I know that. The writer reads his own
blog and celebrates himself. There is no Heidi today to stroke beneath the
table, so one must do it oneself, and that is the essence of a blog. I
understand. I am speaking only to
myself, using a human brain to be human too, as I can. One difference, perhaps,
is that I remember enough however dimly to know that so long as I am in this
human form, I am as that woman said to Kinbote, what’s more you are insane,
something like that, and by contrast, I was not, in the form from which I came,
or if I was, it was so much higher on the ladder that it looked like Truth at
last, Truth at last, thank God almighty, Truth at last! To you humans, and yet
you think you are as sane as the day is long.
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