[ 21 minute read ]
Duality is a bed that duplicity and selfishness share
The world is a noisy place. Thinking, just thinking, is becoming more and more difficult. It seems I am surrounded by demons with the sole job of disrupting achievement. The proverbial teenager; you know the type; someone who wants to listen to music and have constant excitement, considers any person that places a boundary on their activity as a tyrant. Yet, listening to music is only useful to people who are studying or working in the Arts. However, as a leisure pastime, I am told, it is quite popular. Some people, even play music while they are studying. Having a duality of focus is admirable, but I think duality is a bed for duplicity and selfishness that begets a child called interference.
When I drive, I sometimes have the radio on. When some people jog they listen to music. I have even seen cyclists with earbuds and headphones.
I had the radio on when I had to reverse a lorry off a pavement back onto the road. It was a curved road and pavement, which meant that the parked car behind me was in my blind spot for a while. Because it was school-kicking-out time I focussed mainly on the pavement more than the road. The car had arrived between the time I got in the lorry and when I started reversing. I scraped the whole side of the car from front wing to back wing including the doors along the way. No-one was in the car. I did not hear the scraping or feel the bump. If there was a person in the car or someone standing between the lorry and the car, I would not have heard them shout. I could have killed someone. Now, I never have an auditory distraction when I am reversing any vehicle, ever. My passengers look at me agog when I turn off their favourite song.
‘Hey, that’s my favourite song!’
For a few moments, I don’t give a rat’s tail what you like or don’t like or how comfortable you are or what you are saying unless it is relevant to not maiming or killing someone or damaging property.
I silently think, ‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up, you stupid, stupid, ignorant fool. YOU are a distraction!’, Being British, I simply say, ‘Sorry’, then ‘Please don’t’, when they reach for the radio to turn it back on again.
I am a very experienced driver; that is why I am nervous. The checks we make on our behaviour when we are beginners at anything almost inevitably fades into the background when we, with a little experience, regard our watching ‘overself’ as a tyrant that is ruining our fun. A little experience is all we need to convince ourselves that the student (ourselves) has outclassed the master (paradoxically also ourselves). Yet, in my world, the true master has a shape.
‘Well, Look at that! He’s getting ahead of himself. There’s not enough interference.’ The head Demon said. ‘Who do we have under our control. Let’s see, which neighbour is oblivious to our existence? Oh yeah! ALL OF THEM!’ it gleefully shouted.
I had gotten up nice and early to study. All my needs for focused attention were attended to. I had not broken my fast, so my energy would not be diverted to moving food around in my guts, and I was suitably dosed with caffeine, lots of caffeine.
‘He is getting used to the idea that it is useless to even try to succeed.’
‘Just another few shoves and he will give up’
‘Often,’ I hear, ‘it is enough to allow the thought of a probable outcome to divert us from our true path.’
I was reminded of a piece in Reader’s Digest, that someone had sent in. It was about a grandfather of a young boy explaining to him how their footprints in the snow showed their different approaches to life.
‘Look how, as we crossed the field, my footprints go from the gate at that end to the gate here. They are straight and purposeful. Now look how your footprints go from the gate to that tree and then to the pond and then to that tree and the water-trough and then in a curve end up here. Your way is complicated and unfocused. It does not have any direction.’
‘Yes, grandad’, laughed the boy, ‘But we ended up here at the same place and I had a lot more fun getting here than you did.’
It’s all relative. Even as I remembered this, Master nudged me and said, ‘I can hear you saying to yourself that spending time having fun is useful, and is a good argument against applying yourself in a circumscribed and focused way. This is distraction.’
‘Master', I wearily said, ‘I know what distraction is.’
‘Yet, you are distracted from remembering it.’
I arranged a meeting.
Ah! Someone has torn the title off
While this was taking place the Demon regional office looked on, unable to send one of its agents to dance before me and lead me to noticing the vape smell coming from the neighbour below me. It had, of course persuaded, Jake, who really IS below me that vaping is fine and there is no real reason to ever give up doing something that is so much fun. Many times, in the brief moments when our paths had crossed, I had noticed the spiritual spears that pierced his head and upper body. Most gruesome was the demon which had its walrus-like tusks deeply buried into Jake’s right shoulder and that side of his neck. Smaller ones always seemed to be clinging to his back, but really they are controlling him in ways I can not understand. Unfortunately, like bacteria, we all have these stuck to us. And, like leeches, we cannot just pull them off because they leave their ‘teeth’ behind that fester in the wound.
