The Experienced Reality

The Experienced Reality

We all know, that a human can die from fear. Someone is startled, shocked by a frightening event and drops dead as a result. A human can also die from sorrow, from self pity, from self hatred. All these things which kill you can not be touched, can not be seen, they exist only in the mind, but are capable of killing nevertheless. These ‘thoughts’, produce ‘emotions’, to which the body reacts chemically and physically. A thought, a feeling, can help someone survive in impossible situations, but they can also kill as successfully as a real gun.
These invisible killers do not appear out of nothing, they are reactions to the outside world, to the signals which people, books, TV, send to us. During our life, we are surrounded by signals, by information which slowly eats away at our mental and emotional defenses, which slowly kills us. This is called stress. Many people react to this by trying to limit the amount of information around them. Like campaigning against violent films and nudity. Or shutting out the worrying information by creating a mental wall with alcohol or prescription “happy pills”. Or trying to concentrate on one area of life and completely ignore the other areas.
There is always a “black market” when impulses are repressed, a black market of the soul, which contains all the stuff which the conscious mind refuses to accept. Stuff concerning the person in question, as well as the world around him/her. Some people succeed completely in suppressing ‘the other side’ of themselves, and actually divide into separate personalities – they split themselves. It isn’t even always a dramatic condition – just ‘normal’ everyday schizophrenia. We all know people who are sometimes person A and nice to be with, and sometimes person B, who is horrible. Others secretly practice things, which they are later ashamed of, and refuse to think about it until the next time the repressed information overflows, and is acted out in one neurotic ritual or other.

When I, or anyone else, say “Jimmy”…hahaha… When Jimmy lights up a joint, or takes some LSD, or eats a weird mushroom, he, after that act, experiences certain things. But these experiences are not - not - contained in the drug itself. The drug is not a cartridge of information like a CD, a cassette or a book, the cigarette of cannabis does not contain within itself the trip which follows when Jimmy inhales the smoke. The trip is within Jimmy himself, the drug activates it. The trip is not inside the drug, the drug is the trigger of the trip. The emotions, the pictures, symbols, sequences, etc., which make up Jimmy’s trip when high, were already inside Jimmy, no new information has entered his brain by the act of sucking at the joint, what has happened is that for the duration of the “high” experience, Jimmy’s mental and emotional patterns, the patterns of existing information are re-arranged, dis-arranged. New realities or new aspects of the ordinary reality appear. The dreams begin dividing, intertwining and changing.

The debate concerning the inherited knowledge which humans (may) have, the knowledge they are born with, their “instincts”, has been going on for a long time. From the very beginning of my awareness of the existence this debate, I have been in militant opposition to the “pro-instinct” view, perhaps because “I was born this way” is a weak excuse, which is used much too often[1]. Ever since I started examining such notions, it has struck me as absurd, to assume that when a child of a basketball player or a drunk, becomes a basketball player or a drunk, it is because of the “blood”, because of some information stored in the child’s DNA. To me it was, and still is, blindingly obvious, that the “blood heritage” contains information concerning the number of fingers and limbs, and the color of the skin and eyes, but not a micro gram of social information, like what profession or lifestyle the child will choose. Social information is not inherited, but transferred onto the child by the inhabitants of the social environment – first the parents, than their friends, than the kids and grownups on the street and in school, then by the interaction with the whole info-sphere – TV, books, internet, etc. When the child of a drunk becomes a drunk, or a child of hysteric becomes a hysteric, this is not because some information contained in its DNA suddenly became active, but because the child’s psyche was made, was programmed, consciously and unconsciously, by a hysteric or a drunk[2]. The child after all, while still with an unformed character, is programmed by everything an adult does or says, not just by the “pray to god”, “do not tell lies” statements.

There was a point at which I denied the existence of any instincts in the human at all, but I had to modify my opinions, funnily enough, after I became conscious of some of my dog’s behavior. My dog is a toy poodle – as far from a wolf as a dog can get – but still, sometimes he does things, which no one had taught him to do:
When he plays with a toy, he sometimes bites it and shakes his head violently. It is fun to watch, but must be a distorted predator instinct – to bite into the pray and to violently rip out a chunk of meat, or to bite into a smaller animal, and break its spine.
When he takes a crap outside, he then lamely tries to cover up his crap with earth, by using his hind legs. This is also a distorted instinct of a wild animal, which must hide evidence of its presence from other animals.
Sometimes, when he wants to lie down, he turns around in circles, trying to soften up the pillow, or chair, or floor, with his paws. A third example of behavior which he was not taught by anyone, and therefore – inherited behavior, “instinct”, from a time when a wolf or wild dog must make himself a comfortable resting spot in the wilderness.
If we accept the theory, that we humans have evolved from a slightly different animal species, although we know next to nothing of this mystical animal species, I think it is safe to assume, that the difference between us and them, is as big, if not bigger, than the difference between my dog and the original wolf-like wild beasts. In history books it is said, that the dog was domesticated around 15 000 BC. Today, my toy poodle still has some distorted remains of the instincts of the original wild beasts. Therefore, I no longer find absurd the notion, that some instincts may still be operating in humans. What I find absurd is the silly examples which people give concerning our instincts. Although it is logically valid to assume that there must be some inherited information patterns inside us, it is also valid to assume, that we are as blind to it, as we are to air, and as fish is to water. It is an integral part of us, and to actually see it, is very very difficult. When we think we see it, its usually something else completely, something which can be explained by other means, without us having to invoke DNA, YHVH, or ET, depending on the prevailing supernatural leanings. Invoking God, Nature, Biology, Aliens, to give an explanation to a difficult phenomenon, is pure laziness of the brain.

There’s a lot of stuff we know about the world, and an enormous amount of what we don’t know, and when encountering something for which there is no humanly logical explanation, it is much more honorable to say ‘I don’t know. Yet.’, instead of filling the unknown with stuff which makes you feel safe, or secure in knowledge. Of course, this is my personal view, everyone is free to perceive the world whichever way they prefer, even those who I think are horrible people have this right, what I’m saying is, that no-one must force their own loony notions upon me, and especially not have the police or military at their disposal when they try to do it.

When one is open minded, and does not take for granted the spoken and unspoken ‘self – evident truths’, and when one does not force by willpower oneself to see, hear, think and feel only things which are ‘appropriate’ – then one can surf the crazy currents of information in an aware and efficient way. Then one realizes that there is no useless knowledge and no impossible things.
[1] Not to mention the instances of political oppression justified by claims that ‘nature’ is being followed.
[2] Which only illustrates the need to de-program one self if one is ever to approach something like freedom.