Gangsta’s Paradise

 

The real story behind the big hit... yeah, right.

Song had charisma.

It was the year 613 AD. The Sui Dyansty ruled the land of Yingzhou. A ’skilled magician’ named Song Zixian gained followers by making a room glow and projecting images of snakes, men and animals in a mirror.  He said that these images were the forms in which they would be ‘reincarnated as’.

Imagine how many fans you could get if you could convince people you are Biggie Smalls?  Ok, bad example.  Elvis?  How about Buddha?

Song led a coup against the current powers-that-be that resulted not only in his defeat, but in the execution of ‘over a thousand families’ suspected of collaborating with him.  If you figure a ‘family’ of that time is at least two generations, the carnage was heavy.

Where did Song get the idea that he was the prophesied return of Buddha?

Enter Mani, who probably hung out somewhere in the area we know as Iraq, but back in the day – like 210 AD.  He chilled with the Elkasites when he was young, but when he met the Mandaeans, his mind was blown.  See, the Elkasites had some cool ideas, but they were the sugar in the kool-aid of the rest of their artificial flavorings.  The Mandaeans probably still have some non-kool-aid cool shit, but since the current war, they’ve been pretty much wiped out.  Obviously, Mani wasn’t completely taken by the Mandaeans, since one of their big ideas is to keep your mouth shut, lest someone take their cool shit and make it wak.  

Yeah, he was an original gangsta.

Now, Mani was epic.  He created a script and a dogma which you would recognize in the hardcore Gnostic writings found in the North African desert, the Nag Hammadi.  You know what I’m talking about.   Mani’s crew spread to China not too soon after he died, wearing blue bandanas and riding carriages that could do three wheel motion.  

Well, maybe the ideas spread through diffusion, but picturing Ice Cube crossing the Gobi is worthy of a moment of pensiveness.  

Ok, done.

The Mahayana crew split into factions, with Mani’s dudes externalizing everything important that might have passed through, adding arrows and swords to the mix on occasion.  Maybe I exaggerate, maybe I don’t. Who knows?

So Song is one of Mani’s boys, wether he knows it or not.  He thinks that he is a Moonlight Child, like the 8 year old kid Liu Jinghui.  A hundred years earlier, a dude Fa Quan figured it was time to take out the Man because Jinghui was transforming into snakes and pheasants.  I shit you not!  Mutherfucking snakes and motherfucking pheasants, since they had no planes back then.  

And what does a Moonchild have to do with Lord Farquaad?  Apparently, Farquaad wasn’t rounding up characters for nothng.  When he found Fiona, he initiated her into the Mile High Club, thus requiring Samuel L. Jackson to throw down on their spawn, the young Jinghui.

Nevermind me, I’m doing an impromptu fiction mashup here.

How do we know these thousands of people were killed because of ol’ Mani?  Dualism, that’s how.  It’s like distributing guns in a Lord of the Flies scenario.  It is dangerous in the wrong hands.  You think I’m crazy?

I rest my case.

The most useful tools are always the most exploited resources.  Don’t tell me I am full of shit on this one or I’ll shove a Google News search down your throat.  Whoops, I just went dualist on your ass.  Sorry.

Song figured he was Maitreya.  But wielding the sword of dualism, he ended up cutting the throats of everyone who believed in him.  Ain’t it funny how things boomerang and hit you in the ass?  

Only if you believe that your ass exists outside of your own head.

Who You Lookin’ At?

 

What goes up must come down.

 

So you figured out some clever sigil and you did your thing to charge it, yadda yadda.  You sit back and wait for it all to come down.  Wow! Success! I got this cool thing I was after!

There was a pretty ‘unique’ persona who believed that the key to all workings is a point of connection in the ‘material’ world.  I posit that most magick-type personas tend to speak in code.  Ergo, there’s more to the story.  Concordantly, other ’systems’ by other personae tend to expound upon this hypothesis.

Whoa, dude.

Ok, let’s backtrack.  First principle: Simplicity.  Why does anyone need to do ‘magick’ when this whole ‘thing’ is nothing but a big joke?  Because we believe in the reality of duality.  ”Not me,” you say.  But who is this “me” you speak of?  Yeah, you’re tired of me harping on this.  I’m not being an asshole accidentally.  This shit has to come out somehow.

Don’t feel guilty about it.  I’m not trying to bring you down, at least not  in the mundane sense.  It’s simple – to have duality, we gotta believe in it.  At least that’s what those quantum Doppelgänger-bangers tell us, in so many thousands of words.  Belief makes universes, and yours is yours, if you get my drift.  

So, what does this have to do with that unlicensed magical operation you were planning?  

Take a lesson from the L337 H4×0r in you:  It is better to pwn the system before you run your scripts, kiddies.  Why?  Because you created the duality in the first place.  You are the OS and the script.  The cheese and the sandwich.  The frank and the beans.

Hear me now and believe me later:  The key to this thing is that ‘point of connection’.  Connection – kind of like wires being plugged in, but more like a fulcrum.  Picture a teeter-totter.  Picture you on the down side, the universe on the other side, and this little ‘operation’ trying to hold the whole thing up.  Oh, you were thinking the universe was in the middle and this ‘ego script’ would lift you off the ground?

How much do you weigh?

A wise, but broke, judo instructor once told me:  ”You must cooperate with your opponent”.  Ok, he didn’t say that.  But he would have if he knew what he was teaching.  Provoke the opponent by telling him that his mother has a wooden leg with a kickstand.  He runs at you, you use your body script to fling him into that pile of garbage you envisioned him landing on.  Or, you just ‘let it all happen’, knowing yourself in a deep way – and no one gets hurt.  

