I want to point out that the following was not written by me, was written by The Doctor and the original is available at
http://drwho.virtadpt.net/beh.htmlThere are people like you out there in the world. Make contact with them.
People have become so enraptured with their world.. perhaps 'ensnared' is a better term for the state of existence in which the vast majority of the human race spends the whole of its existence. Told what to think, what do do, how to live their lives, and what things are, they forget two very important things, intrinsic to the human condition: How to reason, and to ask questions.
I don't mean the simple act of solving problems, that comes with day to day life, I mean the act of juxtaposing ideas to create new concepts, new ideas. Cross-disciplinary thought is frowned upon at all levels because it muddies what we are told should be crystal-clear ideas. When you think about the English language, that is all you are supposed to think about. Drawing parallels to other topics of discussion, such as formal logic (languages can be used to work through problems in reasoning and deduction, just as numbers can) is simply not done, and even discouraged, under the excuse that it 'sidetracks' the class.
It also conditions people to not draw parallels between dissimiliar things and find new ways to use old ideas.
Asking questions inevitably reveals things that you hadn't thought of previously, or thought that you understood. It 'sidetracks' your train of thought, which as we've been conditioned to believe, is something that should be avoided at all costs because it 'wastes time' and is a 'distraction'.
The more you learn, the more questions you have. The more questions you have, the less certain the world around you is. Things aren't cut and dried, not like we're taught. The world is a very complex, very scary place. It does not fit into tiny little boxes that are then catagorised and indexed, it's a great morass of ideas, all braided together like a child's pigtails and swirled about like fingerpaint. It is possible to discern the individual ideas, and this should not be discouraged. It is also, however, possible to take a step back and look in awe upon the complex pattern of designs and sub-designs that is the world around us. We are taught to forget the poetry of life, the songs of nature, and the brush strokes of the painting through which we (sleep) walk through in our lives.
A brief digression on Newonian physics: The basic laws of physics are these:
* A body in motion remains such so long as no external forces act to change this (entropy aside, of course).
* When a force acts upon a body, the degree of acceleration is proportional to the amount of force applied. The proportion is equal to the mass of the body in motion.
* Every action is always opposed by an equal and opposite reaction, assuming that there are no other forces acting upon the body.
Some of you might vaguely remember hearing about these in science class or on television. This is disposable knowledge, because you're not likely to ever use it for anything, right?
Wrong. All knowledge is precious. A little goes a long way. A lot controls the world you live in. When you start writing off knowledge as useless or unimportant in life, you add another layer of chains, another handful of locks to the cage in which you've been told to imprison yourself. Discarding a little knowledge tells you that it's okay; then you discard a little more, and a little more, and a little more until you're nothing more than a drone.
Now I'm going to define the word 'metaphor' for you. A metaphor is "a figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison; one thing conceived as representing another; a symbol," as the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language puts it.
The human race is a block of matter crawling across an infinite plane. At the leading edge are the births of a new generation of people. Those people crawl forward some amount of distance but then stop moving. The trailing edge is made up of all the people who die every day, dropping away from the cube as a fine dust that eventually blows away in the wind, forgotten many thousands of years hence (with the advance of technology, the memory of the human race has become quite long and detailed indeed, though it too will eventually begin to lose bits and pieces of information). In the middle are the people who move forward for a while and then stop; the cube grows longer before them and shorter behind them before they drop off the edge.
That's a metaphor, kid. Curses, pox, and demons upon the teachers who forbid anyone from using them in any writing done for any class because "they're too hard to understand" and "confuse the issue".
If that's too much for you, get the hell out of here. You have no business reading this. Go back to sleep.
...
Good, you're still here.
Now then, let's apply Newton's first law of physics to our metaphor. That cube of humanity crawling through the universe is going to keep going in the same direction unless something happens to change that. It would take a hell of a lot of force to stop that cube dead in its tracks. It would take a lot of energy to redirect it. It would take less energy to tweak its trajectory just a little. We're not trying to halt the cube dead, nor are we trying to make it take a ninety degree turn off into the unknown. Neither one is going to happen without a lot of might that a small cabal of people can muster. That's what wars are, metaphorically speaking, wars and destruction and suffering on a grand scale. What we're trying to do is redirect the general course of the human race a little bit, so that it is slightly deflected. It might be a one degree change in course when that little tap of energy hits in just the right place, but when you look ahead in time, the course of that cube was radically altered compared to where it started. That's what we do.
