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This
is an offering, part 2
by marriah,
5th August 2001.
This is the story of how I learned to think and
live
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Thus, when I looked at
any person and how they behaved, my first question was, what ideas
were they operating on? In this sense, from the age of 15 and 16, I
saw everyone around me, including myself, as a computer, with
behaving being induced by mental instructions. I had no concern for
God, truth, or any other such concept. I just wanted to find out
what worked and what didn't. But, if I could found out what worked,
and stay away from those things that didn't, I would be able to
control myself and my environment.
In essence, I was, am,
and forever will be a "control freak", a "snob", and darn proud of
it. To me, everyone is either programming, being programmed, or
operating on a program that results from various factors, and the
only question is: do you like the program you are running on? If
not, how do you change it? In this sense, I saw every human as
starting from a position of absolute autonomy or control over his
own mind and body, at the very least. Control is good because
discipline helps you get what you want, and getting what you want
makes you happy. After you get what you want, you help other people
get what they want, so everyone is happy. The only question I knew I
had to answer was how, and why, people gave up their control over
themselves and their environment.
So, my first step was to
see if I could control myself. When I was a sophomore in high
school, I thought it was about time to start making something of
myself. So, first I had to start disciplining myself. So, I created
a program, or a chart of daily events, so that I could control my
behavior, thoughts, and emotions with precision. At the time, I
hated emotions fiercely because my stepmother was the only person I
knew who displayed them so fiercely, often leading to what I
perceived as very irrational behavior that, in the end, made her
suffer. So, my first step was to purge my being of all emotions.
That proved to be harder that I thought, primarily because, with the
normal teenage elements of life - crushes, stress, etc. - I wanted
to vent, and yet stop myself from venting because I knew I would end
up worse off as a person and student if I did vent. I knew I was
going through a critical period of my life, and that every step was
precarious, so I had to be very careful with my actions. That meant
I had to put rigid restrictions on my thoughts. Ideally, by putting
restrictions on the more routine and mundane thoughts, and
mechanizing myself, I would be able to conserve energy and shift it
all onto in-depth contemplation of the world around me, so that I
could figure out how to change it. Thus, I reserved a lot of space
for my diary for figuring out how the world worked, how life should
be lived, and what connections existed between things. I wanted to
mechanize my daily life so thought I could let my thoughts and
emotions run free in this diary.
In fact, when I started
writing a diary at the age of 16, I intended it to be a
pre-chronicle of greatness. In a sense, I had a very hard and fixed
notion that laws controlled the universe, both physically and
metaphysically, and that one needed only to understand the laws to
control life. But, to understand the laws, one needed to slow life
down enough in some parts, and speed it up in others, so that one
could notice patterns. This meant that, when writing my diary, I
would systematically dissect events that I had witnessed or
experienced to find out what was at the root of them. That meant
capturing an image of it in my mind and consistently studying it
whenever I had the chance, in any venue where I had time and space.
But, this meant that I also had to work on my memory. So, I spent a
great deal of time trying to recognize "meaningful" moments so that
I could capture them and analyze them for what made them meaningful.
The result was that whenever something important happened -
say a birthday party, or a date - I mentally stepped out of my body
so that I could take notes on the situation. But I couldn't risk not
living in the moment, because then I wouldn't have a subject to
write about. So, I tried my best to create two parts of me: one
would experience something, then a split second later I would make a
mental note to "record" the experience for later analysis, and them
I would step back into myself. I would put myself on cue to notice
every single nuance and cause-effect situation that might exist.
As I said, this all stemmed from the belief that there are laws
controlling the universe, and our lives. For me, any philosophy that
a person could conceive of had to meet certain requirements in order
to be considered philosophy. It had to speak about big things - the
nature of the universe - and it had to speak about the smallest
things - why I am feeling what I am feeling at this second, and then
it would relate the big to the small. Everything would be explained.
Further, since ideas were essentially tools, any philosophy
would be simultaneously directive - telling me what I had to do if I
wanted to accomplish something - and directed - obeying my commands
as I chose a course of action that had been previously prescribed.