I have long given up trying to ‘educate’ people as to their plight. Realistically, we cannot just go around saying, ‘There is a nasty demon sucking your potential out of you, by the way’, without substituting, ‘by the way’ with ‘Man’. It is quite useless to say, ‘I can help you with that.’ meaning I can’t get it off you but I can tell you it is there and how YOU can get it off you. Actually, we can’t get them off by ourselves, again paradoxically, we need ourselves. You see where the duality is now?
But earlier, I inferred that duality leads to corruption; of the truth primarily. That’s bad isn’t it? Yes!
In surviving life on Earth, we have to play a game with all the other inhabitants; a game which has rules, but like the rules of the game ‘Monopoly’ each human family has adopted new household rules that suit them best. My family, when we played Monopoly, would pay fines into the middle of the board and anyone who landed on ‘Free Parking’ would take the accrued pot in the middle.
Playing the game of life with other people on earth means we have to cheat sometimes. Cheating is selfish, and selfishness means you survive a disaster while altruistic people in the same circumstances are helping others.
I lived in a town that decided to have a music festival one year. ‘Let’s make it a tradition!’ they said to themselves at the Council offices. At the time, I worked about sixteen hours a day and in eleven years I had had only four consecutive days off with a total of nineteen days off out of about three and a half thousand days. Booming music that originated from half a mile away met my ears. Early on, I went to the event, where there were no partying people and made it clear that the music was an interference.
‘We are trying to relax’ the organiser had said.
‘Exactly. Shut it down so we can relax.’ Music festivals are two-a-penny where I live. We need to be away from them to gather our wits and recharge ourselves with reality before the next one.
If I had looked carefully, I would have seen the demon’s spear in the organiser’s head that stopped him thinking clearly. He was egregiously convincing himself that a selfish undertaking to enjoy ourselves through music was justified because entertainment must be had in every stage of a person’s life. His thinking was curtailed by a demon to not include actual rest periods like sleep, contemplation, experiencing misery or sadness; all of which are essential for good life. And yes, misery and sadness are rest periods quite simply because they are a contrast to fun.
Sooner or later, we have to get off the fun fairground ride that are all only so much fun because they are not free. In paying for fun, considered by most people to be a negative in our lives, we have an expectation of getting value for money. While we are on the ride we don’t remember the price we paid to get on it. Of course, we value the memory of the fun too. That is when we compare the cost to the benefit, and mostly find that we have invested our money wisely. Incidentally, my memory has a broken leg or something and won’t get out of its armchair. It has become lazy and arrogant and spends its time replaying old videos of my life, finding fault and pontificating on how it would have done things differently.
‘Yes, Yes, I know,’ I patiently soothe, ‘But that girl didn’t like me, so if I had stayed in the country and asked her out, it wouldn’t have turned out any differently. Memory, you really must stop spending so much time with Supposition.’
I went on after a brief pause for memory to catch up.
‘For most of us, Memory, Supposition is not much more than a tool, but to you, Supposition is your drinking buddy who brings you contraband while you convalesce. You ARE getting better, aren’t you?’
‘I used to be well, you know.’ Memory said. I could almost, but not quite see Memory reach for a blanket to cover his legs. ‘I don’t feel wanted, these days’, it moaned.
‘Trying using Adventure, for a while.’ I said.
Adventure, as we all know, is in all of our medicine cabinets. Sadly, it is gathering dust and hard to reach behind that Austrian product, weirdly labelled, ‘Gemutlichkeit’ because somebody in marketing can’t spell ‘comfortableness’, and hidden by the ‘Scales of Limitation’ with which we daily weigh ourselves, Adventure, dusty, but still a good bed-time read for Memory, patiently sits in the proverbial ‘Dentist’s Waiting Room’ reading magazines. Adventure knows it will have its turn one day but with so long since the last cleaning it expects things to be gruelling and messy when it does happen. In any case, Expectation constantly haunts him, or ‘keeps him company, bless him.’
During our impromptu meeting, I had to remind memory that he was not knowledge itself; that knowledge is in storage, and Memory, with his own predilections that satisfy his own character, is the librarian that fetches information from stored knowledge. I also had to make sure that memory would know that he would not be able to fob me off with some ‘cock and bull’ story about how the stored information has gremlins in it which like to tell long stories that lead off into fiction. I promised I would send someone to mend the swinging door between the library of knowledge and Imagination’s workshop.
'There has to be a door there between the library and Imagination’s Workshop, as well as separate doors to and from each of them, to your office.’ My telephone voice tautously toned over the speaker in the corner of the room. Of course, all my voices had a free ticket to every meeting, except for the comedy voices which were kept in Memory’s office, in a box near the library. A visitor’s quick glance would have seen a recently thumbed instruction manual on the box opened at….let me see…...Ah! Someone has torn the title off. It was probably the same person who had removed the sign from Imagination’s Workshop door that had said, ‘Strictly no admittance’. All sorts of wild ideas had been coming out of there recently. It is almost impossible to police because nobody recognises any of the new ideas until Memory and I have tagged them for processing.
