zhōng guó

Can you feel the energy around you? Do you react to that energy, living solely in the moment? Do you understand the influences outside the moment, the hundreds and thousands of years of 3D chess moves others believe they are making in the moment for moments thousands of years from now?

Do you play Wii games or make Ouija board moves? Do you say that ghosts exist? Do you think you're a puppet and someone is always pulling the strings? Do you believe that extraterrestrial visitors are always picking on you and playing games with your life?

Can you believe you are only a temporary collection of objects haphazardly thrown together, like little factories, seeking input and making output for as long as they can, no intention intended, subject to the interaction of other input/output factories around you and nothing else?

Do you know you have more than a body and will discard this shell when the time comes, going somewhere else that's more than just memories of you being carried by the living?

Life. It's yours. Do with your life as you will. Death of your body is assured and before then it's whatever you want to do to fulfill what you think you have to think you have to fulfill to be fulfilled and feel refreshed, full and fulfilling.

While you're still alive and kicking, let's talk. Which do you think is more important, receiving training in your culture about socially acceptable behaviours and sticking to them your whole life, or finding out what your body can do and optimising the output of your body's functions regardless of cultures or societies or any predefined behaviours?

Can you run 64 kilometers (40 miles) in an hour? Do you have an enlarged heart, enhanced blood circulation system, strengthened muscle cells and ability to drive yourself beyond extreme physical pain?

Can you stop your heart muscle or slow it down to one or two beats per minute?

Do you have no physical emotions whatsoever? Can you carry incongruous thoughts in your thoughts all the time?

What if you were told you can achieve goals for yourself that exclude physical limits? Would you be willing to give up all your dreams, all your family and friends, everything tied to what you've come to understand has to do with being a person in our species, including your thoughts, and become part of something completely radical that has nothing to do with your species, this planet or anything you think you understand you know?

Or are you concentrating on supporting freedom on the Internet, paying it forward for those who've already sacrificed their bodies in the name of freedom of expression in a civil society of a marketplace of free enterprise?

Are you focused on things and ideas like family, countries, material goods and the like? Have you become so comfortable with the idea of a certain standard of living that you're unwilling to scrape the soil, plant seeds and barter plants/animals you've grown for necessary goods and services you cannot create yourself? Are you willing to move into a multifamily farm / commune / community and live like the Amish, free of electricity and other modern conveniences?

Who are you? Who do you want to be? Are you a TV watcher, an Internet addict, a gamer, a technology buff, an IMer, a texter, a mobile phone talker? Is that who you want to be, having already found ways to substitute ideas, yours or someone else's, for reality?

I am asking myself these questions since I write this blog for myself first and you by commonality of species type.

Labels are images, memes, layers on top of layers. Which is more important, the product or the product packaging? I know I am not I. I know I do not exist. I know I am part of the ebb and flow of the states of energy in this area of the universe at this point in time. I know that fame and fortune create a change in inertia, picking up speed and carrying all sorts of people, places and things along with them. Isn't that why we have these blogs, to create the illusion of fame and fortune, even if it's only in the thought that our blogs are here for the rest of the Internet-connected world of people to read, no matter whether anyone besides one of us reads them? To feel we are socially well-connected?

Our destinies are already decided. We can accept that we are who we are in every moment or we cannot accept that fact, believing there's more happening to us from the past, present and future than we know, confusing us and driving us into a frenzied storm of infinite swirling numbers of layers we place upon the only moment in which we live.

Pick one illusion and live with that illusion in the moment. Believe in that illusion strongly enough and others will adopt that illusion as their own.

I know that illusions are illusions and thus illusory. I know that what I perpetuate here in these words does not exist. The person I think I am who is writing this blog does not exist. I maintain the illusion anyway because it's how I manipulate the images that represent reality as I know I don't know it.

There are no secrets. There is no magic. There is only this:::::=> [.....]; that is, modern hieroglyphics. I found it's difficult to slow a moving train by hand; in other words, you can't retrain a society overnight. The vast majority of members of a society want to keep a set of illusions moving from the previous moment into this one. They don't like to start over, just to find out that they were starting over anyway, no matter whether they were creating new illusions or maintaining the old ones.

Use statistics to measure the state of illusions, if you must. Create charts and reports to show you feel smart and know what's going on just because you can take facts of the past and connect the dots. Many people will believe you're insightful and you can help them keep their illusion set intact. Point out trends. Make predictions. It doesn't matter because a smaller group of people won't believe you no matter what you say or how accurate your predictions turn out.

I have my illusions and I like them. For instance, I believe there is nothing to worry about. I believe the only goal any member of our species should have is to reproduce itself. Otherwise, all else is just stuff. I am just stuff, myself. I am not reproducing my species - I am reproducing my current set of illusions while looking for new illusions to create in some other moment.

The gray squirrel on the shagbark tree where the redheaded woodpecker sat the other day has no idea what I'm talking about but it can understand the difference between a life full of predators and life with no predators at all. Those are two separate sets of illusions. The squirrel's body and my body adapt to the environment according to what we think we understand we see and act accordingly.

I'm ready for the next set of illusions. Aren't you?