In essence, I saw any philosophy as one that had to encompass
religion, science, art, psychology, and all the rest of life so that
life would be an open book for any person to read. It would be as if
I were a military officer getting a mission from central command,
and philosophy would tell me what the objectives were. Then, I would
use philosophy to accomplish the mission. And that is exactly what I
saw myself preparing for: a mission for my life.
The nature
of my personal mission was as follows: restore my family to a
position of wealth and power, if they had lost it (which was true
for my mom's side), or bring them to power to begin with (which was
true for my father's side) and teach them how to use it. But, power
and wealth were not intrinsically valuable. Instead, they were tools
to be used for noble goals. The primary goal was ordering life, so
that everyone would be able to do what I could do: have a mission
and accomplish it, therefore finding meaning in their life. The
secondary goal was setting up objectives for missions. I saw these
secondary goals as the exploration of life, so that one person would
be able to experience any other parts of life that he desired,
without having to make drastic changes. In essence, everyone should
not only have the ability to become president of the United States,
as is constantly advertised, but know how to do it, and have the
drive to do it. But you could switch "President of the United
States" with "famous artist" or "great writer" or any other field
that one wishes to experience. And this would be doable without
having to worrying about making a living.
To put it another
way, I saw myself as going to a garden and teaching everyone how to
plant their favorite foods and eat them, without having to give up
the pleasure of planting and eating other foods. My basic premise
was this: we are all equal human beings on earth, and we are
experiencing life in a variety of ways. We should be able to
experience any part of life we choose simply because that is our
right as humans. We are masters of the earth and our lives, in
complete control over everything we do, so why not use that control
to experience life in as many aspects as possible? Let's open up
omniscience to everyone. Why should some God be the sole proprietor
of the grandest things?
With these objectives in mind, I
started to develop the kind of psychology that I knew would be
required for accomplishing the mission I was on. First, I had to
keep myself from falling into patterns of thought or action that
negated these basic premises. Any ideas about the innate
powerlessness of humans, or our inability to know everything, or our
natural and accepted state of suffering were automatically excluded
from my mind. As far as I was concerned, I would think my own
thoughts without letting them get polluted by any negative sources.
As long as I was in control, there was no reason to think I wasn't.
But, I knew that no matter how much control I had over myself, my
control over other things, especially my environment, was a whole
other matter.
For example, I learned at the age of 17 that after
being asleep for 8 hours, my mind would naturally wake up. But, if I
could keep my body asleep, then I would be able to control and
remember my dreams. I saw this as the first step toward mental
discipline. Next, I knew that if I understood the consequences of
ideas well enough, then I could discipline myself to carefully
choose the right ideas to obtain the consequences I desired.
But, though I may have control over my ideas and my sleeping
or eating habits, I had no control over other people's responses to
those things, or over other people's wills. I knew this, but I also
knew that people behaved in patterns, and could be expected to
operate in predictable ways. So, my first step after controlling
myself was to understand other people as much as possible. But this
required more than just talking with people and getting to know
them. It required going into their minds, adopting their thoughts as
my own temporarily, and operating on them to see what it was like to
be them. I would ask myself: how did those thoughts come to be? What
is the connection between the thought and the consequence? Thus, I
had to be able to know people better than they knew themselves, and
I saw this as possible only if I could accurately know all the
thoughts they may have that would govern their actions. This meant I
had to take everyone's thoughts at face value automatically so that
I could understand the consequences of those thoughts in shaping
their behavior. In this sense, I turned myself into an actor: go
into a group of people, learn how they think and talk, and copy
their patterns. Voila! You are just like them for the time being.
But if I chose to step out of their worlds, I could do so very
easily by thinking the thoughts that I had put aside previously. So,
I had to not only remember experiences, but remember what I had been
thinking at particular times.
After that, I would commence a
studious compare-contrast process between the thoughts I had
previously, and the consequences I knew about, with the thoughts I
had adopted, and the consequences I had observed in other people. I
would do this time after time, basically switching between various
masks so that I would be able to coordinate myself among various
groups. If I was around conservative Christian republicans, I would
start talking like them, acting like them, and even going ahead of
them, simply by extrapolating from the logical positions they held.
