The Generic Futility of Blue Goo

 

Ahhhh…waking up to another day of ‘doing’ things and getting things ‘done.’ Not just things, but fooking important things that give a sense of self-actualizing grandiosity in the battle against the deeper sense of your abject insignificance. Sliding down the smoothly polished pipeline of productive people participating in perfectly normal pastimes and polite dinner parties. As Bill Hicks so accurately stated “it’s only a ride.”

It’s a “normal” ride though.

You find it normal negotiating through traffic to arrive at a place where you’ll perform pointless tasks to secure your daily bread and you will do this until the years long burden of earth gravity and brain senility accelerates your physical and mental feebleness demanding an exit affording you the opportunity to make countless trips to the doctor to remind you of the fact that, not only are you physically dying but, more importantly, you’ve have been psychologically dead for years.

You believe it normal to sculpt your delightful little progeny into socialized little lambs, institutionally educated to memorize the required scripts and engage in the same weary roles so that they too can be constructive members of a bipolar communalism and "work" at insipid, vacuous tasks, feeding their faces with chemicalized faux-foods to eventually copulate their way to the formation of new herd members. You believe that working hard to contrive “rest and relaxation” through sporadic episodes  of “vacation” as symbolic of a well rounded “lifestyle.” You participate in various causes in defense of your values, but in the black of night when you’re most alone, the angst of your actual condition permeates your every pore and so pills are eventually a precondition to slumber.

But most of all, you believe it “normal” to live a “meaningful life,” denying that every tiny scrap of meaning you have ever held onto for dear life was handed to you from the moment of birth and even now you can’t remember the last time you had a unique and exciting idea that did not come directly from the socio-cultural lexicon of herd grazing normalcy…. baa, baa, baaaaaaa…

Do you even know why you chose marriage, career and children? Nah, you really have NO clue, other than the fact that everyone else was doing it and still is. Essentially we all do what we believe we’re supposed to do. Nothing more, nothing less.

But what do you do when one day you awake and realize it’s all a sham and you’ve been duped from the start. That somebody else wrote the lyrics to your song and that every choice you’ve made was weaved into your cranial neurocircuitry. Will you have the wherewithal to cut yourself free from it? Will you have the courage and fortitude to self-lobotomize your own habitualized thought patterns?

What happens when getting outa bed to start your glorious, awesome “day,” is a test of mental endurance never before experienced. When all the things that you must do, you have not a shred of desire or even the slightest drop of willpower to get done and all you can do is stare into the abyss of nothingness and perseverate on how you must be mentally ill not to want to play the games and follow the rules as you’ve always done, like everybody else does through the assistance of diversified distractions.

This is a level of ‘awake’ that absolutely no one would choose to engage, because it’s so damn fooking inconvenient. The problem with that “Dark Night of the Soul” is that it can last years.

When you understand that all the things you have done are as utterly pointless and banal as the things you will do and you become completely drenched in the Generic Futility of your entire life project, you can then consider yourself ‘spiritually evolved' or, in other words, 'fucked.'

If reading this post offends or disgusts you then, rest assured, you’re about ready to pop. If this post makes you depressed, angry, anxious or guilty, then brace yourself for impact. It may still be a ways off, but you’re racing to the wall. A wall of complete and total despair.

But be of good cheer! Buddhism will save you or maybe the No-Mind of Zen. Or maybe years of diligent meditation or adopting the precepts of Advaita, the Power of Positive Thinking or the Law of Attraction. There are plenty of drugs to aid in abstaining from your deepest dread.

But if you’re here, then make no mistake, you’ve been traveling to this point all your live long days. and there are very few who ever make it this far with any regular consistency to their despair, because egocentricity will play with you like a fish on a hook, reeling you in and letting you out, reeling you in and letting you out. The rule is that despair MUST be sporadic and inconsistent to avoid the potential that you might wish to exit the herd.

This is why your life themes are so dualistically repetitive and it seems no matter how much progress you ‘believe’ you’ve made in your spiritual practices and life goals, here you are once again playing out the same old patterns, conforming to the same rules, playing the same weary games, on an on, ad nauseam.

