[ 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?
Mental Health
mostly fiction