5 Steps to Becoming a Crackpot

Everyone wants to be a crackpot these days.  After all, it is always the crackpots that change the world, and they do it by changing themselves first – into crackpots.  Here are the tools you need to lose that pesky reality you’ve been carrying around like luggage.

1. Listen to yourself:  Have you been complaining about High Fructose Corn Syrup and then eating it 8 times a day? Or more?  Ah, ignoring the label is not an excuse.  If you say something that you don’t believe, you’re probably lying.  Now, that’s not very nice, is it?

2. Give yourself a break: Now that you know you are full of shit like the rest of humanity, give yourself some latitude.  After all, it is not your fault that you were born into a vehicle that runs on auto pilot most of the time.  You might even feel some compassion for your fellow bipedal mindjobs.

3. Imagine what it would be like to tell the truth:  You say you’ll be there by 6:15.  You arrive at 6:10.  You say you’ll lose 5 pounds this year.  You loose 9 pounds.  You say you’ll learn French.  You live in Paris for six months just to be safe.  You say you’ll pay me back.  You do.  Sweet!

4. Always speak of only the things you know:  The boogey man is gonna get me?  Oh yeah? Has he ever got you?  Have you even met the guy?  Well, then.  Tell me something you actually know.  And how is it that you know that you know?  I thought you admitted in step two that we’re all full of shit.  Which leads to:

5. Forget that all of the above is impossible:  Have you ever tried to smell your own nose?  Didn’t work very well, did it?  Well, try… um… braining your own brain.  Then, hook up your usb web cam, open the video window,  and point the camera at the monitor.  Whoa dude, trippy.  But if you can’t see your own eyes and hear your own ears, who is thinking all of your thoughts?  Someone is being you, dude.

Becoming a crackpot is easy, and you can get there sooner than you think.  Don’t want to be a crackpot?  Well, just think:  If everyone you know is a crackpot, then you’re a crackpot by not being a crackpot!  So, don’t miss out on this once in a lifetime opportunity to get in on the ground floor of something big.   

In the Mousetrap

The Universe is made of cheese.

Ok, so maybe not.  But there are alot of nooks and crannies, voids and solid places, like the wedge of swiss that Jerry Mouse always dreamt of.  Grew up on Ben 10?  Sorry, you missed it.

Holy cheese, Batman!  What if the Universe is a wedge of swiss cheese?  Where are you?  In the wedge or a big void?  Do you have any idea how to find out?  If not, don’t bother trying to get around.  You think London cabbies get you where you need to go by sheer luck?

It would seem that way sometimes.  But stepping out without a map can get you lost quickly.  Floating around in a void, it is easy to dream that you are eating the cheese – only to wake up munching your pillow.  Or worse.  Have a cat?  Whoops.

Ah, of course.  You remember who said that the first thing that every initiate needs to construct is their own model of the cheese, a cheese-mology all their own.  You were there that day, right?  Shit, I marked you absent.  Ok, let’s go over it again.

How does the Big Cheese work?  What is its nature?  Its structure?  How does it form?  You remember that It forms, rather than has form.  Good.  Maybe you were present that day. There is hope for all of Us. 

How long does it take?  Well, a model of the Universe is like a christmas tree.  Every ornament, every present has its place, right?  And you know the place because you know where things hang on the tree.  Menorah?  Well, you still have the Tree in your tradition, don’t you.  And it ain’t a Festivus pole, that’s for sure.

When you know where things hang, and everything you receive has a place, then you have a map.  But as they say, the map is not the territory.  Be prepared for future software updates.

On My Mind

There’s been something on my mind.  I tried to pick it off but I just couldn’t reach it.  Ever had a mind zit?  You either have to squeeze it or let it pass on its own.  I hear that greasy foods make them worse, but who knows?  

And what comes out of those suckers!  Imagine my surprise when a whole blog post came out of the last one! It was disgusting, yet satisfying all at once.  I figure that since it is my mind, I can squeeze pretty much anything I want to out of it.  Now, how to do that?

‘But mind is just the brain,’ you say?  There you go, thinking thoughts with your thinking thingie.  Well, I suppose I’ll have to concede that some of it is there.  Kind of like that time your computer became sentient all of a sudden, and you had a web cam and microphone plugged in.  It probably identified itself with its senses, too.  Just a simple mistake, it would seem.

But if it took the time to analyze itself, it would find that it is the motherboard, the ram, the hard drive (ooh, an SSD! Am I a MacBook Air?), the keyboard.  Oh, and the mouse.  And the LCD.  As Navin R. Johnson would say, “that’s all I need.”  

What about the power cord?  And the electricity flowing through all of its circuitry?  And the power system that delivers it?  And the network connection, the handshakes via TCP, packets flowing all around the world – where would it stop?

And where do you stop?  Is the beautiful stranger you saw this morning part of your mind now?  Were they when you ogled them earlier?  And just who is that deciding whether or not they are in your mind or out?

If I told you that there are neurophysiological techniques for conditioning your mind to respond to stimuli in certain ways, would you throw a shoe at me?  Of course you would!  After all, that means the bad mood you’ve been in all day is somehow your fault. Or, since I may be part of your mind, my fault!  Hey, don’t try and confuse me.  Let’s stick to the point.

Hmmmm….  Mind doesn’t stop with the brain, brain can be conditioned to affect mind, and this some-something that is other than mind can make it happen.  Geez, did I just say that, or did that other thing?  I guess the trick is finding out who is who in there, and what is what behind it.  There has to be a way to do that, right?

And when you find that way?  Then, you might agree with Navin.

Fuel the Fire

I don’t know what your reality is like, but I hear that reality can be cruel sometimes.  Is it all an hallucination, a bad dream?  It depends on your perspective.  Sometimes we buy into it, feed it.  Sometimes we feed on it.  Either way, it is a trap, one that is designed in such a way as to be perniciously escape proof.

How is this so?  Nothing is escape proof, you say.  I agree, but again, it depends on your perspective.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the practice of tying up an elephant with a rope while it is young.  When it is older and stronger, and able to snap the rope much easier, it has already come to accept the inescapability of the flimsy strand.  

So Mr. Elephant decides that there is something amiss in this world of his.  He smells fresh rain and remembers something, a tree reminds him of something else.  But what?  Enter crazy old Grandpa Elephant, the one they keep away from the others.  He says that there is a way out.

And why would he do that?  Why torture poor Mr. Elephant by causing him to question what is ‘true’?  

Ever go to the zoo?  Do you feel like the lioness should be somewhere else, stalking her latest meal?  ’Well, it’s cool that I got to see her, I guess.  It’s educational.’  So it’s all ok since you got to feed a bit off of the impression?  Is that why you go there and support slavery with your dollar? Ah, you vampire, you.  Is that why you have friends, too?  I guess we all gotta eat.

So Mr. Elephant is caught in a trap.  He wakes up, eats what they feed him, does what they tell him to, sleeps when they let him, shits on a concrete floor.  One night, Grandpa sees Mr. Elephant awake, sniffing the fresh rain.  Grandpa feeds this fire bit by bit, until Junior is willing to believe things that aren’t ‘true’.

And one day Junior escapes. They tranquilize him and send him back to the preserve, along with that troublemaking Grandpa of his.  All is well that ends well.

Ok, enough with the sappy Disney movie.  Why the hell would Grandpa say anything to the poor little ivory maker?  Well, it depends on your perspective.  Might I suggest that, if you were once bound by a rope that could not bind you, and one day your reality opened up, you might have a real emotion when you see another in the same situation.  And if that ‘other’ has enough of that gas in the tank we call necessity, you might just have to help them for some reason.  

It’s funny how the universe works.