Egocentricity is essentially defined by keeping all your tenuous and fragile beliefs delicately interwoven to support the routine drudgery you define as “life.” Yet, like a cloth weaved out of Silly String, one wrong move, or even the slightest contradictory thought carried to its obvious conclusion, could rip it all asunder leaving you in a mess of blue goo.

Such is the nature of your “stress.” Day in and day out egocentrics must senselessly struggle to make it all seem “sensible.” Common sense and wisdom are merely egocentric mental farts that seek to make meaningful the generic futility of blue goo.

Forget the wise masters and go for the goo!

One must do this, one should do that and never must/should one do this. For egocentricity to survive, and keep on popping out humanoid-like mimeographed copies, it must have a hierarchical belief system of prioritized fears and worries for which to pass on to its progeny as a means of positive reinforcement for itself. Maslow unintentionally proved this through his “Hierarchy of Needs” and the higher up the scale you go, the more entrenched “you” become in mundane mental constructs and whimsical psychological abstractions that reinforce the egocentric self as real and, more importantly, true. The concepts that you believe give life meaning, i.e., good and bad, right and wrong, beauty and ugly, honesty, truth, pride, fidelity, etc, etc, are so muddled and complex that they tend to loose all differentiating boundaries, only to merge into one cacophonous concerto of dissonant noise.

The only way to maintain this pathetic structured existence is to see it mirrored through other bodies that seem to have minds of their own and who also believe in the same vacuous values you claim to own and that you must defend through your choice of “lifestyle.” It’s all about the car you drive, the clothes you wear, the school you send your kids to and the square feet of your living space. It's about the causes you support and the political parties you cheer for.

It's all about blue goo...

This begs the question, if it’s all a dream, an hallucination, an illusion, an atomic mirage, an apparition, a shape shifting fog, a mass of undulating dualistic energy, then who gives a sheit? If everything is a “lie,” why worry about telling the truth? If everything is true, then you can’t tell a lie. Why care about “honesty” in your dreams, if dreams are false? If it’s all bullsheit who cares about values or morals? If it’s all illusion, why concern yourself with working for a “living” and paying your bills? Why even concern yourself with your next meal?

Why not let it all crumble to pieces around you? Let it all fucking die and take “you” with it? Because without the pieces that make up this delusional puzzle, all you have is an empty box and nobody wants to hold onto an empty box (even though that’s exactly what they do).

Egocentrics have “responsibilities,” because without pieces to fit together what the fook would you do with yourself? They have ego-centered structures to maintain. So rather than nothing, egocentric mammalia must not evolve beyond it’s confinement to normalcy, allowing the dream to incorporate every thought in your head, while you claim it real and true by simply not looking close enough.

But one day, when you SEE it for what it is, you will recognize a generic quality to EVERYTHING, so it all becomes nothing, lending a dazzling sense of utter futility to doing anything at all.

Once you dive into the Blue Goo of Generic Futility, you will likely swim in it for many years, completely and totally…alone.

But no worries, I'm here. Come in and join me for a spell.

The Blue Goo is always warm….

Artwork by Illathias - "Blue Goo"

Choose “Life”!

 
“Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family, choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers.

Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends.

Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchased in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing sprit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing you last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life.

I chose not to choose life: I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who need reasons when you’ve got heroin?” (Trainspotting)

Does the the opium of your Buddhist philosophy maintain your comfort zone and keep you in good cheer and positive spirit? Does your Zazen provide you a sense of well-being through neurochemical whiz-bangs? Does your Advaita make you feel special and raise you above the quiet desperation of the ignorant masses? Does your meditation, meticulously scheduled-in twice daily, help medicate you from the meaningless rigors of your mindless middle class, status-quo existence? Does your particular brand of Christianity help cope with your continued participation in vacuous and insipid social games that you sometimes sense are absurd and pointless? Are your spiritual retreats sprinkled with love and comradery?

As the beloved guru was claiming that we must “serenely mirror the divine love of the universe,” and that we must “engage the world exclusively through universal compassion and unconditional love,” I looked out the side window to observe a cat shred a bird to pieces, devouring each piece then vomiting up the bones and feathers, only to lightly prance off into the trees, tra la la la la….