Then, around New Age groups, or Buddhist groups, etc., I would start
talking like them and looking at life through their eyes. This was I
was able to accumulate a lot of friends. But, I also knew that I had
to coordinate well between the masks, so I had to keep analyzing the
comparison/contrasts between the masks. My ideal was to be able to
know one mask so well that I could automatically put it on without
any guess work, go into a group, and eventually influence it by
steering the group toward some medium goal that I had already
decided on. The ultimate goal was to unite the various attributes of
the masks into one unified whole that would allow the groups to
merge, with everyone sharing experiences and thus permitting every
person to share the omniscience of the group.
After
witnessing people for a time, I begin to notices differences in
personality. I noticed, in particular, that usually there was a
catalyst for group interaction: one trusted, liked person who got
everyone together. There were also stalwarts - those people who
staid in one group, could always be counted on to say a very
predictable thing based on their ideas, and expressed themselves
through the ideas. Then there were the searchers, who tried to make
connections between groups, often choosing one or another as a home.
I tried being all of them, seeing what behaviors were entailed by
always saying the same thing, or uniting different ideas.
Essentially, if I was surrounded by any group of people, I wanted to
be able to tell exactly who they were and why they were like that,
within a few minutes of talking with them, so that I could then act
as a catalyst and connect them with other people from different
groups that might stoke their interest. I wanted to be able to go
inside someone's mind very quickly, know who they were, and improve
them just as quickly by suggesting the appropriate thoughts for them
to adopt if they wanted to improve themselves. In essence, I wanted
to be a universal medicine man, going from person to person,
figuring out their unique case, and helping them.
Yet,
throughout all this, there were many times when I felt I was losing
myself among all the masks. I was so good at switching thoughts and
roles that I began having a hard time figuring out what was truly
me. Thus, I had a hard time figuring out what my mission actually
was. The means to the end was becoming the end itself, and started
getting lost more and more often. I figured the best way to keep
from getting lost was to have a clear map of the masks I knew about,
and that meant using philosophy to sort through all the thoughts and
figure out which thoughts led to which consequences. But, that
required going into the groups to observe the consequences, which
meant putting on masks again and again. I discovered that it was
almost impossible to put on a mask only partway, so that I can
simultaneously be and not be a person.
So I increasingly
sought out an "independent" perspective, which could only be
provided by pure theory. Instead of going into groups and putting on
masks, I tried instead to remember all my interactions and develop
theories about them, testing them against the evidence from my
memory. That meant the major work was not in putting on masks and
taking them off, but in formulating the theories and verifying them,
making sure they were logically consistent, and coming from my true
self - my true experiences and my analysis of those experiences. But
this meant that I had to do something opposite from my previous
behavior. Instead of joining groups, I had to drop out with the
intention of compiling all my research and writing about it. In a
sense, I decided to go on a sabbatical, or a retreat, where I could
engage in full-time contemplation.
The only problem with
that was that I had to have some social contact so that I could keep
track of my observations and theories, and that again would lead
into the regrettable loop that I always found myself in. Hence, I
would seek out people for the purpose of sharing my information with
them, so that I could begin to figure everything out. But, in
seeking people out, I had to put on a mask that prevented me from
divulging any of the information I had gathered, and instead was
forced to simply gather information from the encounter. I
increasingly hoped for a single friend, or ideal person, who would
help me sort through my information while simultaneously providing
additional information through shared experiences. I saw myself
befriending people and going places with them, and in the process of
going places with them, we would discuss all the information I had
gathered and compare it to our new experiences for verification.
Thus, every new person I encountered presented the great possibility
of finally understanding all the information I had gathered over the
past several years. |
| Member Ratings |
| Member |
Date |
Overall |
Agree? |
Writing? |
Enjoyment? |
| anwer
sher |
06 Sep
2001 |
Absolutely
sensational |
n/a |
Don't touch
it! |
Standing
Ovation | |
| every new
person I encountered presented the great possibility of
finally understanding all the information I had
gathered
| |
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