Ok, let me try this again:

What if you are both people on the playground toy?  Well, this whole ‘point of contact’ thing is the dance between / within your dualistic, schizophrenic world.  Ego script?  ”Gimme something, I don’t care how.  Screw the other guy!”  But you’re the other guy!  Why not just switch your perspective, find out what’s going to go down, and then ‘judo’ it with your operation?  Do you think any decent surfer tries to make the wave change direction?

Dude!

So what about this whole black magick / white magick thing?  Well, just imagine punching someone out in a dream and waking up with a black eye.  That just might teach you some empathy.

There’s a great little piece of graffiti carved in some podunk little temple in an old Mediterranean country:  Know Thyself.  I don’t know, just sounds pretty cool, I guess.  Especially if you re-member who you are, and not who your split-self is being.  You think I set out to write this half-assed mindfuck of a rant this morning?  No, it was you!

You made me do it!

Living in a Box

Imagine that you’re living in a box.

In this box, all kinds of things are happening.  People are walking down the street, cars are driving by.  You figure out that you can carjack most of them, and start driving around.  People ask you to do things.  You start to gather units of stuff that matter to you.  

Sound familiar?  

You have figured out how to move, change your perspective, find your way around.  You get better as you go.  You start to meld into the perspective you seem to be locked into.  

Now, imagine that you’re NOT in an XBox 360 playing GTA IV.  You are actually in your own box, unable to escape.  

Still sound familiar?  If not, run along, Agent Starling.  Fly fly.

In this box, you notice that you have three abilities:  You can perceive, you can sense, and you can discriminate.  In sensing, you sense the patterns in things, giving way to smells, music, dance.  In discrimination, you are able to analyze, dissect, classify.  In perceiving, you interact with the world around you.

Eventually, you start to notice that some things you can discriminate, sense and perceive seem to be like a gossamer film hiding in the light.  Makes no sense, huh?  Good.

Then, you notice that, when the ripples of sensing and discrimination settle, there is something on the other side of the perception, like a light in the room behind the mirror.  

And something is happening in that room.  It affects your three abilities, and they affect the action.  And that action somehow creates and is created by the ‘reality’ of your little box.

And then it occurs to you:  Is that me on the other side of the mirror?  Am I the player and the play?  Is everything that I thought was real just a point of view?

Then, you remember the formula:  b = s, where b = (perception * discrimination * sensation), and s is a spoon.  Wait – if there is no spoon, then…

And if you are living in a box that does not exist, then who are you?

Solving for you:  you = spoon.

Do the math.

Links make you lazy.

I’ll put it to you right now to decide whether this is worth reading at all:  Have you found yourself lately drifting on the web?  Ever look at a page and wonder how you got there, even for just a split second?  Wasting a lot of time lately just clicking through Reddit or Digg?  

Well, now that I have your attention, I’ll relate to you a relevant anecdote.

I was in kindergarten the first time I used a card catalog.  My teacher did not believe I could read. She had me select a book that I did not have at home to read to the class.  I was quite annoyed, yet excited at the opportunity.  Five year olds can be complex, it seems.  Don’t you remember?

My affection for the card catalog grew with my curiosity.  By third grade, I was writing research papers and presentations, one of which was on microbes (which I pronounced micro bees – makes a strange kind of sense, doesn’t it?).  While doing this project, it was the card catalog that suggested the best paths of research.  Someone had walked this path before me and had left a list of books under 576 (yeah, it’s 579 now.  I’ve been around longer than Lindsay Lohan).   It was pure brilliance.

Fast forward to the first time I did research online.  It was a cold winter day, a perfect time to warm up my C64 and try out my new CompuServe account – at 300 smoking baud.  If you don’t know what the hell I am talking about, suffice it to say that there was exponentially more material available for my lucid dreaming research paper than there was for the unseen bees.  Yet, it was still manageable.  

I built my first website in 1994.  I was immediately sucked in by the seemingly infinite ways I could contribute to the world community by linking documents in my sites.  I was able to learn Java while it was in alpha using links, and created an entire career for myself by following in the footsteps of those who knew by the links they left as breadcrumbs.  For a young chump, I did pretty well.  

If you haven’t been online for at least 10 years or so, you might not have known that links used to be as good as the card catalog I used in the ’70s.  People put real thought into connecting to another place on the web because it was novel, important, and full of promise.  Nowadays, links are cheap.  Hell, how many links have you whizzed by in the last hour?  On the last page?  

Do this for yourself.  Today, tomorrow – right now – take a rough count of all of the links on each page you go to, just for a few minutes or so.  Every page that takes you nowhere – like this page for instance, or anything off of Reddit or Digg that you read and then close – counts as a zero.  A Zero is like Coke Zero – sweet and tasty, but no calories and no nutrition, at least as far as the usefulness of the links are concerned.  If these pages have ten, twenty, fifty links on them, consider: Are they wasted?   

What about the pages you leave by clicking on one or more links –   are they any better?  Are they taking you closer to your destination?  Or, are the clicks just wasting your time?

Sometimes, when you link for a human, you take from them a good set of search results.  Who says I know what needs a link in this rant – for you?  And what if I do link something?  Am I better at choosing what is linked than a quick Google?   Do links narrow rather than broaden horizons?  Do links dampen critical thinking?

Most importantly, would I be wasting your time by linking to other pages?  Would I be moving the web closer to being The Mundaneum than it already is?  Is there such a thing as link pollution?

I could be making a point right now by linking to something useless, but that would be like shoving plastic bags down the throats of pelicans to show that we need to clean up our oceans- undoubtably an extreme comparison, but it does show that there are other ways to make a point.

It should have been Johnnie Cochran who said, “Where there’s a link, you don’t have to think.”  I’d rather your mind spent a few more cycles here than it would normally.  It’s good exercise.

Now where are you going?  Cut out the middleman!  Do your own search.