Little changes in course, like little errors in a system, add up over time to produce a gigantic effect overall.
There are two ways to get that cube to change course: Tap it in the right place with enough force to tweak its trajectory a little, or place something in its vector that it runs into, which also nudges it a little bit off its present course and speed.
There's one thing that I didn't mention before - when you tap that mass of humanity in the right place, you also deform the mass a little bit. A little bit gets added, or a little bit gets knocked away. No matter what, some of the cube feels a whopping jolt, and the rest of the cube feels a little tap, decreasing in distance relative to where the impact occurred.
Those are our two strategies, tapping the cube in the right place just hard enough, or putting something in its way that it runs smack into. Either way, our goals are realised; the cube's vector is changed a little bit in the short term and a lot in the long term, and the cube itself feels the shock of the change.
Tapping the cube in the right way requires a lot of factors wrapped up in a neat little bullet, fired precisely at the front half of the cube, the part that is still growing forward and fighting its way across the ground, like an ever-growing jello mold that melts, flows forward, solidifies, and rolls to expose more of itself to the ground before repeating this locomotive process. Make lots of little changes in the dynamic part that propagate back to the static part. Tap the cube on its nose and give it a stomach ache.
Seemingly random events pop up at street level that make the active, dynamic part of the cube a) take notice, and b) deflect the course of the cube a tiny bit.
Take a symbol that everyone is familiar with, like the Seal of the United States of America, which has a whole body of conspiracy theory behind it. Now change it a little bit: Add a detail that wasn't there before. Give the eagle on the front a slit throat or put a pistol in its talons where a bunch of arrows used to be. Add a gigantic hand, palm upraised, cupping the capstone with the all-seeing eye on the back. Something small, which disrupts the pattern inside everyone's minds. Not many people really look closely at these symbols anymore. They take a quick glance and their minds suddenly jump from looking at the Seal to "That's the Great Seal of the United States of America. Nothing to see here, nothing to stop for." By making a subtle change, the visual image no longer fits the pattern anymore, and they're forced to take a closer look. Make lots of tiny little changes like this over time, many different variations (all subtle, you don't want to recondition them to accept it as "Another variant of the Great Seal of the United States of America. Nothing to see here, nothing to stop for.") and you'll recondition them to look closely at it each and every time they see it. They'll stop making asumptions about the Great Seal.
If you force them to stop making assumptions about a great many things, you will decrease the number of assumptions everyone makes, because they'll be conditioned to think about what they're seeing around them.
Take that same symbol and simplify it, so that it only suggests the original symbol. The Great Seal of the United States of America becomes an eye inside a triangle; the detail is lost, the lower part of the pyramid is omitted. Now expose the people to this new symbol in subtle ways. Not too often, because you don't want to condition them into thinking that this is a new symbol that must be accepted, you want them to notice it and wonder what it means, and why it's there. I carry a black sharpie with me at all times, and when the opportunity strikes I draw that simplified symbol in places one wouldn't expect to see it, like the insides of doors that lead to out of the way places, like maintenance tunnels or machinery housings. The idea here is to make people think "What is this symbol doing here? Why did someone put it here?"
The symbol is on a place that people aren't ordinarily supposed to go. Draw their attention to it and you draw their attention to whatever might be where they are not supposed to go. Practitioners may wish to use such sigils as focii of attention-drawing and curiosity-sparking latent complexes acting upon the human mind, at your desire.
Don't get caught doing this. You want to shoot peas at the backs of enough necks that the people owning them turn around and look, and not turn around, see you, and run to stomp you flat. Quick and subtle.
Communication also uses symbols. Have you ever heard of someone talking with their hands? Use that to frob the attention of those around you. Nothing overt should be done, nothing that draws their attention to you and why you might be doing such a thing. You want something that will be noticed but not worthy of asking questions; an eccentricity (in the sense of an eccentricity in an orbit) that acts upon other orbits. The Thelemite's greeting and closing "93 93/93" is one such eccentricity. Waving hello or goodbye at someone with the top portion of your middle finger (the part that can be curled without the entire finger reaching the palm, requiring a less subtle manipulation of the fingers) retracted is another such symbol. Something that makes people wonder but keep that wonder internalised, where it can surreptitiously fuel the flames of curiosity.
Signal the people like you, the people who ask questions. But so it in a manner such that you won't be caught.
