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!

Nothing from Nothing Leaves…

Where are the places that you hide your attention?  It is sure easy to do.  I’ve made plenty of money off of other people’s attention, too.  Do you work?  Well, at least when you hide attention there, you get something for it.  But what do you get for hiding attention on the tv?  Yeah, that’s the easiest.  Flip through the guide, watch something you TiVo’d – hey, order some porn!

Or in a book.. Well, that technique is cool, as long as you know what you’re doing.  You could be numbing yourself, or you could be learning something.  It’s up to you.  Hmmmm… sounds like the key to the attention thing is paying attention to your attention.  Why do I keep coming back to this one thing?

Yep, the problem of smelling your own nose rises once again.  What is it, this thing that is supposed to pay attention to your attention, watch what you’re watching?  It is the exact thing that is no-thing, the one thing we want but can’t get – because we already possess it.  Now where did I leave it?

In the spaces between the words, the silence between the sounds, the gaps between information.  What defines the definition?  Boundaries.  Something is nothing without nothing, nothing is everything without something.  Funny how things become their opposite when they are out of balance.  We’ll save that for another time.

So, if you hide your attention in the places between places, the spaces between thoughts, and expand from there, you’ll find something you might not know was lost.  Bonus!

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.