I should say, that
the ‘Scales of Limitation’ is a Trojan Horse gift from the
demon-world. We don’t need a birthday or a debilitating event to be
handed it, but usually these circumstances are the catalysts that
encourage us to accept the ‘gift’. Oh, No, The ‘Scales of
Limitation’ with which we weigh ourselves is in every spiritual
library we attend and the personal-sales technique, that demons use,
persuades us to, at least, stock one copy in our personal library;
you know:
'You never know’, they winningly smile, ‘You might
find it useful. Bye!’
My advice? Burn it! Burn it now! We were born with our own book called, ‘Danger and what to do when it leaps out at you’. The problem is we have to learn how to read it.
‘Hello, young one. Would you like me to read your book to you? Then you can put it away and never need to look at it again.'
I learnt about that trick when I was sixteen during an extraordinary meeting in a lucid dream in which I was to choose which spiritual way I would go. Hmmm, I can’t decide.
Imagination had recently been having a problem with ‘Formula’ creeping into his workshop. Being linear and one dimensional Formula has always been very difficult to spot when he was there, but recent off-site training had made Formula attractive to some of the Concepts that worked in Imagination’s Workshop and a few Concepts were hanging around long enough for a presence to be felt. The clustering of Concepts, of course, led to some very good decisions being made, but I knew that such a conglomeration could easily become a coagulation. Lumpy imagination, we do not want. This then, was another place for demons to get a hand-hold.
I know that conspiracy theories, contrary to beliefs solely formed from external sources, such as in confirmation biased information, needed lumpy imagination in order for Memory to recognise that a formed idea needed filing. Since I have been promoted to, or more accurately a senior post has been created for me of, Chief Operating Officer, with a majority vote on internal activities, I have been sifting through the available departments for records with a goal of creating an agile and lean operating system. Obviously, the two dimensional Formula was assisting me. I told Imagination to stop turning Formula sideways when he came to visit him (we need to see that Formula is actually there), and told Formula that Imagination is always busy but certain times could be arranged to help to construct a ‘form’, jig’, or ‘mould’ for Imagination to work to; but as the nature of Imagination’s job is to take naturally created psychedelic drugs specifically tuned to our being, it is not always a GOOD time to visit, because there is a high chance of coagulation.
‘Invite only.’ I warned.
Head of Services made it clear that some of the cleaners were inconsistent with disconnecting and clearing away all the extraneous and disused temporarily-linked dendrites. In fact, some important ones acting as essential conduits had been removed and some of the more sparkily ones were being used as decorations and starting to take up a longer term residence. Evicting dendrites is problematic in itself but when they are like ropes, the spare bandwidth is often used to carry information that was once pertinent to the original build but is now non-sequitur to anything nearby.
Formulation (Formula’s sister) said she would look into building an efficient super highway of dendrites for the sole purpose of degree level study. I remarked that it would have to bypass Imagination’s Workshop but transit bodies should be able to access it in order to ferry away useful tidbits that we can rearrange for our own purposes. It was noted that this is duplicitous in nature, particularly as there was an underlying tension surrounding the unsaid intention to dismantle the super-highway once all the relevant information had been successfully siphoned off. Head of Works and Head of Services agreed to discuss plans to create a new department called, ‘New Creative Tools’ which would only be accessible from Imagination’s Workshop and Formula would hold the key to, though not necessarily be the ferryman, between the two departments.
- end of story -
Because I operate in a cross-functional team, Harrari and Hakim were present. Personally, we three didn’t really see the necessity of their presence but I had to make sure that they would be able to stop Formula making changes to how we three communicate. There must never be a disablement or interference to our clear communication, particularly in light of the continuing dimming of the spirit world and its slightly gelatinous form in many places that made fluidity between us and the rest of it ever more difficult. We still didn’t have a solution to the microwave problem. Harrari can communicate with her alien species by using the high tension electric wires spread across the countries of the world to send and receive signals; not difficult, she says.
‘It is all done with prime numbers.’
I have actually heard it myself, but, when they sent and received, it just sounded like an American radio advertisement selling something or other, and the carrier wave was just an ear-worm to me. I think Long-wave radio used to send a similar repeating signal when no communication was sent to let people who are seeking the frequency know that they have found it.
Hakim, my faithful friend and protector-avatar, is ever-near and ready for a medium sized spiritual attack, but we three know we will need some new tools one day.