Go to a library and pick out some books that few would take out to read, but students would take out as part of their research for writing papers. Slip into them bookmarks from bookstores or little slips of paper that you would find near the card catalogues for jotting down call numbers upon which you have written a message along the lines of "Reading this is more important:" along with a call number, title, and author's name. I typically reference books that are far less boring, like anarchist theory or applied sociology. Leave just the colour of your note showing from the top of the book; if the whole note is revealed it can be taken out and discarded. The idea is to make it just visible enough that a browser will note the difference in colouration, examine the note, and hopefully go looking for the book you've referenced.
Go to the part of the library where the books in the mid-100's of the Dewey decimal system are found, the ones on pseudomysticism and the occult, and use a pencil to correct the errors in the texts. Don't take the books out and then return them, you'll be caught for vandalising books. Do it in a deserted corner of the library where you won't be seen by anyone. You want the book to give the idea that there are others out there who can see through the bullshit. If someone is inclined to pick up such a book, there's an excellent chance that they're seeking also, and this will prod them in the right direction.
Set up a blind webmail account and pencil it into other books. Hopefully the people who come after you to take the books out will notice and drop you a line.
Find the others out there.
Burn audio CDs with music that you like, music that not many people have heard before and leave them under car seats, in libraries, in other people's music collections, in rental cars, in stacks of pamphets wherever you find them. Signal people that there are people out there who understand.
Secret yourself in places that not many people go, besides maintenance folk and urban explorers, and use your trusty black marker to write legible notes to those who follow you. Tell them to look for gifts in certain places - weapons, poetry, other letters, places of great beauty, desecrated places with notes asking them to help beautify them again. Leave them those gifts. If a climb is hard, leave a sturdy rope for them to aid in their ascent up a damaged stairwell or kicked in wall in an abandoned building. Cache copies of your notes there to inspire the folks that haven't quite awakened yet. Write the schedules of security guards and maintenance folks in out of the way places where others are likely to hide to get away from them. Leave evocations of the spirits of the place there, imploring them to protect passersby and inspire them as the muses of old once did. Scrawl poems on the ceiling. Leave a message that says to find someone wearing a distinctive article of clothing or piece of jewelry at a time several years hence, in a certain place at a certain time, and to greet everyone there who fits that general description in a certain way.
Keep these appointments that you make. This is how you find the others, and how movements start. One person becomes two, which becomes three, which becomes five, which becomes six, which becomes eight... and so on, and so forth.
I once carved in the depths of the Net a virtual space that reflected parts of my psyche, and left notes telling people to gather there everywhere I could find. I left business cards in books in stores and scrawled the address on the walls of bathrooms and classroom desks everywhere. Some people answered my summons; most did not. I made friends with those who did, friends to this day, through thick and thin, lean and fat, ease and danger.
Make friends with those who do.
Make allies.
Pick a direction in life. Choose something that you love to do, but aren't being paid to do or are paying to study. It doesn't matter what it is, so long as it's something that you enjoy doing every chance you get to unwind and get away from the world. It could be drawing, hiking, fixing cars, remodelling houses... as long as it's a passion that hasn't been stamped out or starved by the world. Run the letters together however you like, making that word or small phrase into a distinctive, unique symbol of some kind, as unique and inspired as you are. Turn that symbol into something that you can wear every day, twenty-four hours a day, asleep and awake, at work and at play. Turn it into a piece of jewelry that finds its way into your sight at least once a day. Turn it into a patch or embroidery on your favourite jacket that you wear all the time. Tattoo it onto that special place on your body that is all yours and just yours. Embroider it onto your favourite article of clothing using thread that is just barely darker or lighter than the rest of the fabric. Draw it on your skin in makeup that just barely shows. Work it into everything you draw or write that people will see.
This is your subliminal message to the world, something that will barely make a dent in the rind of each consciousness around you, but each time someone encounters it that dent becomes deeper and more pronounced, turning into a hole and eventually a gaping rent in the armour of familiarity and boredom. This is the ripple in the stuff that makes up the cube, that propagates throughout the whole mass, that nudges its course ever so slightly off the straight and narrow. This is an assassin's idea: Small, deadly, and highly effective when used properly. Again, don't beat people over the head with that which you love, use it the way a kung fu practitioner uses the sweep of a hand to deflect a blow. Use the right amount of energy in the right place at the right time, and you can derail a speeding locomotive.
