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With all this talk of coded messages and embedded EXIF data hiding underneath the veneer of what we see, it sometimes does a person good to just stop and take a look around them – at what’s actually *there.*
It’s still terrifying, but at least you don’t have to look too hard to see it.
Today, for some unknown reason, something struck me: the tagline at the top-right corner of this website. Go ahead, scroll up and take a gander: “from the minds that brought you The TENSION Experience”…
Good marketing, right? Clear forwarding of a previously established IP that allows us to follow through from the genius that drove us all here in the first place (other than Nando on most nights, that is). But when you think about it…
It’s probably nothing. I’m sure I’m just making mountains out of molehills, here. But – like – it doesn’t say “creators.” It doesn’t say “people.” It says “minds.”
Enter Descartes, stage right-brain.
I’ve only ever done Salvia once (so sue me; I spent some time as a psychonaut), but there was a moment in that 20-second collapse of all sense of identity and ego wherein I was pretty sure I had resolved the mind-body duality. There simply was none. I was a thing in that moment – a collection of ideas and memories swirling around through some static freeze-point – and upon regaining control of my corporeal being, I couldn’t shake the idea that I had crossed some point of no return. I wouldn’t say it was a near-death experience, because I don’t remember any tunnels of light or third-person-POV camera-angle shifts, but it was… something.
The point is, at this moment we have to reconcile the fact that while we don’t know who’s running this show, insofar as bodies are concerned (tattooed or otherwise), we are all working under the assumption that it is, in fact, the same minds which constructed the labyrinth through which we have gone to get here.
Descartes had this idea of an “evil genius” who only made him think he existed, and spent a week locked in his angst-filled chambers trying to come up with a solution. He arrived at the now-classic epiphany: Cogito Ergo Sum (“I think, therefore I am”).
But maybe he spoke a little too soon. Maybe he was trapped by his time and space, like that two-dimensional plane-coordinate system he invented (for which many Algebra II students would gladly curse him squarely to hell).
Maybe we need to think a little bigger, and start really digging into ourselves – what are we, outside of our bodies? When someone sees us, and they sum us up into a sigma-total of our apparent identity kits, do we exist beyond their gaze? Are *we* the shadow people we are most afraid of?
Part of Ascension was the ritual of losing your empirical organs: your sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. We willingly submitted because we knew there was a lesson… but what was it? Were we supposed to find ourselves within that darkened echo-chamber of the mind, and recognize that we were far more than this limited collection of sensory data streaming in through our meat-ware – or was it just… senseless?
We face our death daily. Every moment we are still aware of our existence, it is the result of a countless myriad coincidences that have not occurred which would have killed us. That blue car didn’t run you over. That plane engine didn’t malfunction, sending you plummeting into the Atlantic. That horse-trailer didn’t detach on the freeway, scraping a sea of sparks against the asphalt that would be the last thing you ever saw in the body you presently inhabit. And somewhere, we are always wondering… what comes next?
Well, where’s Descartes now? Who ever really was he? To us, he’s little more than a caricature; a meme of philosophical and mathematical significance who visits once in a while to remind us that we exist. But that also means, since he doesn’t really to any of us, that we don’t. Not to other people. Not really. Not I. Not you. Not even Noah. As long as you draw a limit-line around your existence, you will always be bound by it.
That which casts a shadow is impermanent, always and ever.
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