Where the Mind Goes, So Goes I

How often I feel like a fish trapped in a bowl, a prisoner to something called life.

To an outsider this sounds depressing and at times I suppose it is. But it’s all I’ve ever known. Like a 3-legged dog, I’ve only ever known hopping.

Fifty-two years of hopping proves one thing: all that ‘you’ and ‘I’ are is the sum total of mental programming we received. I hop while you may glide and another may strut and still another crawls.

The operating system for each of us went in early – you can credit/blame your parents, immediate family, neighborhood, culture for that. Basically, by the time you wandered into school for more structured forms of indoctrination, your basic hardcoding was in place. Don Draper is an asshole to many of us because ‘he’ was born with good looks and confidence while the rest of us lurked around in his shadow.

More and more I feel this urge to to scrape and power wash all of it out of me – all the thoughts, beliefs, feelings, knowledge, information, content. All that crap I just ‘knew for a fact’ or ‘had faith in.’ All of it. Just scour everything so it shines bright clear like Mr. Clean just blasted through.

Then what? Who am I when all of the programming is removed? Am I like that old MS/DOS C prompt flashing on a blank screen?

C:\>_

Seriously, where do we go when the brain is emptied? Like an Alzheimer’s patient where some of it is lost and other parts get crossed up and the output is incomprehensible yet we still refer to the person by name even though he or she is clearly no longer home.

When David Carse had his awakening in the Amazon, ‘he’ was thunderstruck by the realization, “There’s nobody home.” One big-ass shift in perception and “the David thing” not only was gone, it was totally clear he’d never really existed.

The whole thing, as countless mystics have declared, is a dream and we but dream characters in the dream. Like a vampire finding no reflection in the mirror.

My older sister recently shared a terrific story about a professor who, upon her Alzheimer’s diagnosis, decided to set an end date for her physical existence – she would not allow the ravages of the disease to claim her, she’d go out on her own terms.

Good stuff, but as her disease progressed it raised all kinds of interesting questions. What if she waited too long and no longer remembered to do the deed? What does it mean to ‘make up one’s mind’ in a world where we routinely ‘change our minds’ not so very long after?

“By god, I’m going to climb Everest / lose weight / find a new job.”

“Oh, it’s raining. Maybe tomorrow.”

Also, if the Alzheimer’s ultimately was going to claim ‘her,’ what the heck is ‘her’ anyway? I mean, of ‘sound mind’ she sets out to end life. But if she’d waited just a bit longer there’d have been no ‘her’ to do it. It would have had to be done by someone else who knew the ‘her’ who was no longer there but wanted it done.

Like I said, all we are is mental programming that constantly flits in and out of ‘consciousness’ and broadcasts out of mouths so the world bloody well knows who we are. Until ‘we change our minds,’ that is.

All of which begs the ultimate question: what is all of this mental masturbation appearing in?