Does the cat not know of this "divine love"? Where is its “compassion” and “unconditional love”? Nature couldn’t give a rat’s ass about your dreams, goals and desires. Nature essentially sheits on your spiritual aspirations and practices. Nature doesn’t care if you’re satisfied, discontent or kumbaya happy. Nature doesn’t give a spit about “you” and you are an integral part of it, regardless of silly ideas and activities you employ to generate a belief of extracting your “self.”

If you are not nauseatingly depressed and morose. If you’re not discouraged, disgusted and disenchanted with every choice you have made, thus realizing every future choice can only mirror that same fucking generic futility, then you’re still hypnotized by the invisible jewels of your egocentric conditioning and aren’t even close to the truth of your confinement.

Therefore, you can only choose “life."

It does seem that when you finally reach a point in which nothing gives relief, then you can count on breaking through. Unfortunately, egocentrics struggle mightily against this natural current and it may take years to get to that point, if you get it at all. But that doesn’t matter because it’s not something you choose. Mostly, though, you will choose “life” in an attempt to find a way out of the massive sinkhole of despair you have serendipitously dropped into, but when no further ropes are available for which to climb out, then be of good cheer, for you are almost “’there” (from which you learn you’ve gottin’ nowhere at all and what a “happy” day that’ll be).

Alas, until then, egocentrics MUST choose “life” for no reason at all, except that its really no different than heroin.

Or you can choose something else…

…and very few will ever do that.

Artwork by Sean Donaldson - "Clyde The Evil Cat"

"The Dream Marks Are All Present..."

For as much as a year Satan continued these visits, but at last he came less often, and then for a long time he did not come at all. This always made me lonely and melancholy. I felt that he was losing interest in our tiny world and might at any time abandon his visits entirely. When one day he finally came to me I was overjoyed, but only for a little while. He had come to say good-by, he told me, and for the last time. He had investigations and undertakings in other corners of the universe, he said, that would keep him busy for a longer period than I could wait for his return.

"And you are going away, and will not come back any more?"

"Yes," he said. "We have comraded long together, and it has been pleasant--pleasant for both; but I must go now, and we shall not see each other any more."

"In this life, Satan, but in another? We shall meet in another, surely?"

Then, all tranquilly and soberly, he made the strange answer, "There is no other."

A subtle influence blew upon my spirit from his, bringing with it a vague, dim, but blessed and hopeful feeling that the incredible words might be true--even must be true.

"Have you never suspected this, Theodor?"

"No. How could I? But if it can only be true--"

"It is true."

A gust of thankfulness rose in my breast, but a doubt checked it before it could issue in words, and I said, "But--but--we have seen that future life--seen it in its actuality, and so--"

"It was a vision--it had no existence."

I could hardly breathe for the great hope that was struggling in me. "A vision? --a vi--"

"Life itself is only a vision, a dream."

It was electrical. By God! I had had that very thought a thousand times in my musings!

"Nothing exists; all is a dream. God--man--the world--the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars--a dream, all a dream; they have no existence.

Nothing exists save empty space--and you!"

"I!"

"And you are not you--you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no existence; I am but a dream--your dream, creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this, then you will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you made me....

"I am perishing already--I am failing--I am passing away. In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever--for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free.

Dream other dreams, and better!

"Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago--centuries, ages, eons, ago! --for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane--like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell--mouths mercy and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!...

"You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks--in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.

"It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream--a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought--a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"

He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.

- The Mysterious Stranger, Chapt. 11, Mark Twain LINK

Ridding the World of Ego-Doers

‘Events happen, deeds are done, but there is no individual doer thereof.’ (quote from some ancient smarty pants)

Like zombies, the ego-doers are everywhere, interminably doing the same sheit over and over again....and each time they revel in their uniqueness.

Alas, the important seriousness of the ego-doer, who feels compelled to inform you that you must do THIS and not THAT or THAT and never THIS. To think… you've had it all wrong since birth.