Unfortunately, if we want to walk like the grandad in the story that was sent in to Readers Digest, directly from one place to another, we have to learn how to ignore distractions like pretty trees, and ponds, or clumsy-minded and demon-dulled neighbours creating puffs of sour air with their vapes. The demons love the foetid air here, they meet up here and every now and again when another one arrives, the door to their realm opens and another waft of stale demon-sweat-ridden air leaves my neighbour’s mouth and, looking about itself for an outlet, evilly finds its way into my clean and spiritually-fresh home. Of course, Hakim alerts me and my involved focus on the text I am studying evaporates as we silently debate what to do. Usually, it is a minor demon and now that my nemesis is himself dead, Hakim can easily sieve the demons out of the stench. Nonetheless, Harrari and I are more than a little miffed at the constant interruptions but it is Hakim’s job and he cannot retire until the myriad of demon’s that my nemesis hosted are disarmed, disseminated and made safe. Of course, that day will not come soon. His demons are legion.
Like an obsessed house-proud denizen of pompous self-righteousness I have to stop trying to learn and understand, to sweep out the drunken demons that follow the scent to an idyll. Just like the ‘nutter on the bus’ talking to (poking) the person going to an exam, who has all the information they have on their chosen subject finely balanced on their heads, a slight deviation in posture will bring it all tumbling down. We know that the cheats who smuggled the information into the exam by storing it INSIDE their heads will win through against the distracting non-playable characters on the bus.
Of course, demons are sent to prevent us absorbing information that will be ultimately useful to us. We are supposed to succeed at pretty much everything we try our hands at, if we have the right aptitude; and we would, without distractions.
In psychology, in order to successfully recall information there are three steps required.
Coding
Storing
Decoding
If we fail at one of these tasks we will inevitably lose the information.
Storing information requires a physicality that not everyone possesses. After an incident that affects the brain. Areas where information was once stored may become physically inaccessible. The links in the brain go to a dead-end where there was once a series of shelves with stored information.
Coding information requires the transmutation of stimuli into something that the brain can process. Processing is not necessarily understanding it. Children know that the sky is up and it is blue without understanding why – it just is, is good enough for that information to be stored. Even rubbish can be coded, stored and decoded for successful recall to occur, though this is much, much harder because by ‘rubbish’ we mean ‘random’ as in not obviously linked to anything else. It is the linking of nuggets of information to other ‘bits’ of information that help make up the encoding of information; mnenomics is an example of this. A candle or pencil has a similar shape to the numeral ‘1’, just as the shape of a stereotypical form of a sailing boat (a sloop) resembles the numeral ‘4’. This is rational and dedicated encoding we can use to recall the order of things. Here is a list up to ten
Pencil; Swan; Bow (bow and arrow), Sailing boat; Fishing hook; Tadpole, Boomerang; ‘Fat Lady’ (from bingo); Balloon on a string; Bat and Ball
I prefer rhyming sounds: Bun, shoe, tree, door, hive, sticks, heaven, gate, line, hen.
To remember the order of a list of ten, you simply associate the respective image with the new item to be remembered. This pairing then gets stored and to recall the new item and its place in the list you just bring back the code and see what is associated with it.
‘Please recall item number four’ (an orange – maybe) which to me, is the new item printed on, or is in the shape of a door. The door could have a door-knocker shaped like an orange, or an orange could be the door or blocking the doorway.
All demons have to do is interfere with the coding and the information is instantly lost. Imagine being given a series of numbers to remember and spilling your coffee on your lap-top half way through. A trained person would, however, still code the numbers.
Because learning a
new subject often has few connections to anything else all the bits
of information MUST be encoded not well, that means without
repetition or ambiguity. Understanding something complex requires a
building of information that is coded and stored and recalled over
and over again until the whole is understood and finally coded and
stored, before any comparison can be made with new information and
then recoded and stored. Such as, cows are mammals. Random
information is now stored. Mammals feed their young with milk. Random
information is now stored. It is much easier for us to just remember
that cows feed their young with milk which becomes ‘Milk goes on my
breakfast cereal and in tea or coffee’ which is of secondary
importance to ‘Cow milk is available in shops’.
Now we can forget about cows providing milk. We only have to remember
that we can get milk for our own use in supermarkets. Now we know
this. However, if your phone rings at the split second you notice
there is no milk in the fridge and you answer it and then complete an
action associated with the phone call, there might not be any milk in
the fridge tomorrow morning. If your morning routine is to drink
coffee before you go out to wake you up a bit before driving, and you
simply won’t drink black coffee before driving to the shop to get
milk (half-awake) a demon can make a susceptible person accidentally
dial your phone number the day before you run someone over the next
day.
Why do my passengers want to turn the car radio on when I am about to reverse?
mostly fiction