by Mitch Frye
by Mitch Frye
What is it that makes people special? Ever thought about that? Why are you "better" than a cat?
I'll tell you, children, but afterwards I want to see the collection plate stuffed with panties.
Here you go. The reason you're so goddamned special is that you think you are. Fucking profound? Keep those eyes steady then, Socrates, 'cause I'm about
to attempt a crotch check on you. You think you are, and that's the key word.
You aren't aware of things the way they are. You see/hear/smell/feel
something, your receptors transduce it into a thought, and then it moves into your brain... where it is fucking molested. You pepper your perception
(which is inherently flawed anyway since your senses aren't perfect) with your memories, biases, and all kinds of other random shit.
Example:
As a child, you were bitten by a spider- non-poisonous, but it scared the living fucking holy cunt hell out of you. Your mind is forcefully conditioned to
fear those evil eight-legged whoremongers. Later in your life, a friend tries to turn you onto his favorite band. He pops the CD in the player. Sounds kind of nice. You ask, "Say, who are these guys?" He replies, "They're called Spider 2000." You shiver and are immediately slightly biased against the
music. No longer are you judging the sounds simply by how pleasing their combined pitch and loudness are, but you've inserted your own strange acquired
opinions inside.
So, think of it this way: humans are the animals most capable of twisting ther own reality. Hence, art emerges. Yay.
We can't grasp a "raw" reality. We rely only on our memory-intoxicated, already-dull awareness to keep us updated. It's like asking crazy grandma to take
notes for you... you get some idea of what's going on... but not really.
How do religions see this stuff? Well, Zen's gotcha goods for ya here. Zen says that the way we see the world is wrong, wrong, cuntly wrong. When we look
at something now, we automatically distinguish between two contrasting entities. Heh, heh... "titties". Breasts aside, you sort things and live a
dualistic lifestyle. What if you didn't do that? Well, that'd be just golly-goddamned great. You'd be motherfucking enlightened, wouldn't you? Yes. But
can you do that?
The first thing you see as a baby is a wall. You're looking at mommy, maybe daddy if he wasn't a pussy, and that ass-slapping rat of a doctor... but you see a wall. You can't tell this shit apart because you have no world experience whatsoever. A part of your brain gets cracking on that immediately.
Maybe we have to draw certain distinctions to survive. Yeah, okay, we do. But the ideal would be viewing everything as one. Nondualism, motherfucker.
Let's say that you did see everything as one big whole... how would you feel? Like nothing? Or maybe like everything? How about both at once.
Um. I'm not going to talk about other religions, though. Well, Christianity's concept of the Holy Trinity is something special though. Three as one? Everything as one is a loftier goal, but you have to start 'em out small, don't ya?
Time to talk about drugs? This being the USC Report, it's always time to talk about drugs. Topic: drugs and how they fit in with that other stuff
I talked about.
Alcohol:
Alcohol confuses you and makes you think a little more in the now. Actions are more... um.. primal... and the mind is momentarily reduced to something more
akin to that of a "lower-level" (value judgements BAD... IRONY GOOD) mammal.
Marijuana:
Better for "enlightenment" than alky, or so I hear. Short term memory and muddled perception. Person is forced to think in the nownownow the drugged
individual has to deduce stuff previously taken for given.
LSD:
Remember when I was talking earlier about how your regular perception is always fumbling with your biases? Well, acid is basically a caricature of this.
I said that human beings are capable of altering their realities. Well, kiddies, acid will apparently make you really do that. All of your biases and
prejudices and phobias come tumbling down on you in a visual form that seems completely and totally realistic. I wouldn't know for real (seriously),
but it seems like this is a form of negative therapy: you see, in a no-holds-barred kinda way, exactly how unenlightened you are. Basically, if you have
a very enjoyable or a very horrible trip, it means that you have wrapped yourself up inside your little everyday headworld so tightly that you're just
bumfazzled.
'Shrooms:
What the fuck ever. Someone once told me they felt like they saw the unity of everything while "shrooming" once. Interesting.
....
Aw hell, kids. The moral of the story is this: "RED WIZARD SHOT THE FOOD." I learned that from Gauntlet 2 on Nintendo. Or was it Gauntlet 1? IT DOESN'T REALLY MATTER SINCE BOTH GAMES ARE JUST EXTENSIONS OF ONE ANOTHER, NOW DOES IT? ARE NOT PEOPLE EXTENSIONS OF GOD? DID NOT PEOPLE CREATE THIS GAME?
ISN'T IT AWKWARD HOW I'VE RELATED GAUNTLETS 1&2 TO GOD? Yes.
Maybe next time we'll talk about what I think God is. But for now, the real moral of the story. You think you're special because of stuff that you've taken in from the world and made your own. Interesting? Not that much. But thinking of it that way, the world's utter lack of originality makes
nondualism a tad easier to digest.
"BURP! NONDUALISM WAS DELICIOUS!"