The universal claim is that, from the moment of birth, you’ve been DOING the wrong damn stuff over and over again. Or so they tell you, in their most authoritative tone, “I am descended from the lineage of the great and venerable Master Grand Puba Rinpoche.” If you give a rat’s arse, they’ll have a great day. Otherwise, the Crypt Keepers of Doing True Stuff (as opposed to doing dumb things) become indignant that you could be so irreverent to their Grand Master Flash. Brainwashed Troglodytes of the Conceptually Divine, spewing out the ancient rules, demanding you fall in line and JUST DO IT.

Nevertheless, from the moment of your birth, completely unbeknownst to you, you were engaged in an unconscious constructive process of linking up billions of neurons to create an egocentric network as big as the universe and all right up under your thinking cap. This all began with your parentally inherited DNA, predetermining the expectation of certain responses, which then kicked into third gear with moment to moment experiences dumped upon your developing brain, turning fragile neural pathways into concrete superhighways of normalized expectations and socially sculpted responses.

With the most absolutely importantly significant response being...I AM DOING THIS.

Therefore, the only real purpose all those miles of dendrites serve is to insure that you’re always DOING something. Doesn’t matter what (except to you and the horse you rode in on) but all egocentrics must DO something because it is the very nature of Egocentric Mammalia to be incessantly DOING something. Indeed, it is the very nature of Ego-mammalian's to seek pleasure in what they DO in order to maintain the motivation for continued DOING. It is not important what "you" do...only that "you" think it is.

After it eats, sleeps, shits, fucks and dies, notice how expertly nature does absolutely NOTHING that means anything to nature.

But go ahead, keep trying to DO nothing. It’s impossible! All egocentrics are DOER’s and everything they do is essentially meaningless except to each individual egocentric mammalia, who attains pleasurable neurochemical experiences from the doing of 'special stuff.'

However, this herd believes that doing THIS is downright God ordained. But that gaggle over there demands that this is what God wants. So proclaims the moral neuro-circuitry of righteous ego doers when circuitry is linked up into herd formations.

One day your neural circuitry somehow brings you to a special book written by some grand wizard who informs you that your “ego” is the problem and must be discarded, transcended, destroyed and your ego hears this and screams “hallelujah!” Suddenly, what you spent decades shining and polishing must now be smashed to bits. You’ve been moving toward this your whole life and didn’t even know it. How’s that for “free-will”?

What a grand project! Finally, you have a true purpose (as the circuits subsequently link up to this new self-righteous neural train wreck that you will spend your life crashing into repeatedly)

Unfortunately, the million miles of dendrite-synaptical circuitry that make up egocentricity is beyond your power to reprogram, except for tiny acts of behavioral conditioning (like ending your nicotine addiction, but even that was a royal bitch, yo!).

Egocentric Mammalia is what you are and the power that innately fuels that egocentricity is your moment to moment non-acceptance of what your DOING in that moment. Your daily non-acceptance keeps the joint jumpin’ (brain), demanding ever more new things be DONE to assuage your egocentric self-abnegation over what could be DONE but wasn’t and what what was DONE but shouldn’t be, in opposition to what you DO but don’t want to DO and what you aren’t DOING but want to DO.

Let’s face it, you basically can’t DO anything “right” and, in those moments that you might actually do something right for once, it eventually fades away to become just not good enough. But the whole huge religio-spirituo industry is entirely founded on your NOT being good enough and needing to DO something else to be better by DOING better things.

We must rid the world of ego-doers by short-circuiting the guilt that fuels them.

Hence, the best way to rid the world of ego-doers is to tell them to simply keep DOING whatever it is their DOING. Just go ahead and do whatever the hell ya want to do or do what you think you have to do, while wishing you were doing something else. No need to reroute the circuits, just go with it, cause you have NO choice. Even if transcending the ego is what you feel compelled to do, go ahead and keep doing it, even though my ego feels compelled to tell you what a dodo you are for attempting such a silly thing. Ha! Ain’t this sheit grand!

The only way to rid the world of ego-doers is to tell them that they are doing exactly what they should be doing, each and every moment their doing it. This insures the ego will ultimately crumble from the immense weight of such unconditional acceptance that comes from a complete and total lack of free-will.


 Top Artwork by Dimitri Kozma - "The Gold Brain"